Star Wars_ The Jedi Academy_ Champions of the Force - Kevin J. Anderson [5]
“Yes, sir,” the reply came.
Furgan turned to his comm officer. “Are you certain that boy’s brother is dead? Nothing we can use for leverage?”
Dauren blinked. “I don’t know, sir. You told me to delay him, so I made up a story and sent a fake file. Do you want me to check?”
“Of course I want you to check!” Furgan bellowed. “If we can use the brother as a hostage, perhaps we can force that boy to neutralize the effects of this Sun Crusher weapon.”
“I’ll get on it immediately, sir,” Dauren said, and hammered his fingertips on the datapads.
Six of Furgan’s training commanders, summoned by the wailing alarms, marched into the control center and saluted briskly. Standing shorter than his commanders, Furgan clasped his hands behind his back, pushing his chest out as he addressed them.
“Take an inventory of all functional ships on Carida. Everything. We need to download the data cores from our computers and take as many personnel as possible. I doubt we’ll be able to evacuate them all; therefore, choices will be made on the basis of rank.”
“Are we just going to abandon Carida without a fight?” one of the generals said.
Furgan screamed at him, “The sun is going to blow up, General! How do you propose to fight that?”
“Evacuation on the basis of rank?” Dauren said in a small voice, looking up from his panel. “But I’m only a lieutenant, sir.”
Furgan scowled down at the man hunched over his control panels. “Then that gives you all the more incentive to find that kid’s brother and force him to rescind that torpedo!”
Through half-polarized viewports Kyp watched the surviving TIE fighters pull away and swoop back toward Carida. He smiled with satisfaction. It would be good to watch the Caridans’ panicked scramble as they tried to grab everything of value on an entire planet.
Over the next twenty minutes he watched streams of ships launch away from the main training citadel: small fighters, large personnel transports, StarWorker space barges, and one deadly looking Dreadnaught battleship.
Kyp was annoyed at himself for allowing the Imperials to haul so much weaponry away. He was sure it would eventually be used against the New Republic; but at the moment Kyp took his pleasure from eradicating the solar system.
“You can’t escape,” he whispered. “A few might get away, but you can’t all escape.” He glanced at his chronometer. Now that instabilities had begun pulsing out of the star, he could get a more accurate determination of how long it would take for the sun to explode. The Caridans had twenty-seven minutes before the first shockwave struck.
The flow of ships had petered out, and only a few scrap-heap vessels struggled out of the gravity well. Carida did not appear to be well supplied with vessels; most of their prime equipment must already have been commandeered by Grand Admiral Thrawn or some other Imperial warlord.
The holopanel flickered, and the image of the comm officer appeared. “Pilot of the Sun Crusher! This is Lieutenant Dauren calling Kyp Durron—this is an emergency, an urgent message!”
Kyp could well imagine that anyone still on Carida might have an urgent message! He took his time answering just to make the comm officer squirm. “Yes, what is it?”
“Kyp Durron, we have located your brother Zeth.”
Kyp felt as if someone had thrust a lightsaber through his heart. “What? You said he was dead.”
“We checked thoroughly and found him in our files after all. He is stationed here in the citadel, and he has not managed to find transport off Carida! I’ve summoned him to my comm station. He’ll be here in a moment.”
“How can that be!” Kyp demanded. “You said he died in training! I have the files you sent me.”
“Falsified information,” Lieutenant Dauren said bluntly.
Kyp squeezed his eyes shut as hot tears sprang to fill his vision: sudden overwhelming joy at knowing Zeth was still alive, anger at having committed