• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Luke let his eyes drift shut. “Significant degradation of combat function. That means people dying, doesn’t it? Ships crippled or destroyed?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then say so.”

“Sir?”

“That’s an order, Thavish. No euphemisms.” He reflected sadly that five years ago, he hadn’t known, really, what people dying meant—his first real taste of that had been the charred corpses of Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru, leaking smoke up into the Tatooine twilight …

He’d learned a lot since then. Not all of it was about being a Jedi.

“Yes, sir. Um, is this a Jedi thing, sir?”

“No,” Luke said. “It’s a General Skywalker thing. When you talk about someone as a set of degradable capabilities instead of a person, it’s too easy to think about him that way, too.”

“Yes, sir.” Thavish turned back to the holoimage. “We used the Double Sevens as our baseline, as they’re roughly median size for the task force. A DS at this point, for example, will have a one point eight five percentage chance of a catastrophic impact—”

“That’s less than one in fifty!” Captain Patrell shook his head, chuckling. “For a minute, you had me scared!”

Luke said, eyes still closed, “What’s the time frame?”

“Sir?”

“One point eight five percent in how long?”

“Oh, yes. That percentage chance is on, well, on insertion. That is, uh, instantly.”

Captain Patrell stopped chuckling.

Luke nodded. “And after that?”

“Well—the statistical modeling is complex. It’s a sliding scale, more or less; assuming you’re not instantly, uh, destroyed, we have to calculate the—”

“Let’s say, an hour.”

When the numbers came up, the expressions got even more grim. After one hour, the probability was running over twenty percent. “So, basically,” Luke murmured, “you’re telling us that one hour into this operation, we’ll have lost two ships. If the enemy does nothing at all.”

“Well, the math is a bit more complicated than—”

“Basically.”

Thavish nodded apologetically. “Basically. Yes.”

“It’s a graveyard,” Patrell said. “It’s where capital ships go to die.”

“The Taspan system,” Thavish said, “is an almost perfect starfighter base. In a starfighter, you’re not only a smaller target for the asteroids, but you’re maneuverable enough to dodge them. But to hold Shadowspawn there, we need the interdictors. Otherwise his entire force can simply vanish into hyperspace. But our interdictors are so vulnerable we can’t afford to bring them in.”

“Lord Shadowspawn,” Luke murmured. “Not a stupid man. He knew what he was doing when he picked Mindor.”

He looked up at the ceiling and took a deep breath, wishing mightily that he could steal an hour or two to rest and meditate and try to summon some of that Jedi insight he was supposed to have, but there just wasn’t time. If only Ben—or Master Yoda, or even his father—would phase in right now with a word of wisdom … but whatever parts of them remained active in the Force apparently had business elsewhere. Just as they’d had for months now.

No insight from the Force. All he had for insight was his own.

It had better be enough.

He sighed. “Well, we can’t wait them out, and we can’t whittle them down. We can’t even fight a pitched battle. That only leaves one option.”

Admiral Kalback nodded. “Overwhelming force. Shock and awe,” he said.

Commander Thavish tilted his head consideringly. “It might actually save lives, on balance. Ours, at least. Maybe even theirs. If we never give them a chance to think they can fight their way out, they might just surrender.”

“Saving lives is swell, if we can. Winning is more important,” Luke said. “If we let Shadowspawn’s forces escape, they could scatter. Go on the run—break up into small, independent units. We know better than anyone in the galaxy how much damage that kind of decentralized guerrilla insurgency can do—it’s how we brought down the Empire. This might be our last chance to engage Shadowspawn force-on-force.”

Luke looked around the table, meeting each commander’s eyes in turn. “Every one of you needs to understand this. We hold nothing back except a small reserve force, to cover our extraction