Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor - Matthew Woodring Stover [19]
Admiral Kalback shifted forward in his command chair. Nictitating membranes swept his eyes and retreated only halfway—the Mon Calamari version of a satisfied smile. “Accept the hail.”
The lieutenant swept his webbed fingers through a complex curve in the air above his console, and the battle bridge’s holoprojectors flickered to life.
The image they formed was of a tall human male, standing motionless in robes so long that they draped in folds around his feet. His hands were similarly hidden, folded before him within voluminous sleeves. His face was pale as a corpse’s and as expressionless, and his eyes were rimmed in black. He wore some sort of curious headgear: an inverted crescent as broad as his substantial shoulders, which framed his head as though his face were a mountain, looming in silhouette before a cloud-blackened sun half below the horizon.
“Unidentified Rebel command cruiser,” the image intoned in a voice black as a subterranean cavern, “I am Lord Shadowspawn. You have defeated us. I respectfully request permission to board, that I may formally treat for the lives of my men.”
Lieutenant Tubrimi said, “That’s all of it,” and the image flickered out.
The admiral had never been a particularly demonstrative being, but there was quiet joy in his voice as he turned to the young human who stood beside his chair. “It seems congratulations are in order, General.”
The general stood exactly as he had throughout the operation: motionless on the Justice’s battle bridge, hands folded behind him, a faint frown painting his brow. Beside him, maglocked to the deck, waiting with electronic patience, stood an R2-droid series model. The general seemed to be listening to some faint and distant sound, far beyond the confines of the ship, and it appeared that he didn’t like what he was hearing.
Shadowspawn’s voice … he couldn’t pin it down. There had been something weird about it, some strange resonance, that struck him as both too familiar and just plain wrong.
“General?” Admiral Kalback repeated. “My congratulations—”
Luke replied grimly, “Not yet.”
The battle had gone like chronowork. The sudden appearance of the Twenty-third Combat Starfighter Wing coming out of hyperspace at the very limit of Mindor’s gravity well had apparently caught Shadowspawn’s forces entirely by surprise; the Twenty-third’s Y-wings had managed two devastating torpedo runs on the warlord’s base before the first TIE defenders on combat patrol had been able to get back to engage the Twenty-third’s X- and B-wings; the Ys managed several more runs during the ensuing dogfight. The battle at the edge of Mindor’s atmosphere had drawn in the rest of the combat patrols from across the system, leaving clear space for all twelve of the Rapid Response Task Force’s capital ships to jump in.
The five Slash-Es had come out of jump in a precise formation—a regular tetrahedral dipyramid, to be exact—with the planet of Mindor at its geometric center. Once their gravity-well generators activated, they bracketed the planet with a mass-shadow more than seven light-minutes across. But before the generators were triggered, the other seven ships had jumped in. Six of these remaining seven were a motley collection of various styles and makes, from a pair of refitted Acclamator II assault cruisers to a battered old Techno Union Bulwark-class battleship, dating from before the Clone Wars; all they had in common were retrofitted Class 0.6 hyperdrives, multiple-redundancy deflector and particle shields, and the ability to transport a minimum of three full squadrons of starfighters apiece. Adding to the ungainly, cobbled-together appearance of these ships were the vast number of pre–Clone Wars Jadthu landers maglocked to their hulls, which not only added their own very substantial armor as additional protection for the cruisers, but also gave the four non-atmosphere-capable