Light of the Jedi(97)
Much good it would do them now. It was two Vectors against an entire Nihil Tempest.
The first ship pulled away from the Cloudship’s nose, trying either to flee or to get into some sort of attack position.
Lourna Dee snorted.
Good luck with that, she thought.
Kassav looked at the battle display, frowning. Almost simultaneously with his order to his Tempest to move into an offensive position, to go on the attack, the Republic Cruisers had disgorged an unending stream of those arrowhead-shaped fighters they used—Skywings—along with a good number of the bigger workhorse ships, the Longbeams.
His people were fighting back, and mostly giving as good as they got in the small skirmishes, but the big guns on the Republic heavy cruiser and its five smaller companions were lashing out, almost every shot finding a Cloudship. The shields on the New Elite and some of the bigger Nihil ships could withstand those shots—for a while, at least—but the Cloudships? No way. They flashed into a cloud of flame and vaporized durasteel every time a shot found its target.
The numbers were still on their side, but it couldn’t last—and the ships from Eriadu were getting closer with every second, creeping up on them, implacable. Either his Nihil punched a hole through the Republic fleet and made it to the hyperlane access point, or they might all die right there.
There was another ship out there, too—the Jedi cruiser. So far, it hadn’t done anything, but there was no way it didn’t have some of those Vectors aboard. That was the last thing he needed.
“Anything from the Eye?” he called out.
“Nothing yet, boss,” Wet Bub answered.
Kassav hadn’t expected anything. He was pretty damn certain no miraculous escape route was going to be uploaded to their Path engine. If he wanted to get back to Marchion Ro and bury his blade in the smug bastard’s creepy eye, he’d have to do it himself.
He looked at the tactical display, trying to figure out what orders to give. The Republic was chewing his people apart, their disciplined, coordinated attacks incredibly effective against his Tempest, where each pilot was their own master and fought however the hell they wanted. Most of his Nihil were engaging in dogfights, each trying to shoot down a Republic ship, make a big name for themselves, a good story to tell back at the Great Hall. But against trained military, they just couldn’t—
That’s it, he thought.
He keyed open a fleet-wide comm channel.
“My Nihil—this is the Tempest Runner. You’re teaching these Republic fools one hell of a lesson. I’m impressed. But I want them to leave this battle knowing better than to go up against us again. Stop fighting them on their terms. They won’t learn a thing.
“Fight like the Nihil,” he said. “Fight free. Fight dirty.”
He grinned.
“Show them who we are. That’s an order.”
It took a moment or two for that instruction to sink in, but then one of the larger ships, a repurposed freighter only a little smaller than the New Elite, opened its cargo bay doors. Its engines kicked on and something spilled out, propelled by the momentum, a gelatinous gray goo. Kassav remembered that this particular ship was a hijack. Evidently the new Nihil owners had never emptied the cargo containers, and evidently the ship was originally some kind of waste carrier.
The sludge oozed out in a noxious flood, coating the Republic fighters pursuing the freighter. Two Skywings spun out and collided, causing an explosion…which ignited the whole load. Flame rippled out in a surging wave, catching every Republic ship that had been coated with the gunk when the Nihil freighter let fly. They all blew up, every one, in a chain reaction of explosions that was one of the most beautiful things Kassav had ever seen.
Fight dirty, indeed.
The rest of the Nihil saw it, too, and they got the message. Suddenly it wasn’t about dogfights or head-on battles with your opponents. Kassav watched one of his ships land on one of the bigger Republic craft, then do a high-intensity engine burn right into the bridge viewport. He saw another crew use the harpoon trick that had worked so well in Ab Dalis, ripping apart one of the five cruisers.
It wasn’t all good news, though—one of his bigger vessels, a light corvette, was under heavy attack from a squadron of Longbeams. Its engines flared out, and the vessel began to drift.
That’s that, Kassav thought. Blast it. Could’ve used that ship down the road.
A number of escape pods jettisoned from the ailing Nihil corvette, and the Longbeams immediately broke off their attack and began collecting them with some sort of magnetic clamp apparatus. They towed them back to the nearest big Republic Cruiser, entering its docking bay with the pods trailing behind.
Kassav worried for a moment about what those prisoners might be able to tell the Republic about the Nihil and its operations, then realized it probably didn’t matter. Things couldn’t get much worse.
And then the Republic Cruiser blew up, in a massive explosion that also took out a number of smaller craft nearby. At the same time, the engines on the Nihil corvette, the one Kassav had written off, flared back into life, and the ship slewed around, its weapons firing at a nearby set of Skywings.
Kassav understood what had happened. The escape pods didn’t have his people aboard—they’d been packed with explosives, and when the Republic idiots got all noble and tried to rescue them because…