The New Jedi Order - 05 - Agents of Chaos II - Jedi Eclipse by Star Wars

Author:Star Wars
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science Fiction
Published: 2010-08-26T08:25:38+00:00

SIXTEEN

On a purely objective level, battles in space had a savage beauty, an incendiary splendor. Any veteran warship commander or fighter jock ordered to speak the truth would have said so. The more candid among them might even have confessed to moments of exhilaration or, at the very least, moments of hypnotic fascination, when ranging laser bursts or the stroboscopic dazzle of short-lived explosions were enough to carry a pilot completely out of him- or herself. Add distance to the view and the enchantment increased a hundredfold, for along with fiery and coherent light there was the black velvet tableau of stars, planets, moons. . . and ships-thrusters flaring, burnished by starlight, reduced to fleeting comets, twirling and pirouetting in a slow, pyrotechnic ballet of death.

The Battle of Tynna was no exception.

Being seven hundred thousand kilometers removed from the cloud-wreathed, cool-blue and dark-green gem was like having an upper-tier balcony seat at the Corus-cant Opera, but the lofty vantage compensated for the lack of details. And as at the opera, technological assists were available for any who wished to bring the action into extreme close-up.

Major Showolter might have expressed as much to fellow intelligence officer Belindi Kalenda, but he feared being misunderstood. Consequently, he kept his thoughts to himself as the two women at the helm of the KDY LightStealth-18 reconnaissance leaned to either side to afford him and Kalenda an unobstructed view of Tynna's ruination.

A carbon-black six-passenger craft with a needlelike body and disproportionate, downsloping stabilizers, the LightStealth recon was the closest anyone had come to producing a starship capable of hiding itself even while it scanned. Unlike the wide assortment of vessels designed by Raith Sienar, Imperial Section 19, or Warthan's Wizards during the days of the Empire, the LSR wasn't cloaked, but was instead built for silent running and remarkable speed. Bristling with low-profile rectennae and packed with signal-augmented sensor jammers, blind-band hypercomm transmitters, crystal gravfield trap scanners, and a power core more suitable to a ship of the line, the LSR could all but see around the universe to its own aft and could outrun nearly anything that got wind of it.

The craft's pilots, on temporary duty from the Intelligence division's own Black Force Squadron, had assured Showolter that the LSR could be moved to within visual range of the Yuuzhan Vong flotilla and still evade detection. But Showolter had no desire to be any closer to the rout than necessary. They were only there as observers, in any case.

"It's horrible," Kalenda said abjectly, turning away from the narrow viewports. "I can't stand just sitting here, doing nothing."

"Showing ourselves will allow the Yuuzhan Vong to know we've found a flaw in their strategy," Showolter pointed out. Even so, the realization that they really could do nothing brought an end to his ruminations about the beauty of battle and pulled down the corners of his mouth. "But I agree it's horrible."

Kalenda was slight, dark-skinned, and a touch glassy-eyed, where Showolter was thickset, pale, and a bit more conspicuous than Intelligence liked its officers to be.

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