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Kalback still looked doubtful. “You’re expecting a direct attack?”

“Or something like it. Get me firing solutions for fifteen to twenty-five gravities throughout that cone,” Luke told the fire-control officer. “Lock targeting with all nearside batteries and prepare for torpedo launch.”

“General?” The lieutenant twisted toward Luke, blinking in astonishment.

“Belay that!” Kalback sputtered. “That’s—that shuttle’s unarmed!”

“That’s an order, Lieutenant.” Luke turned crisply to Kalback. “I should say, that’s an order, Admiral. Excuse me for giving orders to your men on your bridge. Direct your men to follow my command.”

“But—but at least we must warn him!”

“He’ll get the message when his sensors pick up our targeting lock.”

“Are we the Empire? Would you destroy an unarmed craft? That’s murder!”

“Admiral?” The ensign’s voice had gone tight as a full dragline. “Countersensor measures and evasive action from the shuttle. Acceleration still increasing.”

“No simple shuttle comes with CSM,” Luke said. “Admiral, give the order to fire.”

“But without weapons—”

“It is a weapon.” Luke could feel it now. “It’s a flying bomb.”

“But—but Shadowspawn himself—”

“Isn’t in there,” Luke finished for him. “Look at the evasion pattern—that’s an Imperial fighter pilot. A good one, too.”

“Admiral—” The ensign’s voice was barely more than a strained hiss. “Vector change. Intercept course at twenty-five standard gravities. Five seconds.”

“Admiral,” Luke said, calm as a stone. “Now.”

Kalback’s nictitating membranes swept across his huge eyes, and this time they did not retreat. “May my pod and all its ancestors forgive me,” he said. “Fire.”

Turbolaser blasts clawed through space. In the bare eyeblink before they would strike the shuttle and obliterate it, the shuttle vanished in a flare of actinic white.

This flare did not expand in a spherical shock front, like an explosion, but instead shaped itself into a single plane, like a planetary ring or a black hole’s accretion disk. This plane of white flashed outward at lightspeed and whipped through the Justice’s shields without resistance. It also whipped through the Justice’s armor, hull, and internal structure.

And the ship just … fell apart.

CHASK FRAGAN HAD BARELY BEGUN TO RELAX AFTER the battle; he had just canceled the B-wing’s HUD and was settling back in his pilot’s couch, allowing a long whistling sigh to escape through the gill slits above his eyes, when Kort Habel fluted an unprintable expletive from the gunner’s couch behind him.

“What now?” Chask half rolled toward his ventral side, twisting so that he could see Kort’s screens … but Kort wasn’t looking at his screens. He was looking at a brilliant white star that had suddenly bloomed entirely too close to the coordinates of the Justice, five light-seconds away. “Hot staggering glurd! What was that?”

“Dunno,” Kort answered through clenched masticators. “Nothing on scan—wait, nothing on comm either! Subspace gives back only fuzz.” He went grim. “They’re jamming us.”

“Who is?”

“The comm fairies, chitin-brain. How should I know?”

“Try realspace EM.”

“Radio? We’re five light-seconds out—”

“Which means that explosion happened what, twelve seconds ago now?”

“Nothing on EM. I mean nothing. Just fuzz. Wait, here it comes.”

In scattered spits and static-fogged gasps, the realspace comm gave up the news: Justice had been hit by an unidentified weapon, and hit hard. Ship damage was so severe that the massive battle cruiser was breaking up in orbit. No estimate of casualties, though its fighter escort reported sighting landing craft and escape pods ejecting from the wreckage; only seconds later, the fighter escort reported engaging a superior enemy force as it swept in to fire on the pods. “They’re pounding the wheezing garp out of us!”

“Who is?”

“At a guess?” Kort flicked a mandible up and out, toward the tumbling storm of asteroids outside the cockpit—a storm of asteroids that now flared with the plasma signature of dozens—no, hundreds—of ion drives firing on full throttle. “Them.”

Chask