Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order_ Rebel Dreams_ Enemy Lines I - Aaron Allston [40]
“It shall be done.”
* * *
“Arrival in three … two … one … mark.”
Right on the navigator’s spoken cue, the swirl of lines in Lusankya’s forward viewport straightened out and contracted into stationary stars, one of them barely near enough to be recognized as a sphere instead of a mere pinpoint of light.
Commander Eldo Davip, nearly two meters of space navy gristle packed into a bulging officer’s uniform, shook his head, not satisfied with the results. His bridge crew, most of its members new to Lusankya, had not so far demonstrated reliable competence, and now they’d managed to drop his new command into the Pyria star system much farther from the planet Borleias than he had indicated.
Then he frowned. Ahead, some stars were disappearing, others reappearing, as objects moved into and out of the way. Did the Pyria system have an asteroid belt? He turned to his navigator to ask that question, but suddenly the bridge was filled with alarm bells and the startled exclamations of officers.
“It’s a trap!” That was the sensor operator, a male from Coruscant, his excitement not quite concealing the clipped, upper-class pronunciation that betrayed his origin. “We’re surrounded by Vong vessels!”
Davip whirled to face the sensor screen set up near his commander’s post at the rear of the bridge’s second-level walkway. It showed Lusankya’s position with the blip representing Millennium Falcon neatly tucked in beneath, but the two spacecraft were surrounded by the blips of dozens of vehicles, mostly capital ships, all either enemy red or winking from unknown yellow to red.
The horror of the situation swelled in Davip’s throat, choking him for a brief moment. Then the commands he needed to utter, had to utter, forced their way past the obstruction. “All shields up! All batteries fire at will! Fire as you bear! Launch all squadrons!”
As soon as the drop out of hyperspace was complete, Han Solo frowned at his instruments. “We dropped a couple of seconds early,” he said.
Leia, looking absurdly tiny in the Millennium Falcon’s oversized copilot’s seat, pointed up through the cockpit viewport. The underside of Lusankya hung there like an irregular ceiling. “It wasn’t a mistake. Their nav computers must have sent us faulty data.”
“No, I’m showing heavy gravitic abnormalities here. We were pulled out of hyperspace by the presence of—” Han’s eyes snapped wide open and he yanked at the Falcon’s controls, sending the onetime freighter into a rolling dive its original manufacturers had never intended it to experience. Shouts of surprise—and a couple of thrill-rider glee—erupted from the passenger compartment.
A glowing trail of fire, ejecta from a Yuuzhan Vong plasma cannon, ripped through space where the Falcon had just been. Han pitched his voice to be heard throughout the ship: “Take the guns! We’re in the middle of a Vong fleet!”
Wyrpuuk Cha nodded, satisfied with the results he was seeing.
The blaze bugs flurried, rapidly changing position in the portion of the depression representing the reserve fleet. Wyrpuuk Cha frowned as he took in the changes. Something triangular, in the same approximate shape as one of the enemy’s hated Imperial Star Destroyers but much larger, was now situated in the midst of his fleet. Wyrpuuk Cha wondered if the blaze bugs’ representation was actually to scale.
He glanced out the viewport of his bridge. There, to port, seemingly close enough to touch, hung a vast expanse of darkness decorated by running lights in deep blue, a vastly oversized Star Destroyer.
Jolted by sudden panic, Wyrpuuk Cha opened his mouth to issue commands.
The Super Star Destroyer erupted as if channeling an internal explosion through innumerable tiny ports on its hull.
Wyrpuuk Cha didn’t know