Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 21_ The Unifying Force - James Luceno [154]
Enormous singularities began to open as the chunks were sent tumbling into the upper reaches of the envelope. But the orbital dovin basals that had created the gravitic anomalies were already overburdened, and many of the fragments plummeted past them, becoming fiery streaks as they entered the atmosphere.
Jag knew that scanners aboard the Alliance capital ships were already analyzing the relative strengths of the singularities and monitoring the trajectories of the meteors that had slipped through the gravitic shield. Once the areas of greatest stress were identified, their locations would be relayed to the transports and starfighters.
Not quite two years earlier, the troop transport Record Time had delivered its cargo of Wraiths and Jedi to the surface of Coruscant in single-person containers. But that was before the dovin basals had been seeded into orbit. More important, there was no reason for stealth now. As someone at Contruum had said to Jag, “If we can’t drop a moon on them, we can at least make it rain rocks.”
“Twin Suns,” Right to Rule control said, “you have open windows at coordinates four-two-three and four-two-five. Rothana transport is reorienting to follow you through.”
Jag passed the word to his pilots, even though the navi-computers on each starfighter had certainly received the course corrections. Configured into pairs and trios, Twin Suns formed up along both sides of the antique wedge-shaped ship and began to herd it toward the infiltration zone. Adapting their vectors to match those of the escort starfighters, coralskippers attacked from all sides, threading through the fragment cloud and augmenting it with plasma missiles and gouts of molten stone.
Flying just at the perimeter of the transport’s shields, Jag’s clawcraft was jarred by every projectile that found its target. The comm channel was a babble of voices, as pilots issued warnings of strafing runs or declared the status of their ships. Explosive light washed into the spherical cockpit of Twin Suns One from astern, and Jag glanced at his displays to see Twin Eight and Eleven vanish from the grid. With scant room to maneuver, he tried to make the most of every squeeze of the trigger, but the skips had the advantage of being able to take evasive action, whereas the starfighters were intent on protecting their ward.
Carefully trained laser bolts from Right to Rule created a sudden corridor of destructive energy around the transport and fighters. A dozen more skips became extra fodder for the meteor-gobbling dovin basals. Still in darkness, a Yuuzhan Vong cruiser stabbed by convergent blasts from three separate Alliance ships cracked open and blew apart. A second vessel, spewing blades of flame from its midsection, rolled lazily out of orbit and began to fall into the atmosphere.
The dovin basals were trying desperately to prioritize, but more and more rock fragments were getting past them. As overtaxed as they were, the gigantic biots still posed a threat to any ship that ventured too close. For that reason the transports had been retrofitted with Bakuran-designed HIMS generators, which should have allowed them to sustain momentum even in an interdiction field. At Contruum, few had expressed confidence in the retrofitting, and Jag was one of the first pilots to see why.
His group of vanguard starfighters was just passing between a pair of the Yuuzhan Vong orbital monstrosities when two overlapping singularities yawned, catching the pointed bow of the transport and dragging it hard to starboard. The ship’s aged cylindrical thrusters tried to compensate for the unexpected tug of gravity,