Star Wars_ The Dark Lord Trilogy - James Luceno [98]
A flash of intense light blinded Padmé momentarily. The skimmer tipped harshly, almost spilling its occupants into midair. Smoke poured from the starboard turbine nacelle, and the small craft went into a shallow dive.
“Hold tight!” Bail yelled.
“We’re doomed!” C-3PO said.
Padmé understood that Bail was swerving for a landing platform that abutted a wide skybridge. Tears streaming from her eyes, stricken with a sudden nausea, she placed her right hand on her abdomen.
Anakin! she said to herself. Anakin!
Flagship of the Separatist flotilla, General Grievous’s kilometers-long cruiser the Invisible Hand held to a stationary orbit above Coruscant’s Senate District, just now in full sunlight, the most majestic of its forest of aeries standing tall above the clouds. Magnified holoimages of the buildings rose from the tactical table on the cruiser’s bridge. Grievous studied the images for a moment before returning to his customary place at the forward viewscreens.
Glinting in daylight, the gargantuan wedge-shaped assault ships that were, for good reason, the pride of the Republic fleet were positioned to provide cover for the planet’s most important centers. In the first moments of the sneak attack, Grievous had caught a few of the ships with their shields contracted, and those hapless few glided now like flaming torches above Coruscant’s pearl-strung night side, fire-suppression tenders and rescue ships following in their wake, gobbling up escape pods and lifeboats. The surviving cruisers were managing to keep their Separatist counterparts at bay. Although that scarcely mattered, since neither aerial bombardment nor invasion was important to the plan.
From the point of view of Republic naval commanders, it must have appeared that Grievous lacked a plan; that desperation resulting from his previous defeats in the Mid and Outer Rims had driven him to gather what remained of his fleet and hurl it into a battle he couldn’t possibly hope to win. And indeed, Grievous was doing everything he could to encourage that misconception. The warships under his command were haphazardly dispersed, vulnerable to counterattack, concentrating fire on communications satellites and orbital mirrors, lobbing occasional and largely ineffectual volleys of plasma at the world they had come so far and risked so much to assail.
All this was crucial to the plan.
The tactics of terror had their place.
From hundreds of areas on Coruscant’s bright and dark sides streamed columns of passenger and cargo ships, determined to reach the safety of deep space. Indeed, there were almost as many vessels attempting to depart as there were arriving, constrained to autonavigation lanes and easy prey because of that. Elsewhere in local space, inward-bound ships that had reverted to realspace outside the battle zone had diverted from their approach vectors and were either hanging well to the rear, close to Coruscant’s small moons, or deviating for the star system’s inner worlds at sublight speeds.
In the middle distance, droid fighters and clone-piloted starfighters were destroying one another with a vengeance. Perhaps a wing of Vulture fighters had penetrated Republic lines at the start of the battle, but many had since been destroyed by orbital platform cannons, flights of high-altitude patrol craft, or ground-based artillery. Others had dashed themselves against the defensive shields that provided additional safeguards for Coruscant’s political districts. But that, too, was part of the plan to inspire panic, since the sight of plasma bolts or plummeting ships detonating against those transparent domes of energy could be terrifying. Smoke billowing from some of the capital world’s deepest canyons told Grievous that a few of the spearhead droids had succeeded in evading both shields and antiaircraft fire.
Similarly, tentative maneuvers on the part of Coruscant