Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order_ Dark Tide 02_ Ruin - Michael A. Stackpole [107]
“Eleven hot and green.”
Sparky hooted and started painting tactical data on her primary monitor. In an eye blink a dozen Yuuzhan Vong targets scrolled past. The monitor displayed a huge Yuuzhan Vong cruiser, bigger than anything she’d seen before. It bristled with long spines of yorick coral, though the core of it seemed to have started life as an asteroid onto which the other pieces had been grafted.
Three smaller cruisers—all the size of the ship they’d fought at Dantooine—surrounded the largest cruiser, then eight more ships were positioned in support of the rest. From all of them boiled skips, forming a cloud of contacts. Through all that Sparky managed to pick up a series of medium-size ships that Jaina took to be troop carriers.
Fleet command immediately downloaded tactical designators for the Yuuzhan Vong ships. The biggest was designated a grand cruiser. The smaller ones became assault cruisers, and the smallest were tagged light cruisers. The quickchat designators of grand, salt, and light were appended to the files, though Jaina assumed the pilots would come up with their own designators just to spite the tactical planners.
The troop carriers earned the name crate. Jaina knew they had to be jam-packed full of Yuuzhan Vong warriors. The soldiers would be helpless until they got into atmosphere and on the ground, and an attack on them didn’t need to destroy the crate, just open the hull enough to let the atmosphere out and cold in.
Gavin’s voice crackled over the comm channel. “Rogues, we have the crates. Lasers if you can, torps if you can’t. Better us killing them up here, than having them on the ground.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
“It’s huge, Admiral. It masses as much as a Super Star Destroyer.”
Pellaeon turned slowly away from the viewport on the Chimaera’s bridge, knowing he would win the battle as much by the demeanor he showed his crew as he would by firepower or tactics. “We’ll have to see, Commander, if we can trim mass from it, shall we?”
The Chimaera sat in the center of the defender’s formation, deep in the well of a cone. Arrayed around and ahead of it were four other Imperial-class Star Destroyers—two each from the New Republic and the Remnant. Then nine Victory-class Star Destroyers, three Bothan Assault Cruisers, and a Mon Calamari star cruiser ranged out further along the cone. Beyond them came a scattering of smaller ships, from frigates on down to a couple of freighters with more guts in the crew than weapons on the hull.
“Firing solutions for the grand, please; fire at will.” The Imperial admiral turned and watched the turbolaser batteries on either of the ship’s flanks fill space with hot red bolts of energy. Some of the weapons emitted a nearly constant stream of small bolts that sprayed back and forth at the target. The voids the Yuuzhan Vong used to shield their ships sucked them up greedily, though when a few began to get through, the other guns unleashed a concentrated torrent of fire.
Those heavier bolts flashed in at their targets. Pellaeon expected them to hit and melt gaping holes in the grand’s rocky hull, but voids swallowed those bolts, as well. The admiral’s eyes narrowed as he studied the large ship’s ability to absorb the punishment his guns were doling out.
“No good, sir.” The weapons-control officer let frustration bleed into his words. “These snubfighter tactics may work against skips, but not against the big ships. They have enough shielding to hold us off.”
“That’s possible, quite possible.” Pellaeon frowned, and ran his right hand over his chin. “Or have they learned how we fight?”
Jaina scattered laserfire over a skip, then drilled a quad burst into its aft. Coral slagged off into a frozen comet tail. The dark little Yuuzhan Vong ship started to roll and began on a course that