Aftermath: Empire's End (Star Wars: Aftermath #3)(107)

But they never find their target.

Temmin cries out as a piece of black metal crashes down right in front of him, separating him from his oblique pursuit of the TIE. It crashes into the ground, sending up a cloud of red dust. Temmin peels the ship away from its destined course, turning the X-wing sharply to avoid other debris.

Blast it, that looked like a piece from a starship. A turbine, by the look of it. His comms growl with Admiral Ackbar’s voice:

“Soldiers and pilots of the New Republic! The dreadnought Ravager is down—it falls to Jakku! Beware debris and take cover!”

The Ravager? It’s down?

He whoops as his giddy feeling surges higher. With the Ravager gone, that’ll open up a huge hole in the Imperial fleet. That big monster was everything the Empire had. If it’s gone…

That means the New Republic just won this battle.

And maybe, the whole war.

Now it’s all just cleanup.

Wedge still has that bug on him, so Temmin flicks the X-wing back to the right again, looking for Phantom Leader in his scopes—ah, there he is, dead ahead, zipping over a flat plane where the sand looks like waves frozen in space and time. He spies Yarra coming in from the other side, and he thinks, Okay, Yarra, let’s see who blasts this bogey first.

He lines up his shot—

Wham! Something hits his ship hard, and next thing he knows he’s spinning like a corkscrew. His brain forces itself to catch up to his head as he spirals out of control, and past ropes of crackling electricity he sees on his screens that the wings have been sheared off on the one side—they’re gone!

I’m going down.

I’m hit.

Mom—

He pulls up on the stick and levels out, just as the X-wing belly-flops into the dust, kissing the surface of Jakku and sending up a tidal spray of sand behind him. The ship slides along on its belly, grinding and hissing as it does—Temmin’s head snaps hard left and right, cracking into the blast glass of the cockpit viewports, each time rocking his dome dizzy.

The cockpit pops and he paws at the edges of his seat, pulling himself out. Temmin rolls over the edge of the X-wing, landing in the space where the wings should be. His shoulder hits stone. He turns over and dry-heaves.

When he finally looks up again, he sees what took him out.

Two dunes away, pinning a pair of S-foils, is a fist of metal from what looks like a Starhawk. A Starhawk? I thought the Ravager was hit…

And it all starts coming down.

Meteors made of broken starships start plowing into the ground. Each time they hit, Jakku coughs up another geyser of sand. Temmin cries out at the cacophony of sound—the booming drum of the planet being struck, the susurrus of sand rising and falling back to itself, the distant explosions. His ears ring and he clamps his hands over them.

Temmin risks looking up. To see if he can spot the rest of Phantom Squadron. But as he does, the light is blotted out. Day turns to night in the matter of moments.

It’s the Ravager.

The Imperial colossus drifts in front of the light, eclipsing the sun. Another ship precedes it—that’s the Starhawk. Fire comes off the New Republic ship, tornadoes of flame crackling from holes in its side.

He thinks: It’s coming down right on top of me. There’s nowhere to run. Nowhere I can go to get safe. But the panic subsides when he realizes his perspective is off. Yes, the ship is massive, but no, it’s not coming down here. It’ll hit dozens of klicks away. But what will it hit? Who will it destroy? Their own people are that way. So is the enemy. That’s the Imperial line—the fighting is going on right there. Temmin pulls up his wrist comm and starts babbling into it, telling everyone to go, to move, to get out of the way, but the device suddenly fritzes out and spits sparks before going dead.

A sound comes out of him: a small, fearful moan. He’s never seen anything like it before. He wonders if this is how his mother felt flying inside the Death Star—and then escaping, watching it detonate behind her.

The Ravager struggles to stay aloft—he can see, even in the half dark of eclipsed day, how underneath its positioning thrusters fire intermittently, desperately working to keep it from pointing straight at the ground, but failing to stop its fall.

It moves inescapably toward the ground. Leaning hard to the side…

The Starhawk hits first. Whoom. Temmin runs up to the nearest dune and watches as the New Republic capital ship crashes into the sand, crumpling up as if some giant just stepped on it—he sees an AT-AT walker moving away from the impact site as fast as it can, which from here looks dreadfully, painfully slow. And it won’t matter anyway.

With the Starhawk gone, the tractor beam shears and the Ravager’s thrusters must cause it to overcompensate—it begins to invert, turning belly up as it drops.

The Ravager hits next. It hits broadly, not spearing the ground but crashing flat against it, upside down—the AT-AT never has a chance. Nor do the starfighters trapped in the shadow of the dreadnought before it crashes. Nobody does. It’s like watching the ceiling fall down on a child’s playroom of toys. The Ravager plows into the sand, and the impact rocks the whole world—the vibration moves outward in a monstrous ripple, sending sand up along the shock wave, and when it hits where Temmin is standing, it knocks him off his feet. Again his ears ring. Everything vibrates: his teeth, his toes, all his bones. He struggles to stand anew—

And already he can’t see the Ravager anymore.