"If they're in such rotten shape, then it won't be much of a loss, will it?" Rozhdenst locked his gaze with that of the younger man. "Look, if you or any of the other mem-bers of the squadron don't want this job, then fine— you can stay out here at the base and watch. But I'm going in."
Klemp was silent for only a fraction of a second. "And I'll be right behind you, sir. Along with everybody else."
"Good." Rozhdenst gave a single, quick nod, then handed the microphone to Klemp. "There's no time for plotting a formation attack; this show is going to be over in minutes. Give the squadron full operational initiative— everyone's on their own for vector, approach, and target. Total scramble, eye and comm unit contact to avoid tak-ing each other out." The Scavenger Squadron com-mander stood up from the controls. "Let's get going."
"They must have seen us coming," said Dengar. "So they decided to blow the whole place up."
The explosions had filled the forward viewports as soon as the Hound's Tooth dropped out of hyperspace. Both Dengar and Boba Fett, in the ship's cockpit, could see the fiery cataclysm taking place in the Kuat Drive Yards' construction docks.
"Don't be stupid," snapped Fett. He pointed to the display screen. The tiny dark shapes of Y-wing craft could be seen silhouetted by the roiling masses of flame. "Those Alliance fighters are obviously going in to try and pull out what they can of the ships moored there. The docks are being blown up from within; there's only one person who could have arranged it, and that's Kuat of Kuat."
"He's blowing up his own facility?" Dengar frowned in puzzlement. "Why would he do that?"
"Because he'd rather destroy it," said Fett, "than let it fall into anyone else's hands. I've dealt with him before; Kuat Drive Yards is all that matters for him. Something must have happened—probably with the Rebel Alliance and that fabricated evidence his head of security took from us—that would end his control over the corpora-tion. So he's taking the whole thing with him."
"You mean . . . he's in there? You don't think he escaped?"
Boba Fett shook his head. "There's no place for Kuat of Kuat to escape to. Or at least no place that has Kuat Drive Yards in it. Survival doesn't mean the same thing for him that it does for you and me; for Kuat, it's just death without peace."
"This is the end of the road, then." Dengar stood back from the pilot's chair and folded his arms across his chest. "You're not going to get any answers out of him now."
"Don't bet on it." Boba Fett reached for the naviga-tional controls.
A sharp current of alarm raced up Dengar's spine. "What're you doing?"
"I'm going in. To find Kuat."
"You're crazy—" The main thruster engines had al-ready kicked in. As Dengar watched in mounting horror, the explosions bursting up from the Kuat Drive Yards' construction docks swelled in the forward viewport. The black shapes of collapsing cranes and heat-warped gird-ers became visible. "You'll get us killed!"
"Maybe," said Fett. "But I'm willing to take the chance."
"Yeah, well, you might be willing, but I'm not." Standing behind Boba Fett, Dengar clutched the back of the pilot's chair to keep the Hound's surging acceleration from throwing him off his feet. "I can live without every question in the galaxy being answered."
"I don't care about every question. Just the ones that deal with me."
The shock wave from another explosion, larger than the ones before it, buffeted the Hound's Tooth. In the forward viewport, a gaping hole could be seen in the cen-ter of the KDY construction docks large enough to fly a ship through and ringed with twisted, smoldering metal.
Dengar, with sudden desperation, tried to reach past Boba Fett and grab the controls. "We're supposed to be partners—" His fist locked on to one of the main thruster engine throttles. "And I say we don't get our-selves killed—"
With a quick swing of his forearm, Boba Fett knocked Dengar back against the cockpit's rear bulkhead.
"You're outvoted on this one," said Fett.
Slumping down to the floor and squeezing his eyes shut, Dengar could still see the bright glaring light of the explosions, as though they were about to shatter the viewport and annihilate everything in the cockpit. Alarm signals shrieked from the control panel as the Hound's Tooth bucked and spiraled through an engulfing bloom of shrapnel-filled flame.
Not a good idea, thought Dengar as he ground his teeth together and scrabbled for any hold he could find. The worst one yetThe commander of the Scavenger Squadron had been within a few meters of Ott Klemp's wingtip, matching velocity with him all the way to the inferno consuming the KDY construction docks. But he'd had to bank hard to one side to avoid another fireball and whirling tangle of girders and cables; by the time Klemp pulled back on course, any visual contact with the rest of the squadron was cut off by roiling masses of smoke and flame.
A gap appeared in front of the Y-wing through which Klemp could just make out a moored Lancer-class frigate. As with the other newly constructed ships in the docks, a tug module was magnetically clamped to the bridge. The tugs were not much bigger than the fighter craft swarming through the explosions and white-hot shrapnel; they had no thruster engines of their own, but were designed to be wired through the cruisers' and De-stroyers' data-cable ports, using the larger craft's engines to maneuver out of the docks and into open space. At the moment, the tugs were still enclosed in the balloonlike atmospheric-maintenance shrouds in which the Kuat Drive Yards had worked while routing the control lines. The durasteel-laced shrouds had a programmed viscous layer between the inner and outer membranes, with near-instantaneous resealing capabilities to prevent fatal air-loss during routine industrial accidents. Without those shrouds, Klemp knew, there would be no chance of the Scavenger Squadron's pilots pulling any of the fleet out of the cataclysm engulfing the construction docks.
He could see the bridge of the frigate now, with the shroud's bubble on the section of hull immediately be-hind. The sequenced explosions hadn't reached the ship yet, though its flanks were tinged with the churning red and orange of the approaching flames. Klemp rolled the Y-wing into a diving arc, straight toward the shroud.
The Y-wing's prow ripped through the shroud's fab-ric; Klemp could hear the sharp ping of the durasteel threads snapping against the leading edges of the wings. At the same time, he was blinded by the thick semiliquid smearing across the cockpit's canopy. That wouldn't be enough to slow the Y-wing down; within a fraction of a second of penetrating the shroud, he slammed on the craft's braking rockets, their maximum force nearly enough to cut the pilot seat's restraining straps through his chest, and snapping his head forward hard enough to momentarily dizzy him.
A tangle of broken durasteel threads, embedded in the shroud's viscous resealing layer, pulled away from the Y-wing's hull as Klemp popped the canopy. There wasn't time to check if there was any atmospheric pressure left in the construction shroud; he gulped in the thin oxygen and looked back along the inner curve of the bubble be-hind the Y-wing. The fighter's rear section was mired in the rapidly setting substance, with fluttering tatters of the white fabric sucked into the dwindling gaps. Klemp didn't wait to see if the new seal would hold, but instead ran along the frigate's upper hull toward the tug module.
Within seconds, he was inside the tug and slamming the exterior hatch shut behind him. The controls on the panel before him were the minimum necessary for lifting the frigate out of the dock in which it had been built; even before Klemp hit the tug module's pilot's chair, he had engaged the controls running to the cruiser's aux-iliary thruster engines. There was a response lag of nearly a second before the ship responded; with a slow surge of power, its enormous mass began ponderously rising from the dock. The power cables and mooring conduits that were still connected to the hull's various ports now taut-ened and snapped free when they had stretched to their limits.