For a moment, Caedus thought he could feel familiar presences in the Force, but the sensation passed. It was replaced by his Sith battle awareness of his captains and commanders, a living grid of interconnected reactions that tilted, panned and zoomed like a holochart marked with transponder icons. Caedus had a better picture of the theater of war than instruments could give them, he knew; it was a hard act of faith for them to surrender judgment to something so nebulous.
Something blipped in his field of vision, and was gone again.
Maybe it had never been there. That was a drawback with battle awareness. The more he could see with the technique, the more detailed it became, and the harder it was sometimes to separate the images in his inner eye from what he could physically see.
The orbitals he managed to observe before running short on time were packed with ships, many looking as if they were near the final phase of construction, and more than he’d ever realized Fondor had in build. This wasn’t just a symbolically important planet to bring into line. It was a legitimate target.
It would have been so much simpler with the mine network in place.
He hyperjumped briefly to bring him closer to his flagship. The technique alarmed non-Jedi X-wing pilots; they once said he’d fall out of hyperspace smack into the hull of an SSD one day if he kept bouncing around blind like that. But Caedus knew instinctively where he was in three dimensions, and even in the higher ones. He knew.
There.
He was back in realspace and the Anakin Solo was visible in a constellation of frigates, cruisers, landing craft, carriers, and ten Star Destroyers.
Niathai’s Third Fleet-a task force, but it was convenient to think of them in separate fleet terms, because they were not all one happy navy, not by a long shot-would need to keep the planet’s defenses occupied while he captured the orbitals. The Imperial Remnant would need to prowl the outer boundary, alert for the return of the Fondorian navy. Caedus felt he’d planned it well enough. Even Niathal’s outburst and insistence on rushing here to show him how to do it properly fell elegantly into the battle plan. He substituted Niathal for the mine net.
Caedus reached out to his commanders and spread a lit-tle genuine confidence that things would work out fine. Nevil… he could focus in on Nevil, and the man was deeply troubled. Oh, yes. His son was killed. I forget that. It was an unhappy mind, and Caedus moved on, concentrating on the threatening storm pressing on his sinuses, the vague sensation in the Force that told him ships were out there, massing somewhere-and Niathal should have been dropping out of space just about….
Now.
He looked around for the blooms of light as ships reappeared in realspace. As he slowed his approach, he caught the shooting-star effect in his peripheral vision, and rolled the StealthX slowly to look around. Yes, the Third Fleet was on time. The fleet gradually built up, star by artificial star, into a ragged constellation of navigation lights and harshly sunlit surfaces. Early warning systems on Fondor would have detected the emerging fleet by now.
They could still surrender. He’d go through the motions, but only to check the boxes. If they did surrender, he’d still have to occupy the planet for a period anyway, just to make sure it stayed that way. That devoured more resources.
There was still the Fondorian navy to account for, though.
He felt it out there. It was in hyperspace, and his awareness was nothing like the one he had in normal space; there was no real size or scope to guide him, just an impression, a little more solid than a hunch.
Now it was time to face Niathal.
He flicked open the comlink, perfectly secure this close to the ship. StealthXs almost always operated in complete comm silence, and nobody could monitor them without big clues like an open channel. The fighters really did van-ish. “Solo to Nevil, the Third is on station. Patch me through to Ocean.”
She would be…
No…
Caedus had jerked the StealthX ninety degrees to starboard before his retina-fractionally slower than Force senses-registered a slab of ship filling his vision. And it wasn’t the Anakin. He righted himself relative to the assembled fleet; but he was suddenly overwhelmed, ships popping into existence all around him in a complete 360-degree ring. Wherever he turned the StealthX, he was facing the spars and sensor masts and patchworked hatches of warships. Cannon turrets-he couldn’t identify the type, the navy, anything. It was a fleet from another time and place.
He could feel the ships, but he had no impression of lethal, implacable mass. His passive sensors showed static, as if he’d been hit by an EM pulse that hadn’t tripped the warning. He sensed danger, though; a real threat.
Caedus did what any pilot would, and signaled a warning as best he could, trying to work out what he had fallen into.