Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 04_ Agents of Chaos 01_ Hero's Trial - James Luceno [64]
Elsewhere, juking through whirling hunks of debris, a squadron of E-wings converged on a maimed Yuuzhan Vong ship and began to nip at it mercilessly. Proton torpedoes punched through its imperiled defenses and slammed into the bow. Stratified layers began to peel away from the ship, rubble exploding outward, rocketing from sight. A second, smaller craft, similarly lanced by laser fire, also blew to pieces, showering nearby space with briefly glowing motes.
Close to Ord Mantell’s outermost moon, a chaotic melee raged as coralskippers, X-wings, and TIEs mixed it up, ferociously and with grim resolve. The starfighters came out of smooth rolls, inverted dives, and predatory banks to go to guns with their prey, riding them until they were annihilated. Other ships revectored, racing through fragment clouds to escape the carnage or form up for reengagement, sometimes slewing wildly out of control.
In midsystem the battle cruiser and warship advanced on each other, now trading fusillades and broadsides. Localized storms of blue lightning enveloped both ships as their extended energy defenses made contact. The Yuuzhan Vong vessel poured its most lethal fire into the larger ship, and the cruiser replied with volley after volley of directed light. Caught between the two, an escort took a direct hit, sending scorched and misshapen pieces of wreckage spinning off into space.
As if angered by the loss, the cruiser upped the ante with escalating fire. Boulder-size blocks of mirror-finish coral flew from the warship, but it was not about to be humbled. Plasma streamed from the tips of the enemy ship’s forward arms, raising blistering explosions along the cruiser’s port armor plate.
Weapons blazed and flared. Fire fountaining from the cruiser’s aft hull, the ship began to founder, tipping to one side with main guns still discharging and sensor arrays in flames. Projectiles continued to penetrate her armor until the hull surrendered integrity and precious atmosphere began to stream outward. With artificial gravity disabled, hatches and seals, turrets, and sensor pods blew. Then vacuum played its hole card, tugging crew and contents into the polar night.
X-wings and E-wings rushed dauntlessly to the cruiser’s support. Proton torpedoes found soft spots in the warship’s tattered defenses, bursting against the superstructural arms and command ridge, and loosing geysers of spindrift coral.
But the starfighters’ efforts came too late.
A hellish explosion pushed outward from a rift in the hull of the Mon Calamari vessel, splitting it in half. Escape pods launched, vectoring toward Ord Mantell like drops of radioactive rain, while the battle cruiser became a ballooning sphere of roiling incandescence, then exploded brilliantly.
The Star Destroyer emerged from between Ord Mantell’s moons with main and auxiliary thrust nozzles flaring. Throwing itself headlong into the fray, it fired repeatedly as its pointed bow swung in the direction of the warship. Thread-fine against its enormous bulk, blue lines of energy from aft turbolasers and ion cannons stabbed unrelentingly at the black ship.
The Erinnic braced for return fire, but the plasma and projectiles never arrived.
Abruptly the warship changed course, accelerated, and began to unleash its fury on Ord Mantell, cutting loose with all forward guns. Blinding missiles streaked toward the planet’s surface, burning seething tunnels through the atmosphere. Detonations on the ground lighted the undersides of ragged clouds.
Then, from a dark orifice in the bow, the warship extruded an enormous hose that was more living monstrosity than machine. The blunt nose of the stipple-skinned gargantuan caught the scent of the nearby Jubilee Wheel and, elongating, began to close on the small orbital station, weaving its way through the Wheel’s flock of freighters, barges, and passenger ships.
A trailing wedge of X-wings and TIEs launched from the cruiser-carrier