Aftermath: Empire's End (Star Wars: Aftermath #3)(104)

She fires everything. Banks of turbolasers. Ion torpedoes. Concussion missiles. Bright lines of death streaking through the black. Lines of the same—fire, castigation, heat—launching from the Ravager toward her. Like threads of light seeking each other. But they will pass each other, instead, each heading onward to an act of destruction, not creation.

The Concord roars toward it, even as its deflector shields begin to fail on the side. The ship tilts starboard. Debris punches through the hull. The engines gutter. She wills the ship to keep going.

Hope is a fire fast extinguished inside her. She sees the fury unleashed from the dreadnought—predictive analysis shows the Concord losing this fight. Her volley cannot match that from the Ravager. The Ravager is a beast and will not be sated. She will damage it. To what extent she cannot say, but if she opens it up to attack—even still, her mind attempts the calculations. If she opens up a hole in the side of that thing, it’s something, but it’s still not enough. And if the other Star Destroyers close the gap and protect the injury made against the Ravager, then what?

Out there, through the cathedral-like arches of glass, she sees the weapons streaming toward her.

This is it.

But then: Agate has a new idea.

—

War brings with it moments of inevitability. A sinking ship. An onrushing horde. A mortal wound. The worst kind, Ackbar thinks, are the moments when you watch friends die. Especially those times when it happens slowly, too slowly, as if all the moments leading up to it are drawn out and given time like images flash-pulsed into your mind’s eye.

This is one of those times. Agate cuts communication with him, and he sees the Concord burn hard and move toward the dreadnought as both it and the monstrous Ravager launch everything at each other.

The problem is, the Ravager’s weapons are far greater than those of a single Starhawk. The Starhawk’s weapons are prodigious and better than even he has on the Home One. It is the uttermost of their tech: bleeding-edge armament. But by itself it can only hope to wound the dreadnought.

And it will die in service of that act.

Agate is still on board. He knows this. She is going down with her ship—a dramatic gesture that he hopes has purpose behind it. He suspects she feels that she must command every moment between now and her end, that it should be her hand directing the ship and its fusillade of fire.

But the Starhawk makes an unexpected turn.

The Concord banks sharply to the starboard, maneuvering quickly to turn that side of itself toward the incoming attack. The port is already damaged by the debris field. The starboard side taking the hit—with the shields already gone, Ackbar sees—may not destroy the Starhawk outright, but it’ll sink it. Already its engines are damaged on the far side. Atmosphere will grab that vessel like mud sucking on a soldier’s boot.

A hologram flashes over his console.

It’s Agate.

“Agate! Get off that ship—”

“Admiral, listen. Get everyone you can to hit that dreadnought from aft. Take out its engines. Send every starfighter, every CR90, anyone—”

“Commodore, I command you to abandon that vessel.”

“Admiral, it literally pains me to deny your order. But please, trust me. Listen to me. The engines!”

Out the viewport and on his screen, he watches the fusillade from the Ravager close in on the Concord.

“What are you doing? Hitting those engines—the Ravager is not moving. The engines aren’t where we need to be concentrating our fire—”

“Just trust me.”

“Commodore—”

“Thank you, Admiral. It has been the highest honor.”

“Kyrsta!”

And then she’s gone again.

Just trust me.

War brings with it moments of inevitability, yes. But it also carries with it the opposite: moments of grave uncertainty bridged only by acts of blind faith. When they say to one another, May the Force be with you, it is precisely this that they mean: It is a wish that when the time comes to leap into the void and to make a decision based on instinct and trust, you are rewarded for that act and not punished. The hope is that if you meet the galaxy halfway, it meets you in the middle and carries you the rest of the distance. Ackbar decides to trust and to leap…

And to pray that the Force is with them all.

—

The exchange of destruction is a mighty one. The Concord’s barrage slams into the Ravager, ripping a hole in the side of the gargantuan ship with the ferocity of a biting, rending rancor. The injury is black and deep, but not fatal. And the dreadnought’s own weapons strike the Concord, slipping past what little is left of the deflector shields and punching clean through it. Oxygen whistles out into the void. Fire plumes as chemicals off-gas into space. The ship groans. Somewhere in the belly of the ship, explosions start going off—fuel cells and magna-batteries chain-reacting, boom, boom, boom. It won’t detonate the whole ship. But it has gutted it.

The ship is dead in the water.

And without the repulsors from underneath keeping it aloft, the atmosphere of Jakku is like a reaching, claiming hand. She feels the ship drift downward, drifting as it goes.

But the Starhawks were designed with one thing in mind: upgrade. So long did the rebels endure an aging, piecemeal fleet that when the time came to finally design something new to serve the nascent Republic, they went all-in. Every internal system, every external design feature, every weapon—all of it was upgraded beyond the watermark set by the Mon Cala ships prior and beyond the known capabilities of the Empire’s extant ships.