Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor - Matthew Woodring Stover [84]
For a moment, all of the battle was contained by the raging firestorm. Starfighters could not fly, overheated turbolaser towers could not fire, armored domes could not be opened, and no ground forces could leave either the landers or Imperial bunkers.
But the storm didn’t last long; in minutes, the tons of dust and sand and gravel it sucked up into itself reached the tipping point beyond which the debris no longer added to the conflagration but began to smother it. As the storm shrank, the three Republic battle cruisers withdrew behind its retreating face.
Seconds later—while the rock and sand still glowed scarlet with heat—turbolasers began to cough plasma blasts at incoming starfighters. Concealed blast doors swung open across the summit and disgorged streams of armored stormtroopers and files of rumbling hovertanks. Republic landers opened fire with their antipersonnel turrets, and their own troop ramps swung down to make a path for charging marines, and the Battle of Mindor was now joined on the ground. Face-to-face. Blaster-to-blaster.
Knife-to-knife.
WHEN GROUP CAPTAIN KLICK AND HIS COMPANY OF elite commandos had opened the wide arching doorway to the Sorting Center, the place had been in chaos. The bombardment on the surface above sent shock waves through the stone that made the floors shudder and shift continuously like a long, low-level groundquake, and filled the air with a just-above-subsonic rumble like a nonstop roll of thunder; the prisoners, panicked at the rain of dust and chunks of stone from the vault ceiling overhead, rushed the doorway en masse. Klick’s men had driven them back; stun blasts dropped the leading ranks, and full-power blasterfire over their heads sent the others cringing toward the far walls. Klick had kicked his way through the twitching bodies, raised his E-11, and triggered another burst over the heads of the cowering prisoners.
“Down! Facedown! On the floor! Now!” He turned to the trooper beside him. “Sergeant, take Second Platoon and shoot any prisoner still on his, her, or its feet five seconds from now. The rest of you, on me.”
He led them trotting through the black-gleaming fusion-formed cavern to the Election Center’s door.
“Fourth Platoon: front and center.” He stepped to one side. “Seal this door! No one in, no one out. First Platoon: firing position in support of Four. The rest of you, prepare to repel assault.”
A couple of troopers from Fourth Platoon deployed their foamplast canisters. Engineered for a quick-and-dirty seal for envirosuit ruptures or minor hull punctures, foamplast would expand to fill any and all available space around its application point, then harden almost instantly. A thin bead around the edges of the door sealed it permanently in place, and not a moment too soon—only seconds after the foamplast had set, Klick heard the whine of the door’s servos as someone tried to open it from the far side.
“Back!” he snapped. “Company: form up and prime weapons! Prepare to fire on my order!”
For a long, long second the only sound in the Sorting Center was the rustle and snap of blasters being readied and the clacking of the nearest troopers dropping prone, those behind to one knee, and the rear taking firing stances with carbines at their shoulders. Klick himself stepped away from the door; the only way to open a foamplast-sealed door was a breaching charge.
Seconds ticked past with no explosion, and just when Klick began to wonder if he’d imagined the servo whine, a spot high on the right-hand side of the door glowed red and brightened almost instantly to white before it burst and vaporized around a bar of green plasma.
All right, two ways through a foamplast-sealed door, Klick amended silently. Breaching charge, and lightsaber.
A green lightsaber … !
Klick had a terrible premonition. “Hold fire,” he warned. “Anybody shoots before my order, I’ll kill him myself.