Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor - Matthew Woodring Stover [126]
“I’m startin’ to believe you.”
“Now, if you would summon your men and follow me,” the air marshal said as he turned and walked briskly away. “Though General Calrissian’s forces are doing their best to delay or prevent it, catastrophic destruction of this facility may commence as soon as six minutes from now.”
He had barely gotten the words out when the floor seemed to drop half a meter, then spring back up to slam them all off their feet. At the same time a terrific roar came up from the floor and out from the walls and battered them like invisible mallets crushing the breath from their chests. The echoes of the roar shook the dome until its armor shrieked and twisted and started to tear, and chunks of permacrete ripped loose from the walls and fell from the ceiling …
When the roar finally subsided to a mere grinding rumble, Fenn managed to sit up, coughing permacrete dust from his throat. “A bit optimistic about that six minutes, weren’t you?”
CHAPTER 17
THE FIRST OF THE GRAVITY BOMBS WAS A DIRECT HIT: its impact blasted seven or eight hundred meters of the leading edge of the flying volcano into a bunch of high-velocity asteroids streaking through a cloud of expanding plasma. Two entire banks of the massive gravity-drive thrusters that the flying volcano depended upon for maneuvering were destroyed, and the central coordinating nexus was damaged, which destabilized the remaining three banks. These three banks of gravity-drive thrusters began to swing and blast in random directions as their autocompensators tried and failed to discover a configuration that would continue to guide the base along its programmed trajectory.
The resulting stresses began to rip the Shadow Base apart.
This process substantially accelerated with the arrival, in brisk succession, of the rest of the gravity bombs. The three remaining Slash-Es raced in at a steep deflection, overdriving their gravity projectors in a vain hope of dragging them far enough off-course that the mountain had a chance to survive, but the bombs came in a great deal faster than they had gone out, having picked up considerable velocity in their slingshot around the planet.
Which meant that some 3,426 civilians—citizens of the Republic who had been violently kidnapped and forced into slavery, who were currently crowded shoulder-to-shoulder in what had once been the Sorting Center—had roughly four minutes to live.
In slightly less than those four minutes, the breakup of the Shadow Base would rupture the pressure seal around the Sorting Center and expose them all to hard vacuum. Further, the only landers available to shuttle evacuees away were not only far too few to hold more than a tenth of their number, but were also currently moored on the exterior of the flying volcano. To reach them, the evacuees would have to cross hundreds of meters of that selfsame hard vacuum—without the benefit of environment suits.
Han stared through the cockpit’s transparisteel, his face bleak as empty space. “They don’t have a chance.”
“They do have a chance,” Nick insisted from the seat behind Chewie’s seat. “The same chance you had. They’ve got a Skywalker on their side.”
“You think that’s enough?”
“It was for you,” Nick pointed out. “Skywalker’s got a plan. He’s always got a plan.” He turned to Luke and lowered his voice. “Uh, you do have a plan, don’t you?”
“As a matter of fact,” Luke said, “I do.”
Luke had, before he had ever assumed command, familiarized himself with every detail of every ship that would form any part of the RRTF. So he knew that three Corellian frigates attached to the task force had been converted from heavy freighters. He also knew that some of their original equipment had been preserved in its original configuration, to avoid a ridiculously expensive refit.
One piece of this original equipment was a conveyor bridge, intended to transfer cargo to or from another ship out of atmosphere. It was essentially a framework supporting a moving belt some six meters wide and a hundred meters long, enclosed in a force tunnel to maintain atmosphere,