The slug repeaters of the GAVs were useless against the aides' armored hide, and their turret guns were of even less use against the agile akks than they'd been against the blundering grassers. The infantry had nothing that could scratch them; they began to scatter, triggering the akks' herding instincts. The akks overleaped them and slaughtered the leaders, sending the rest retreating in disorder to the killing ground at the tunnel's mouth.
The militia unit commander, who from his post in the turret of a GAV had seen his dream of victory morph into a nightmarish massacre in less than two minutes, did the only thing he could do.
He called in an airstrike.
The gunships in action at the Lorshan Pass were still engaged in shuttling soldiers from the embarkation point at Oran Mas. When they received the unit commander's call, at least one third were already headed in the direction of the pass. The Sienar Turbostorm was not by any means a fast ship-it could barely reach point-five past sound speed in a steep dive-but only seconds later the sky over the pass cracked open with two dozen sonic booms. The gunships shed velocity by heeling over and using their repulsorlift engines like retrothrusters. Their troop bays swung open, disgorging twenty arpitroops at a belch, then the gunships righted themselves and swooped upon the battlefield, spraying missiles from their forward batteries.
The missiles ripped into the battlefield indiscriminately, crushing akks but also shredding the soldiers they fought. The akks' only de fense against concussion missiles was evasive action, and they scattered into the trees. Seeing a chance for a daring stroke, the unit commander ordered a charge by his five GAVs: they would drive right up the tunnel ahead with his own in the lead, crushing grassers and knocking aside akk dogs. More heavily armored than the gun-ships above, he felt they had little to fear-a feeling which he had less than one second to regret as a pair of proton torpedoes streaked from the tunnel's mouth and blew his GAV to scrap.
At this point, finally, the partisans deployed their one and only piece of mobile artillery: Twelve metric tons of ankkox lumbered from the mouth of the tunnel.
The drover who stood on its armored head was a Korun as tall as a Wookiee, with shoulders like a rancor's and a pair of ultrachrome teardrops fastened to his forearms.
The Korun gestured, and the twisted pile of smoking scrap that had been the unit commander's GAV squealed as it flattened beneath the ankkox's massive feet. He swung one arm, and the ankkox's tail mace blurred through the air, knocking the turret gun of the next GAV spinning so that its point-blank shot instead detonated against the armor of the one behind.
Two pairs of Korunnai, nearly as large as the one on the ankkox, and similarly armed, crouched on either curving flank of the beast's dorsal shell; one of each pair wore the bulky, unwieldy shoulder unit of a proton torpedo launcher, while the other tended their supply of disposable loader tubes. They had four apiece, and they seemed to have no interest in conserving them. Torpedo after torpedo streaked from the launchers, first destroying the remaining GAVs, then curving upward to blast gunships from the sky.
A few heroic soldiers of the militia tried to scramble close enough to the ankkox to attack the Akk Guards with small arms, only to be sent spinning through the air, chests crushed with blinding efficiency by blurred blows of the ankkox's tail mace.
At the crest of the ankkox's dorsal shell, where once had stood a howdah of polished lammas, a heavy repeating blaster had been bolted directly to the beast's armor. Its power generator was tended by a young Korun male with vivid blue eyes and a manic grin, and it roared a continuous song of destruction, spraying high-energy particle beam packets across the field of battle.
The gunner on this weapon was a Korun girl with pale skin and startling red hair, whose feel for the weapon was such that she could be seen to fire with her eyes closed, unerringly hammering the cockpits and cannon turrets of even those gunships that screamed past on transsonic strafing runs. Streaking concussion missiles were met tens of meters away with bursts of blasterfire; not one got through.
Nor could the gunships stand off and pound her in a laserfire duel; not only did her every shot rock their ships, spoiling their target locks, but she was defended by a Korun man and a Chalactan woman who handled Jedi energy blades as though they'd been born with them in hand.
Two gunships that tried to attack went down in flames.
Others peeled away, swinging around to take cover behind shoulders of the mountain. An instant later, three gunships appeared in formation straight up the mountain's face, diving, but firing repulsors to slow their dive to not much faster than a man might run. Ventral doors retracted to expose their belly-mounted Sunfire flame projectors.
A wave of unstoppable fire swept down.
The Jadthu-class landing craft carried by the Halleck were modified Incom shuttles not unlike the ones that ferry passengers to and from the liners that ply the Gevarno Loop. With reclining chairs replaced by benches, and transparisteel by armor plate, each was capable of carrying up to sixty fully outfitted troopers. Roughly box shaped, they were rear loading, so that they could be packed in a solid block, four ships by five, and socketed against a cruiser's hull, facing outward.
A simple design, they were easy and inexpensive to build, and were convenient to transport.
Heavily armored, they were also capable of absorbing incredible punishment.
This was a good thing, because they lacked hyperdrives, and they paid for their durability with a maneuverability quotient that had been compared unfavorably to a Hutt on an oil slick.
Their only armament was a pair of dual-laser turrets fore and aft, and an Arkayd Caltrop 5 chaff gun, which could spray a cloud of sensor-distorting durasteel slivers in any direction.
Gunners on the landers had discovered in their very first engagement that at the speeds of starfighter combat, the chaff sprayed by the Caltrop 5 was itself a highly effective weapon: like a miniature asteroid field, it would disastrously perforate any craft unwise or unlucky enough to fly through it, especially droid starfighters which sacrificed armor for greater maneuverability, depending on energy shields for defense-which would not, of course, do them any good at all against chaff.
When the Halleck-fully engaged and heavily damaged by the clouds of droid starfighters that whirled around it-blew the docking clamps and streaked for hyperspace, there were nineteen landers, bearing a total of 977 clone troops, including pilots and gunners.
These landers had no fighter cover: the Hal,'eck's fighter escort had been destroyed in the first minutes of the engagement. Their sole defense beyond their own guns were five Rothana HR LAAT,"I gun-ships. These had been detailed to the mission as antipersonnel cover for the landers, should they be forced to make a pickup in a hostile-fire zone. While these gunships had been retrofitted with sublight drives for orbital use, the LAAT,"I had never been intended to dogfight against the electronic reflexes of droid starfighters.