Star Wars_ The Jedi Academy Trilogy 02_ Dark Apprentice - Kevin J. Anderson [120]
Kyp’s face was a grim mask as he flicked a row of red activator switches. He knew exactly how the Sun Crusher worked; he had stolen those memories from Qwi Xux.
Warning beacons flashed across the command-system panels, and Kyp confirmed his intentions to the onboard computer. The torus-shaped generator at the long end of the Sun Crusher powered up, crackling with blue plasma.
Kyp remembered the New Republic engineers attempting to determine how the superweapon worked, how they had panicked at the sight of a simple message cylinder. The resonance torpedoes that triggered stellar explosions were dense packets of energy, programmed and modulated to make the core of a star unstable. The torpedoes could initiate a collapse and rebound of the outer layers of star material, unleashing a tremendously violent explosion that would rip a star apart.
Kyp targeted the cluster of blue-giant stars. He did not hesitate. He knew in his heart what he had to do.
He pushed the activation buttons. The Sun Crusher shuddered as the superweapon launched seven high-power resonance torpedoes.
Against the muted swirls of the Cauldron Nebula, he saw sizzling ovoid shapes of electric green, white, and yellow fire. The energy torpedoes streaked out, plunging into the boiling surfaces of the giant stars.
Kyp dimmed the segmented viewport and fixed his gaze on the blue giants. The cluster would explode simultaneously, and the shock waves would ignite vast oceans of nebular material in a galactic wildfire. It would be a perfectly clear signal to the remnants of the Empire.
But it would take hours for the torpedoes to tunnel to the stellar cores and set up the chain reaction. The wave of destruction would boil up from the depths of the stars until a flash of incredible force spewed brilliant light, high-energy radiation, and star matter into the Cauldron. The entire sector would become an inferno.
Kyp felt a cold fist clench inside his stomach. He could not turn back now. Once launched, the resonance torpedoes were irrevocable. These seven stars were doomed to explode in a few hours.
He pulled away at a leisurely pace, killing time. The Sun Crusher was so small that few sensor systems could detect it, especially within the electromagnetic chaos of the Cauldron Nebula. The weapon was designed to flit into a system, drop its torpedo into a star, and vanish without a battle, without loss of ordnance or personnel. A simple first—and final—strike.
Admiral Daala would never detect his presence.
Kyp’s gaze wandered back to the chronometer, impatient to watch Daala’s ships being wiped out in the murderous waves ripping through the nebula. He had the most powerful weapon ever invented, and he had the powers of the Sith that Exar Kun had shown him.
Where others had failed against the Empire, Kyp Durron would succeed. Completely.
As he drifted away from the blue-giant cluster, he noted that only about an hour remained before the massive explosions would begin. The waiting seemed to go on forever. He sent out his thoughts again, wishing he could taunt Daala.
Then, unexpectedly, her Star Destroyers began to move. The Basilisk and the Gorgon powered up their sublight engines and started a slow drift, aligning themselves to a hyperspace path, as if they were ready to launch another attack.
Kyp felt a flame of anger sear through him. “No—she can’t leave now!”
He could not go back and stop the explosion of the core stars. Daala had to stay where she would be trapped!
Kyp slapped at the Sun Crusher’s weapon-control systems, powering up the defensive laser cannons mounted at sharp angles on the weapon. Then he shot forward at full thrust.
When he and Han had first escaped from the Maw cluster, Daala had thrown all of her fighters at him in a desperate attempt to recapture the Sun Crusher.
Kyp figured it would take little more than a few potshots to give her the incentive to stay around.
Admiral Daala raised