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“Thinking? You were gone, kid. Your lights were on but there was nobody home. It was scary.”

“Yes,” Luke said. “For me, too.”

CHAPTER 13

NIGHT WAS FALLING ACROSS THE SHADOW REALM.

At the center of the system, clouds of asteroids spiraled in toward Taspan’s photosphere. The interaction of the gravity stations and Taspan’s own gravity gave them a kind of order: as they fell inward, tumbling toward the fusion-powered furnace of the star’s surface, the clouds elongated, and curved, and melded from individual clouds to an array of twisting streams like the stripes on a candy sparklemint stick.

Smaller rocks vaporized in Taspan’s corona and chromosphere; larger asteroids ignited on the way down, becoming streaks of fire whose photosphere impacts created splash rings as wide as a major planetoid and hundreds of kilometers tall, as well as central rebound spikes that actually ejected stellar material beyond the critical point where the star’s gravity and magnetic field could contain it, unleashing huge bursts of very hard radiation—which was exciting enough in itself, because it managed to knock down deflector shields throughout the system.

The only shields these bursts didn’t knock down were those of the starfighters making atmospheric attack runs on Lord Shadowspawn’s volcano base—these shields weren’t knocked down because interference from the atmosphere prevented them from being raised in the first place—and those of the Slash-Es and the other Republic cruisers huddling into the radiation-shadow cast by Mindor itself.

And night was falling.

As Mindor turned its face from Taspan, out of the blood-colored west came waves of Republic starfighters. They hurled themselves at the dome’s defenses with reckless abandon, their half-useless laser cannon battering the heavy armor of turbolaser towers. The towers, mounted on gimbals the size of spacecraft, tracked the streaking fighters, their massive guns pumping out so much plasma so fast that they superheated the nearby air into a titanic updraft, blasting a vast rolling mushroom cloud of corrosive sand and dust and smoke from the dome to the stratosphere.

Down through that cloud came wave after wave of TIEs.

There were so many that the atmosphere’s effect on their cannons was irrelevant; they could destroy whole flights of X-wings by simply being airborne obstacles—their presence over the dome forced the Republic pilots to break formation and reduce their speed to avoid midair collisions … and the slightest reduction in speed could be fatal. Turbolaser drive technology had advanced in the years since the destruction of the first Death Star; these were far faster on traverse, and included range-sensitive trajectory-projection software that automatically timed their fire to intercept any starfighter unwary enough to go in a relatively straight line for more than a second at a time.

And against an unshielded X-wing, even a glancing hit from a tower-mounted turbolaser left nothing but an expanding globe of plasma.

Still the X-wings came on, in wave after wave, pilots giving their lives to shield flights of B-wing bombers that swooped in for torpedo runs. The B-wings weren’t after the towers; they focused their fire on six heavily armored domes atop the highest curve of the volcano.

These domes were closed up tight, relying on their multiple-meters-thick ceramofused armor to absorb the shattering blasts of proton torpedoes and detonite-tipped missiles, which it did very well indeed. “We’re barely even leaving dents!” a B-wing pilot shouted over the comm.

“Shut up and keep shooting,” his squad leader ordered.

“But we can’t hurt them as long as those armor domes are closed!”

“The point is, as long as we make ’em keep those armor domes closed, they can’t hurt us!”

Inside those armored domes were the base’s planetary-defense weapons. The five smaller domes that surrounded the vast central dome contained dual-mounted ground-to-orbit ion-turbo cannons: the twin mounted barrels would fire on a precisely timed interval, ensuring that a strike from the ion cannon to disable