Thrawn Ascendancy Book 3: Lesser Evil
- Автор: Зан Тимоти
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: Random House
- ISBN: 9781473596580
- Жанр: Боевая фантастика
Электронная книга - «Thrawn Ascendancy Book 3: Lesser Evil». Краткое содержание книги:
And charging in right behind the breachers was the Stingfly, lasers blazing, clearly intent on making its first kill of the day a memorable one.
Thrawn had anticipated that delivering a severe blow to Jixtus’s flagship would force him to retreat from the battle while he made running repairs of the damage. But Ar’alani hadn’t expected that retreat to take quite so extreme a form. Even as the Stingfly blazed its way in from the rear and the Vigilant and Aelos continued their barrage from the front, the FateSpinner swiveled ninety degrees, turning its flanks to both attackers and launching a full salvo of missiles at each. Then, as the three Chiss warships shifted from attack to missile defense, the Grysk gave a blast from its main thrusters that sent it diving straight toward the planet below.
“Get those missiles clear!” Ar’alani snapped, watching the FateSpinner plummet into Sunrise’s upper atmosphere. If Jixtus didn’t pull out soon, he would be out of the battle permanently.
But it was quickly clear that Jixtus hadn’t panicked, and moreover that he knew precisely his flagship’s limits and capabilities. The Vigilant’s sensors were picking up the first atmospheric tendrils from the FateSpinner’s edges when the warship swiveled up again, pulling out of its dive and curving into a low orbit parallel to the planet’s surface. One final pitch, and the FateSpinner was racing along its new path in a sideways position, its thrusters pointed at the ground, its bow and shoulder weapons pointed straight up. “Thrawn?” Ar’alani called.
“Nicely done,” Thrawn said with the cool admiration Ar’alani had heard from him when remarking on cleverness and skill from an enemy he nonetheless still fully intended to destroy. “Pursuing him would mean having to deal with the uncertainty of atmospheric effects, plus his current posture makes it nearly impossible to come up on his damaged stern. A relatively secure position which also permits him to monitor and direct his forces.”
“Unless we jam his comms,” Ar’alani pointed out. “Might be something to consider.”
“It might,” Thrawn agreed. “Once we’ve eliminated enough of the enemy that we can spare a ship for that duty, perhaps we can do that. Until then, I think we need all the firepower we can bring to bear.”
“Good point,” Ar’alani said. “Orisson? How are you doing?”
“Qilori!” Jixtus’s voice bellowed from the Whetstone’s bridge speaker.
Qilori twitched, his winglets going rigid. The FateSpinner had disappeared out of his line of sight, diving toward the planet, and he’d wondered if the massive Grysk warship had been destroyed.
Clearly, it hadn’t.
“Qilori, answer me!”
The vassal at the comm station was still bowed over his panel, clearly oblivious to the rest of the universe. Qilori hurried to the vacant command chair instead and fumbled for the comm control. “I’m here, sir,” he said. “Are you all right?”
“No, I’m not all right,” Jixtus snarled. “The Chiss have some impossible wizardry going on, some way of disabling our hyperdrives while not affecting their own. Tell me how they’re doing it.”
“I—how should I know?” Qilori asked, his winglets fluttering.
“Tell me how they’re doing it,” Jixtus repeated, “or you will die. I still have more than enough firepower in hand to destroy the Chiss and their allies. Tell me Thrawn’s secret, or you will die alongside them.”
Qilori looked at the tactical, then out the viewport, then at the tactical again. Was Jixtus right about still having the upper hand?
He was, Qilori realized with a sinking heart. Or at least he could be. Several of the Grysk ships had taken damage, and one of them—the Emery—had been completely destroyed. But at least eight of the Chiss ships were no longer under power, drifting through space, clearly out of the fight. The only reason they and their crews were still alive was that the Grysks were smart enough to focus on disabling the more immediate threats instead of wasting time delivering complete destruction to the wounded.
And when the battle ended, and Jixtus set about destroying his weakened enemies, he might well put the Whetstone in that category. “I don’t know for sure,” he told Jixtus, cursing his trembling voice. “But I’ve heard tales of a device called a gravity-well generator that supposedly creates a field that simulates a planetary mass. Not like real mass, of course, but something that fools a hyperdrive into thinking it is.”
He stopped, bracing himself. If Jixtus dismissed the idea as ridiculous, Qilori had nothing else to offer.
But there was no outburst of disbelief, no scornful insult, no repeated or intensified threat. Jixtus was silent.
Qilori peered out at the battle, waiting, his eyes darting to the side as one of the BattleChiefs exploded. Two Grysk ships gone, but the FateSpinner and two of the StoneCrushers were still functional, along with most of the BattleChiefs.
“And you think the Chiss might have created such a device?” Jixtus asked at last.
“I don’t know if they could create one,” Qilori said, pulling his thoughts away from ship counts and back to the topic at hand. “But they could have found or stolen one. I’m just saying that it fits what I’ve seen so far.”
“That it does,” Jixtus agreed. “Where is it?”
Qilori’s winglets twitched. “I have no idea.”
“Where is it?”
Qilori looked at the tactical, feeling panic rising in him again. How could he possibly know that? He didn’t know how big it was, or what it looked like—
“Never mind,” Jixtus said. “I see it.”
Qilori frowned. “Where?”
“The gunboat that’s not moving,” Jixtus said. “The one still making that spiral plume of smoke.”
“Yes, I see it,” Qilori said. Odd he hadn’t noticed how that particular gunboat hadn’t moved even when the rest of the Chiss force went charging to the attack. “What are you going to do?”
“What do you think?” Jixtus bit out. “I’m going to destroy it.”
“I’m a bit busy at the moment, Vigilant,” Roscu said tartly, wincing as another shot from the SkySweep burned through the Orisson’s electrostatic barrier and took out one of its starboard lasers. She and the other Chiss light cruisers were slowly whittling the enemy down, but they were taking a lot of battering in return. “What do you need?”
“The Springhawk’s ready to play bait,” Ar’alani said. “I need you and the Grayshrike to play hunter.”
“Understood,” Roscu said. So Thrawn was ready to initiate that part of his plan? Good. She and Ziinda had practiced this one extensively in the past two days, and she was looking forward to seeing how it worked in actual combat. “I’ll be there—wait a second,” she said. One of the Chiss light cruisers had gotten a breacher through to the SkySweep’s aft ventral flank, and the Grysk commander had responded by twisting out of line to keep the Chiss from following up with a laser barrage.
Unfortunately for him, the maneuver had merely sent the vulnerable spot rolling across the Orisson’s own line of sight. “There!” she snapped, pointing. “Hit it—now!”