Chapter Thirteen

If M'thas Char had been annoyingly brash and neurotic as a disgraced ensign, he was intolerably so as a decorated lieutenant. In the week since his promotion, he had been more arrogant, more illogical and impulsive, and far more bipolar. His squadmates put up with him, working on the assumption that this attitude, like so many others, was a phase. The junior officers around him were as bipolar in their response as the newly- minted Lieutenant himself: they varied between awed hero worship and resentful loathing.

He probably deserved both. His latest idea was simply this: take back all the systems that had been lost or divided, reconsolidate them as an Empire- declare the Admiral to be an Emperor. Not a bad thought, but certainly unlikely, implausible, and impracticable- with only about a Sector Fleet's worth of forces? A Grand Admiral might be able to do it, or perhaps a Moff-- Isard, hateful as she seemed, might manage it-- they all had dozens of Imperial Star Destroyers at their disposal. The Admiral, though they valued him above any other officer yet living, had three.

Not exactly an auspicious start on the road to conquering half the known galaxy.

When Lieutenant Mal had asked, facetiously, what part M'thas would play in this new Empire, the answer was prompt: head of the Royal Guard. After all, he'd already helped to save the Admiral twice- who else could do it? Some stormtrooper?

Mal thanked the Force, which he wasn't sure he believed in, that he'd been a Lieutenant longer than M'thas. That way, if he decided to shoot him, it wouldn't be insubordination.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In the same week, the senior officers under Piett had been working on less ambitious plans. They had to find a way to beat the Ssi-Ruuk, and quickly. They had to do it quickly: current estimates said the invaders would reach Tanroial en masse in three weeks. That meant hitting them hard, and hitting them now. As Lieutenant Char failed to devise a strategy to destroy the Rebellion once and for all, more practical plans were being drawn up against the more immediate threat.

"Our best bet is the Colchis system," Vice Admiral Misth said. "They've committed their forces in greater bulk elsewhere, and they won't be expecting any real fight from the Colchians. Probots indicate they have four heavy cruisers, a carrier, and just over a dozen smaller support craft. While a defeat at Colchis won't really slow them down, that's not what we're after here. We need to gauge our strengths against their weaknesses, rather as the Admiral inadvertently did last week."

That gathered a few chuckles from around the table, and a ghost of a smile from Piett himself. The analysts had extrapolated a lot from the behavior of both the scout ships and the battle droids- a reliance on overwhelming numbers rather than superior tactics. It was, ironically enough, the preferred strategy of inferior Imperial commanders everywhere. Needless to say, no one here ascribed to that school of thought.

"What forces do you suggest we send against them, then?" Commodore Andleton asked, impatiently. He was the youngest officer in the room, and, with one exception, the most junior. He obviously had an answer of his own, one that he had to restrain in order to keep it from escaping.

"Two of our three Imperial Star Destroyers, one of the Victory-class Destroyers, and four or five smaller ships to back them up."

Andleton looked both relieved and gratified, as though he was surprised at the intelligence of the reply. "Good. I agree. For the support craft, I'd like to make some recommendations."

Piett bit back another, more substantial smile. The Commodore was obviously chafing at the restrictions protocol placed upon him. "Go ahead, Commodore."

"An Interdictor, both Lancers, and a Carrier." He paused, looking around to try to ferret out any opposition, and then explained. "The Interdictor is an obvious choice, in order to engage them we have to keep them in-system. As for the Lancers and the Carrier, Intelligence reports say that the droid fighters make up the bulk of Ssi-Ruuvi forces. The Lancers can be sent out offensively to destroy incoming waves of them, and the Carrier can launch a screen of fighterships to defend the Star Destroyers."

Misth shook his head. "I agree only partially. The Interdictor, yes. But we are not aware of how effective the Lancers would be against fighters that size. To commit both of our Lancers in our first battle would be foolish. As for the carrier, we are already aware that most of our own fighters are insufficient to combat the drones. The Adversaries are going to be placed on Star Destroyers first, as top priority. Until we have many more than we do, sending a carrier into battle simply gives the Ssi-Ruuk more cannon fodder. A Destroyer protects fighters better. A carrier's advantage is in numbers, such as the Ssi-Ruuk use and we do not have. I say one Lancer accompanies the fleet, as do the Corvettes."

Andleton looked incredulous. "Corvettes? Why would you want Corvettes?"

Misth sent him a look that was meant to be quelling, and Vice Admiral Litsen replied. "The Corvettes at the shipyard have been refitted. They have more agility and heavier shielding than standard vessels that size. They are probably best-suited for defending against the smaller Ssi-Ruuvi support craft."

Andleton, looking very slightly subdued, thought this over for a moment. "All right, I can see the logic in that."

Piett nodded. "Any other suggestions or objections?"

He glanced around the table. There were none. "What sort of resistance are the Colchians offering the Ssi-Ruuk? Is anyone familiar with the system?"

Litsen leaned forward to speak again, catching his attention. "It was in my Sector patrol zone, before I was reassigned to Imperial Center. The Colchians have mostly snubfighters and modified freighters. Their forces would probably be about equal to the smuggler forces at the Battle of Nar Shaddaa. No more than one or two capital ships, but enough to slow the Ssi-Ruuk, and scattered enough that it would take more than one decisive engagement to finish them. By the time our forces arrive, we should expect less than two dozen freighters all told, no capital vessels, and an uncertain number of snubs. How many will depend on the number of droids the Ssi-Ruuk have with them."

"Are you familiar with the layout of the system? Asteroid fields, best jump points, mass shadows?"

"I remember some of it. For the rest, I can consult the Sleipnir's logs."

"All right. I'm giving you command of the task force, then. Misth and Andleton will be going with you, as will all three Corvettes." Piett turned to Vice Admiral Hayden, aware, through his peripheral vision, that Litsen's gaze was still fixed upon him, consideringly. He wished he knew what in blazes it was she was always assessing. "Vice Admiral Hayden. What are your recommendations for the other support ships? I haven't had time to become familiar with the commanders of your Victory-class ships."

Hayden considered only momentarily. "Malahos and the Eviscerator. He isn't always the best strategist, but he knows how to handle his ship in battle better than the others. As for the Lancers; both the Andvari and the Brynhild are newly constructed, with inexperienced crews and freshly promoted commanders. Neither have seen any combat, but both Captains have, I think, the necessary skills to acquit themselves well. Tactically speaking, there is no appreciable difference between the two."

"The Andvari, then." He paused. "Vice Admiral Litsen, I'd like you to submit a battle plan by tomorrow, 1200 hours. The task force is to be launched in four days. Commodore Edlund needs time to produce more Adversaries. Are there any further matters to be discussed? Then you are dismissed."

They rose and left the room, but he remained. The meeting had been shorter than he was accustomed to. But then, most of the similar meetings he'd attended had been aboard the Executor, with many more officers and more varied goals to accomplish. That these meetings were shorter should be a good thing; they were almost unified in their aims and their ideas. The commanders of shipyard defense under VA Hayden had remained silent for the entire meeting, so completely so that he had almost overlooked them entirely. Both, while excellent commanders, were not strategists. While leading a defense force of an isolated shipyard, they were not required to be. For that matter, they were outranked by nearly everyone in the room. Line-Captain Samris was younger even than Andleton.

The silence of Hayden's officers did not concern him much. If he was reading them correctly, their silences denoted confidence in their commanders as much as any discomfort with an unfamiliar situation. Such confidence was, he thought, not misplaced.

It was something else that was bothering him. Some feeling, some mental itch that he could not quite name. Maybe it was delegating command of a task force to someone else. He was used to taking his flagship into battle, fighting on the front lines with a dark Lord of the Sith watching over his shoulder, and offering occasional curt commands. Now, he was in that position, sans the black armor and blacker sorceries. And without a flagship. That was another problem to remedy.

If that was what was worrying his subconscious, he could bury it. He had every confidence in the abilities of the officers under him. Litsen's constant scrutiny might unnerve him, puzzle him, but she was far more than competent as a commander.

The indecipherable whispers in his mind kept murmuring that he was missing something, that things were not in the order they ought to be. He could not, however he tried, put them to rest.

Piett swiveled his chair to face the viewports, and looked out at the stars.

Chapter Fourteen

As the unreality of hyperspace twisted back into a starfield, Vice Admiral Litsen smiled, briefly. A few kilometers away, she was sure, Commodore Andleton would be wearing a similar expression, but for a different reason. He wanted battle, craved action, hungered for the challenge. She was smiling simply because she was ready, and so was the Sleipnir. It was as though she could taste it: the adrenalin and the scent of confidence from thousands of officers hanging thickly in the air, filling the ship's atmosphere, a feeling that all the air exchangers and purifiers in the Empire could not erase. It was as though her heartbeat was pounding in harmony with the pulsing of the ship's engines, though she knew it was not. Hundreds of crewers stared out through gunports, and although she could not see through their eyes or read their minds like one of the legendary Jedi Vader had slain, it did not matter. She could feel, through instinct, that they were prepared for battle.

Ahead, the enemy fleet came into sensor range, and her confidence rose as she directed the ships around her into their formations, and gave them their assignments.

The secondary sensor report came back as they closed in, and a little of that confidence died.

Thousands of droid fighters filled the vacuum between the capital ships. The sensors were unable to track them all, or give a good estimate. The tac display simply showed a wall of shifting red icons.

Litsen hesitated, then glanced at the rate the Ssi-Ruuvi capital vessels were closing. "Litsen to all ships: ignore your designated primary targets. Do not, repeat, do not launch fightercraft. All guns fire: sweep all forward arcs. With this many fighters, we shouldn't even need to aim. Litsen to the Eviscerator."

"Yes, Admiral." Pompie Malahos' voice was crisp, brusque, and confident.

"Fall back to guard the Centurion. Do not engage the enemy with concussion missiles at this time. I doubt their targeting systems to get a lock, and we hardly need friendly fire incidents adding to the confusion."

"Understood. Any further orders?"

"No."

"Malahos out."

Litsen turned to watch the tac readouts, ignoring the waves of turbolaser fire streaming from every turbolaser battery in the Imperial battle group. There were no visible explosions, because the turbolaser bolts were larger than the fighters they struck. Laser and fighter simply converged and vanished.

"Litsen to all ships: prepare for collision with droid fighters and debris. Transfer power from auxiliary systems to shields."

As she spoke, the space around the Sleipnir began to sparkle with energy discharges, as numerous fighters and thousands of particles of radioactive rubble battered against the shields. Normally, impacts this small would be like a meteor shower: distracting, but no threat to shield integrity. Unlike meteors, however, Ssi-Ruuvi drones ran on heavy fissionables. Ray shields could only block so much hard radiation before they collapsed.

Litsen waited, letting the firestorm continue, watching the Ssi-Ruuk cruisers draw closer, and closer, watching the red dots filling the display dwindled to a less astronomical number.

When there were still almost fifteen hundred swarming outside the shields, she swore and gave the order for all ships to launch fighters. It was impossible to wait longer. The first cruiser, at maximum range, had opened fire.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When Lieutenant Kamsov of Marauder Squadron broke her hand during a game of smashball, one of her opponents in the match, one M'thas Char by name, volunteered to fly in her place. No one doubted his qualifications, and, unlike the Sleipnir's Colonel Ratonje, the Centurion's Wing Commander Ketliss had no grudge against the young officer.

Marauder Squadron had been assigned one of the first squadrons of TIE Adversaries. M'thas had made sure of that before he arranged a match against a team that had five Marauders playing on it.

By the time the launch command was given, some of his eagerness and frivolity had faded. The odds looked bad, at least for the fighter pilots; he though the cap ships were on more even footing. Unlike most of his temporary squadronmates, he wasn't Corellian, and so those odds made an impression on him. Inside the confines of his life support gear, he started sweating.

As soon as the full squadron was outside the bay, the sweat stopped, and his rising anxiety faded into the background. Whether his solar panels were slashed with his old unit's characteristic crimson stripes or not, M'thas was still a 181st pilot at heart. A cold smile brushed his lips. He might not be Baron Fel, but he could outfly any droid, any time.

"You're my wing, Seven." The words came easily to his lips, and before Seven could acknowledge, he pulled ahead, vectoring along the Centurion's side, below the gunners' firing arcs, waiting for the drones to get just a little nearer.

Above him, two kilometers off, the Eviscerator began to pull ahead, interposing its nine-hundred meter bulk between the Centurion and the nearest Ssi-Ruuvi cruiser, which was trying to slip past the Omwat. One of the Ssi-Ruuk support ships, a cruiser only half the size of its companion, was moving in on the Omwat's other flank. In order to keep it off of the more vulnerable Corvettes, Misth was forced to turn, and let the big cruiser pass nearly unmolested. It was a dangerous gambit for the Ssi-ruuk to play, and put more faith in the smaller cruiser's endurance than it should. Pincered between the Omwat and the Sleipnir, the ship's shields shrank under a two-way barrage, then collapsed. The hull followed suit shortly, and after a single brilliant flash from somewhere amidships, its engines and running lights went dark, along with its guns.

The larger cruiser paused in its advance as it passed the Omwat's engines, taking the time to overwhelm them with wave after wave of ion blasts, ensuring that the Star Destroyer couldn't turn and trap them behind Imperial lines, and that any other ship would have to circle around the long way.

Then it engaged Malahos and his Eviscerator, and, finally, the droid fighters moved into the range of M'thas's guns.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In the next week, the junior officers determined to their satisfaction that the Ssi-Ruuvi cruiser captain must have been under the influence no less than three powerful hallucinogenic chemical substances at the time of his attack. The senior officers, after reaching a similar conclusion, researched the system forces that the Ssi-Ruuk had already faced, and noted that none had contained VSDs. After that, the truth was obvious: since Malahos had been commanded not to use his concussion- missile launchers, the Ssi-Ruuk had no idea they existed. They had not considered that, once they moved into range, they might face salvos of eighty missiles at a time.

It took precisely two waves of missiles to breach the shields: almost twice as much damage as another VSDs shields would have been able to stand. At that point, the Eviscerator moved sideways, just enough so that the Centurion could bring her forward guns to bear on the cruiser. The combined firepower slagged the cruiser's hull, ruptured its bulkheads, ignited its atmosphere, and superheated any undamaged area to the point where its inhabitants were baked onto the decking they stood on.

The other Ssi-Ruuvi cruiser pair was pressing against the other side of the Imperial formation, trying to force the Sleipnir to back down from its advance. Behind it, the rest of the Ssi-Ruuvi vessels were swinging around, trying to force their way through the center of the formation, where any Imperial fire that missed them would strike other Imperial ships.

The smallest alien vessels, picket ships only forty-five meters long, slipped through the gap between the Sleipnir and the now-stationary Omwat, toward the fleet's rear guard: the Lancer-class frigate Andvari and the three corvettes, all assigned by Litsen to sweep up whatever fighters made it past the front lines. Nine of the pickets made it past the walls of laserfire pouring from the Star Destroyers, angling up toward the Andvari's lightly armed underside. Dozens of ion cannon pierced the Lancer's shielding, sending surges of electric power through the hull, where dancing lightning traced across system after system that went dark and powerless in its wake. The corvettes, angling downward to outflank them, managed to pick off two of the nine almost instantly, but then the pickets scattered, like a school of metallic fish after a stone is dropped in their pond. One of them, trying to use the Andvari for cover, got its engines shot out from behind by a focused burst of firepower, then knocked sideways by a second burst. The Corvette Neutron Hammer was directly in the way of its new and uncontrolled trajectory. The Neutron Hammer's shields flared into visibility for a moment, and then vanished, the dorsal shield generator exploding before its emergency shutdown subroutines could save it. The impact of the Corvette's shields fractured the picket's hull, and slowed it, but not enough to avoid a collision. The picket rammed sideways into the Neutron Hammer just forward of the engines, plowing through durasteel and puncturing the Corvette's main fusion reactor. Both ships vanished into molten metal and glaring white flames. The explosion lingered for a moment, as the last of the nuclear fusion reactions burned themselves out.

The debris, in turn, caught another picket, gutting it and leaving it to spin, slowly, dead in space.

The other five wheeled around the wreckage and angled back toward the Andvari, abandoning ion cannons and firing linked laser blasts at the exposed underside, chewing slowly through hull plates. More like oversized fightercraft than anything else, they began strafing runs along the ventral hull, staggering their approaches to further throw off the gunners. The Lancer's lasers, calibrated to engage snubfighters, spattered off the pickets' shields, dealing no appreciable damage, being blasted into exceedingly small pieces for their trouble. After the ventral lasers went silent, the pickets moved on to the engines, slipping around the ship's fuselage in order to keep it between them and the remaining Corvettes, who, with their slower engines, were hopelessly outmaneuvered.

Methodically, they worked their way around the sides of the ship toward the dorsal half. Here, the lasers were more thickly clustered, and the first of the pickets to move into their targeting brackets was dissected by a series of bursts almost surgical in their precision. The Corvettes, anticipating evasive action, were not disappointed. One of the craft dodged directly into a stream of turbolaser-fire.

The three remaining vessels tried to flee back to the comparative safety behind Ssi-Ruuvi lines. Only one survived the crossing: both of the others were caught between enemy and friendly fire.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The surviving Ssi-Ruuk had, apparently, had enough. Their largest cruiser, its smaller partner crippled by laserfire and wracked by continuing explosions, began retreating, drawing the Sleipnir after it. As the gap between Star Destroyers widened, the other Ssi-Ruuvi ships succeeded, at last, in breaking through the gap, and half a minute later, the cruiser slipped under and past the Sleipnir, joining them.

The Corvettes, outgunned by ten to one, backed off, so that, from this angle, only the Andvari stood between the alien fleet and the Centurion. The Interdictor's shields had, by this time, been battered down by thousands of low-power laser blasts, and hundreds of impacts with the heavily radioactive wreckage the droid fighters left behind. While the capital ships had been otherwise engaged, every last fighter had swept down on Commodore Andleton's ship, twelve hundred strong.

After dispensing with the Andvari and its (to capital ships) laughable laser cannons, the remains of the Ssi-Ruuvi battle group swept behind the Eviscerator, and engaged the beleaguered Interdictor.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

M'thas Char had been without his wingman for over ten minutes, his comm system approximately six, and his shields a scant thirty seconds.

Each loss served to infuriate him, pumping him full of adrenaline and half a dozen other fight-or-flight hormones. For M'thas, or any pilot, the two instinctive options were one and the same, subject of countless variations on the same stupid jokes.

The sight of the approaching enemy vessels nearly drove him to apoplexy, and to new and groundbreaking records for creativity, obscenity, and endurance in cursing. He cursed the Force. He cursed the Rebels. He cursed Palpatine, the Ssi-Ruuk, and reptiles in general. He cursed, at length, the ancestry, hygiene, and sexual habits of all of the above, in Basic, Ryl, Calamarian, Barabel, and fragmented bits of seven other languages where all he knew was profanities. After a full two minutes of this, uninterrupted except for five near-death experiences, he was hyperventilating, and no less livid.

As always, when he was angry, he very badly wanted to shoot something. Luckily, there were plenty of available targets in his sights.

He quieted, and returned to pursuing the alien fightercraft. When they began retreating en masse to the Ssi-Ruuvi carrier, depriving him of things to shoot at, he resumed cursing.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

As soon as the path of the Ssi-Ruuvi fleet had become obvious, the Eviscerator had started turning to face them, but nine hundred meters of durasteel is never swift, even in a vacuum. Only the hindmost vessel moved under their guns, and immediately Malahos gave the order to attack. Missiles and laserfire hammered the bloated support ship from behind, venting alien atmosphere and Imperial frustration in almost equal amounts. Even as the ponderous alien ship began splitting apart under heavy fire, Ssi-Ruuvi lasers pierced the globes that held the Centurion's gravity-well generators, putting them suddenly and permanently off-line.

For a moment, the surviving ships hesitated, as if wondering whether they had time to finish the Interdictor off. Their answer came by way of laserfire, closing in from behind as the Sleipnir and the Eviscerator found the correct ranges and fire vectors to do damage once more.

The three alien vessels vanished into hyperspace, leaving the Colchis system behind.

Chapter Fifteen

Once again, Piett found himself watching the stars: from his quarters, this time. He had, in the past week, been feeling more reflective than ever before.

Well, perhaps not. After he broke off the engagement with that Caridan girl, whose name he had never been capable of pronouncing… then, he had been much more reflective. But then, of course, he had still been studying xenobiology. A lot had changed in the years since then. Twenty-seven years was time enough for a lot of change.

When was the last time he had thought of that engagement, that girl? Tfalraei Kelehere. That hair, those eyes, that mouth…

Forget Tfal. When was the last time he had seriously thought about any woman? When was the last time he had taken anyone out to dinner? That would be… Flight Officer Mei Ahana… at precisely the same time that the first Death Star detonated in orbit of Yavin. Almost five years ago. He'd taken her out to celebrate his new Captaincy… and nearly been demoted for fraternizing with someone so far below him in rank. As if Ozzel, the old hypocrite, hadn't been caught with his pants down- literally- with one of his own daughter's classmates, not ten weeks beforehand.

Actually, that was probably why Ozzel had been so upset, what with his wife leaving him and all. He'd never liked Ozzel, but the man had deserved better than a summary strangulation. A court-martial for incompetence and corruption, maybe.

The door-buzzer chimed, and Piett was startled back into the present. Who- oh. Right. At the morning's briefing, he'd asked Vice Admiral Litsen to come by with her tactical analysis when she finished it. Then he'd forgotten all about it, dwelling on Tfal and Mei and Ozzel's pet cadet.

"Come in."

Litsen entered with that sublime and indifferent confidence which she seemed to leak into the air, as though it were some kind of pheromone. She was intimidating in some ways, but not nearly as much as, say, Isard. It wasn't fear that her presence inspired, but a sort of insecurity. Although no one else seemed to have the same reaction that he did. Peculiar, that. Especially because this insecurity seemed familiar, somehow.

This rather pointless train of thought was complete before Litsen was through the door. At his invitation, she sat down across from him at his holodisplay table, and called up the sensor records of the battle, taking him through its finer points maneuver by maneuver. Occasionally he would ask for clarification on something: the reasoning behind a tactical decision, or the damage report from a specific exchange of firepower.

"Conclusions?"

"The Lancers and Corvettes should be protected by a capital ship. They can easily keep off the fighters, but even the picket ships can pick them apart. Whatever we assign to protect Interdictors in future engagements should be more maneuverable than Ssi-Ruuvi cruisers. Also, we should equip as many vessels as we can with missile launchers. Their particle shields are notably weaker than their ray shields, so even one concussion missile can be as effective as a turbolaser. A Victory Star Destroyer is easily as valuable against them as the Sleipnir or the Omwat or the Csucskari would be." She paused the display, and replayed the cruiser charge. "Their speed is their greatest asset. We could never have done something like this against the Rebels, because we don't have the ability to accelerate this quickly. I'm beginning to agree with Andleton: taking a carrier into battle would be a good idea. If we load it with blastboats as well as fighters, we can defend more easily against the pickets, and stop them from outflanking us so easily."

"And their fighters?"

"The TIE Adversaries are superior to them, but our fightercraft are outnumbered ten to one by more maneuverable craft with smaller target profiles and strong shielding. This is another reason why we need a carrier accompanying the next battle group. And, if it's possible, we should discontinue all the other TIE production lines, so that we can make more Adversaries, faster. Until we even the odds a little, we're going to lose a lot to attrition. Thirty-nine percent of the fighters we launched were destroyed, and half of those were gone in the first five minutes after launch."

"Anything else?"

"No, sir." She paused the display again, and again fixed that intense gaze of hers on him. "Just wondering when and where the next battle is."

Piett tried to shake off the gaze, and realized he knew now precisely what that annoying insecurity she inspired in him was. Tfal made him feel like that when he first met her. With Mei, he hadn't known her long enough to work past it.

It was attraction. Her confidence, her intelligence… her looks, too, admittedly. He was not immune to lust, though there was more to this feeling than that.

"Itonchet, in two weeks. Before we make another move against them I want to see how they react, now that the situation had changed."

It was also, personally, how he felt at the moment. He wanted time to watch her reactions to him before he made any move whatsoever. Facing enemies and overwhelming odds he could be confident and composed. Here, there was that damn insecurity making him second-guess himself. He hated second-guessing himself.

"Will the Sleipnir be leading the next battle group?" A touch of uncertainty slipped through the casualness with which she asked the question. It meant something like 'What is your opinion of me as a commander? Did I do a good enough job for you to entrust your command into my care again?' She had, most certainly, but…

"I'm afraid not. Their presence at Itonchet is considerably larger, and I want to try something different." He smiled. "I'm going to be taking command personally from aboard the Phantom. Hopefully they'll find it harder to outmaneuver a ship they can't see."

An almost feral grin crept across her lips. It made her look much younger, as though she was in her early twenties. Commodore Andleton (although he, too, had left his twenties behind several years before) smiled like that. Piett himself had worn it often as a young commander, but the advent of his first assignment under Vader had mostly erased it from his system. Since Endor, it had crept up on him and caught him unawares a few times.

He contemplated that as he explained his battle plan for Itonchet to Litsen. It was certainly less complicated than thinking about her, one way or another. There'd be time enough for that later.

Vader was one of five or six pivotal figures in his life. As far as Piett's perspective on life went, he could divide it into three distinct groups: before, during, and after Vader. The 'after' category didn't quite fit- he'd also watched the destruction of a unified Empire, been taken prisoner by Ewoks, nearly eaten by an arboreal predator, nearly toasted to death in a forest fire he'd triggered, been swept over a waterfall and nearly drowned- within the week that followed. Any one of those could be a real outlook-changer.

What it amounted to was that he'd buried part of himself under Vader, in order to survive. Now, for whatever reason, it had returned to find him quite different, and he still needed to survive. Without Vader, he wasn't sure if this buried part of him- call it his youth, for lack of a better, more expressive term of its gestalt effect- would help or hinder that, or have an effect at all.

When he finished the explanation of his plan, making direct eye contact with Litsen once again, she was giving him a half-curious, half-distracted frown.

"Decicred for your thoughts, Admiral? You looked like you were at least half a system away during your entire explanation."

He shook his head, looking rueful. "Memories of Vader. Sometimes I think the blasted Sith Lord is going to haunt me. He comes to mind at the strangest moments."

That much, at least, was true- not honest, exactly, but true.

Litsen's expression became more curious, and less distracted. "What was it like, serving under him?"

"Interesting," he said, dryly. "Interesting like riding out a Chadran squall-gale in an underpowered aquashuttle. Each wave, individually, is probably survivable- but there are always more waves, more wind, and lightning. Why, didn't you ever have the… privilege of meeting him?"

A sour look twisted her lips. "Once. When I was with intelligence, on Toprawa."

He understood that look, instantly. "Who did he kill?"

"The intelligence director. In front of all four assistant directors in the conference room. Then, the quadrant commander in charge of the continent the Rebels had transmitted their message from. Then he told us to discuss among ourselves who would take the director's place. I transferred to the Navy that evening."

"My first encounter with him was similar. Only, I was the only one who could accept the promotion."

This was uncomfortable territory, and obviously so, for both of them, so he was thankful that she found a way to change the subject.

"What you said about squall-gales… it sounded like you were speaking from experience."

"Yes. Back before I transferred into the Navy. I was an Ensign in the 41st Commando Division, Squad Nine. SpecOps." Not that that had been his first squall-gale. He'd only been included in that mission because he'd grown up on Chad.

"The 41st… the division you led before you went Navy?"

"Yes. Years after we tried to flush out the Chadran Rebels. Back then I was just the team's Xenobiology and Aquatic Combat Specialist."

"From xenobiology to command?"

"Field promotion. The tac officer caught a live proton grenade during a raid a few years later."

Again, they'd meandered into awkward territory. While she was thinking of something to say, he made a decision. If this awkwardness was so inevitable… he had nothing to lose. Except a substantial portion of his pride.

The conversation after that was short, cautious, neither one wanting to intrude again on uncomfortable topics. Before long, there were duties they both had to attend to. Litsen said as much, and perhaps they could continue this conversation some other time.

What the hell.

"Would you, by any chance, be available for dinner later?"

She blinked, and something which might or might not have been a very small, very surprised smile flew across her lips, and vanished into something more contemplative.

"I would, but… postbattle inspections."

Sithspit. He'd forgotten that.

"Tomorrow?"

"Meeting with the quartermaster and the shipyards."

He was both delighted and dismayed. Delighted because she looked dismayed that her schedule was busy.

"A rain check then? Until, say, after Itonchet?"

"It would be my pleasure."

Chapter Sixteen

Waiting was always the hardest part of battle for any soldier, and it was no different for Admirals, who at least knew what they were waiting for.

The Phantom lay silent and undetectable in space, about three hundred kilometers ahead of the Ssi-Ruuvi fleet, which was spread out in a web.

A search pattern.

They knew, from the burst of Cronau radiation that accompanied the end of a hyperjump, that somewhere ahead of them was a ship. That was, of course, the first step in the plan. The Ssi-Ruuk would assume that it was a small vessel, a spy ship with sensor jammers and souped-up engines. No challenge for a cruiser. That meant that when they began to search, there was no reason not to spread out a little.

Piett had no intention of disillusioning them- and no intention of actually being found. Before they closed the search pattern like a net around him, they would be… distracted. Because it wouldn't do for the fishermen to discover that the fish in their net was going to eat them all in time for them to set it loose.

In the meantime, he waited, and all the Phantom waited with him.

The net of cruisers was three-tiered: four larger cruisers on both the high and low tiers, and twelve of the smaller cruisers in between. The picket ships, twenty of them, hung back on all three levels. As the net moved forwards, the pickets advanced, slipping in between the cruisers and then ahead.

Piett smiled. Back behind the net was a carrier, with two thousand fighters aboard it, as yet unlaunched. Now, it was unprotected.

He hit the comm switch, sending out a single tight-beam signal.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

On the outskirts of the system, four ships entered hyperspace for a forty-second jaunt.

~~~~~~~~~~~

On either flank of the net, parallel with the carrier, two ships exited hyperspace. Each pair had an Interdictor and a Victory-class Star Destroyer to guard them. Instantly, the Interdictors started powering up their gravity wells, and the Star Destroyers launched fighters. The net began to turn back to face their attackers, whom they outgunned by a considerable margin: hundreds of turbolasers, dozens of ion cannon, thousands of fighters.

The Sleipnir exited hyperspace directly above the carrier as it disgorged swarms of pyramid-shaped drones. Guarding its ventral side, close enough in to be protected by its shields, was the Lancer Brynhild. Behind and above it, safe to launch fighters without risking enemy fire, was the Imperial Carrier Ship Briareus.

Turbolaser fire rained down on the Ssi-Ruuvi carrier, forcing it to raise its shields, trapping its fightercraft inside. Those few outside the shield radius were picked off quickly by the wing of TIE Adversaries circling the capital ships, patrolling the vacuum around them.

By now, the net of cruisers was reversed, drawn together in a spear-shaped phalanx, larger cruisers backed by smaller, smaller backed by the pickets. They showed no interest in the Interdictor Cruisers: even with the Sleipnir's battle group, they had more than double the firepower of the Imperials. Their phalanx could easily shatter the Star Destroyer, leaving them to attack the other vessels at their leisure.

~~~~~~~~~~

It was time to stop waiting, and to act.

~~~~~~~~~~

As the Ssi-Ruuvi spearhead moved into firing range, while the Victory Star Destroyers closed on either side almost ignored, the pickets behind their main formation started exploding in seemingly sourceless blasts of laserfire. Half of them vanished before the ships could begin to react, and then they scattered, leaving the cruisers vulnerable from behind, trapped between the hammer and the anvil. The phalanx halted its forward rush, making a confused sort of retreat to the sides… and into repeated missile salvos from the Victory Star Destroyers. Seven cruisers (two large, five small) stopped their flights, engines silenced, lights extinguished, gunports slagged and bulkheads ruptured, but with fire coming from three directions, determining which attack was responsible for their destruction. Regaining some semblance of control, they fled downwards, under the bellies of the Star Destroyers. Two more of the smaller cruisers, both almost literally cut in half, failed to make it past Imperial lines, but the remaining vessels regrouped a hundred kilometers or so away. All of them were damaged, slowed enough that outrunning the Imperials would no longer be possible. This, like the rest of the Imperial assault, was not an accident: gunners had been ordered to disable engines above all else.

The remaining picket ships, the only vessels nimble enough to escape, sped past the regrouped ships, past the reach of the Interdictors' gravwells, and vanished into hyperspace.

Again, with the odds now much closer to even but the element of surprise spent, the Ssi-Ruuvi formed up into a tight bunch and charged at the Sleipnir, which was still focused on the trapped Ssi-Ruuvi carrier, stripping its triple-layered shields away slowly but surely.

Above and behind them, over a thousand kilometers off, a third Victory Star Destroyer dropped out of hyperspace at the edge of the Interdiction field. Its sublight engines, fully twice standard sized, blazed with the fusion reactions that powered them, pushing the Destroyer forward. Again, the charging ships were caught between hammer and anvil, though the hammer was much less formidable this time.

The trapped carrier's shields dropped- not decimated but deactivated- and the carrier dropped away from the Sleipnir, power rerouted to its undersized engines. Quickly, they were overloaded, flaring out one by one, but the carrier was beyond firing range by then, limping away on thrusters only. It presented a clear challenge, a temptation to chase the carrier down, but that would spread out the Imperial battle lines and leave the enemy cruisers a gap to slip through. As ruses or provocations went, it was a sad, desperate attempt, and none of the Destroyers moved after it, even once it started launching fighters once more.

As they closed, the Ssi-Ruuvi ships fell into two columns, with the smaller cruisers at their head to force a gap in the Imperial formation, and the larger ones in closer together behind, to break even the smallest gap wide open.

The first pair of small cruisers came into range, not only of the Sleipnir but of the Eviscerator, on their starboard, and the VSD Mathonway on their port. Barrages of concussion missiles pierced their shields, then crushed them, and turbolasers ripped through their hull plating as, without stopping to exchange fire, they cut through the space above the Sleipnir. The first cruiser's engines failed, stripped bare by laserfire, but the second continued on in a straight line, playing chicken with the Imperial Carrier which still hung stationary behind the Sleipnir. It began to yaw to the side… and the Sleipnir's lasers punched entirely through its hull, killing the engines. It no longer accelerated… but it could not maneuver, either. The carrier's shields, shunted so all power was focused forward, became visible as the Ssi-Ruuvi cruiser's bow slammed into it with a dark, shrapnel-thick series of explosions. Then the shields vanished, as the cruiser's truncated nose plowed a furrow in the carrier's hull, tearing a line twenty meters deep across the gunwales, through the bridge… and into the dorsal reactor core, detonating both ships in a furious sphere of white fire.

And leaving a hole through which the rest of the cruisers who survived the gauntlet could pass.

The Sleipnir's guns continued firing nonstop, changing their focus to the next cruiser pair. This time, they stopped one dead in space, but the second slipped past, shields still intact, and the next cruiser pair came up swiftly in its wake, piercing the lines nearly unscathed.

Behind them came the first pair of large cruisers, their fighters shrouding them in a protective cloud. Their lasers burnt though the strained shields of the Victory Star Destroyers, who had already taken the brunt of the fire from the previous retreat, and then moved on to the Sleipnir.

The Sleipnir, who had withstood the first charge and broken the nose of the second as best it could.

Its shields went down almost immediately, and, reluctantly, it veered out of the way. With a hole left by the carrier's death, it could no longer stop the ships from passing through, and there was absolutely no point in sacrificing the Sleipnir in a futile gesture of defiance or inadequate resistance. The Empire most emphatically did not need martyrs.

All six cruisers sped through the hole in the Imperial formation without pausing even to shoot behind them.

Because, unfortunately, they had not forgotten that the Phantom lay somewhere ahead.

~~~~~~~

It had been an extraordinarily frustrating battle for Piett. He had known, when he devised this plan, that the Phantom could not play as large a role as the Executor would have. Since even Imperial gunners couldn't see the ship, making the Phantom part of the battle line was asking for friendly fire incidents. It was during the first charge, the one he had baited the Ssi-Ruuk into, that the Phantom had played its only intended role. Certainly he had not meant to forestall a charging ass-backwards sort of retreat. Since the enemy couldn't see him, they couldn't shoot him, but they also couldn't take evasive action to prevent themselves from ramming him.

Having his flagship accidentally rammed did not strike him as a brilliant idea. "Helm: turn us to face them directly." Facing them nose-on, presenting their smallest target profile, lessened the chances of a collision, but not to a margin Piett was comfortable with. Because, of course, the surviving cruisers were turning- vectoring directly at him. It was the strangest imaginable angle for an escape: the main body of the Ssi-Ruuvi invasion was almost exactly a hundred-eighty degrees away from the angle they had taken. If they jumped along that course once the were free of the gravity wells, they'd be headed in the general direction of Tanroial- where they were highly unlikely to receive a warm welcome.

"All guns, fire forward: let's show them where we are."

The cruisers, seeing a river of green fire raging toward them, swerved, angling away on both sides.

"Focus on the last cruiser, guns."

The last cruiser, engines already next to crippled, was too slow to turn… but also too slow in its approach. The Phantom's two hundred turbolasers turned its hull to a molten blob of durasteel.

Behind the Phantom, the last cruisers returned to their idiotic escape vector, and vanished into hyperspace.

A half-suspicion welled up inside Piett's gut. "Sensors- track that vector. What system will they exit in?"

Before his answer could come, the comm officer vaulted out of the crew pit and ran toward him.

"Admiral, sir- we're getting a distress signal from Tanroial! They're under attack- over thirty enemy cruisers coming in from system's edge."

"The cruisers are on a vector for Tanroial, sir."

The two reports tightened his mouth in a grim line.

"Tell them they have eight more enemy cruisers on the way in, four hours out. And tell them that reinforcements are on there way, about ten minutes after that. Then signal our ships in-system- have them collect their fighters and form up for a jump back, immediately. Tell them Tanroial is under siege."

Chapter Seventeen

At one of the nodes where the girders and arms of the shipbuilding facilities surrounding Tanroial met, there was a variable-gravity gym. Since his last bacta dunk, Lt. Comd. Talaer Shivon Andleton had spent most of his waking hours there. While his arm might be healed, months of inactivity had atrophied his muscles and dulled the edges of his skills. Here he could sharpen them again. He was shadowboxing with a holo- opponent there when the klaxons sounded.

The tone of the siren was one he recognized, one he'd heard while in orbit of Endor. Enemy ships in system, report to battle stations.

Sithspit. He was still officially on sick leave. He hadn't been assigned a battle station. He hadn't even been issued a new blaster rifle yet. If the shipyard was boarded...

He started for the armory at a dead run.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

With the Centurion in drydock for repairs, and Lieutenant Kamsov's hand mended, M'thas Char had spent the last three days trying to argue his way into the cockpit of an Adversary again. He was presenting his case rather eloquently in the groundside office of Colonel Ahana, Wing Commander on the VSD Pryderi, when the sirens interrupted him.

Without further discussion, they both ran for the hangar bay. It was already empty of TIEs when they reached it- the only ship which remained was a blastboat.

The Colonel started a string of curses very similar to those M'thas had been considering. Before he could express them himself, she turned to face him.

"Lieutenant."

"Yes, sir?"

"Can you fly that thing?"

He dismissed the first few, mostly insubordinate sorts of things which came to mind. "Yes, sir."

"Fly me up to the Pryderi, and we can see if there's anything there that suits your fancy better."

"Yes, sir."

It was a matter of less than a minute, once inside the blastboat, to slave all four of its consoles to the pilot's flight board. Usually on a flight this short he wouldn't have bothered, but the vacuum in between the surface and the docking ring where the Pryderi hung in space was crowded, mostly by things that would shoot at him. The Ssi-Ruuk had been fast- they'd entered realspace too close, and advanced too quickly for the planetary shields to have been raised. Now, almost their entire fleet was within the shield radius- and most of the Imperial fleet was just outside it, returning from their patrol circuits. It was a very deft move- without going to the trouble of blowing up the heavily guarded generators, the Ssi-Ruuk had ensured that the shields would stay down.

Now, as he lifted off, he watched their cruisers close above them- the four or five nearest ones arrowing straight for the Pryderi.

An alien landing craft went by, so close that the blastboat's shields shuddered, then turned to fall in behind them. Quickly, M'thas spun the blastboat, using only one hand on the main control board- his other hand, blindly, had sought out fire control. He found it just as the lander fell under his sights. Without stopping the spin, or even achieving a target lock, he fired off a pair of concussion missiles. By the time the blastboat's nose was properly aligned again and pointed toward the Pryderi, the lander was flame in dust in their wake.

It was about then that, twenty klicks above them, the Pryderi's shield towers exploded in a cascade of fire and ion- blue lightnings.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In other places in Tanroial's orbit, the Imperial fleet had bunched up in knots of two or three ships, but the Pryderi was alone. Five Ssi-Ruuvi cruisers, surrounding it, had taken its shields down in less than five minutes, and now raked its hull with laser cannon, scraping it clean of weapons emplacements and sending fire chasing through the durasteel and into the corridors beneath, igniting the ship's atmosphere in fountains of flame that gouted from it like blood from a wound. More and more fire bled forth, the gouges in the hull growing both in depth and circumference, until, ricocheting off one of the more secure bulkheads near the engine rooms, a stray turbolaser struck the fusion reactor. The resulting explosion tore the engines loose from the hull, sending them spinning, disintegrating into yet more flame and shrapnel. One of the Ssi-Ruuvi cruisers vanished in the cloud of fire and did not emerge.

What remained of the Pryderi's forward section went dark, and M'thas began plotting a new course.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Halfway across the planet's surface, on the Centurion, Lieutenant Mal watched the Pryderi's aft section explode. His team's battle station was a standby position, rather than a combat one, and so Ensigns Piper and W't'kaer watched with him.

The Centurion was stationary, tethered to the shipyard by cables and frameworks surrounding the destroyed gravwells: apart from the rest of the battle, in the quiet behind the front lines. Battle droids and landing craft streaked around the ship, but none boarded: the planetary facilities and the active ships were the only priority targets.

While trying to recall some of the fouler Kuati invective M'thas had taught him, he heard footsteps approaching rapidly and turned to face them- then came to attention and saluted, as Vice Admiral Hayden and Commodore Edlund came around the corner.

"At ease Lieutenant, Ensigns." Even in an obvious hurry, Hayden spoke with precision: every last syllable was clear. "You three are SpecOps?"

"Yes, sir."

"On standby duty?"

"Yes, sir."

"The Commodore and I need an escort. As of now, you're reassigned, official paperwork pending."

"Yes sir. Where are we going, sir?"

He stretched out a hand to point out the viewport, past the main bulk of the enemy lines, at an angle cutting across the planet's orbit, to where a distant glint, like a bright star, hung in space.

"The torpedo platform Typhon." Hayden said. "Tanroial is short of personnel, so she was never assigned a crew- more than ten thousand people just for standard operating systems, let alone during combat."

"Then how-"

Commodore Edlund smiled, and brandished a datapad. "I designed her. I have the command codes."

_________________________________________________________

Chapter Seventeen, part two

Six landers had fallen under M'thas's guns, but dozens more had reached the planet's surface. Above them, in high orbit, capital ships were hurling themselves into the midst of the Ssi-Ruuk formation, one after another, and being torn apart by laserfire. The ISD Csucskari was the latest in the series of chargers, and for a minute, perhaps two, the egg-shaped alien cruisers gave way before it. It pierced the enemy lines, and they closed behind it. The light from its engines went dark, and it vanished off the blastboat's sensors.

Far to their starboard, a single Lambda-class shuttle hung arrested in space, surrounded by a cloud of droid fighters, too agile for its guns to track. M'thas set a course toward the shuttlecraft, watching on sensors as its shields flickered, on the edge of giving way. A lucky shot from one of its cannon imploded a fighter, sending radioactive debris spraying outward, and the shield collapsed. The fighters vectored inward-

-and then out again, as M'thas's blastboat came in on an arc so tight he could have reached out and touched the shuttle's hull. The blastboat's lasers scattered the fighters, but hit none, and they began to angle inwards behind him.

The first hit a concussion missile dead on. M'thas had, during his approach run, remotely disabled the missile's engines before launching it, so that it hung, undetectable, in the drones' path. Four of them disintegrated in the blast, and both shuttle and blastboat were rocked by the shockwaves, pushing them sideways.

M'thas used the explosion's propulsion to his benefit, killing engines, with the sole exception of maneuvering thrusters, so that he spun back to face the rest of the fighters, their sensors momentarily blinded by the blast.

The rest was child's play.

"Lieutenant Char to shuttle Sidonna. You gentlemen need an escort somewhere?"

There was a faint crackle of static and an amazed sort of curse.

"M'thas?"

"Raien?"

"What are you doing out here?"

"Saving you, apparently. What are you doing out here in that lumbering durasteel crate Intelligence wants us to think is a ship?"

"We're escorting Admiral Hayden and Commodore Edlund to the Typhon. And, uh, according to the Admiral, as of now your borrowed blastboat is doing the same thing."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The landers which bypassed the Centurion were, for the most part, headed for the planet's surface, but two dozen affixed themselves to the shipyard proper. Plasma torches cut through the hull plating, and dozens of attackers poured through the breaches: lizardlike beings smaller than the Ssi-Ruuk, with drab olive scales. In their claws were beam weapons, shaped like flattened teardrops, and one out of every four had a bandolier of grenades.

Lieutenant Commander Andleton had the ill luck to stumble across a full squad, as yet unmolested by the stormtroopers that were, somewhere, patrolling the corridors.

He ducked back around a corner before they saw him, ramming the setting on his sidearm to full power. When the first lizard-thing stepped around the corner, he pressed the blaster against the center of its forehead and pulled the trigger, even as its eyes widened in surprise.

The noise of the blaster was muffled, but the sound of the body falling to the deck was not. Before the others could come around the corner to investigate, he ran across the cross-corridor, firing constantly, and kept running. The five remaining who could still run followed.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Carving out a clear space for the shuttle to travel in was akin to navigating an asteroid belt. The only notable differences were that the asteroids dodged laserfire- and then shot back. M'thas had rather expected that the going would get harder the closer they got to the Typhon, but the reverse was true. No more landers pursued them: all of them had found somewhere to unload their troops. No kore fighters clogged their path: the remaining Imperial forces at Tanroial were in retreat, and most of the Ssi-ruuk who weren't engaging in an idle, halfhearted sort of aerial bombardment were in pursuit.

The Typhon's docking bay, however, was already occupied. Four landers and their detachments waited just inside the forcefields, watching shuttle and blastboat approach.

Commodore Edlund, after a moment spent tinkering with the shuttle's comm unit, had sent a signal to the station's life support systems, and depressurized the bay. After it had emptied of anything still resembling life, he switched the pressurization field back on.

After they landed in the bay, they waited while the Typhon's scrubbers refilled the bay with air and heat. When they came stepped out into the bay, it felt like a mountaintop on Hoth, and so they made for the doors immediately.

The corridor beyond it was empty, and the seven of them moved quickly, blasters drawn, with M'thas and Ensign W't'kaer at point, and Lt. Mal and Ens. Piper bringing up the rear. Colonel Ahana bristled at the intimation that she needed protection, but Hayden and Edlund accepted it: they'd had years to get used to it.

Rather to M'thas's chagrin, it was W't'kaer who took down the first of the stunted-looking aliens who blundered across their path. His own shot, hurried and instinctive, went wide, while hers struck it high on the throat.

The sound of blasterfire drew the enemy to them like moths to a flame.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Though their legs were far shorter than his, Andleton discovered, the aliens ran fast. This wing of the shipyards was mostly empty scaffolds, and as a result there were no reinforcements for either him or the lizard-things. He tried to double back through they network of corridors, but the aliens were in the habit of sending one of their number down a side corridor to prevent this sort of trick. Three times, he found a route to run back along, and each time, from behind some sort of cover, the alien fired needle-thin beams of silver light at him until he was discouraged.

Until, rather than doubling back, Andleton continued down the side corridor and found an alcove of his own to duck into, unseen by his pursuers. He heard a sharp, polyphonic whistle- some sort of alien, curse, he assumed- and then the rapid tic of claws against the deck plating as the lizard-thing came after him. Further away, but still disconcertingly close, he heard the clatter of the other four, approaching from the other direction. A quick glance proved they were past the next junction, and out of sight- for the moment, anyway. On his left, the alien footsteps stopped, just around the corner. His sneaky friend was being cautious.

Andleton ducked back into the alcove, and waited. Another footstep, then another- the thing was easing around the corner, looking for him. Another step and the creatures' foreclaw came into view- from behind. The lizard-thing was facing the other way.

He stepped out of the alcove.

As it turned to face him, he kicked, striking its wrist and sending its weapon flying. It reached for the necklace of grenades it wore, but Andleton was quicker. He seized it by its thick neck, dragging it forward and off balance, then, dropping his blaster to free up his other hand, turned the ridged knob set into one end of the nearest grenade. The lizard thing, shocked and whistling its distress, raked him with its blunt claws, hard enough that, besides the bleeding furrows it left in his skin, he felt a rib crack. Ignoring that, he readjusted his grip, and lifted the alien off the ground, then pivoted to face the junction behind him. One step, and he was at the corner, another, halfway around it- he heaved his writhing, panicked burden at its fellows, then ducked back around the corner.

The concussion of the exploding grenade threw him off his feet, and brought him in an arc that ended when he slammed face-first into the deck.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The sharpness of ozone-smell burned in M'thas's nostrils, and the blaster in his hand was uncomfortably warm. The bridge was two decks away, and at the rate he'd been shooting, his last power pack should see him through just long enough. Unlike the depressurization of the docking bay, the programming subroutines guarding engines and fire control could not be accessed remotely. The command codes were, at the moment, useless.

That was, in and of itself, more than enough trouble. Added to that was the fact that, with the exception of life support and maintenance systems, the main computer was dormant, and just as inaccessible as fire control. That meant no security fields to hold the invaders back. No sensor relays to assess the battle outside. And, worst, no turbolifts to take them to the bridge.

It was a long walk.

Behind him, Ensign Piper yelled in surprise, and M'thas spun, twisting out of the way of the disturbingly silent thread of silver energy fired in his direction. The corridor behind them was, quite suddenly, filled with the compact aliens that had dogged them for the last seven decks. A second and third beam scissored in on Lt. Mal's legs, illuminating them with a surreal glow, and sending him collapsing, nerveless, to the deck. The effect was temporary- a beam had grazed his left arm in the aliens' first concerted charge, and, though it tingled, it was no longer completely numb. It was, however, enough to give them a foothold in the corridor. Half a dozen more beams scythed in at them, flooring Ensign Piper and catching Colonel Ahana in the side, but leaving the others unscathed.

The Vice Admiral and the Commodore fired in unison, and Ensign W't'kaer joined only a fraction of a second later. M'thas himself was a touch slower- whenever fire was directed his way, it took a moment while his hands tightened reflexively on an imaginary control yoke before he remembered he wasn't flying a TIE. Then they were in his sights, shooting again, and he returned fire. Nine had been alive for the first salvo, but only five were standing now, and all of these were cut down before their third salvo.

Their second, however, clipped both his ankle and his gun hand, sending him staggering up against the bulkhead, and his blaster, sparking with some sort of energy discharge, dropped from frozen fingers.

Colonel Ahana and Lieutenant Mal were still concious and partly mobile, Ensign Piper was not. While M'thas tried to flex his fingers or walk without limping, the others moved them further down the corridor, behind the cover of a tangle of coolant tubing.

Before they started toward the bridge again, Mal relieved the unconscious ensign of his blaster and tossed it to M'thas, who caught it awkwardly, left-handed.

Then they were moving again, W't'kaer alone at point, M'thas taking up the rear.

The next deck was quiet, empty, still smelling of cleaning solutions, without the thick, obvious overlay of musky scent that the aliens left behind them.

The command deck, by contrast, was swimming with it.

"The bridge is sealed," Edlund said, answering M'thas's unasked question. "Three blast doors and a forcefield. The command codes will open them in about five seconds, but anything short of artillery would take upwards of six hours. We field-tested it."

His reply came in the form of a grenade hurled around the nearest corner, clattering on deck plates. It skittered past them to land, spinning slowly, just behind M'thas. He skipped backwards, over it, and kicked, sending it forward again, ricocheting off the walls as it rolled. Then the four of them were running backwards, chased by the roar of vaporized atmosphere and an orange-white wavefront of fire and blinding light. It pushed them together, colliding and falling to the deck. As the roar and the light faded, the sound of rending metal took their place, as jagged and half-molten chunks of the ceiling collapsed onto the decking where they'd stood before. What had been decking, at any rate.

"Let's try the next corridor over," the Commodore suggested, a little breathlessly.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There were no more grenades thrown, but only a blur of hesitant advances and hasty retreats, argent strands of light matched with red flashes of blasterfire, a slow sense of progress and a quicker sense of hopelessness- and then, the bridge doors, the corridor before them strewn with half a dozen reptilian corpses.

The doors irised open, then shut behind them, and the Commodore plugged his datapad into the nearest console.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Aboard the Centurion, Commodore Andleton barked orders, every third of which seemed to be a withdrawal. The Omwat paced beside his ship, giving ground just as reluctantly, but no slower. No other capital ships remained intact, and beneath them, both the shipyards and the surface were going dark under sensors, section by section. The Ssi-Ruuk were still going strong: fourteen cruisers, two carriers, two planetary assault craft, and over thirty picket ships. It was a calculated insult that all but six cruisers were focusing on the planet, leaving the others to finish the half-crippled Imperial vessels. If Admiral Piett's time estimate was correct, in little more than half an hour Ssi-Ruuvi reinforcements would arrived, and the Admiral himself would be hot on their heels. It was likely that the Centurion and the Omwat could survive that long, but nothing of the shipyards would. That would leave them short of a full defeat, but so close that the next Ssi-Ruuvi advance would easily destroy them. There had to be something that could be done, anything-

As he glanced at the sensor displays that hovered as glittering holos to his side, three of the most distant alien ships vanished. It took him a moment to find their destroyer- a stationary point of holographic light the sensors had previously tagged as noncombatant.

The Typhon. The icon representing it shaded from neutral white to blue on the display, and began to move: sweeping around the planet in a low, fast orbit that had to be burning fuel at an unbelievable rate, straining the torpedo platform's engines almost into the red. Another ship vanished in it path- this time, it was a cruiser.

"Commodore, sir!" The sensor officer said, in startled and disbelieving delight. "The-"

"I see it," he said shortly, cutting the man off. "Does the shipyard have any visual relays left in that quadrant?"

In lieu of a verbal response, the display shimmered, and the thick, clumsy-looking disc that was the Typhon appeared in its place, burning through the black of space. Dozens of torpedoes rode tails of blue fire outward from it, punching through the shields of the enemy vessels clustered over the shipyards, driving them backwards, then piercing shields and hull to engulf them in explosive meteor showers, shattering them. The ubiquitous clouds of droid fighters obscured the platform's aim, and almost a third of the torpedoes detonated prematurely amidst their swarms.

The cruisers pursuing the Centurion broke off, arrowing towards the main Ssi-Ruuvi formations, which fell back before the Typhon as the Centurion had fallen back before them.

Rather belatedly, the Commodore had a minor sort of epiphany.

"Sensors!"

"Yes, sir?"

"Are Tanroial's shield-generators intact still?"

"Yes, sir. They're subterranean, sir."

"Superimpose an image of the shield radius over the display."

The sensor officer did. Slowly, the Ssi-Ruuk were backing across it, and the Typhon was following.

When the shields came up, the Centurion and the Omwat were back within them.

They watched the Typhon's advance slow further, then stop before the massed Ssi-Ruuvi formations. When the reinforcements arrived, minutes after that, they drew back to join them- and moments later, began vanishing into hyperspace.

By the time the Phantom and the rest of the fleet flickered back into realspace, the last of the Ssi-Ruuk were gone.

Chapter Eighteen

Weeks passed in a rush of adrenalin and anticipation. Just compiling the damage assessment took two days, and prioritizing what repairs they were still capable of took five more... then, because it could not be overlooked, the rewards, promotions, and commendations to the dozens of officers who had distinguished themselves. The awards were necessary not so much for the sake of the officers who earned them, but for the morale of the fleet, which had sunk lower than at Palpatine's death. Then, at least, the spectre of imminent death had not been upon them. Now it was. Somewhere, scattered across three sectors and several cubic light years, over sixty Ssi-Ruuk cruisers remained intact, and over a hundred-sixty support vessels. If they regrouped, and sent a concentrated force to Tanroial...

At the end of the second week, a message drone came in from Bakura. How they had learned that there was a facility in- system was a moot point, the fact that they had allied themselves with the Rebels was disturbing... the message itself was the best thing Piett had seen in some time. Five layered algorithms, destined for a program chip in some slicer droid's brain... every deciphered Ssi-ruuk military encryption code, and a translation key for their birdlike, whistling language.

By the middle of the following week, every small hyperspace-capable craft at Tanroial had a reprogrammed slicer droid aboard and a subsector to scout- to scour, for any sign of the Ssi-Ruuk fleet.

By the end of the week, the scouts had found them. Hundreds of transmissions had been intercepted coming to or from a star cluster a sector and a half away from Tanroial. The first messages indicated that the 'Imperial threat' in the area was next to neutralized- insulting and only partially true, but not as interesting as the rest- a priority summons to the star cluster in question. Best estimates suggested that half the Ssi-ruuk fleet was already there, and the rest still scattered across space- though why was anyone's guess. The cluster in question, CL- 714-6, was uninhabited.

"It's our best- our only- chance. If any more of them gather in one place, they'll be unbeatable- but if we hit them in the one place they're focused, at a time they don't expect, we can cripple them, and chase down the others at our leisure. There won't be enough of them left to get past the Typhon."

That, or words to that effect spoken loudly, insistently, and repeatedly- was Commodore Andleton's assessment, and it was accurate. No one from the greenest ensign to Admiral Piett had disagreed.

The point of contention was whether nine capital ships and two corvettes could defeat a fleet of thirty-five cruiser-class ships, and more than twice as many support vessels. It was whether those eleven ships- the only sizable combat vessels the Imperials had remaining- could be repaired in time to do any good. It was whether they could even reach the cluster before the rest of the Ssi-Ruuk.

Since their survival depended on it, it was decided that those answers had to be yes. Twenty-seven days after the brief, aborted siege of Tanroial, that assumption was put to the test.

~~~~~~~~~~~

The fighter pilots were all fatalists- every individual expected to die, though each maintained that they believed the Imperial fleet itself would win, despite the odds.

Brevet Captain M'thas Char was leading the 264th squadron- the Raving Mynocks- off of the Phantom, through sheer luck. For him, it was good luck, but he despised it nonetheless. His promotion and placement came only because, at Tanroial, an incredible thirty-one percent of the fleet's TIE pilots had died, and the more experienced pilots on the Phantom had been promoted to replace Wing Commanders on other ships. The fatalities included almost all of the pilots off the Centurion... his friends and sometime rivals. Of Marauder Squadron, who he'd served with at Colchis, only Lieutenant Kamsov remained. When he'd gotten command of the 264th, he'd had her transferred in. He needed a familiar face nearby. Flying was in his blood, his brain, his soul... but he missed working with Lieutenant- now also a Brevet Captain- Mal, and Lieutenants (j.g.) Piper and W't'kaer.

Unlike the pilots under his command, he didn't expect to die, and he didn't secretly think that the Imperial fleet would lose. He refused to. He had not spent two years outside of a TIE cockpit only to flame out the week after he was readmitted to the Corps. He had not helped save Admiral Piett, Vice Admiral Hayden, and the whole fleet just to see them taken by crazy lizards now. He was twenty-seven: not too young to die, but too ambitious, too abrasive, and too arrogant, at least. There were probably several other cardinal virtues that would keep him and the Empire alive, but those would do for starters.

The fleet arrived in the C-21416 system in three prongs. The Omwat and the Sleipnir, flanked by the two remaining corvettes, took the center. The three Victory Star Destroyers and three Interdictors took the left. The Phantom took the right.

All the other ships launched their fighters immediately, sighting on the half-organized cloud of ships that was the Ssi- ruuvi fleet, but the nine squadrons on the Phantom remained in their launch bays. Until they hit the Ssi-Ruuk, there was no advantage in disclosing their location. M'thas understood that, agreed with it, found the reasoning tactically sound, and hated it with every fiber of his being. There were over two hundred pilots engaging the countless Ssi-Ruuvi drones at that second, and he wasn't one of them. This, he thought, was a problem.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Phantom's sensor officer was one of the most quiet, decorous, by-the-book young officers Admiral Piett had ever seen.

At the moment, he was swearing like a Corellian losing at sabacc.

"Lieutenant Kadrides, is something wrong?"

"We've got problems, sir."

"And those would be?"

"Nineteen more cruisers than we expected, and almost thirty more support ships- including six carriers."

Six carriers meant seven thousand more drones.

As the Lieutenant spoke, a full dozen cruisers arrowed toward the Omwat and the Sleipnir, and half that again toward the Victory Star Destroyers. The plan had been to string the enemy vessels out, and then have the Phantom broadside them, but the approaching ranks of cruisers were hardly strung out- their formations were at least three deep.

At least, he thought, they still had the element of surprise. "Helm! Full forward! Guns- focus on the middle ranks- this isn't a strafing run, we want to punch right through them. Sensors- when they start hitting us with more than one out of three shots, launch the fighters."

And, he added silently, purposely echoing the benediction that had seemed to work so well for Rebel commanders, may the Force be with us.

For the first and only time in his life, he found himself close to wishing that Vader was present. But then, the Force hadn't done the Dark Lord much good in the end.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Four cruisers- two large and two small- formed the line that the Admiral had chosen to cut through. Before the Phantom reached the first ship, her two hundred turbolasers had done their work. Three of the cruisers were dark, broken things, and the fourth was trying to maneuver out of the line of fire. As it failed, the Phantom slid in between two ranks of cruisers, moving too fast to be stopped by the dozens of ion cannon that lit its shields and hull with brief flashes of blue lightning. To the Phantom's port, the Omwat and the Sleipnir pressed in, driving the four cruisers nearest it back, forcing them to choose between their guns and the Phantom's. Their shields began to fail, but then the Phantom passed through, and the broken formations closed and advanced again.

Before the Phantom could turn back for another pass, the Ssi-Ruuvi reserves were upon it- ten of the small cruisers and three carriers. One salvo of turbolasers convinced them that this would not be enough, and four of the larger cruisers broke off their assault on the left prong of the Imperial formation.

The carriers almost vanished from the tac displays as they approached, outlines blurred by the thousands of droid sensor signatures pouring from their hangar bays.

Then they were surrounding the Phantom and its fighter compliment, outgunning them by some incalculable amount.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Raving Mynocks sped from their berths as swiftly and erratically as their namesakes, piercing the near-solid walls of drones with fire. There was no question of evading, no worrying about aiming- every shot they fired hit, and the vacuum was filled with too much enemy fire to avoid.

M'thas's confidence wavered momentarily, then recovered as the Phantom's batteries opened up again, smashing through squadrons of drones without slowing. They were, he was fairly certain, aiming at the cruisers beyond the fighter screen, but to hit them, the Phantom had to clear the space between them first.

That was going to take awhile.

A quartet of the pyramidal drones surged forward, trying to box him in- full reverse thrusters propelled him backwards, until they were all under his sights. A lone droid fighter, lasers clipped off and surfaces seared, charged toward him on a suicide vector- he blew it out of space.

"One Flight, this is Lead. Form up behind me."

Two of the three other fighters in One Flight complied- the other had gotten between a half-dozen fighters and one of the Phantom's heavy turbolasers.

They waited, watching their sensor boards, until the Phantom's barrages cut through clear space and struck one of the enemy cruisers. There were something like nineteen hundred drones left around the Phantom out of a launch group of three thousand, and about eighty TIEs.

Nonetheless, they sped toward the nearest cluster of enemy ships, watching them scatter under their guns.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

As soon as the cruiser group coming at the Eviscerator- flagship of the left prong, his ship- divided, a third of the ships breaking off to attack the Phantom, Pompie Malahos divided his own forces. They quickly pincered the approaching cruisers between them- as, twelve klicks to their starboard, twenty or so ships were pincering the Phantom, and another dozen were trying to outflank the Omwat.

Once the cruisers were caught between them- three Interdictors on one side, three Victory Star Destroyers on the other- he gave the order to fire. Dozens of concussions missiles flashed from dozens of launch tubes, crushing the cruisers' shields under the combined kilotons of their explosions, destroying one and then another- before another half-dozen cruisers, moving at full speed, swept down upon them.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Vice Admiral Litsen kept her composure as yet more Ssi- Ruuvi reserves pushed the Sleipnir back, but inside she was seething. Barely half of the alien fleet was engaging them. They simply sent out wave after wave of ships when the last wave was destroyed- wearing the Imperials away through simple attrition, a costly tactic- but the Ssi-Ruuk could afford to pay that price, play that game. The eleven ships of the Imperial fleet could not.

Ten ships. The INT Tartarus vanished from her screens as she spoke, giving the command to fall back a klick- again, backing away from the main alien fleet as it hovered over C- 21416-A, the system's only inhabited planet. The mass of enemy ships showed up clearly, even using visual sensors only, silhouetted against C-21416-A's single, massive moon. She felt sorry for whatever people lived on the planet- from the amount of development sensors detected on the surface, they were advanced enough to be watching the battle with some kind of telescope or deep-space sonar. Advanced enough to see the Imperial fleet's gradual destruction, and then the waves of landers dive through their atmosphere.

Hopefully, advanced enough to burn down some measurable fraction of the invaders before they were captured, enslaved, and enteched.

She prepared to give the order to fall back again, even though a pair of cruisers had just fallen under their guns- two more and a carrier were moving in to replace it.

Before she could speak, the Omwat's shields flickered into nonexistence, and its engines gave out.

This would be it, then- the last stand, the last charge.

"Move forward, Helm. Let's see what we can do to delay the inevitable."

Two more ships winked out on her screens- VSDs Koshchei and Mathonwy, overrun by a fresh wave of the smaller, more agile cruisers the Ssi-Ruuk seemed to enjoy throwing at them. Three of the cruisers vanished with it, but the battle was almost over there, too- the Imperial formation was broken in too, with the Eviscerator retreating one direction and the Interdictors forced to retreat the other.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A dozen cruisers had vanished under the waves of fire streaming from the Phantom's batteries, but now the shields had failed. The streams of fire had thinned- almost half the Phantom's turbolasers had been destroyed.

They were no longer pincered- they were surrounded. The engines were failing, the lights in one section or another going dark. Only the sensors remained untouched- allowing Piett to watch his life, his dreams and ideals, and all those who shared those ideals die, one after another.

Conflicting forms of despair warred within him, and for once, he was unable to ignore them. He did not succumb to the numbness, or the tears, or the useless rage that welled up and ate at his insides- but he could no longer pretend he didn't feel them.

The ship rocked with a concentrated salvo of laserfire, and half the consoles in the crew pit exploded as power surged through them, the whole bridge glowing an unearthly blue as an ion bolt struck beneath it.

The lights went out.

This time, he thought, there would be no desperate run for an escape pod- and even if that was an option, he would reject it. The Admiral would go down with his ship, as he should have done on the Executor. If he hadn't, maybe this would not have happened. Maybe-

No. he could not sit here and brood in the darkness, hearing the panic and turmoil sweep through his crew, watching the guttering tongues of fire dance in the dead consoles until some larger, fiercer fire claimed him.

He vaulted down into the crew pit, searching for a power regulation console. He found it, abandoned by the ensign whose job it was to man it, and rerouted power until he located a circuit relay left untouched by the ion blast. Red, emergency lighting came up on the bridge, and three or four other consoles lit up again.

Among them was the sensor board, and he would go to it as soon as he could, but there was something else first. Something there hadn't been time to do on the Executor, something probably futile, but still necessary. If there was any shred of his hope left, any splinter of his ideals left, it had to be given the chance to escape.

He moved to the comm board.

"All hands, this is Admiral Piett. Abandon ship. Repeat, aba-"

A massive swirl of lights formed on the sensor board, and he broke off in mid-syllable. The new ships on the display were colored green- unknown types and allegiance.

He called up visuals on the sensor board, and found two dozen predatory, angular shapes, plated in dark, coppery armor, bristling with weapons he didn't recognize, sweeping into realspace with strange, prolonged flickers- a drive technology far different, and far more primitive than the Empire's.

As he watched, the shapes were joined by hundreds of small, thornlike fightercraft, rising from the planet's surface. Together, the ships swept deep into the heart of the Ssi-Ruuvi formations, grey-white blasts of staticky light tearing through their hulls, brilliant orbs of white fire burning holes through the egg-shaped cruisers.

The ships attacking what remained of the Imperial formations broke off, swinging back to battle the unknown aliens- outnumbering them two to one.

The alien ships were unshielded, according to sensors, and Piett grimaced- merely a temporary reprieve, then, before death claimed them. A chance for some of his officers to escape, at least.

Waves of laserfire struck the dark coppery hulls, glowed, and vanished.

Piett swore and ran another scan- molecularly bonded armor coated every one of the unknown ships, down to the smallest fighter. Another scan revealed an artificial gravity well- something akin to Interdictor technology.

The Ssi-Ruuk were trapped.

Their systematic slaughter by the unknown aliens took seven hours. The molecular armor was not impervious- nine or ten of their two dozen ships melted under repeated attacks, and another three or four went dark under barrages from ion cannon.

The Imperial ships that could still maneuver- the Eviscerator, the Sleipnir, the Styx, the Centurion, and one of the two corvettes- joined in the battle, helping to round up the Ssi- Ruuk that tried to escape the gravity well.

Dozens of officers rejoined Piett on the bridge, making halfhearted attempts to clear the deck of dead bodies and coax a few more systems into running, but mostly watching the sensor board or staring out the viewports to see the bronze-hued, thorn- like fighters flying in tandem with TIEs.

Seven hours. At their end, Piett moved, as if sleepwalking, to the comm board, and opened all channels, directing his message on every frequency and through every medium the Phantom's comm possessed, aiming all transmissions on the alien flagship.

"This is Admiral Piett, commanding officer of this fleet. On behalf of my people and the Empire, I extend my greetings and most heartfelt gratitude."

One of the channels lit up with a return signal, and Piett called it up on the board- a flatscreen communication.

"Dhral chet, ek mi ento ja ek tann. Co'ba, Courani tann elahsha savriel."

The words were incomprehensible.

The speaker that appeared on the screen was human.