Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor - Matthew Woodring Stover [85]
The bar of green plasma cut a ragged oval through the door. When the cut was finished and the oval slab of durasteel fell through a shower of sparks to clang on the fusion-formed stone, Klick did not give the order to fire. He did not give any order at all. He simply stood, staring, awestruck beyond words.
Standing in the doorway were only two men. One was a tallish wiry man with dark skin, and blood trickling sluggishly down his shaven scalp, dressed in Pawn robes and holding an E-11 dangling by its shoulder strap. The other, smaller man was dressed in a sodden and filthy Rebel Alliance flight suit, and his damply tousled hair of radiation-bleached blond stuck in tangles to a tanned face whose features, Klick ever-so-slowly realized, had the exact contours of his very fondest dream …
Klick’s mouth went dry and his legs went numb and he could barely force the words through his slack lips. “Emperor Skywalker …”
He dropped to one knee, undogged his helmet, yanked it off, and inclined his head in reverence. “Down weapons! Down weapons! Buckets off and kneel to your Emperor!” he cried. “Your pardon, my lord, I did not know you!”
REPUBLIC MARINES FEVERISHLY TRIED TO DIG IN AROUND the ion-turbo emplacements while they poured fire into the advancing stormtroopers. Their armored landers added antipersonnel punch with turret-mounted SoroSuub clusterfrag launchers; the whole curve of the base’s summit sparkled with thousands of tiny detonations, each of which scattered high-velocity flechettes, though most of them only clattered off the rocks in a rushing roar like a Chadian monsoon.
The stormtroopers advanced at a run behind the cover of heavily shielded hovertanks. The tanks’ forward cannon arrays pounded away at the landers and blasted marines to bloody bits, and their drivers ran them right up against the landers’ skirt armor. From there the stormtroopers could charge into hand-to-hand—but when they did, the stormtroopers discovered to their considerable dismay that Republic marines, unlike many other enemies, didn’t seem at all intimidated by the stormtroopers’ vibroknucklers, and that the marines favored, for close combat, 18 cm aKraB clip-point vibrodaggers that could cut Mark III armor like rendered gorgan blubber.
Around the dome that housed the gravity gun, twelve landers from the Remember Alderaan had come down in a double ring: four close in around the emplacement with the other eight encircling them. The inner four were too close to the emplacement’s infantry bunkers for artillery or tank fire—so close that the landers’ own antipersonnel turrets could not depress their aim to ground level; all they could do was chip away at the upper curves of the bunkers and the gravity gun’s dome. Black-armored stormtroopers came swarming out from the bunkers like ravenous carrion beetles, using the inner landers themselves as cover from the fire of the surrounding eight while they went to work on the hulls with fusion torches and shaped-blast breaching charges. If any of the stormtroopers found it odd that these twelve landers, unlike the ones around the ion-turbo emplacements, remained tightly sealed instead of disgorging their own swarms of marines, none of them remarked on it.
The explanation for this unusual tactic was discovered by one particular stormtrooper officer, who led one of the strike teams that blasted their way into one of the landers and found no Republic forces at all—only a remote computer link jacked into the pilot’s station, and another jacked into the fire-control board. The lander was not, however, actually empty. It was packed, wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling, with detonite fused to motion detectors.
It was the last thing the officer saw—the simultaneous explosions of all four landers vaporized not only him and his strike team, but also all of the hundreds of stormtroopers nearby, as well as buckling the blast doors of the infantry bunkers.
Though most of the force of the explosions was directed inward toward the bunkers and the gravity gun, the residual blast was enough to rock the other eight