Star Wars_ The Black Fleet Crisis 02_ Shield of Lies - Michael P. Kube-McDowell [129]
The early images from N’zoth caused a buzz in the room. They showed the unmistakable shapes of Star Destroyers, singled out by the R2-controlled imaging systems on Rone Taggar’s Jennie Lee. After leaving Han, Leia had gone to stand by Ayddar Nylykerka, who was busily capturing individual frames from the data into a collage of ship portraits. She listened in while the intense little analyst from the Asset Tracking Office talked aloud to himself.
“That could be the Redoubtable,” he muttered, consulting his lists. “It’s definitely early Imperial-class, despite the modifications to the forward superstructure—”
The buzz turned into a dark murmur a few seconds later, when the view from Number 1 changed and another, sleeker dagger shape snapped into focus. There was hardly a person in the room who could not identify that profile, and the exceptions quickly learned the significance in a hasty whisper from a companion: there was a Super Star Destroyer in orbit around N’zoth.
From the beginning, the New Republic had opted to build a larger number of smaller vessels—Fleet carriers, Republic-class Star Destroyers, battle cruisers—rather than adopt the Imperial design philosophy. Mon Mothma had given orders to scrap rather than repair or make a museum piece of the sole SSD captured from the Empire. Consequently, the eight-kilometer-long behemoth circling N’zoth had anything in the New Republic Fleet badly outgunned.
“Now, that, that can only be Intimidator,” Nylykerka pronounced. “All of the late-production Super-class had that additional shield tower located on the centerline—”
Shocking as that discovery was, the attention of the audience in the War Hall was quickly drawn elsewhere. As the counters approached the two-minute mark and the scouts raced toward the midpoint and closest approach of their passes, the display wall was filling with images of warships, until it resembled a larger version of the collage at Nylykerka’s station.
There were Star Destroyers at Wakiza, at Zhina, at New Brigia and Doornik 881, where the Imperial factory farm had been. The Yevethan fleet at Morning Bell now numbered at least sixteen vessels, including four Star Destroyers, six Aramadia-class thrustships, and a queer-looking Dreadnaught-scale ship, which Nylykerka excitedly identified as a long-missing Imperial testbed, the EX-F. Other thrustships seemed to be everywhere—orbiting all the other Duskhan League worlds, at Polneye and the former Morath mining operation on Kojash.
Conspicuously missing from the entry scans were the three Imperial shipyards named in Lieutenant Sconn’s deposition: Black Fifteen, which had been located in orbit at N’zoth; Black Eleven, which had been at Zhina; and Black Eight, at Wakiza. Ackbar noted their absence to Han and added, “I do not think we will find them—I do not put it past the Yevetha to have moved the shipyards to concealed locations. I suspect that that is what Astrolabe stumbled on at Doornik Eleven Forty-two.”
At 02:05, the signal from Number 16 at Polneye abruptly terminated, the tracking chart freezing with only forty-two percent of the planet scanned. Moments later Number 19, at Morning Bell, and Number 5, at the Duskhan world Tizon, also went dead.
The losses did not stop there. All over the wall, the individual displays were going blank almost as quickly as they had come to life. Only half the scouts reached the midpoint of their runs. Three more winked out almost as one as Leia drifted away from Nylykerka and toward the middle of the War Hall.
“What’s going on out there?” she breathed to no one in particular as she stared up at the displays.
The signals from Z’fell, Wakiza, Faz, N’zoth—all assigned to the 21st Recon Group’s X-wings—were among the last to vanish, but vanish they did. No scout managed to scan more than three-fourths of a Duskhan League