Aftermath: Empire's End (Star Wars: Aftermath #3)(87)

Norra wants to wait and help. She wants to use Bones and take out the hunters. But Jas is right. She can’t risk it.

Brentin. Sloane. The Imperial base. That’s the goal. The stakes are huge and she can’t risk them on this.

Gritting her teeth, Norra tells Bones to hurry, and together they run for the shuttle.





At a distance, the tactics of combat are about the battlespace, or the arena one is given in which to fight. The battlespace above Jakku is nearly limitless—its moons orbit far enough away not to enter the fray, there exists no debris fields as yet, and the only object forming a boundary to the assault is the planet itself.

That gives the New Republic the advantage of coming at the arena from all angles except below.

But the advantage of the Empire is that the fleet is neatly compressed—it has created a nearly perfect defensive perimeter formed of its own Destroyers, with the Ravager at the heart of it. That dreadnought has the chance to fire its considerable armament from relative safety, but its angle of attack is limited by the ships that form a sphere of perimeter. It cannot fire wantonly and without regard for its own ships.

That is war. It is the placement of ships. It is the advantages and disadvantages of those placements. It’s about how you move, how you fire, what weapons you bring. Every piece fits into the larger whole: ammunition in a blaster, blaster in a pilot’s hand, pilot inside a starfighter or frigate. Everything is a resource. How do you expend them? In what direction? At a distance, war is a game, however deadly—usher this ship there, that ship here, converge, fire, dominate, defend.

But when you’re in it, there exists no distance at all.

When you’re in it, the decisions you make feel less tactical and more elemental—for you are part of two forces crashing together like waves, like two mountains toppling into each other, like two planets colliding and breaking apart. There exists no distance, no separation. Not for Commodore Kyrsta Agate, at least, who cannot separate herself out from the orchestrated chaos beyond the viewport of her Starhawk—no, she and her crew and her ship are part of the fabric of the battlespace. She is not a divine hand engineering the movement of pieces on a game board.

Rather, she is one of the pieces.

The bridge is swarming with tension. Comm officers keep her in touch with Ackbar and the other Starhawks. Weapons officers, led by Ensign Sirai, a Pantoran, coordinate all systems to ensure the most effective targeting. A trio of white-helmeted navigators sit nearby, guiding the ship’s movement through the battlespace—cutting through the chaos like an ax.

And Agate stands in the center of it all. She gets commands from Ackbar. She relays her commands to the bridge via the senior officer, Lieutenant Commander Spohn. All the while, she feels like she is the star around which everything else orbits. She’s not, of course, but she suspects every officer commanding a capital ship feels this way—out there, in the broad viewports that rise above her like the arches of a cathedral, TIE fighters slash past, chased by or chasing New Republic ships. Corvettes lead the charge, pushing on toward the Destroyers, launching their full armament ahead of them—torpedoes that leave indigo streaks in the black. The other two Starhawks slide in on each side of the Concord—to starboard side is the Unity, to port is the Amity.

Agate feels it all. As if her skin, her veins, her nerves, are all connected to the battle by puppet strings. Her flesh prickles. The hairs on her neck stand tall. It’s the strangest feeling, and it never fails to find her: the suspicion that if she blinks or twitches a finger in the wrong way or dares to cough or sneeze, somehow that movement will ripple out across the battle—her ship will crash, her friends will fall, the enemy will conquer them all. Absurd, but that is how Agate feels about war. No distance to be found at all. It is intimate. It is anxious. She is part of it and it is part of her, the same way a heart is not separate from the body in which it beats.

One of the corvettes goes up in a bright ball of coruscating energy.

An X-wing spirals, sparking, through space.

One of their Nebulon frigates breaks in half—its front end still firing the full detachment of weapons, peppering the side of a Star Destroyer.

Agate feels it all. Every death feels like her own.

But that is the trick, isn’t it? She can’t let it overwhelm her. That will come when it’s all over (should she survive): At night, it’ll feel again like she’s dropped over the edge of an abyss. Like she’ll want to die. She’ll bite a belt or the side of her bed to stop all the thoughts and the endless loop of violence replaying in her head over and over.

All she allows now is that slight shaking that always comes, the one she cannot deny, the one that has become part of who she is. Everything else, all the other tremors, will wait until nighttime. Again, if she survives.

For now, she and the other two Starhawks have one job:

Bring down that dreadnought. Destroy the Ravager, end the fight.

Let’s get to it, then.

—

Temmin is lost.

He told himself he’d be fine. He thought, I’ve piloted ships before. And weeks before he was right here, in the same space, above Jakku—he survived that, and he told himself he could survive this.

But now he’s not so sure.

Wedge said the plan was simple: They weren’t meant to be here at the battle, so their role was to provide support. Stay out of the way of the big ships, and pick off the TIEs swarming around.