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By Root 1282 0

that were every bit as fatiguing as work itself without fearing that the Amerce would never be completed and leave would never be granted. To make matters worse, space raid drills had become quotidian events, jarring everyone from sleep long before they were required to report to work.

Today was no exception.

Adding his elaborate groan to a chorus of similar protests issuing from all corners of the bunkroom, Mitsun buried his head under a pillow and declined to move, despite the unrelenting howling of sirens and the insistent appeals from the Bothan female who had the bunk opposite his.

“Come on, Chief,” she pleaded, trying to shake him into motion. “You know what happens if we don’t report to our stations.”

“I don’t care,” Mitsun said, his voice muffled by the pillow. “How do they expect us to finish the Amerce if we’re asleep on our feet for most of our shifts?”

“Please, Chief. If you get suspended, things’ll be worse for everyone.”

Mitsun started to wave her away, but suddenly found himself rudely tossed from his third-tier bunk to the hard deck.

“What’s the idea?” he stammered, hauling himself to his feet, only to see that the Bothan female and almost everyone else in sight had been similarly displaced.

Without warning, the facility sustained a follow-up blow, powerful enough to topple several banks of bunks and hurl everyone halfway across the hold.

“This is no drill!” someone yelled.

Mitsun heard the words but refused to give them credence. Stepping over sprawled bodies, he hurried to the outer hull bulkhead and slammed the heel of his hand against the release stud that raised the hold’s night curtain and blast door.

By the time the curtain had pocketed itself, several other workers had joined Mitsun at the underlying transparisteel panel, beyond which the Amerce lay half in ruins, holed and venting its guts into space.

From the direction of Fondor’s closest moon came a storm of asteroidlike ships, so fixed on demolishing Shipyard 1321 that they weren’t even bothering to discharge weapons, but were instead accelerating toward the battleship and the facility.

“Leave cancelled,” Mitsun said to himself as he caught sight of two coralskippers hurtling directly for the bunkroom.

Leia followed briskly on the heels of the colonel who had fetched her from her cabin aboard the Yald, saying only that it was urgent that she join Commodore Brand in the tactical information center quickest. She and Brand’s adjutant were stepping from the turbolift on the secure deck that housed the TIC when she nearly collided with Isolder, who had obviously just arrived from the Song of War.

“Do you have any idea what this is about?” he asked her.

The question was pointed, though without his being aware of it. What had begun at Gyndine as vague misgiving and had swelled to apprehension as a result of the vision on Hapes had now become unmitigated dread—as tangible as any fear or phobia she had ever experienced—even while its source and substance remained veiled.

Hours of meditation had allowed Leia to determine that part of her apprehension was centered on Anakin and Jacen and the forecasted attack on Corellia. But just how her concerns for them were connected to the foreboding that swirled like excited electrons around Isolder—and more specifically around Commander Brand’s battle plans—she could not say or even guess at. She knew only that her composure was unraveling, and that forces were converging in a way that no one had anticipated.

“Leia?” Isolder said.

The Jedi’s weapon is her mind. When a Jedi is distracted, when she loses her focus, she becomes vulnerable …

“I’m sorry, Isolder,” she said at last, “but I don’t know what this is about.”

He studied her in silence while they hastened for the war room and entered side by side. Brand, looking stricken, gazed up at them from his tall stool alongside a sprawling horizontal plotting panel. In fact, beneath all the frantic activity, everyone in the enormous room seemed to be moving in a daze.

“On-screen,” Brand ordered one of the technicians, as Leia and Isolder approached.