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“Strap in,” he said through his teeth. He tightened his grip on the control yoke. “This ride’s gonna start with a bump.”

THE TASPAN SYSTEM EXPLODED INTO A HURRICANE OF death.

None of the Republic’s warriors could see the whole picture, but what each of them saw was horrifying enough.

Lando Calrissian, on the bridge of the Remember Alderaan, watched over the shoulder of the NavOps officer as his sensor readout showed gravity wells sprouting and spreading throughout local space like Turranian flesh fungus on a three-day-old corpse, and all he could say was “No, no, no, this can’t be happening!”

Wedge Antilles and the pilots of Rogue Squadron stared in frozen horror as thousands of TIE interceptors streamed out of the asteroid fields, hurtling toward the Republic ships at maximum thrust. As each one slipped from the shadows of the asteroids into the full harsh glare of Taspan’s stellar flares, the fierce radiation turned their ships into brilliant stars plunging toward destruction even as the pilots inside them were being roasted alive. They came on without maneuver, without tactics or even formation; the lead ships vanished in silent fireballs as Republic starfighters and the guns of the capital ships laced space with annihilating energy, but the TIEs behind them just came on and on, flying through the wreckage of their comrades, throwing themselves on unswerving suicide runs into the Republic ships clustered in Mindor’s shadow.

Wait a Minute was the closest to the leading edge of the swarm. Its point-defense guns destroyed dozens of incoming TIEs, but finally one slipped through; after the first impact took out two of his turrets, Captain Patrell ordered his ship into rolling fire, but another TIE hit only meters away from the first, and two more hit after that.

The ship broke up and finally exploded, and the storm of TIEs just kept coming.

They streaked straight through the wreckage field and curved toward the next-closest ship, and by that time Wedge and the Rogues and all the remaining Republic starfighters had thrown themselves into the suiciders’ path and lit up space with the fireballs from hundreds of exploding TIEs. The Imperials didn’t even bother fighting back; Wedge didn’t need his tactical navicomputer to calculate the chance that any Republic ship could survive this storm.

There wasn’t one.

In the crowded hold of Lancer, the screaming of the stormtroopers had raised hairs on the back of Fenn Shysa’s neck. He didn’t have any idea what was going on, but he understood all too well the fundamental rules of combat, one of which was When you don’t know what’s happening, what’s happening is always bad.

As the troopers had fallen into seizures, Fenn had jumped atop a cargo container and roared in Mandalorian, “Secure their weapons! Now!,” which was the main reason the slaughter that followed wasn’t much, much worse—but it was still bad enough.

The mercenaries had leapt to their task like the disciplined warriors they were, deploying in staggered array to keep clear lines of fire open so they could cover each other and, if necessary, shoot the convulsing stormtroopers. Unfortunately, no amount of training or discipline could allow a small cadre of soldiers to instantly control several thousand panicked civilians.

Some of those civilians had enough military experience to understand that the most useful thing they could do was get themselves out of the way; they dived to the deck and pulled down other civilians around them, but still there were more than a thousand who stood frozen, screamed, or tried to run.

Those were the first to die.

The seizures stopped as suddenly as they had begun; the stormtroopers who had not yet been disarmed leapt to their feet or simply rolled into firing position and opened up on the crowd; the mercenaries returned fire, and within a second or two the entire hold was filled with a haze of blasterfire and the stench of burning flesh. The disarmed troopers still had the fist blades that were integral to the