Star Wars_ The Dark Lord Trilogy - James Luceno [175]
Obi-Wan looked unimpressed. “And so?”
Anakin unsnapped the crash webbing that held the pilot’s corpse and pulled the body from its chair. “And so you’d better strap in,” he said, settling into the chair, his fingers sliding over the unfamiliar controls.
The cruiser bounced even harder, and its attitude began to skew as a new klaxon joined the blare of the other alarms. “That wasn’t me!” Anakin jerked his hands away from the board. “I haven’t even done anything yet!”
“It certainly wasn’t.” Palpatine’s voice was unnaturally calm. “It seems someone is shooting at us.”
“Wonderful,” Anakin muttered. “Could this day get any better?”
“Perhaps we can talk with them.” Obi-Wan moved over to the comm station and began working the screen. “Let them know we’ve captured the ship.”
“All right, take the comm,” Anakin said. He pointed at the copilot’s station. “Artoo: second chair. Chancellor?”
“Yes?”
“Strap in. Now. We’re going in hot.” Anakin grimaced at the scraps of burning hull flashing past the view wall. “In more ways than one.”
The vast space battle that had ripped and battered Coruscant space all this long, long day, finally began to flicker out.
The shimmering canopy of ion trails and turbolaser bursts was fading into streaks of ships achieving jump as the Separatist strike force fled in full retreat. The light of Coruscant’s distant star splintered through iridescent clouds of gas crystals that were the remains of starfighters, and of pilots. Damaged cruisers limped toward spaceyards, passing shattered hulks that hung dead in the infinite day that is interplanetary space. Prize crews took command of surrendered ships, imprisoning the living among their crews and affixing restraining bolts to the droids.
The dayside surface of the capital planet was shrouded in smoke from a million fires touched off by meteorite impacts of ship fragments; far too many had fallen to be tracked and destroyed by the planet’s surface-defense umbrella. The nightside’s sheet of artificial lights faded behind the red-white glow from craters of burning steel; each impact left a caldera of unimaginable death. In the skies of Coruscant now, the important vessels were no longer warships, but were instead the fire-suppression and rescue craft that crisscrossed the planet.
Now one last fragmentary ship screamed into the atmosphere, coming in too fast, too steep, pieces breaking off to spread apart and stream their own contrails of superheated vapor; banks of turbolasers on the surface-defense towers isolated their signature, and starfighters whipped onto interception courses to thin out whatever fragments the SD towers might miss, and far above, beyond the atmosphere, on the bridge of RSS Integrity, Lieutenant Commander Lorth Needa spoke urgently to a knee-high blue ghost scanned into existence by the phased-array lasers in a holocomm: an alien in Jedi robes, with bulging eyes set in a wrinkled face and long, pointed, oddly flexible ears.
“You have to stand down the surface-defense system, sir! It’s General Kenobi!” Needa insisted. “His code verifies, Skywalker is with him—and they have Chancellor Palpatine!”
“Heard and understood this is,” the Jedi responded calmly. “Tell me what they require.”
Needa glanced down at the boil of hull plating that was burning off the falling cruiser, and even as he looked, the ship broke in half at the hangar deck; the rear half tumbled, exploding in sections, but whoever was flying the front half must have been one of the greatest pilots Needa had ever even heard of: the front half wobbled and slewed but somehow righted itself using nothing but a bank of thrusters and its atmospheric drag fins.
“First, a flight of fireships,” Needa said, more calmly now. “If they don’t get the burnoff under control, there won’t be enough hull left to make the surface. And a hardened docking platform, the strongest available; they won’t be able to set it down. This won’t be