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Wedge knew Super Star Destroyers had only come into service after the Battle of Yavin, which meant the Lusankya had to have been created and hidden on Coruscant before the battle of Endor. Unless the constructor droids just built it there, then built over it. The idea that a hundred-square-kilometer area of the planet could have been razed and rebuilt to hide a Super Star Destroyer seemed beyond belief, especially with no one noticing the ship’s insertion into the hole. Could the Emperor’s power through the dark side of the Force have been sufficient to compel thousands or millions of people to forget having seen the Lusankya being buried?

As hideous as that idea seemed, Wedge hoped it was the truth. The likely alternative—that the Emperor had ordered the deaths of all the witnesses—seemed that much more horrible.

“Lead, you have a squint coming up from below.”

“Thanks, Five.” Wedge rolled to port, then dove into a looping roll that took him out and around the Interceptor’s attack vector. He let his dive carry him down into the upper reaches of the city. Using control telemetry from a skyhook to keep track of the squint, he cut around one of the star-raking spires and came up at it on a nearly vertical run.

It started to roll to elude him, but a little left rudder kept his lasers tracking. Half the quad burst missed, shooting past the cockpit windscreen, but the other two bolts hid dead on. They cored through the Interceptor’s starboard solar panel and pierced the cockpit. The squint continued its lazy roll, then tightened it into a spin that sped the ship in an ugly, squared-off tower.

Out to the south the Lusankya’s aft came free of the planet. The superstructure of the Super Star Destroyer and its general outline fit with what he remembered of Vader’s Executor at Hoth and Endor, but the Lusankya hull appeared to be resting on a massive platform made up of hexagonal cells. It fit the bottom of the starship perfectly, with openings in the hexagonal field so weapons could fire down at targets below and TIE fighters could launch from the ship’s belly.

Wedge frowned. What is that? It reminds me of a Hutt’s repulsor-lift couch, hut the Lusankya is a warship, not a lounging crime boss. Suddenly he realized his analogy wasn’t that far off. The Lusankya is built for space travel, not fighting its way free of a planet. That must be a lift-cradle designed to get it up and out of the hole in which it was entombed.

With the prow stabbing up into the sky, the Lusankya’s thrusters ignited. Searing blue plasma vaporized huge chunks of cityscape beneath the ship’s aft end. The destroyer began to move forward and upward out of the column of smoke that marked its birth. A ship that boasts a crew of over a quarter of a million individuals must have killed ten times that many lifting off.

The massive ship turned its attention on a skyhook floating off its starboard bow. Altering course slightly, the ship gave more of its turbolasers and ion cannons a chance to bear. A Super Star Destroyer possessed enough weaponry to reduce a city to rubble from an orbital assault. At point-blank range, the weaponless skyhook offered the gunners a deliciously easy target.

The turbolaser batteries in the bow started firing at the skyhook as they came into range, then the broadside assault shifted to other weapons as the ship slid past. The verdant laser-bolts came so fast and so close that whole sheets of energy seemed to pulse from the Lusankya to the skyhook. In seconds what had once been an elegant disk with an Ithorian jungle paradise at its heart became a melted demilune with a forest fire crashing into the mountain district’s towers.

As the Lusankya picked up speed, the gunners shifted their aimpoints and began firing at the upper atmosphere. Their shots hit and splashed color into the lower of the two shield spheres encasing the planet. Created to stop starship assaults from without, they proved just as powerful against an attack