Aftermath: Empire's End (Star Wars: Aftermath #3)(103)

“But with me present—”

“We have no time for this, General Tyben. I thank you for your concern and your update.” Ackbar ends the holographic transmission, then turns to open a channel to Agate. But his webbed hand pauses, held fixed over the console as he gazes out the viewport of the Home One bridge—

His blood goes cold as saline as he watches the tragedy unfold.

One of the Star Destroyers—the Punishment—turns its nose drastically starboard. It turns right toward the Starhawk Amity. And the Amity has little room to maneuver given its proximity both to Agate’s Concord and to the battle raging all around it.

It’s suicide, Ackbar thinks. He believes it must be an accident, but it seems to be deliberate. The Punishment’s nose is like a sweeping blade, and it crashes into the blunt fore of the Amity, shearing through it. Fire blooms in space. Bodies drift. And the Punishment keeps going. Thrusters burn at the back and repulsors fire along the side—the Destroyer becomes a weapon as it cuts the Starhawk in half, debris from both ships cascading outward as lightning coruscates between the two obliterated vessels.

Agate’s own ship is right in the middle of it all.

He hurriedly opens the channel.

—

Everything focuses to a sharp point. Agate hears Ackbar in her ear, is faintly aware of his presence cast in holographic blue to her right. He’s warning her about the debris field coming her way, but he doesn’t need to tell her about it. She sees it on her screens: A hundred red motes blink like furious eyes winking in the dark. Each is a piece of debris, and each piece rockets toward her like a weapon—the wreckage of not one ship but two.

That wave of destruction will be here in less than three minutes.

She yells for Spohn to strengthen the port-side shields. But she knows they’ll only hold up so long. That many fragments? It’s too much.

“Abandon ship, Commodore!” Ackbar roars. “That is an order.”

“Yes, sir,” she says, her voice sounding a thousand light-years away.

This is what it comes down to, she thinks. Her return to war is over as quickly as it began. Their brute-force strategy to break the blockade of Star Destroyers has ended. The Amity is down. The Concord won’t last. She barks for the communications officer to warn the Unity—they have room to maneuver, to get out of range. Not only will the Concord create its own debris field, but with that Star Destroyer gone and the two Starhawks vacating the field, that will leave the Unity vulnerable to attacks from that massive dreadnought waiting in the center of it all.

Abandon ship.

She makes the call. It’s the right thing to do. And they’re going to have to move fast—worst thing is, they can only use the pods on the starboard side. Otherwise, they’d launch right into the wave of wreckage.

Red lights pulse. Klaxons blare. A flurry of activity rises around her as the people of the bridge do as they have been trained to do, streaming efficiently and effectively toward the exits—the capital command crew have escape pods all their own and within spitting distance of the bridge.

Her artificial eye focuses on the screens. She sweeps her finger ahead, fast-forwarding the expected consequences of what’s coming—the computer is predictive and models the likeliest outcome. The debris will damage, but not destroy, the Concord. It will, however, leave them open to attack from the dreadnought. And they’re close enough to the top of Jakku’s atmosphere that the ship will likely drop toward the surface. Crashing into sand and stone. They will lose the Concord one way or another.

Spohn grabs her elbow. “Commodore, it’s time.”

“I’m coming,” she says. “I’ll be right there.”

But it’s a lie.

“Commodore—”

“I said go. I’ll be along.”

Ackbar starts to ask her what she’s doing. She ends communication with him. I am sorry, Admiral. But she realizes something:

If the destruction of the Punishment and the Amity open up her ship to attack by the dreadnought—

Then it also opens up the dreadnought to attack by the Concord.

She has her chance.

It’s one she likely cannot survive. But the costs of war are heavy, even in victory. That has been one of her guiding, governing principles. It is a grudging reality that informs all that she does in battle.

Her hand is no longer trembling. It has been stayed, perhaps by the first moment of certainty she’s felt in a very long time. How about that.

She uses her newly steady hand to urge forward the Concord’s throttle so that it seizes the gap in the Star Destroyer barricade, thrusting hard toward the dreadnought. Above her head, lights flick from red to green: pod bays launching one after the other as her people abandon ship.

Good. Go. Get safe.

She takes a moment to look around her. She’s alone. Like a little island in the center of a calm, quiet lake.

Her screens light up. As expected, the dreadnought is unleashing hell—right as debris from the two eradicated ships begins slamming into the Concord. Lights go dark, then bright, then dark again. The ship shakes and bangs as if it’s a toy held in the hand of a careless child.

From Agate’s bridge console, she flicks over to the weapons consoles. She prepares everything they have, every bit of ordnance this ship has to bear.

Bring hell to my door, I’ll bring it to yours.