Star Wars_ Tales From Jabba's Palace - Kevin J. Anderson [214]
“Temperature in the wake?” he asked.
The science droid consulted the sensor data on its compscreen. “Within the tolerance of the harvester droids.”
Saes watched the cruisers slide through the atmosphere and light the moon on fire. He turned in his command chair to face his second in command, Los Dor. Dor’s mottled, deep red skin looked nearly black in the dim light of the bridge. His yellow eyes mirrored the moon’s fires. He never seemed to look up into Saes’s eyes, instead focusing his gaze on the twin horns that jutted from the sides of Saes’s jaw.
Saes knew Dor was as much a spy for Naga Sadow as he was an ostensible aide to himself. Among other things, Dor was there to ensure that Saes returned the Lignan—all of the Lignan—to Sadow’s forces at Primus Goluud.
The tentacles on Dor’s face quivered, and the cartilaginous ridges over his eyes rose in a question.
“Give the order to launch the harvester droids, Colonel,” Saes said to him. “Harbinger’s and Omen’s.”
“Yes, Captain,” Dor responded. He turned to his console and transmitted the order to both ships.
The honorific Captain still struck Saes’s hearing oddly. He was accustomed to leading hunting parties as a First, not ships as a Captain.
In moments hundreds of cylindrical pods streaked out of Harbinger’s launching bay, and hundreds more flew from her sister ship, Omen, all of them streaking across the viewscreen. They hit the atmosphere and spat lines of fire as they descended. The sight reminded Saes of a pyrotechnic display.
“Harvester droids away,” 8K6 intoned.
“Stay with the droids and magnify,” Saes said.
“Copy,” answered Dor, and nodded at the young human helmsman who controlled the viewscreen.
The harvester droids’ trajectories placed them tens of kilometers behind the destruction wrought by the mining cruisers. Most of them were lost to sight in the smoke, but the helmsman kept the viewscreen’s perspective on a dozen or so that descended through a clear spot in the sky.
“Attrition among the droids upon entry is negligible,” said 8K6. “Point zero three percent.”
The helmsman further magnified the viewscreen again, then again.
Five kilos above the surface, the droids arrested their descent with thrusters, unfolded into their insectoid forms, and gently dropped to the charred, superheated surface. Anti-grav servos and platform pads on their six legs allowed them to walk on the smoking ruin without harm.
“Give me a view from one of the droids.”
“Copy, sir,” said Dor.
The helm worked his console, and half the viewscreen changed to a perspective of a droid’s-eye view of the moon. A murmur ran through the bridge crew, an exhalation of awe. Even 8K6 looked up from the instrumentation.
The voice of Captain Korsin, commander of Harbinger’s sister ship, Omen, broke through the comm chatter and boomed over the bridge speakers.
“That is a sight.”
“It is,” Saes answered.
Smoke rose in wisps from the exposed subcrust. The heat of the plasma beams had turned the charred surface as hard and brittle as glass. Thick cracks and chasms lined the subcrust, veins through which only smoke and ash flowed. Waves of heat rose from the surface, distorting visibility and giving the moon an otherworldly, dream-like feel.
Hundreds of harvester droids dotted the surface, metal flies clinging to the moon’s seared corpse. Walking in their awkward, insectoid manner, they arranged themselves into orderly rows, their high-pitched droid-speak mere chatter in the background.
“Sensors activating,” intoned 8K6.
As one, long metal proboscises extended from each of the droids’ faces. They ambled along in the wake of the destruction, waving their proboscises over the surface like dowsing rods, fishing