Before the Storm Read online

  High-powered lasers on the cruisers painted the batteries, blinding ground sensors and testing for counterpunch fire from secondary sites. When there was none, the great pulse cannon mounted aboard the Star Destroyers methodically turned the ground batteries into smoking black craters. The only casualty for the Republic was an A-wing from Blackfire Flight, which picked up a sleeper mine on the right wing while making its pass against a recon satellite.

  On the far side of Bessimir, the cruiser detachment approached the alpha moon on a high-speed collision course. As drone fighters appeared from concealed launch chutes on the surface, the big ships fanned out three abreast and began releasing clusters of penetration bombs.

  Tall as a man and tipped by a reinforced spike, the black-cased bombs sped down toward the fighter base as the cruisers veered off. The drone fighters rising from the moon veered off as well. Moments later a dozen antiship batteries on the surface surrendered their camouflage, opening fire on the infalling bombs.

  But the penetration bombs—propelled only by inertia, and with their casings as dark and nearly as cold as space itself—did not offer much of a target. Most fell through the defensive barrage unmolested. Two seconds before impact, small thrusters in the tail of each bomb fired, slamming them into the surface at even greater speed and driving them twice their length into the barren ground.

  A moment later, with the dust of impact still rising, the bombs exploded as one. The flash and flame were swallowed by the moon’s face. But the terrible concussion propagated downward and outward through the rock. It shattered reinforced walls like matchsticks, and collapsed underground chambers like eggshells. Great plumes of gray dust shot out of the launch chutes, and the ground itself subsided over what had been the main hangar.

  At the moment the bombs exploded, Esege Tuketu was flying lead in an eighteen-ship formation following the cruisers toward the alpha moon. “Sweet mother of chaos,” he breathed, awestruck by the sight. For just a moment, he took his hands off the controls of his K-wing and lowered his forehead against his crossed wrists—the Narvath gesture of surrender to the fire that consumes all.

  From the second seat of Tuketu’s bomber came an equally heartfelt and respectful “Wow!” voiced by his weapons technician. “And I don’t care what they say,” he added. “I felt that one.”

  “Seemed like I did, too, Skids,” said Tuketu.

  “No one had a better seat for it than we did, that’s for sure.”

  They watched carefully ahead with eyes as well as passive scanners. No more fighters emerged from the hidden base. The antiship batteries were still.

  But the drone fighters already launched fought on, even though deprived of their controllers. Following internal combat protocols, they flung themselves against the largest targets, the cruisers. Agile but lightly armed, the drones did not last long. The cruisers batted them down like so many insects.

  “Good shooting!” Tuketu exclaimed. None of the other crews in the formation heard him. The attack force was following blackout protocols—including strict comm silence, despite the close formation and the critical timing of what lay ahead.

  “This is going to work,” the weapons tech said hopefully. “Isn’t it?”

  “It has to,” said Tuketu, thinking about what lay ahead.

  Only one real threat to the fleet remained—the great hypervelocity gun on the far side of the gravity-locked moon. Like a swift-footed sentry making its rounds, the alpha moon would soon revolve around Bessimir to a point where the HV gun would have its pick of targets in the fleet.

  According to the New Republic’s surveillance droids, the gun emplacement was both ray-shielded and particle-shielded. Moreover, with the weapon’s power plants and shield generator buried deep in the rock, it could easily survive the sort of assault that had destroyed the fighter base. If Etahn A’baht’s capital ships had to slug it out with the alpha moon’s big gun, the Fifth Battle Group would surely lose several ships in the process. The key to avoiding that outcome lay with Tuketu’s eighteen bombers.

  “Coming up on the break,” said Skids, glancing at the mission clock and then at the broken surface of the alpha moon, rushing toward them.

  “I’m on top of it,” said Tuketu.

  “You’d better be,” was the nervous reply. “My mama’s counting on me doing more with my life than making a hole in the ground someplace where they already got enough holes in the ground.”

  “Break in ten,” said Tuketu. “Signaling the others. Break in five.” A collision alarm began to sound in the cockpit. The moon’s surface seemed terribly close. “Break!”

  The entire spaceship shuddered as the emergency deceleration thrusters roared and the nose of the K-wing swung up toward the horizon. Tuketu and Skids were slammed back into their flight couches as the moon rotated dizzily under them. Breathing came hard throughout the long moments of the pullout.

  When the ship stopped shaking and it was possible to breathe again, Tuketu’s ship was skimming the surface of the alpha moon with only two other bombers nestled in behind. The K-wings had scattered in six groups, each taking a different compass heading to the target. With luck, they would meet again over the aperture of the electromagnetic gun.

  “Pardon me, but has anyone seen my wits?” Skids said in a squeaky voice. “I had them right here just a moment ago—”

  Tuketu laughed. “That was fun, wasn’t it?”

  “Fun?” Skids shook his head. “Fun like having a rancor sit on your lap is fun. Sir, I am afraid I must relieve you of command, effective immediately, on the grounds that you are clearly insane. Please surrender the controls and come along quietly.”

  Smiling, Tuketu reached overhead and adjusted the trim thrusters. “We were a little late getting to the first ground check. I’m taking us up a couple of points. Check back there and make sure the others stay with us.”

  “Copy, Tuke,” Skids said, twisting his head first to the left, then to the right. “By the jewel of Haarkan, you put that much ordnance on a K, and you get one mean-looking, chip-on-a-shoulder, fixing-for-trouble star kitty.”

  “Let’s hope we don’t need all of it,” Tuketu said soberly, almost to himself.

  According to reports Fleet Intelligence had provided to the Fifth’s planners, Bessimir’s hypervelocity gun fired at a rate of 120 slugs per minute, though rarely for more than ten seconds at a time. To avoid deflecting the superaccelerated projectiles, the particle shield protecting the gun was synchronized with the firing controller. The shield would open for each outbound slug when the gun was fired, while the ray shielding would remain in place throughout, protecting the emplacement from any long-range counterfire.

  Open, close, open, close, like the winking eye of a shutter, like a tempting carnival game. Time the opening correctly and win the prize. That was why two of the three K-wings in each flight were configured as penetrators, carrying no energy weapons at all—just ordinary slug cannon and an extraordinary number of fléchette missiles. If even one round, one explosive splinter, could slip through and find its target—

  But to have even that slim chance, they had to get very close—and something had to coax the gunners into firing.

  That something was the New Republic Star Destroyer Resolve. Specially outfitted with multiple shields into which were poured the full power of her engines, she came out of hyperspace nearly dead center in the gun’s field of fire. The K-wings were approaching the perimeter of the shield zone, hiding in the clutter, hugging every contour of the surface as they closed in.

  A’baht watched nervously, his shoulder spines rippling. A few moments longer, and the approaching bombers would be spotted, the threat analyzed. “Fire,” he whispered. “Come on—take the bait.”

  Esege Tuketu, watching his penetrators race toward the red line on his battle display, tensed himself for the high-G abort maneuver he expected them to have to execute.

  A heartbeat stretched out to a lifetime.

  On impulse, Tuketu thumbed his comm swi
tch and broke comm silence. “Red Leader to Red Two, Red Three, stay on the tower, stay on it!”

  “What are you doing?” Skids demanded.

  Tuketu shook his head. “We have to get the game in before it rains.”

  Red Three suddenly broke right, away from its target, trying to escape the invisible wall that lay ahead. But Red Two flew past the wave-off point and opened fire. Streams of silver missiles flashed from under its wings toward the stubby shield tower in their sights.

  “Sorry, Tuke, too late, going around,” Red Three called.

  At the same moment, the big gun roared, belching a staccato stream of slugs toward the Resolve.

  Red Two broke left and up, its cannon tracking the shield tower and firing nonstop.

  “Come on, come on, come on,” Tuketu said under his breath. “Make a hole for us.”

  The leading edge of Red Two’s salvo reached the shield boundary as the gun was still firing. Most shattered without exploding, crushed like insects hurled against a cockpit canopy. A few exploded against nothingness, their triggers overwhelmed by a surging induction current as the particle shield cycled on and off. But two fléchette missiles slipped through. The hemispheric dome of the shield tower disappeared in a small but brilliant explosion that left the metal remnants burning.

  “How did you know?” Skids said wonderingly.

  Tuketu shook his head. “I didn’t,” he said, pushing the throttles forward. Ahead lay the aperture of the big gun.

  Like a frantic animal fighting for its life, the hypergun fired on the Resolve without pause from the moment the particle shield vanished. The big cruiser wasn’t nimble enough to evade the barrage pattern thrown at it from the alpha moon, and Commander Syub Snunb wondered if it was tough enough to withstand the hits it was taking. Shells crashed against its invisible shields with such force that the ship itself shuddered and shook.

  “Red Flight is inside the perimeter,” a lieutenant sang out.

  Steadying himself against a bulkhead, Snunb acknowledged the report with a nod. “Then we’ve done our job. Keep tracking the incoming fire,” he said. “Navigator, turn and show them our heels. Keep us on an escape heading. If they give us any kind of break at all, drop the auxiliary shields and jump us out of here.”

  “Yes, Commander.”

  Just then the outermost shield buckled under a salvo of shells, the impacts sucking the field strength from the protective bubble faster than the shield generators could restore it. An alarm sounded on the bridge as the shaking abruptly got worse.

  “The D shield is down. The generators are slagged!”

  Snunb shook his head. “I must remember to tell General A’baht that I do not much like being the bait tied outside the predator’s lair. How much longer?”

  His first officer pointed to the tactical display. “Tuketu should be over the target in another few seconds.”

  Another alarm sounded on the bridge of the Resolve. “I hope we have another few seconds to give him.”

  The aperture of the hypergun was glowing brilliantly in the infrared on Tuketu’s targeting computer. “Let’s finish this on the first pass.”

  “Arming Number One,” Skids sang out. “Arming Number Two. Taking attitude control, now.”

  Tuketu lifted his hands from the stick and throttle. “All yours.”

  The nose of the K-wing lifted skyward, and the bomber began to climb. “Range—mark. Number One away. Number Two away. Let’s not hang around, Tuke.”

  As the lob bombs began to trace a clean, elegant ballistic arc, up and over the top of a gravitational hill, Tuketu hauled the nose of the bomber back and around to the left so sharply that he felt momentarily dizzy. While the broad bottom of the ship was facing the target, there was a dull roaring sound, a brilliant flash that cast long shadows on the surface, and a neck-snapping vertical translation, as though some mighty hand had shoved the K-wing from below.

  “Too soon, too soon!” Skids cried in alarm. “Not ours.”

  At that moment Black One flashed by overhead, and the comm speaker crackled to life with gleeful exultations. “Scratch one big gun,” drawled Black Leader. “My stars, that was a big splash. She was still firin’ when we bracketed her—we must have jammed up a couple of shells in the barrel. Did you see it, Red Leader?”

  “Negative, Black Leader.” The landscape lit up again with a double flash that was a pale echo of the first. “Sounds like you didn’t leave much for us, Hodo,” Tuketu said with a grin.

  “That’ll teach you not to dawdle—sir.”

  “This is Green Leader,” said a new voice. “I’ve made a verification pass and I confirm target destroyed.”

  “This is the Resolve. We concur with Green Leader, target destroyed. Thank you, boys.”

  “Copy, Green Leader. Copy, Resolve,” said Tuketu, turning his ship skyward, toward where the cruisers waited for them. “All ships, form up with me. We have a rendezvous to keep.”

  Standing at a podium and wearing the uniform of the Joint Defense Operations Staff rather than the Mon Calamari battle dress in which he had earned his fame, Admiral Ackbar gestured with a large hand toward the display screen on his right.

  “With the Fleet firmly in control of local space, it is now relatively safe for the gunships to begin opening a corridor to the surface,” Ackbar said, looking out at the small, select audience. “The tactics echo those used against the hypergun—to expose well-armored vessels to enemy fire in order to locate and destroy the defensive emplacements in the target sector. In this case, as you can see, the counterfire is coming from the heavy batteries of the vessels in orbit.”

  The monitors in the conference hall at the New Republic Defense Force’s headquarters on Coruscant showed much the same images as those on Intrepid’s bridge, though lagging some seconds behind.

  The signals were being relayed across fifteen parsecs by hyperspace transponder, then reviewed by military censors to make sure that what appeared on the displays was appropriate to the clearances of the audience in the hall. That afternoon, little censorship was needed. The audience included all eight members of the Senate’s Council on the Common Defense, half a dozen senior Fleet officers, and Princess Leia Organa Solo, president of the Senate and commander-in-chief of the New Republic’s defense forces.

  Ackbar went on, “The curvature of a planetary body limits the effectiveness of fixed emplacements with line-of-sight weapons. Destruction of only a few such emplacements creates a breach in the planetary defenses, and a corridor from space to the surface. You see here that the Fleet is close to opening such a corridor. The threat at this point would be from atmospheric fighters or ground-to-air missiles launched from over the horizon. But Bessimir has no such defenses. When the breach is fully opened, the invasion will begin.”

  “Admiral Ackbar—a question,” Senator Tolik Yar called out. “How realistic a test is this for the Fleet? Is this anything more than a scripted performance?”

  “It is as realistic as possible,” said Ackbar. “This is an operational readiness exercise, not a simulation. It is true that the Fleet is opposed only by battle drones and computer sims. But I can assure you that the defense team takes pride and pleasure in constructing a difficult problem for the Fleet tacticians.”

  “Admiral Ackbar,” said Senator Cion Marook, rising from his seat and allowing the great, heavily veined air sacs on his back to fully inflate. “This has been a most impressive demonstration so far. But on behalf of my colleagues, and those we represent, I must wonder why command of the new task force was given to such a newcomer.”

  “Senator, General Etahn A’baht is hardly a hatchling—he is easily twice my age, and I suspect he is senior to you as well.”

  Marook bristled. “I did not say he was young, Senator, I said he was a newcomer. The commanders of the other fleets are all veterans of the Rebellion—leaders who, like yourself, earned honor in the great battles at Yavin, Hoth, and Endor.”

  Ackbar acknowledged the compliment with a nod.


  “But this Dornean has worn our uniform for less than two standard years. The Fifth Fleet was authorized in no small part on your personal testimony and assurances, and built at great expense to the New Republic. I would be much happier if it were you on the bridge of the Intrepid and General A’baht were here waving a pointer in front of us.”

  “But you ought not be, Senator,” Ackbar said sharply. “Though it was not part of the Rebel Alliance, Dornea has its own heroes from the fight against the Empire. General A’baht has a long and exemplary record as a fleet commander with the Dornean Navy. We are fortunate to be able to call upon his services.”

  “The entire Dornean Navy numbers barely eighty vessels,” Senator Marook said with a grand gesture of contempt.

  Standing by the back wall of the conference room, Princess Leia rolled her eyes and shook her head. It was wholly predictable that the complainant was Marook. Hrasskis society was built around a strict notion of succession by seniority, and the highest social value was waiting one’s turn. After five years in the Senate, he still had not embraced the notion of basing appointments on merit.

  “And yet, the Dornean Navy successfully defended Dornea’s independence throughout the reign of Palpatine, against Imperial forces several times as large,” said Princess Leia, intervening in the hope of cutting the argument short. “Come now, Senator Marook—surely this is an inappropriate time to argue over command assignments. Let’s move on.”

  Admiral Ackbar held up his broad hand. “Princess Leia, if you please—there is no better time to put this to rest. I have heard rumors of discontent in the Council for weeks, but this is the first time anyone has voiced such sentiments in my hearing. I would like the chance to explain to Senator Marook exactly why he is so terribly wrong.”

  Even offered in his measured tones, such a direct rebuke was out of character for Admiral Ackbar, and told Leia how angry her Calamari friend was. “Very well, Admiral,” she said, nodding and settling into a seat to listen.