Nothing.
Niathal cut into the bridge comlink. “Stand—”
Caedus felt something then, all right. He knew what it was a moment after it pressed like a weight behind his eyes. It was the sudden surge of drives, tension peaking, thousands upon thousands of beings exploding into action.
It was the Fondorian fleet.
In the slow-motion way of thoughts in battle, he had time somehow to wonder why sensors weren’t showing him ships popping out of hyperspace and targeting weapons all around him.
Then he saw why, with his own eyes, on the monitors.
The orbital yards had come alive in an instant, Destroyers lifting clear of docks, smaller vessels forming up around them. Caedus felt the precision of the maneuver without even needing to see the rapidly changing transponder icons on the holochart; half of the ships focused on the GA elements now stuck between Fondor and the ring, and the other half turned their attention to the rest of the task force beyond.
The Fondorian fleet—or a very large part of it—boiled out of the yards like kag bugs pouring from a broken drain.
The sensor scans went wild.
Why didn’t I feel them before, at such close quarters?
Jedi. That’s where they were, putting all their effort into blocking his senses, no doubt persuading themselves that they were defending the civilian workforce or the orbitals. That fitted. Not rebel enough to come right out and fight side by side with Fondor but pious enough to aid their—
“Incoming! Brace brace brace—”
Nevil’s voice was unnaturally calm, as it always was. But despite shields, the turbolaser volleys that struck the Anakin Solo were enough to shake the bridge and fill the viewscreen with brilliant, blinding, white-gold light.
Caedus took it in his stride. This was meant to be, to put him in the right frame of mind to win. The bridge around him distorted a little and the colors seemed to leach out, but he recognized his anger and grabbed the reins to make it serve him. Unlike the bloodfin’s unlucky rider, he wouldn’t fall and be devoured by it.
He reached out to his commanders and imbued them all with a little more aggression, a little less willingness to play by the rules of engagement.
Nevil, looking at Caedus’s face, seemed frozen to the spot. Ah, my eyes have changed. They’d have to get used to that. The vague sensation of ships streaking in hyperspace had gone now.
“Captain,” Caedus said, “at least we know where they are. And why I didn’t sense that they were waiting for us.”
SECOND BATTLE OF FONDOR: COMBAT INFORMATION CENTER (CIC), GALACTIC ALLIANCE WARSHIP OCEAN
Niathal stood with both hands braced on the holochart table in the CIC, dismayed. The removal of Jacen Solo would have to wait.
Fondor was putting up a credible fight and it was turning into a long slog, longer than she’d expected. The mine network would have made life so much simpler. But she’d taken her decision, and now she had to deal with it. Admiral Makin, stranded here with her because the battle was too fierce for him to transfer back to Sarpentia, drummed his fingers on the edge of the table as he moved around it, examining it from every angle.
And I said we’d offer them terms after we softened them up a bit …
“Admiral Niathal.” Jacen’s voice had an edge to it. “I intend to break this stalemate before we lose too many ships.”
“I suggest we disengage and regroup.”
“We will not run.”
“I said regroup.”
“And then what? What kind of assault will get us any farther than we are now?”
The comm went silent. They watched the Anakin Solo’s blue icon moving steadily through the three-dimensional plot, making for Fondor. Flagships did not rush into the thick of the battle and fight like frigates, but maybe Solo hadn’t got to that page in the manual yet.
“He’s not a team player, is he?” Admiral Makin said quietly.
“Colonel Solo.” Niathal rarely knew which way Jacen would jump in a fight, and he was getting more unpredictable every time. “Colonel, can you hear me?”
There was the faint chatter of static. “Yes, Admiral.”
“Please confirm your position and intentions …”
“I’m advancing.”
“Yes, I can see that. Why?”
“To bring this to a quicker conclusion.”
Niathal looked at Makin. The veteran Mon Cal commander made a gesture that indicated he wasn’t convinced of the firmness of Jacen’s grasp on the situation.
“Colonel, I really think you should fall back and concentrate on managing the battle,” said Niathal.
The Anakin Solo didn’t deviate or decelerate. “I can do that from here. Just keep the Fondorians as busy as you can. I’m going to target Oridin City.”
“The ground batteries, you mean. Can you identify targets a little more precisely, please?”
“I mean Oridin City. As in capital, commercial capital, strategic target capital.”
“Wait one.” Niathal switched the comm through to Bloodfin, cutting Jacen out of the circuit. “Gil, can you follow this?”
“Yes. He’ll have to get the planetary shield down first, and we’ve got our hands full with the Fondorian fleet, so he’s on his own.”
“If he didn’t have a ship’s company of decent beings with him, I’d be rooting for the Fondorians to do us a favor,” she said. “He treats that ship like it’s his Stealth. This fighter ace mentality infuriates me.”
“You can’t stop him, and we have our hands full.”
“I’ve just seen your sitrep.”
“Yes, Cha. Two destroyers and eight cruisers—even we notice those losses.”
GA blue icons were clustered within the inner cordon, as they’d rapidly taken to calling the space between Fondor and its orbitals. The other side, the outer cordon, showed amber and blue icons—GA and Imperials—scattered more loosely in clusters, Star Destroyers attempting to target each other while frigates and the rest of the battle group around each of them tried to shield them. Another blue icon—a frigate—vanished from the plot and appeared on the tote board as lost. Sometimes, that happened simply when they lost power to certain systems. Niathal hoped for the latter.
Makin’s frustration was getting to her. Unable to fight in his own ship, he was trying to be useful. He put on a headset and listened to another comm channel, eyes closed.
“Cha,” he said, “I know you’re busy, but have you actually listened to this? The Fourth Fleet elements inside the cordon?”
There were too many ships for her to even begin to monitor voice traffic from individual captains. “No, should I?”
“Yes. It’s … odd.”
Makin didn’t usually talk like that. He was precise and specific. Niathal almost dismissed it, but relented and listened in on the same comm channels.
The mood and tone in the command center of a warship, even in a tight spot, was a lot quieter and more focused than holodramas depicted. Under fire, it was intense, and voices did get raised, but what she heard was not typical of her navy.
One captain was urging cannon teams to blow the Fondorians apart in extremely graphic and profane terms. She winced. “Who’s that?”
“Tarpilan.”
“Is he drunk?” Jun Tarpilan? Never. She didn’t even realize he knew words like that. He was old school, very formal. “That can’t be him.”
“Work through them all. They’re all doing it. It’s like they’ve all gone collectively mad—well, more like they’ve all had a few ales too many and they want to take on the galaxy. And I don’t mean incompetent, either.”
Niathal was starting to worry. The more she listened, the worse it got. Commanders she’d known for years—human, Mon Cal, Sullustan, all species—seemed to have taken on more reckless and aggressive personas. It was no time to dissect this with Makin, but she thought of the things Luke Skywalker had told her about Jacen dabbling in the darker side of the Force. Jedi could carry off some extraordinary sensor
y manipulation; she would have bet her pension that Jacen could, too.
“I’d use the phrase fighting mad,” she said.
She was cut short by the shipwide comm. “Incoming, brace brace brace.”
Niathal bent her knees and grabbed a rail to buffer the shock. The whole CIC fell quiet apart from the faint hum of electronics, but there was no shiver from a missile or cannon round hitting the shield, so they breathed again. Destroyers like Ocean were well armored and shielded. But nobody was taking anything for granted with an enemy that had produced the galaxy’s most powerful warships and weapons before the Yuuzhan Vong War.
In the CIC, there were no external viewscreens. The only images of the battle that weren’t translated into sterile graphs, numbers, and moving points of light came from external holocams on every ship or from cockpit cams. Niathal didn’t want to avoid the reality; she felt she was breaking faith with her crews if she couldn’t look at those balls of flame and twisted sections of hull plating spinning off red-hot into space. But to keep fighting these days, she had to find some distance. The small suffering dragged her away from the bigger picture. Then movement on a screen caught her eye and she couldn’t avoid it: a forward view from a cockpit as a fighter crashed into the Fondorian ship it had already ripped into with cannon fire, a sudden zooming image of a Fondorian crest that was leaking flame.
I wasn’t like this when the war started.
“Just as well the Imperials signed up,” Makin said quietly, as they watched the Anakin Solo’s inexorable progress into the inner cordon. “We’d have been sliced and diced by now without them.”
“Good old Gil,” Niathal said, still shaken. “But after this, who’ll be left for Jacen to sign up to make up the numbers?”
ANAKIN SOLO, FONDOR INNER CORDON
The Anakin Solo was in a hurry, and plowed between two orbitals on a direct course for Oridin.
A wave of fighters broke from an attack on the cruiser Armistice—pounding away with turbolasers at a yard that was venting gases into the atmosphere—and headed for the destroyer. Balls of white flame flared and died in the viewscreen, gone in an instant, and Caedus couldn’t tell—with his eyes, at least—if they were fighters exploding or strikes on vessels.
He didn’t need the tracking screen to feel the ships. He was fully battle-aware now, sharing his channeled anger to embolden the commanders in his fleet, and able to shut out anything that was irrelevant to the situation at hand. If Luke tried any more stunts with illusions, he wouldn’t get far.
The adrenaline and pure white rage looping back to him from the individual commanders made his throat tighten. It was almost like a back-pressure effect, that the passion for the battle that he was channeling into them gained power and momentum, and syphoned back into him as a changed and magnified thing that he felt he had to vent from his chest or scream.
He was out of breath. He hoped nobody noticed. It might have looked as if he were panicking.
“Sir …” Nevil seemed to be agitated by the battle link. He looked as if he was trying to shake it off, like someone fighting to stay awake. If he’d only given in to it, he would have felt much better, like the others Caedus could hear—could feel—totally caught up in combat. “Sir, I’d appreciate it if you’d share your plans for breaching Fondor’s shield, because with the power we’ve got available, we’re going to be hammering away for hours to weaken it. Can I suggest we divert Dewback to help us out?”
“It won’t be necessary,” Caedus said. He had to get this energy out of him. It was a weight crushing his chest. “Alternative power source, you might say. I’m going to get them to drop the shield. Stand by concussion missiles.”
“I see.” Nevil’s tone said that he wanted to take this on faith, but he was struggling. “Is this like …”
“Captain, I know you’re troubled by what you saw happen with Tebut, and … I regret my behavior, but I’m learning to use combat powers way beyond those of the Jedi, and I wasn’t fully in control of them then. I am now. Keep monitoring the shield, and as soon as you see it drop, set ten concussion missiles to airburst over Oridin and two over the shield generator plant.” Caedus made an effort to sound detached and normal. It was hard to keep his voice steady. “Don’t fear me.”
“Very well, sir.”
Nevil said it in as matter-of-fact a tone as if his commander had asked for a cup of caf at an inconvenient moment. Caedus sat down in one of the command seats and watched the disk of Fondor gradually filling the viewscreen until it had no sharply contrasted frame of black space left.
His lungs demanded air. The cumulative effect of his commanders’ heart-pounding aggression needed out now. He could no longer pick out the individual crew and their stations around him in the Anakin Solo, just a complex tapestry of emotions, and that was the state of near blindness that he needed to push his way into the minds of strangers many kilometers away on the planet beneath.
The dam burst in him, but it found a river channel.
Caedus saw what the Fondorians operating the shield facility might see; he had no idea what the actual location looked like, but he didn’t need to waste his strength projecting his consciousness to actually observe. Any imagined scene would do to focus him as the torrent of anger and raw nerves of a hundred or more commanders poured back through him. He pictured the shield generator plant, the control room, imagining it much as any other power plant in the industrialized galaxy: a wall covered in readouts and status lights, and rows of consoles around him where other workers kept an eye on the integrity of the shield and ensured that a constant power level fed it. There would be a message system, possibly an illuminated board updating staff on the security alert level, too. The exact details didn’t matter, he knew, as long as he could imagine enough about what was happening in their minds to be able to latch on to some breeze of a thought in the Force, and slip into their world.
It was like listening for a particular noise or vibration when tuning a speeder drive. He always knew which sounds were normal, and which—however faint, however close to the threshold of his hearing—shouldn’t have been there and indicated a problem. Once he heard that sound, it was the only one he could hear, blanking out all others.
Caedus dropped into that white noise of the feelings and thoughts of billions on Fondor, and heard the one repeating note out of kilter with the rest. He focused. In seconds, it filled his head to the exclusion of all else.
He was aware of solid, real beings moving around him on the ship, but he was now more aware of the shield generator facility five kilometers east of Oridin and the minds of the control room team.
There were more of them than usual, he could feel that. There was a sense of having strangers around, as if they’d called in extra staff and were running emergency operations, which fitted a facility that probably ran on standby with droids and a caretaker crew most of the time.
The fleet needs to shelter.
Caedus concentrated on projecting an impression that the GA Fleet and its allies had been driven off, and now ships needed to return to base under the protection of the shield. There was urgency in it, because many of the vessels were damaged and needed to land before atmosphere vented or hulls gave way.
Open up. Let us in.
He flooded the operators’ minds with an urge to get the ships to safety as soon as possible, all kinds of worries and concerns about family members who might be on board, a burning sense of saving people, of pulling out all the stops …
Now. Drop the shields, we’re going to crash, let us through, for pity’s sake help us—
“Shields down!” It wasn’t Nevil’s voice, but that of the weapons officer. Caedus was still drifting in that fog of minds, drowning in their panic and urgency, and not here with the ship that was going to unleash their worst nightmare. “Conc section, fire when ready—”
Caedus tried to snap back at the moment the airburst sent a blinding, searing shock wave across the packed city, but he was a fraction too late, and he
caught a moment of pure animal terror that took his breath away. He jerked alert in his seat, wanting to complete a scream that wasn’t his. He caught it in time. If he’d screamed—well, the crew thought he was crazy anyway.
On the monitor, he could see a fireball spreading and debris billowing up into the atmosphere on a plume of rolling smoke. Now he needed other GA vessels to turn toward the planet and press home their advantage. He wondered if he could even move. He was drained, and for a moment he couldn’t even grip the arms of his seat.
“Sir …”
Caedus looked up into Nevil’s face, suddenly reminded that the Quarren once had a son, but Caedus had forgotten his name. And I had a daughter. She’s lost to me now. It was a sentimental thought totally at odds with being a living weapon. He suspected it was an echo from being in the minds of people who feared the worst for their own loved ones.
“Sir, Admiral Niathal is on the comm.”
“Tell her to wait. We need to hit Fondor hard now, before their fleet closes in on us.”
The colors were coming back. The bridge looked familiar again.
Caedus’s head was clearing, and he could see the overlay in his mind again, the biggest cities on the planet and the infrastructure that he would need to cripple to bring Fondor to its knees. It was like being in a pleasant trance; not fully in the present, but aware, and unwilling to snap out of it because it felt so still and perfect—as if everything in the galaxy suddenly made sense and had an answer. He was vaguely aware that the captain had darted away. He was probably stalling Niathal from another comm position so he could gripe about Caedus unheard. No matter. He could gripe all he wished.
“Take us in,” Caedus said to the helm officer. “Close as you can.”
chapter fourteen
Officer of the deck’s log, Galactic Alliance warship Anakin Solo:
1300: At action stations.
1330: At action stations.