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:
“Understood, Senior Captain,” Apros’s voice came tightly over the Vigilant’s speaker. “Am I still on the primary vector?”
“Yes,” Thrawn said. “Turn onto it now, but hold position until your attackers have delivered their first volley. Then turn off the field and run at full acceleration.”
Ar’alani felt her stomach tighten. The gravity-well generator ate up a lot of the power that could otherwise be utilized by the drive and the enhanced electrostatic barrier Uingali had added to the gunboat while the Springhawk’s techs were busy getting the generator installed. On an immediate tactical level, it made sense for Apros to do his running with the generator off.
But on a slightly longer strategic level …
“I’ll tell you when to turn it back on,” Thrawn continued. “At that time you’ll also dump the rest of your load of smoke.”
“Understood, sir,” Apros said. “Standing ready.”
Ar’alani keyed the comm back from general to Thrawn’s private frequency. “You sure you want the Grysks to have a clear shot?” she asked.
“We need them to,” Thrawn said. “Their first shot will be from a distance, and we need them to think that the gunboat has extra protection—”
“Which it does.”
“Yes, though not the kind they’ll assume,” Thrawn said. “I want them thinking they need to get closer, possibly to point-blank range, before they fire again.”
“You realize how risky that is, don’t you?” Ar’alani warned. “We could lose it all.”
“Not all,” Thrawn assured her. “But I agree it would make the rest of the battle far more costly.”
Ar’alani nodded, acutely aware that the rest of the Vigilant’s bridge was listening in on this conversation. She was the senior officer on the scene, which meant that she should be the one making these victory-or-defeat decisions. Handing them off to Thrawn or anyone else still made the end result her responsibility. “I could go to his assistance,” she offered.
“You can’t get there any faster than the Grayshrike,” Thrawn pointed out. “Besides, right now the Vigilant is the only thing keeping the FateSpinner pinned down and out of the battle. I need you right where you are.”
“Understood.” Ar’alani keyed back to the general frequency. Unfortunately, he was right on both counts. “Everyone stay sharp,” she called. “Apros … good luck.”
Ziinda had hoped she would be able to cut off one of the Grysk BattleChiefs, which would at least have left Apros with only one enemy warship on his immediate tail. But the breacher ambush had put the Grayshrike too far away and had taken her momentum too far down. Even with the best speed Wikivv could coax out of the drive, it was clear both BattleChiefs would get to Apros first.
Ziinda was still racing across the battleground when the enemy opened fire.
The laser blasts were simultaneous, twin stabs of energy blazing across the sky into the spiraling black smoke that still twisted slowly out of Apros’s gunboat. Ziinda braced herself, leaning forward in her seat …
And then, like a flashfly escaping its cocoon, the gunboat blasted out of the encircling smoke and took off, headed away from the planet.
Ziinda felt a small surge of relief. So the metal-infused slurry that the Paccian techs had created really had diffused the Grysk lasers the way Uingali had promised it would.
And now, with the smoke and presumably surprised Grysks behind him, Apros opened up the gunboat’s thrusters at full power.
“Whoa,” Vimsk commented from the sensor station as the gunboat leapt forward like a scalded stingfly. “Who lit a fire under him?”
“Mid Captain Apros said the Paccosh did some upgrades on the thrusters,” Wikivv said. “I didn’t realize how upgraded they were.”
“Easy, Apros,” Thrawn’s voice came over the Grayshrike’s speaker. “Don’t get so far ahead that they give up the chase.”
But also don’t let them get close enough to kill you, Ziinda wanted to add. But Thrawn and Ar’alani were in command here, and Ziinda knew better than to throw conflicting orders into the mix.
Once again, her only hope was that Thrawn knew what he was doing.
A laser flashed across the sky, glancing off the Grayshrike’s bow. “Evasive,” Ziinda ordered.
Wikivv pitched the Grayshrike upward out of the laser’s focus as Ghaloksu fired back at the BattleChief that had taken that shot at them.
But with that attack, and that single twitch off its path, there was no longer any chance the Grayshrike could get to Apros’s pursuers before they settled into chase positions behind him. It was all up to Apros and Thrawn now.
And to the surprise Thrawn had only half promised he could deliver.
Once again, a drama was about to play out at the far side of the battleground. Once again, Thrawn was rolling the dice and making an outrageous bet.
Only this time, Qilori knew, it would be the Chiss side that was going to lose.
At least it would be quick. Even as the gunboat raced for its life, the two Grysk BattleChiefs were steadily closing the gap between them. The gunboat was well outside Sunrise’s gravity well now, which suggested that the only reason it hadn’t jumped to the safety of hyperspace was that it couldn’t.
But of course it couldn’t. Not with a gravity-well generator blasting away right on top of its hyperdrive.
Qilori’s winglets twitched. Odd. Earlier, it had looked like the commander could turn the generator on and off. Why wasn’t he doing so now? Had Qilori simply been mistaken about that?
No, he’d read that scene correctly. All he could think of was that having a generator operating that close to the hyperdrive had somehow caused some damage. The stories about such tech didn’t say anything about any side effects, but such stories were seldom fully reliable.
Either way, the gunboat’s commander had apparently been left with the lone option of running as fast as his ship could manage and hoping his pursuers would lose interest or be called back to the main battle. He couldn’t even turn away to try to find refuge near one of the bigger Chiss ships—his pursuers were far too close for that. All he could do was run.
And in the end, he would still die.
That end would come soon enough, Qilori knew. The Whetstone’s tactical display marked a sudden faltering of the gunboat’s drive, a warning twitch that the thrusters were about to fail. A distant puff of black appeared, the commander perhaps making a last futile bid to throw off his pursuers by disappearing into a smoke screen. There was a flash of laserfire as one of the BattleChiefs took a shot into the cloud—
Abruptly, a dozen new ships appeared, spread out in loose battle array in the space directly in front of the gunboat. Qilori felt his winglets flatten against his cheeks in shock.
And as the fleeing gunboat sped harmlessly through the center of their formation, all twelve ships opened fire on the Grysks.
From the comm, Jixtus snarled something in the Grysk language, the words sounding both furious and disbelieving. “Qilori!” he bit out. “Who are those? What are those?”
“I don’t know,” Qilori said. “All I know is—”
He broke off as, in the distance, the two BattleChiefs at the center of the firestorm disintegrated in a pair of violent explosions.
“All I know,” Qilori said weakly, “is the Chiss seem to have found some new allies.”