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Emtrey turned from his position. “Sir, I have inserted the auxiliary code into the blueprints here. Our computer center is begun.”

The buildings in their path immediately came alive with lights moving at a variety of speeds. Wedge scanned the console and punched a button, shifting the image over from visible light to infrared. He saw traces from all manner of speeders heading out and away. A solid mass of gold tinged with red at the top and bottom surged across the bridges connecting the doomed towers with safer buildings.

The console’s comm unit came alive. “This is the Ministry of Planning and Zoning. Construction droid Foursixnine, do you have a problem? We’re showing a deviation of your course.”

Wedge hit the reply button. “No problem here, we just have new plans. With Coruscant being under new management, we wanted to get things started early to ease the transition.”

“What are you talking about? Who is this?”

“Rogue Squadron Contracting. X-wings are faster, but they don’t build things as nicely as this does. Antilles out.” He hit the comm, terminating the conversation. “There, think that will make us a target?”

Iella laughed. “If it doesn’t, that’s just one more example of why the Empire is too stupid to survive.”

Captain Uwlla Iillor of the New Republic Interdictor cruiser Corusca Rainbow glanced at the Chronographie display built into the arm of her command chair, then up at the holographic representation of Coruscant hovering in the middle of the bridge. The display indicated there were only twenty standard minutes left before the Rebel fleet would be within range for her to pull them from hyperspace. If she did not, they would continue on into the system and arrive around Coruscant to do battle for the Jewel of the Empire.

The hologram of Coruscant—which was based on Imperial Traffic Control data broadcast to the system—showed the world as a translucent sphere studded with a rainbow of lights. Superimposed over that were two spheres made up of hexagonal tiles. As long as those spheres were there, indicating the presence of shields around Coruscant, Captain Iillor was under orders to power up her ship’s gravity well projectors and pull the fleet from hyperspace prematurely. The situation was desperate enough that Admiral Ackbar had even said a partial shield failure would be sufficient to let the fleet continue on in, provided Captain Iillor felt the shield outage was significant.

The decision she had to make was even more difficult than the choice to defect with her ship and crew to the Rebellion. While Ackbar had been clear in his instructions to her, she knew the conquest of Coruscant would significantly cripple the Empire and correspondingly enrich the New Republic. That she had been placed in such a position of trust and power showed her how different the Republic was from the Empire and because of that difference she didn’t want to make the wrong decision.

Lieutenant Jhemiti, her Mon Calamari First Officer, held a datapad out for her inspection. “Projector crews have run full system diagnostics on their equipment and we are ready to power up when you give the word.”

She glanced at the times appended to each diagnostics run. “The crew is slow. We can’t have that.”

The Mon Calamari opened his mouth in a smile. “Few believe we’ll be activating the gravity well projectors, Captain.”

Iillor raised an eyebrow. “And why is that, Lieutenant?”

Jhemiti hesitated for a moment. “Rumor has it that the people we have on the ground are Rogue Squadron. They’ve killed Death Stars. They’ll accomplish their mission.”

“Ah, yes, Rogue Squadron.” The Captain smiled slightly. “Let me tell you, Lieutenant, I’ve fought Rogue Squadron. They drove this ship off. They cost me almost all of my TIE fighters, too, in doing so. Were anyone else down there, I would take their failure for granted. With them, I am willing to allow the possibility they will succeed.”

Jhemiti blinked and the gold flecks in his red scales sparkled.