Star Wars_ The Jedi Academy_ Champions of the Force - Kevin J. Anderson [75]
Both Ackbar and Mon Mothma stared at him in astonishment.
“Of course!” she said. “But it’s been months. Why did they choose such a slow-acting …”
Terpfen closed his eyes, and the words came to him as if he were reciting a script. “They wanted a long, debilitating decline for you because of the damage it would do to the New Republic’s morale. If you were simply killed, you could become a martyr. Your death might have galvanized support from otherwise neutral systems. But with a slow, progressive weakening, it could be seen as the decay of the Rebellion.”
“I see,” Mon Mothma said.
“Very shrewd,” Ackbar said. “But what are we to do with this information? What else do you know of the poison, Terpfen? How can we treat it?”
Terpfen heard the silence in his head like a scream. “This is not a true poison. It is a self-replicating swarm of nano-destroyers: microscopic, artificially created viruses dismantling Mon Mothma’s cells one nucleus at a time. They will not stop until her life ceases.”
“Then what do we do?” Ackbar persisted.
Finally the helplessness and all the pain within Terpfen built until it spilled out of him like a star finally reaching its flash point.
“We can do nothing!” he shouted. “Even knowing about this poison does not help us, because there is no cure!”
26
The battered Star Destroyer Gorgon barely survived its passage through the gravitational whirlpool into the Maw cluster.
Admiral Daala strapped herself to a command chair on the bridge as the Star Destroyer was buffeted by tidal forces that would rip the ship apart if their trajectory deviated from its charted path. Daala had ordered her crew to stand down and take refuge in protective areas, to buckle themselves into their stations and prepare for a rough ride. Of the very few known paths inside the Maw cluster, she had chosen the shortest, the “back door,” but still her ship was in no shape to withstand the enormous stresses for long.
Many of the Gorgon’s stabilizers had blown in their narrow escape from the multiple supernova explosion in the Cauldron Nebula. Shields had failed at the end—but they had held long enough. The Gorgon’s once-ivory metallic hull was now streaked and scarred. Outer layers of armor had boiled away, but Daala had taken a gamble.
She had been lucky fleeing from the exploding suns, while only seconds behind her the Basilisk had vaporized in flame, disintegrated by the outrushing supernova shock wave. But Daala had ordered the Gorgon to plunge blindly into hyperspace mere moments before the explosive front had reached her rear thrusters. The desperate leap knocked them headlong on a reckless course through the hazards of the universe. The Gorgon would have been obliterated if they had stumbled onto an interdimensional path that passed through the core of a star or planet. But through some miracle of fate that had not happened.
The Gorgon had emerged in an uninhabited void in the Outer Rim. Their shields had failed, life-support systems partly burned out, and the hull had been breached in several areas that let the atmosphere squeal into the vacuum of space until those compartments were sealed off.
Collectively gasping from their narrow escape, Daala’s crew had set about effecting repairs. It took her navigators a day just to determine their galactic position because they had gone so far afield. Armored spacetroopers in totally contained environment suits walked over the external skeleton of the Gorgon, removing ruined components, patching weak spots in the hull, rigging replacements from their meager inventory of spare parts.
The Star Destroyer