Star Wars_ The Approaching Storm - Alan Dean Foster [168]
This was more than a simple refusal to surrender, though the marauders had shown a distressing tendency, when they found themselves in imminent danger, to shout out words to the effect of For Shadowspawn and the Empire! Forward the Restoration! and blow themselves up. Forensic engineers examining wreckage of destroyed TIE Defenders hypothesized that the starfighters were equipped with some unexplained type of deadman interlock, which would destroy the ship—and obliterate the pilot—even if the pilot merely lost consciousness.
The brilliant part of Wedge’s brilliant plan had been to conceal hundreds of thousands of miniature solidstate transponders among the flechettes inside Rogue Squadron’s custom-made torpedoes, before giving the marauders a fairly decent pasting and letting the rest escape. Unlike ordinary tracking devices, these transponders gave off no signal of their own—thus requiring no power supply, and rendering them effectively undetectable. These transponders were entirely inert until triggered by a very specific subspace signal, which they then echoed in a very specific way. And since the only transponders of this very specific type in the entire galaxy were loaded in Rogue Squadron’s torpedo tubes, drifting at the ambush point in deep space along the Corellian Run, and lodged in various parts of the armored hulls of a certain group of TIE Defenders, locating the system to which said Defenders had fled was actually not complicated at all.
Wedge’s holoform took on a vaguely puzzled look. “Taspan. Sounds familiar, but I can’t place it …”
“The Inner Rim, off the Hydian Way.”
“That would be the less-than-good part.”
“Yeah. No straight lanes in or out—and most of the legs run through systems still held by Imperials.”
“Almost makes you wish for one of Palpatine’s old planet-killers.”
“Almost.” Lando’s smile had faded, and he didn’t sound like he was joking. “The Empire had a weapons facility on Taspan II—it’s where they tested their various designs of gravity-well projectors—”
“That’s it!” The image snapped its fingers silently, the sound eliminated by the holoprojector’s noise filter. “The Big Crush!”
Lando nodded. “The Big Crush.”
“I heard there was nothing left at Taspan but an asteroid field, like the Graveyard of Alderaan.”
“There’s an inner planet—Taspan I is a minor resort world called Mindor. Not well known, but really beautiful; my parents had a summer house there when I was a kid.”
“Any progress on this Shadowspawn character himself?”
“We’ve only managed to determine that no one by that name was ever registered as an Imperial official. Clearly an assumed identity.”
“The guy’s got to be some kind of nutjob.”
“I doubt it. His choice of base is positively inspired; the debris from the Big Crush hasn’t had time to settle into stable orbits.”
“So it is like the Graveyard of Alderaan.”
“It’s worse, Wedge. A lot worse.”
Wedge’s image appeared to be giving a low whistle; the holoprojector’s noise filter screened it out. “Sounds ugly. How are we supposed to get at them?”
“You’re not.” Lando took a deep breath before continuing. “This is exactly the type of situation for which we developed the Rapid Response Task Force.”
Wedge’s image gave a slow, understanding nod. “Hit ’em with our Big Stick, then. Slap ’em good and run like hell.”
“It’s the best shot we’ve got.”
“You’re probably right; you usually are. But it’ll sting, to not be there.”
“Right enough. But we have other problems—and the RRTF is in very capable hands.”
“Got that right.” Wedge suddenly grinned. “Speaking of those capable hands, pass along my regards to General Skywalker, will you?”
“I will do that, Wedge. I will indeed.”
THE NEW REPUBLIC
(5–25 YEARS AFTER STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE)
The destruction of the second Death Star and