Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 05_ Agents of Chaos 02_ Jedi Eclipse - James Luceno [124]
Brand swiveled his chair to study various threat-assessor displays and vertical plotting panels. “The Hapans will put the fear into those warships,” he assured in a voice loud enough to be heard throughout the bridge.
Leia hid her trembling right hand beneath her cloak and cut her eyes from the viewport to the plotting panels. She reached out with the Force for Anakin and Jacen. Where earlier the effort had only increased the gravity of her distress, she now experienced relief. A transcendent calm enveloped her, and the apprehension she had known since Hapes was suddenly gone.
But the serenity was fleeting. Almost instantly something raw and uncontrollable flooded into her awareness. Again she reached for Anakin and Jacen, and at once realized that her concerns for them had dammed a deeper though less personalized fear, which suddenly rushed in.
She swung to the viewport to see the Hapan fleet forming up into battle groups and already beginning to close with individual enemy warships.
“You may fire when ready,” she heard Brand telling Prince Isolder, but as if at some great distance.
All at once, a flash of radiant energy illuminated local space. From Rimward of Fondor’s outermost moon, or perhaps gushed from hyperspace itself, came a torrent of starfire a thousand kilometers wide. Coalescing into a savage beam of focused annihilation, it tore into the midst of the dispersing Hapan fleet, consuming every ship in its path, atomizing some in the blink of an eye and holing others with spears of seething light. Weapons, superstructure, and antennae vaporized by the skewering beam, the ships exploded outward, vanishing in globes of brilliant mass-energy conversions. Even those ships outside the limits of the beam were hurled violently off course, slagged along their inward-facing sides, or thrown into collisions with one another. The mated saucers of the Battle Dragons broke apart and disintegrated, and the battle cruisers were snapped like twigs. Fighter groups vanished without a trace.
Leia was dumbfounded. Nothing in the Yuuzhan Vong arsenal had prepared her for devastation on so immense a scale. For a moment she was certain she was in the grips of another terrible vision, but it quickly became clear that the violence was real.
Her stupefaction deepened when the beam didn’t diminish as it punched through the Hapan fleet. Lancing deeper into Fondor space, the shaft of raging power went on to graze Fondor’s penultimate moon, effacing a portion of the cratered planetoid as a surgical laser might a tumor. Then it ripped unabated into the heart of the enemy armada, obliterating masses of coralskippers and pulverizing several of the largest warships. Finished with its work or not, the beam then shot past Fondor, singeing the northern hemisphere in its passing, perhaps to destroy some even more distant target.
All systems had failed on the bridge, and for a long moment, even as consoles and display screens flickered back to life under emergency power, everyone was simply too stunned to speak or cry out, much less make sense of what they had just witnessed.
“Some sort of repulsor beam,” a tech finally said in a stark disbelief. “Delivered through hyperspace.”
“Centerpoint,” Leia said, as if in shock.
Brand and several others turned to her.
She looked at the commodore. “Someone fired Centerpoint Station.”
Han embraced Roa as he came through the airlock in the Falcon’s port-side docking arm.
“Fasgo’s dead,” Roa said when Han let him go.
Han shook his head in dismay. “He could have been a friend.”
“As I was saying on the Jubilee Wheel, fortune smiles, then betrays … then smiles once more.”
Han ran his eyes over his friend and managed a grin. “You know, you don’t look half bad.”
“The half that does I’ll have repaired. Did my ship survive?”