Star Wars_ The Dark Lord Trilogy - James Luceno [88]
“Torpedoes away!” he said at the halfway mark.
Obi-Wan triggered the launchers and watched two torpedoes burn toward the target. Behind him, the rest of Red Squadron did the same. Hits began to score, fire and gas fountaining from breaches in the ship’s dark hull.
The disabling run completed, Anakin boosted for Tythe.
“She’s finished!”
In single file, Red Squadron followed.
Almost instantly the punctured vessel exploded, stunning the fleeing starfighters with a wave of force. Red Nine disappeared at the edge of the roiling detonation zone, and Red Seven wheeled off into the void with both wings sheared away.
Obi-Wan regained control of his craft and once more attached himself to Anakin’s six.
“Insertion point in fifteen seconds,” Anakin updated. “Dial inertial compensators to maximum. All power to the ablative shields. Deceleration burn on my mark …”
Obi-Wan clamped his hands on the violently shaking yoke as Red Squadron ripped into Tythe’s plundered atmosphere. He thought his teeth might rattle out of his jaws and drop into his lap; eyes and ears might implode from the pressure; chest might cave in and crush his heart.
Light flashed behind him; streaked past the cockpit.
Half a dozen droid fighters were chasing them down the well.
Not having to concern themselves with endangering living systems, the Vultures should have been able to descend even more rapidly and more acutely than the starfighters. But as the heat of entry built in the ships, survival protocols began to kick in, tasking the fighters to adjust the angle of their descents. For some of the droids it was already too late. Single contrails became particle showers as gravity summoned the broken fighters to their doom.
Punching through the blankets of clouds at suicidal velocity, Obi-Wan’s starfighter went into a roll. Pinwheeling before his eyes, Tythe was a kaleidoscopic furor of white and brown, smeared occasionally with striations of blue-green.
Anakin’s voice grew loud in his ears. “Nose up! Nose up!”
With effort, Obi-Wan leveled out of his plummet, his stomach lurching up into his throat. Reaching forward, he engaged the starfighter’s topographic sensors. The ship was dropping toward ice floes and bergs. Then, far below, peninsulas of rocky islands came into view. The surging waves of a dead gray ocean. The denuded shelf of a continent. Barren land fissured by dry, sinuous riverbeds, and mounded by brown hills strewn with toppled trees.
A ruined world.
“Head count,” he said into his helmet microphone.
Five voices responded. Reds Eight and Eleven were lost.
“Locking in target coordinates,” Anakin said.
Red Squadron flew just above the contours of land that had once been as lush as the area surrounding Theed, on Naboo. Now a desert, save for areas where exotic species of vegetation thrived in lakes of red-brown water, their jagged shorelines crusted yellow and black.
Also like Naboo, Tythe had once mined plasma in sufficient quantities to ship offworld. But greed had driven LiMerge Power to experiment with dangerous methods for keeping the ionized gas under adequate heat. A chain reaction set in motion by nuclear fuels had destroyed facilities throughout Tythe’s northern hemisphere and had left the planet uninhabitable for a generation.
“Target facility is ten kilometers west,” Anakin said. “We should be hearing from artillery soon enough.”
Soaring from the edge of a high plateau, the six starfighters dropped into a broad valley, disturbingly reminiscent of Geonosis, right down to the berthed starships and war machines spread across the floor.
Hailfire droids wheeled out to greet them with volleys of surface-to-air missiles. Turbolaser cannons affixed to Trade Federation landing ships cut the gray-yellow