Star Wars_ The Dark Lord Trilogy - James Luceno [86]
His eyes fixed on the display screen of his data processor, Captain Dyne ambled toward Mace and Shaak Ti.
“Master Jedi, our search is about to take us to a whole new level.”
Mace looked around the tunnel for signs of a concealed turbolift or staircase.
“Up or down?” Shaak Ti asked, equally bewildered.
Dyne glanced up, blinking at her. “I didn’t mean ‘new level’ in the literal sense.” He indicated the hovering probe droids, which were eager to have the team follow them east. “If the prints lead us far enough, we’re going to end up in the sub-basements of 500 Republica.”
Mace tracked the droids as they moved deeper into the corridor.
Five Hundred Republica: home to thousands of Coruscant’s wealthiest Senators, celebrities, shipping magnates, and media tycoons.
And one of them, very possibly a Sith Lord.
There was little the Confederacy or the Republic could add to the damage LiMerge Power had inflicted on Tythe generations earlier. From deep space, the surface—glimpsed through a pall of ash-gray clouds—looked as if it had been licked by a flare from its primary, or had had a brush with an enormous meteor. But Tythe’s scars owed to none of that. The planet had been spared everything but LiMerge itself, whose attempts to exploit Tythe’s abundant deposits of natural plasma had invoked a cataclysm of global proportions.
The three drifting hulks that had been Republic cruisers might have been caught up in the cataclysm but were, in fact, casualties of the Separatist attack, which had come swiftly and without quarter. Nimbused by what vacuum had drawn from their interiors, the scorched and lanced trio lazed midway between opposing battle groups of Separatist and Republic vessels.
“Just once I wish we could repay Dooku and Grievous in kind,” Anakin said over the tactical net, as Red Squadron dropped from the belly of the Integrity and rocketed toward Tythe.
“The fact that we don’t is what keeps us centered in the Force,” Obi-Wan said.
Anakin grunted. “There’ll come a time come when they’ll have to answer to us personally, and it will be the Force that guides our blades.”
The two starfighters were flying abreast, almost wingtip-to-wingtip, astromech droids R2-D2 and R4-P17 in their respective sockets. Tythe’s rubicund star was at their backs, and the ships that made up the Separatist flotilla were strung menacingly above the planet’s northern hemisphere.
With Tythe’s brood of moons clustered in a two-hundred-degree arc, the Separatists had worked quickly to strew mines at several hyperspace jump points, leaving the Republic ships with only a narrow window in which to revert to realspace. Trade Federation, Techno Union, and Commerce Guild capital ships occupied the apex of that window, deployed from north pole to equator above Tythe’s bright side, with wings of droid fighters boiling into space to the fore of the arrayed vessels.
To minimize their profiles, the Republic ships—widely dispositioned, like a group of predatory fish—had their triangular bows pointed toward the planet. Red and other squadrons were streaking forward, but well short of engaging the vanguard Vultures and tri-fighters.
“Prepare to break hard to starboard,” Anakin said over the net to the entire squadron. “Watch your countdown displays. On my mark, ten seconds to break …”
Obi-Wan kept his eyes on the counter at the bottom of the instrument panel’s tactical display screen. At the zero mark, he yanked the yoke to one side and peeled away for clear space.
Behind the squadrons of V-wings and Jedi and ARC-170 starfighters, the Republic battle group broke to port, drenching the distant Separatist ships with furious broadsides. Blinding pay-loads of spun plasma hurtled through space, detonating against the shields of the enemy vessels, atomizing any droid fighters unlucky enough to have been caught in the way.
The Separatist ships absorbed the first hits without