"There!" someone called, and Doriana saw an arm point upward from one of the pits. "The Hardcells have launched their missiles."
"About time," Doriana muttered, feeling a cautious hope rising within him as five clusters of three missiles each shot toward the attackers.
The attackers reacted instantly, five of the fighters abandoning their thrust toward the battleships and curving toward the outside of the Trade Federation formation. The missiles, locking in on the movement, followed. "Good," Kav said with satisfaction. "The next salvo will draw the rest of the fighters away and leave the cruisers undefended. Then our own quad laser batteries can destroy them with ease."
"Maybe," Doriana said cautiously, following the fleeing alien craft with his eyes. They were cutting in and out through the masses of drifting starfighters, clearly trying to throw off the pursuing missiles' homing locks.
But to no avail. Techno Union hardware was among the best in the Republic, and the missiles maneuvered their own way through the clutter with case as they continued to close the gap. The aliens reached the edge of the starfighter cloud and curved tightly back into it again, driving inward toward the main ships. Again, the missiles matched the maneuver. The fighters straightened out; and then, in near unison, each dropped a small object aft toward its pursuers.
And Doriana stiffened as a well-remembered hazy cloud erupted from each of them, unfolding directly in the path of the incoming missile clusters. "More Connor nets!" he snapped.
But there was nothing the onlookers could do. The nets enveloped the missile clusters and flashed their killing jolts of high-voltage current, destroying homing electronics and drive systems alike and leaving the missiles as dead as the drifting starfighters around them.
Only once again, Mitth'raw'nuruodo hadn't been content to merely protect his own ships from attack. Even as Doriana's hands curled into helpless fists, their inertia sent the missiles slamming into the Techno Union ships. There were multiple blasts as sections of hull metal shattered outward into space
And then, like a minor sun going off at close range, one of the ships exploded completely.
"What-?" Kav gasped. "No! Not from a single missile cluster. This is impossible!"
"Everything Mitth'raw'nuruododoes is impossible," Doriana retorted bitterly. "The missiles must have hit a weak spot."
"What kind? Where could it be?"
Doriana snorted. "Just watch his ships. They'll be targeting the same spot on all the rest of them."
He was right. Within minutes the alien fighters and cruisers had successfully dodged the desperate flurry of missiles the Techno Union ships were now throwing at them and had efficiently destroyed every one of them. The spot, Doriana noted with morbid fascination, was the line junction to the massive external fuel cells.
"We must escape," Kav said, his voice shaking. "Helm-prepare to jump to lightspeed."
"Wait a minute," Doriana protested, grabbing at his arm. The specter of defeat loomed before him, along with the fate of all those who failed Darth Sidious. "You can't just abandon the fleet."
"What fleet?" Kav snarled. "Look around you, Stratis. What fleet?"
Doriana felt his throat tighten. He was right, of course. All six of the Techno Union Hardcells were gone, half of them destroyed by their own missiles. The seven escort cruisers, never intended to operate against such enemies without capital ship support, were being systematically hunted down and eliminated. Only the two Trade Federation battleships were still in any condition to fight or run.
But with their communications still blocked, there was no way to order a general retreat. If theDarkvenge left, it would be leaving alone.
"Jump calculated," the helmsman called.
"Make the jump," Kav ordered, glaring at Doriana as if daring him to argue. "Do you hear me? Now."
"The hyperdrive does not respond!" the helmsman said, his voice bubbling with sudden panic. "It claims we are too close to a planetary mass."
Doriana twisted around to look at the row of status boards. That was what the readings said, all right.
But there were no planetary masses nearby, or even any sizable asteroids. "Malfunction?"
"No malfunction," Kav murmured, his voice dull and fatalistic. "Merely more Chiss wizardry."
A fresh flicker of light caught Doriana's eve, and he looked back out the viewports. Across the field of carnage, droid starfighters were starting to explode as too many minutes without communication passed and they began to activate their self-destruct mechanisms. Through the scattered bursts of fire, Doriana saw theKeeper suddenly lurch as the upper surface of its starboard ring half erupted in a hundred small explosions. "Vicelord!" someone called.
"I know," Kav said with a tired sigh. "The starfighters I ordered prepped are exploding."
Doriana nodded, his own bitterness long since faded into a deep sense of the inevitable. The reinforcements would have been flying through the hangar bays when Mitth'raw'nuruodo's jamming began and they went dormant. Tumbling helplessly at high speed down a curved corridor, they would have slammed into bulkheads or storage racks or other equipment. There they'd lain, tangled and broken, while they waited for their own self-destruct chronos to run down.
"Then it is over," Kav said quietly. Lifting his hands, he carefully removed his five-cornered hat and set it with equal care on the floor in front of him. "We are all dead."
"It would seem so," Doriana agreed mechanically, feeling his forehead creasing as a strange fact suddenly struck him.
With all the death and debris and charred hulks of ships floating all around them, theDarkvenge itself had yet to be so much as scratched.
He took another, longer look at the status boards. Except for the inexplicably dormant hyperdrive, everything else seemed perfectly functional. "Or maybe not," he added. "I think Mitth'raw'nuruodo has something else in mind for us."
Kav snorted derisively. "And what precisely gave you that impression?"
Puzzled, Doriana turned back
To find that one of the alien cruisers had suddenly appeared outside the viewports. It was hovering bare meters away from the transparisteel, its missile racks pointing in to the bridge in silent warning and clear command. "Close down the midline quad laser batteries, Vicelord," Doriana said quietly. "Then seal the main hangar exits and shut down all the droid starfighters." He took a careful breath. "And then," he said, "prepare for company."