Star Wars_ Legacy of the Force 01_ Betrayal - Aaron Allston [173]
Han grinned. The girl was in good enough shape to try to kill him again—her tactic, leading pursuit missiles across his path, would have worked had he not already been designated a nontarget by the droids. All was right with the world. He could have cheered.
At least, all was right until his datapad beeped again at him. Its screen read,
TRANSPONDER TRAGOF1103 ON FREQ 22NF07 IS JAINA
The majority of missiles reached the summit of their arcs and turned back toward the ground.
Some didn’t. A few hit targets in the air—starfighters circling above the Galactic Alliance beachhead, pilots waiting to get into the fight, pilots who weren’t fast enough to elude missile fire or eject in anticipation of the impact.
The other missiles completed their turns and roared downward, concentrating into three streams.
The leading missiles of those streams hit the glowing dome of the GA shield, matching their explosive energy against its coherent force.
The first several lost that match; the shields were too strong. But the missiles kept coming, each one adding new explosive power to the equation.
The shields shivered. Complicated energy matrices began to lose their coherence. Within the Center for the Performing Arts, alert, failure, and overload lights began to flare on shield generator machinery; operators began to look at one another uncertainly, and the more fearful of them glanced around for a place to take shelter, for a direction to run.
Then, in one thousandth of a second, it happened: the complex fabric of the shield unraveled at one point, and the next missile entered the empty space where it had been. It did not detonate. The computer at the heart of its guidance system relayed its new position, meters beyond what had been designated the shield limits, to the other missiles in the flight, and those that could still maneuver to position themselves along its path began to do so.
That missile was halfway down to the crown-like top of the Center for the Performing Arts when the next spot atop the curved surface of the shield gave way. More missiles flashed through the widening gap.
The foremost missiles roared down toward the roof below, calculating at each minute fraction of a second their current position, estimated range to target, estimated fuel reserves—
Observers weren’t aware of what happened in thousandths of a second, of course.
When the first missiles struck the shield, onlookers saw a glow begin there, accompanying the distant whumpf of the missiles’ detonation. The glow grew larger and brighter; the noise from the detonations became louder.
Then a lance of fire shot down from the position of the shields and hit the roof of the Center for the Performing Arts.
The center seemed to swell, its walls bulging outward with flame behind them. Then the whole immense building erupted like a cake of solid fuel. Ironically, though the shield projectors were in the act of melting, disintegrating, the shields they created had not had enough time to fail utterly, and the leading edges of the explosion hit them, were contained by them.
Then the shields gave way, and the flame and debris behind them spilled out in all directions.
Missiles continued to rain down, many of them pouring into the increasingly cavernous hole that the center had been. Others hurtled onto the hulls of the small capital ships that had landed around the center. Their shields were up; their shields went down, collapsing under the relentless explosive barrage, and those fighting ships began erupting with explosions of their own.
CORUSCANT
“I was fighting a simulacrum of Jacen,” Luke said. He paced through his bedchamber, looking in the closet and then under the bed, as if more enemies were likely to be found