Star Wars_ The Dark Lord Trilogy - James Luceno [158]
“Impressive,” Palpatine said, but then he cast a significant gaze up the staircase, which the vector of the artificial gravity had made into a vertical cliff. “But what now?”
Before Anakin could answer, the erratic gravity swung like a pendulum; while they both clung to the railing, the room seemed to roll around them. All the broken chairs and table fragments and hunks of rubble slid toward the opposite side, and now instead of a cliff the staircase had become merely a corrugated stretch of floor.
“People say”—Anakin nodded toward the door to the turbolift lobby—“when the Force closes a hatch, it opens a viewport. After you?”
GRIEVOUS
The ARC-170s of Squad Seven had joined the V-wings of Squad Four in swarming the remaining vulture fighters that had screened the immense Trade Federation flagship, Invisible Hand. Clone pilots destroyed droid after droid with machine-like precision of their own. When the last of the vultures had been converted to an expanding globe of superheated gas, the clone fighters peeled away, leaving Invisible Hand exposed to the full fire of Home Fleet Strike Group Five: three Carrack-class light cruisers—Integrity, Indomitable, and Perseverance—in support of the Dreadnaught Mas Ramdar.
Strike Group Five had deployed in a triangle around Mas Ramdar, maintaining a higher orbit to pin Invisible Hand deep in Coruscant’s gravity well. Turbolasers blasted against Invisible Hand’s faltering shields, but the flagship was giving as good as it got: Mas Ramdar had sustained so much damage already that it was little more than a target to absorb the Hand’s return fire, and Indomitable was only a shell, most of its crew dead or evacuated, being run remotely by its commander and bridge crew; it swung unsteadily through the Hand’s vector cone of escape routes to block any attempt to run up toward jump.
As its shields finally failed, Invisible Hand began to roll, whirling like a bullet from a rifled slugthrower, trailing spiral jets of crystallizing gas that gushed from multiple hull ruptures. The rolling picked up speed, breaking the targeting locks of the ship’s Republic adversaries. Unable to pound the same point again and again, their turbolasers weren’t powerful enough to breach the Hand’s heavy armor directly; their tracking points became rings that circled the ship, chewing gradually into the hull in tightening garrotes of fire.
On the Hand’s bridge, overheated Neimoidians were strapped into their battle stations in full crash webbing. The air reeked of burning metal and the funk of reptilian stress hormones, and the erratically shifting gravity threatened to add a sharper stench: the faces of several of the bridge officers had already paled from healthy gray-green to nauseated pink.
The sole being on the bridge who was not strapped into a chair stalked from one side to the other, floor-length cape draped over shoulders angular as exposed bone. He ignored the jolts of impact and was unaffected by the swirl of unpredictable gravity as he paced the deck with metal-on-metal clanks; he walked on taloned creations of magnetized duranium, jointed to grab and crush like the feet of a Vratixan blood eagle.
His expression could not be read—his face was a mask of bleached ceramic armorplast stylized to evoke a humanoid skull—but the pure venom in the voice that hissed through the mask’s electrosonic vocabulator made up for it.
“Either get the gravity generators calibrated or disable them altogether,” he snarled at a blue-scanned image of a cringing Neimoidian engineer. “If this continues, you won’t live long enough to be killed by the Republic.”
“But, but, but sir—it’s really up to the repair droids—”
“And because they are droids, it’s useless to threaten them. So I am threatening you. Understand?”
He turned away before the stammering engineer could summon a reply. The hand he extended toward the forward viewscreen wore a jointed