Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 05_ Agents of Chaos 02_ Jedi Eclipse - James Luceno [67]
The Battle of Tynna was no exception.
Being seven hundred thousand kilometers removed from the cloud-wreathed, cool-blue and dark-green gem was like having an upper-tier balcony seat at the Coruscant Opera, but the lofty vantage compensated for the lack of details. And as at the opera, technological assists were available for any who wished to bring the action into extreme close-up.
Major Showolter might have expressed as much to fellow intelligence officer Belindi Kalenda, but he feared being misunderstood. Consequently, he kept his thoughts to himself as the two women at the helm of the KDY LightStealth-18 reconnaissance leaned to either side to afford him and Kalenda an unobstructed view of Tynna’s ruination.
A carbon-black six-passenger craft with a needlelike body and disproportionate, downsloping stabilizers, the LightStealth recon was the closest anyone had come to producing a starship capable of hiding itself even while it scanned. Unlike the wide assortment of vessels designed by Raith Sienar, Imperial Section 19, or Warthan’s Wizards during the days of the Empire, the LSR wasn’t cloaked, but was instead built for silent running and remarkable speed. Bristling with low-profile rectennae and packed with signal-augmented sensor jammers, blindband hypercomm transmitters, crystal gravfield trap scanners, and a power core more suitable to a ship of the line, the LSR could all but see around the universe to its own aft and could outrun nearly anything that got wind of it.
The craft’s pilots, on temporary duty from the Intelligence division’s own Black Force Squadron, had assured Showolter that the LSR could be moved to within visual range of the Yuuzhan Vong flotilla and still evade detection. But Showolter had no desire to be any closer to the rout than necessary. They were only there as observers, in any case.
“It’s horrible,” Kalenda said abjectly, turning away from the narrow viewports. “I can’t stand just sitting here, doing nothing.”
“Showing ourselves will allow the Yuuzhan Vong to know we’ve found a flaw in their strategy,” Showolter pointed out. Even so, the realization that they really could do nothing brought an end to his ruminations about the beauty of battle and pulled down the corners of his mouth. “But I agree: it’s horrible.”
Kalenda was slight, dark-skinned, and a touch glassy-eyed, where Showolter was thickset, pale, and a bit more conspicuous than Intelligence liked its officers to be. Recently they had worked closely together in overseeing the Yuuzhan Vong defector case, which had not only turned into a political debacle of major proportions, but had also landed both of them in bacta tanks.
In private moments Showolter still chided himself for having been so easily manipulated by Elan—the Yuuzhan Vong priestess and faux defector who had very nearly done in Han Solo, as well. Showolter had never trusted her, and yet despite his suspicions he had relaxed his guard and ultimately failed to deliver her to Coruscant. He often wondered what might have happened had he succeeded. Would he have been a victim of her poison breath, as Solo had come close to being? Would she have accomplished her goal of assassinating Luke Skywalker and other Jedi Knights? He wondered, too, about the fate of the strange being that had accompanied Elan, the one called Vergere, who had fled in one of the Millennium Falcon’s escape pods, perhaps back into enemy hands, perhaps not.
Kalenda had also borne the brunt of the fallout from the affair, as it was thought that she had unwittingly divulged vital details to an informer who sat—even now—in the senate or on the Security and Intelligence