The E-wing dove to the right, and Tomax obediently went left, looping for good measure.
The pursuer flashed past where the Dominion bomber had just been, and immediately an Avenger from the squadron of the same name followed behind it.
White-and-green laser bolts stitched across the enemy starfighter in a dotted line.
On the wing surfaces, deep scorched furrows remained, alternating with punctures in places.
Another volley — and the E-wing's main engines tore off the hull, flew forward, and exploded into a fireball that completely consumed the Alliance new-build.
"Space is clear, Scimitar-01," Bren heard the dry voice of the clone Major Kreb.
"Acknowledged, Avenger-Leader," responded the commander of the lead ship of the Scimitar squadron. "Engaging the third target."
"We're isolating the enemy."
Now everything depends on the Avengers. If they can hold back the Alliance E-wings trying to break through to the Scimitars, then the Scimitars will work cleanly and without the slightest problem.
Tomax stabilized his ship.
He used a rush to shorten the distance between himself and the targeted ship.
Having passed through the escort carrier's defensive fire, Tomax banked, sliding along the starboard side of the Quasar Fire.
Moving along the ship's belly, the captain targeted a pair of cannons on the wedge-shaped section of the ship.
The fire from his forward mounts caught the enemy completely by surprise.
The defensive weapon blisters, struck by white-green energy bolts, held on for a few seconds, after which the armor could not withstand the stress and shattered into a myriad of fragments.
Having secured his work area, Tomax pulled the Scimitar-01 out from under the defenseless belly of the Quasar Fire, positioning his nose toward its hospitality open hangars, resembling elongated honeycombs.
Using his maneuvering thrusters, he matched speed with the enemy ship's slow forward drift.
"No, look at that," Alex said. "We have a battle here, and they haven't even closed the bay doors. They're covering with atmospheric shields and luuu-ring proton torpedoes onto their own heads."
Tomax, at that moment, thought about something else.
The onboard computer reported that the kinetic projectiles were ready to burst from the bomb bay, dive into the welcoming interior of the escort carrier, explode, and detonate the fuel, ammunition...
On the other hand, this ship, though located in the thick of the enemy fleet, is quite fragile, but it's an escort carrier. And escort carriers have settled in quite well in certain branches of the Dominion Armed Forces.
This ship was too tempting a target to pass up — since the landing bay doors weren't yet sealed by armored shutters, why not respond appropriately?
Tomax hesitated only a few seconds. And not at all because he was concerned about the battle between friendly and enemy fighters around the escort carrier. Simply, warning signals about overload in the maneuvering thrusters appeared on the instrument panel.
They were designed to adjust the movement of small craft, not to work to exhaustion and provide "reverse" motion for Scimitar-01 in front of a moving enemy starship. At least, not for this long.
The proton torpedoes remained inside the bomb bays. But the laser cannons performed admirably, damaging the atmospheric shield projectors.
The essence of an escort carrier on the battlefield is to deliver to the front and provide rotation for a separate air wing. Doing so without the ability to retain atmosphere in the landing bays is impossible.
Pumping out the atmosphere before landing and pumping it back in after is of course possible. But that would waste so much time that it's simpler to forget about it entirely once the locking panels come down, sealing the landing bays — which are ejecting their contents — from the inhospitable vacuum of the Makem Te system.
Tomax took his ship below the belly of the Quasar Fire, came out at its stern, performed a small vertical climb, then, not sparing the main engines, launched proton torpedoes at them, depriving the starship of the ability to move in realspace.
From now on, all that awaits this ship is a useless drift on inertia, with no ability to support its air group.
Without engines, without any serious weaponry, with blocked landing bays, it's no longer a ship but ballast, and one that is, moreover, drifting toward the orbital defense stations.
In such cases, Imperial directives ordered the destruction of enemy ships, since without control they could pose a threat both to the defense systems and to the entire planet.
Escape pods sprayed in all directions from the ship's hull, flying away from the now useless starship.
This was done in the hope that other starships would take in the escaping crew of the escort carrier.
And it would be fine if it were the only victim of such a raid by fast bombers... The Scimitar squadron disabled all of them.
And consequently, at least one of the enemy starships will react to such a large number of evacuees.
Hundreds of escape pods filled the space around the battling starships.
Someone's nerves will surely falter, and the starship commander will give the order to rescue.
The only thing he can do in such a case is to open his hangars, removing the armored shutters.
And not every Galactic Alliance ship had enough courage (or stupidity — depending on how you look at it) to lower even part of their shields and take in the evacuees.
On Tomax's scanners, just such a compassionate ally of the defeated was detected.
A Home One, slightly deviating from its course but continuing to fire on the Implacable, aimed toward the largest concentration of escape pods, which it was picking up using tractor beams and towing toward its hangar decks.
"Rush!" Tomax warned, aiming his ship at his new attack target.
A couple of heartbeats later, the Scimitar-01 was right next to the hospitably wide-open hangar bay door of the merciful Home One.
Ahead, two E-wings had detected its approach and were trying to drive the rogue away from such a tempting target.
The deflectors absorbed several shots, but the enemy's defenses couldn't do anything against the proton torpedoes Bren had launched, which tore the enemy machines to pieces.
Putting the ship into a barrel roll over the right side, the captain pulled the craft away and attacked the nearly sealed landing bay door with four proton torpedoes.
Unlike escort carriers, main-line ships were built to last, so pumping dangerous munitions into them wasn't exactly out of the ordinary.
One of the torpedoes hit the armored hangar door without managing to slip inside, unlike its three companions.
But that hardly mattered anymore.
The internal explosion — actually a series of blasts — tore the mechanical barrier out like a shockwave blowing out transparisteel in high-rise buildings during an explosion.
Smoke, debris, human bodies, and a jet of flame poured from the ship's innards, the fire choking out almost immediately from lack of oxygen in the vacuum.
Wounded in the side, the ship tried to drive off the rogue, but the proton torpedoes released from their rails, guided by their seeker heads, tore apart its battery decks.
Not even a minute had passed since the attack began, and the entire port side of the Home One Tomax had chosen as his target was already chewed-up scrap metal, riddled with holes, scorch marks, cracks, and a stream of debris trailing from the vessel's guts.
Captain Bren noted that the other ships in his squadron had also worked on the same vessel, mauling it from bow to stern, diving under the deflector shields for maximum damage.
Burning like a wroshyr tree hit with a flamethrower, the enemy ship slowly drifted away from the movement of the entire Alliance detachment.
At the same time, the enemy decisively attacked the bold fast-bomber pilots, whose squadrons were brazenly causing problems for the reforming enemy fleet.
One of the E-wings moved along the frigate's side, and Tomax caught the enemy fighter in his targeting crosshairs.
A twin-linked burst melted the left wing in an instant, and a black trail of fragments stretched out behind the damaged fighter.
The pilot jerked the ship right, trying to escape, but was unlucky — he flew into a shot from one of the turbolasers on a neighboring Galactic Alliance ship and simply vaporized.
Six E-wings appeared from behind the ridge of the damaged Home One, their every aspect showing a desire to punish the careless abusers of the capital ship.
"Scimitars, pull back," Tomax commanded.
They had done plenty for one raid, and there was no point in risking it in this kind of fight.
Especially since TIE Interceptors and assault gunships were already moving onto the battlefield. With their lasers and cumulative missiles, they would undoubtedly accomplish far more than bombers that had lost their main gun.
Tomax glanced at the Alliance pilots rushing toward his bomber squadron.
The half-squadron opened fire from long range, firmly confident in their impunity.
However, the pilots of the Avenger squadron, who had appeared from a micro-jump, had a completely opposite opinion on the matter, which they expressed with a missile strike that incinerated the enemy pilots.
* * *
Rear Admiral Mor didn't take his eyes off the tactical holoprojector, assessing the enemy's disposition.
While the initial Dominion formation was a "half-bowl," the enemy had arranged their forces in a massive cone, with the distance between ships reaching several dozen standard kilometers.
This was done because the enemy feared ships colliding when exiting a hyperspace jump.
And now that single unit had split into three groups.
One was pressing the flank, hammering the Implacable and its escort with streams of plasma, lasers, ion cannons, and proton torpedoes.
The second group — Strike-class medium cruisers converted into minesweepers — had ascended to a higher echelon compared to the first unit.
The third group was currently preparing for a micro-jump.
A couple more minutes and the trap would snap shut.
"Sir," a watch officer appeared beside him, "a report has come in from the grav-acoustic team at the tracking post ten light-years from here. A large enemy fleet is approaching us."
Alexander quickly calculated that the enemy preferred to install class-one hyperdrives on their ships.
Consequently, their arrival speed in the system was increasing, and the window of control was shrinking.
Rear Admiral Mor looked at the gravity trawls formed by one of the interdiction Star Destroyers.
The other two still weren't participating, holding the right flank, which was on the verge of collapse, only with the fire of their guns and missile launchers.
But the enemy had already formed their own short conical trawls, creating artificial gravity zones to the left of the Implacable to pull Alliance ships out of hyperspace.
The man glanced again at the datapad with the decoded dispatch from the Guardian, scanning it.
Thrawn's order had arrived literally five minutes before the enemy clearly showed their intentions.
And that had saved Alexander from an inevitable trap and the loss of ships and personnel.
But the proposed action plan...
It was undoubtedly good.
The only problem was, it would have been better if it had arrived five minutes earlier, before Alexander had sent the fast bombers on their mission to strip the enemy of their escort carriers.
"I would very much like to know how he does it," the rear admiral grumbled with a sigh, raising his eyes to the watch officer. "Are there any Scimitars near the enemy minesweeper cruisers?"
"No, sir. They've pulled back for rearming and emergency repairs," the subordinate's reply did nothing to boost morale. "Only the Scimitar squadron has completed rotation and is preparing to continue hunting the Home One-class star cruisers."
One squadron against a dozen and a half...
Better than nothing.
Besides, it was the Scimitars.
"Put me in touch with Captain Bren," Alexander wiped the sweat from his forehead, feeling the heat in his uniform jacket. "I'll inform him of the mission change personally."
* * *
"The order is clear, Rear Admiral," Tomax replied mechanically. "Beginning execution."
"Proceed, Captain. The success of this operation depends on you," Rear Admiral Mor added dryly to his command.
Allowing the onboard computer to calculate the optimal flight trajectory, Tomax quickly relayed the updated order to his subordinates along with the tactic for approaching the target.
"Hmm... Minesweeper cruisers?" Alex repeated. "Interesting, my friend... And what's supposed to happen if the enemy ships don't come out of hyperspace where they were supposed to?"
"That's what command planned," the onboard computer beeped a signal indicating readiness for the jump.
"Uh-huh... I wonder if they told the Implacable and its escort what will happen after we..."
Without warning, Bren switched the SLAE to launch position, and the Scimitar-01 vanished through space and time.
"Don't do that again!" Alex's roar was heard. "I nearly bit my tongue off!"
"Keep your mouth shut more often," Tomax advised, pushing the control stick away from him.
The Scimitar-01 obediently dove "down" toward the grayish-white hull of the nearest Strike-class medium cruiser.
Covering fighters rushed to meet them — and there were plenty of them here; the Alliance commander was diligently protecting his most valuable ships from attack by fast bombers.
But Tomax and his pilots weren't charging straight for the interdiction cruiser.
For this, Bren chose an echelon "above" the enemy ships, where enemy pilots and artillery couldn't reach them in the first moments after the jump.
Then, he dove steeply down, heading straight for the enemy starfighter formation.
The E-wings rushed to intercept, hosing the Scimitar-01 and the ships following it with red laser fire.
Tomax banked the fast bomber onto its right side, dodging a cumulative missile fired at him.
The self-guided projectile flew past, but hesitated for a second, correcting its course.
Alex's accurate burst prevented the kinetic warhead from continuing its pursuit.
The interception attempt against the fast-bomber squadron ended with the E-wings clashing with nearby pilots from the Avenger squadron.
According to scanner readings, an indistinguishable but deadly melee had broken out in the upper hemisphere of the medium minesweeper cruiser Tomax had chosen.
Meanwhile, Tomax had already reached his target.
The Scimitar-01 pulled out of its "dive" at the bow of the chosen target ship.
The white-gray hemisphere of a gravity well generator, protruding from the hull, appeared before the cockpit.
"Arming!" he warned, activating the targeting computer.
"Safeties off, torpedoes ready!" Alex responded. "We've got two on our tail!"
"Keep them busy!"
The fast bomber moved along the upper part of the enemy ship, preparing to strike.
The targeting reticle changed color, and Captain Bren squeezed the trigger with his thumb.
Four proton torpedoes tore from their rails and streaked toward the first dome.
The Scimitar-01's control stick pulled back, and the ship responded to the pilot's demand with a sharp, sustained increase in thrust from the forward maneuvering thrusters.
The front of the fast bomber began to lift up, its belly and lower deflector meeting the detonation of the first artificial gravity projector dome.
Several red slashes hit the aft deflector, dropping the energy shield indicator.
Rolling into a barrel, the captain dodged the launch of several unguided missiles — the warning system hadn't worked — which flew perfectly forward, slamming into the second dome right along with a new volley of proton torpedoes.
The Scimitar-01 had already turned away from the new detonation site, then dove sharply "down" along the first ship's side, slipping out of the pursuer's sights.
Tomax continued moving under the belly of the medium cruiser, letting Alex target the E-wing on their tail and knock out its deflectors with fire from the rear rapid-fire cannon.
At that same instant, the fast bomber made another jump, pulling up side-by-side with its second target.
"It exploded!" Alex reported.
"The E-wing or the Strike?" Tomax clarified.
"The first one rammed the second," the flight engineer explained. "And yeah, the cruiser doesn't have long left."
As it should be.
Tomax had taken on the role of the "bait," being the first to break through to the target ship, drawing out the covering fighters that the pilots from the Avenger squadron hadn't managed to tie down in combat.
A trick aimed at rookies and young pilots, but as practice showed — the more the Alliance armed forces faced the Dominion's professional clones, the fewer experienced, highly skilled personnel they had left.
But this time, it almost worked.
The rest of the ships in his squadron, following Tomax into the breach, managed not only to reach the lead Alliance minesweeper cruiser but also gifted the ship damaged by Boren's crew with a swarm of proton torpedoes. These tore the jury-rigged interdiction vessel's keel beam outward.
This clearly displeased the nearest fighters, one of which went after the lead bomber.
Pumping more power into the shields, Tomax banked the Scimitar onto its right wing.
Then he pulled the ship into a loop, held it for about three seconds, cut speed to match the inertial movement of the interdiction cruiser, and flipped over.
Another loop, this time fast, gaining speed on the exit, a half-roll — and Alex reported the pursuer was destroyed.
Just in time.
The targeting computer locked onto the first target, and four proton torpedoes flew toward the dome shifted toward the bow of the Galactic Alliance ship.
Tomax made a right turn, shaking off a Republic pilot who had emerged from the thick of the fight, and slammed another salvo of proton torpedoes into the second dome.
Apparently, inside this ship, the laws of physics had decided to behave differently.
Either the reactors were running on overdrive, or the Alliance had the bad habit of keeping excess munitions or fuel on their ship's decks.
Either way, the vessel blew apart.
This wasn't big news for the Scimitar-01's crew — when you've been fighting non-stop for the last year, you start to notice the first signs that a ship you're attacking is going to blow to pieces.
Without wasting time on a superfluous warning, Tomax picked a direction and yanked the SLAE lever.
The ship surged forward, leaving behind a pursuer that couldn't escape the fate of being stuffed with various pieces of debris from the detonating medium cruiser.
As expected, the Alliance cruiser stopped playing the part of the trapper — the scanner showed the area of artificial gravity had shrunk by half, meaning one of the gravity well generators had been shut down by its own crew.
And that meant only one thing.
Tomax managed to swerve the ship just enough to avoid the enemy's barrage.
But not completely.
A crimson discharge burned a hole in the left stabilizer, causing the Scimitar-01 to vibrate noticeably.
"Stabilizers are shot, left cannon buffer too," Alex commented.
"Well, fix it!" Bren grabbed the control yoke with both hands to keep the bucking small craft from spinning into an uncontrollable flight.
"Yeah, sure, Commander, I've already reclassified myself as an astromech, crawled outside, and I'm just about to fix our Naboo cruiser," the flight engineer's voice dripped with sarcasm. "Right after that, we'll fly off to Tatooine, where some crap is definitely waiting for us..."
"Torpedoes!"
"Activated!"
"Full salvo!"
"But this isn't a Star Destroyer, what do we need that many for?!" Alex exclaimed, fully aware that their remaining proton torpedoes were enough not just to put the enemy ship out of commission, but to turn that flimsy little vessel into a field of fine metallic dust.
"Prepare to fire!" Tomax roared.
The control stick was periodically locking up, which meant the Scimitar-01's control and stabilization systems were in pretty bad shape.
This threatened a cascading system collapse — the tricky electronics wouldn't allow piloting a ship that could turn into a tiny supernova in an instant due to a systems failure.
However, the scanner, stubborn piece of metal, reported that the nearest friendly bombers were twenty units away.
And the time allotted for the mission was running out faster than a suntan appears on the skin of a Coruscant lower-level native under the rays of Tatooine's twin suns.
Without stabilization, the targeting computer was useless — it simply couldn't lock onto the generators.
So, there was only one chance left to complete the mission.
Ground artillerymen and weapon operators call this technique nothing less than "eyeballing it and area saturation fire."
"All warheads are armed!" Alex reported. "Self-guidance is offline. And yeah, we've got two bandits on our tail!"
"Deal with them!" Tomax seized the moment, redirecting power from weapons to the aft shields.
This would give them an extra chance of survival during the approach to the target.
He dealt with the threat of the medium cruiser's laser cannons using dizzying piloting and the remaining maneuverability of his fast, but unruly, bomber.
Feeling his fingers go white with pain, Tomax did his best to level the ship's nose toward the target, then, with a light heart, pressed the trigger.
The proton torpedoes tore from their pylons in pairs and shot forward, leaving only the crimson glow of their engines behind.
Half the munitions detonated against the hull, punching many new, structurally-unplanned holes in the ship.
At least a third went wide — the disabled seeker heads couldn't lock onto the slowly course-correcting enemy vessel.
But the rest...
Some of the rockets slammed into the working gravity well generator, causing it to detonate.
The power of the warheads that struck the dome, multiplied by the unleashed energy of the generators, struck both in the direction of least resistance — into the vacuum — and inside the ship itself.
In the few seconds it took Alex, in the nearly uncontrollable shaking, to finish off one of their pursuers, the enemy medium cruiser was torn apart so thoroughly that only mangled pieces of the structural frame and armor plates blooming like a "rose" remained of its bow.
The Scimitar-01 bucked like a maddened bantha in a technogenic frenzy, and Tomax cursed through his teeth as he watched the indicators of various systems fail one by one.
He, like Alex and the Dominion's creators of the Scimitars, perfectly understood that the ship was doomed.
But Tomax had made the decision to complete the mission, even if it bordered on a cascading equipment failure and loss of control.
And now he was squeezing everything he could out of that decision to save the crew from the fate of being helpless in territory controlled by enemy ships.
The captain was fully aware that at this moment, he and Alex were practically deep in the enemy detachment's rear, and even if they sent a distress signal, the first to respond wouldn't be Dominion rescue teams.
"You know, I want to be honest with you, Bren," Alex suddenly said.
"Surprise me!" the captain hissed through his teeth, trying to get the ship as far away as possible from enemy crossfire and the fighters dreaming of finishing off the smoking bomber.
"You are the worst pilot I have ever flown with in my entire life!" Alex confessed. "And it hasn't even been six months since the last sortie, and we're crashing again! Couldn't you have practiced on the simulators while you were in the brig, or something?! No, seriously, how much longer can this go on?!"
The pilot's nervous laughter was the answer to the joking complaint.
"Aft shields are gone," Alex told him. "I'm fending them off with the quad-cannon, but there are a couple of E-wings on our tail."
"Too bad for them," Tomax spotted the long, graceful hull of the trailing ship in the detached formation of Galactic Alliance vessels. "Alex..."
"When you talk to me in that tone, it means the situation is 'bantha poodoo and it's only going to get worse'," the flight engineer complained. "And now you're going to say you know how to make a graceful exit, aren't you!"
"Is the SLAE working?"
"That piece of crap seems to be the only thing, besides life support and the cockpit's emergency systems, that is working!"
"Spool it up!"
"What do you mean!"
"Let it run!"
"Bren, have you lost your mind?! It'll blow in a couple of seconds from doing that!"
"That's all we need!"
"Commander, if we get captured by the Alliance, I'm going to tell them you kept me as your personal slave and generally hate all aliens, and that you brought flowers to Admiral Ackbar's grave from a different cemetery!" the flight engineer warned honestly.
"SLAE!"
"I'm working on it, damn it!"
Tomax couldn't keep his teeth from chattering from the vibration, and the pain in his hands had spread to his shoulders, then to his head, and throughout his whole body.
It seemed the only indestructible part of this ship was the control yoke, because it still hadn't torn out of its socket.
"Safeties off! Power buildup initiated! Core melting! Well, Bren, if we're about to die, I want you to know — I'm having Kessel flashbacks!"
"Me too!" the pilot leveled the ship and locked the controls on a single trajectory.
This almost immediately caused the aft deflector protection to sag, but Tomax no longer paid attention to it.
"Sealing the escape pod?"
"Normal!"
"Emergency thrusters?"
"Ready!"
"Alex!"
"My control panel is dead! What do you expect from me? For me to climb out and check if they've been shot off?"
"The emergency kit?!"
"Look under your seat, you piloting genius?! Your dear mommy even washed your bib!"
Jokes on the verge of death were the most desperate.
They were beyond any kind of subordination, even friendly.
"Thanks, mommy!" Tomax laughed nervously, hitting the levers. "But you should know I wasn't born from you!"
"I know, you little bastard! You're adopted!" Alex roared, firing the quad-cannon. "And anyway, me and daddy Thrawn took you from a test tube! He wanted a girl, but I insisted on taking the ugliest one of the embryos! Sorry, sonny, for hiding this from you for so many years. But when you were just a little kid, an evil Sith took you away from us..."
His ears were blocked — the failure of the inertial dampeners had some rather unpleasant consequences for both men in the Dominion fast bomber's cockpit.
The ejection systems and the SLAE launch control triggered simultaneously.
The electronic signals passed with a tiny, microscopic difference in transmission speed through the wires.
But the commander of the Scimitar-01 had been counting on precisely that difference, deciding to put a final chord in his raid.
The order to activate the SLAE, which had become a bomb, reached the crippled ship's electronic brain at the moment when the emergency launch thrusters had already carried the cockpit away from the decapitated fast bomber.
The next moment, flying farther and farther away, Tomax noticed that the independent automation of the cockpit, which also doubled as a rescue pod for the crew, had kicked in.
And fifty standard units away, the Scimitar-01, having accelerated to insane speeds, slammed into the hull of a Mon Calamari light cruiser.
The MC40a might have had strong deflector shields, but that didn't save it from its sad fate.
Like a mass driver projectile, the Scimitar-01 embedded itself in the side of the ship, like a lightsaber entering the body of a Jedi's enemy.
With the only difference being that the damaged Dominion vessel didn't come out the other side.
"Oh, well that doesn't count then," Alex said, disappointed. "We didn't even put it out of commissi...
The next instant, a blast flash on the damaged enemy ship caused the transparisteel to darken, protecting the pilots from excess radiation.
Debris was hurled in all directions, but the enemy detachment that had separated off was unharmed.
"Damn little bastards," Alex cursed bitterly (and from the sound of it, kicked the instrument panel too). "We're too late after all! Look, the Implacable and its escort are moving to the upper echelon!"
The Star Destroyer, whose defenses had finally failed under the hurricane-like bombardment, was beginning to change its base echelon quite rapidly under the cover of the nearest heavy cruisers, using its emergency thrusters.
Along with all the other Dominion ships on the right flank.
One look and a couple of memories were enough for Tomax to understand the obvious.
Rear Admiral Alexander Mor was pulling his starships out of the projection of the artificial gravity zones of the enemy's interdiction cruisers destroyed by the Scimitars.
Simultaneously, on the right flank of the Dominion starships climbing "upward," the recently separated enemy starships emerged from hyperspace. Their trailing light cruiser, which Tomax Bren had destroyed with a ramming strike from his fast bomber.
As a result, the Star Destroyers and heavy cruisers, fired upon from the sides and upper hemisphere, were presenting their undersides—unscathed in the recent exchange—to enemy attacks.
Given that, in the time that had passed, their own fire from upper hemisphere guns and broadside batteries had inflicted considerable damage on the part of the Galactic Alliance force pressing them there, putting two Home One ships out of action, the enemy now faced not weakened Dominion starships, but relatively intact and combat-ready artillery batteries located in the ships' lower hemispheres.
However, this wasn't entirely far-sighted, because now two enemy detachments were simultaneously bearing down on the ships on the Dominion's right flank.
"It looks like the Rear Admiral miscalculated," Alex hissed through his teeth. "General Kota wasn't planning to bring in reinforcements using his interdiction cruisers!"
"He used the gravity projectors on our Dominator," Tomax stated the obvious. "He brought the reinforcements in not from the Implacable's left flank, but from the right!"
"Maybe he changed his mind because we destroyed the Alliance's interdiction cruisers?" the flight mechanic suggested the most obvious theory.
"Yes, but then why did Mor even use the Dominator in the first place if he didn't want to send his own ships to that flank?" Tomax didn't understand. "And he's still not doing it even now. I really can't figure out what's going on... Wait, the Dominator changed its vector ten degrees closer to the planet!"
Which meant the artificial gravity zone created by the interdictor wasn't positioned to cover the enemy detachment that had arrived via micro-jump at all, but was much farther away from it.
Consequently, the largest enemy starships were now outside the hyperdrive suppression zone!
"The arriving Alliance detachment is starting to maneuver!" Alex noted. "Looks like they're panicking. Why would they...?"
He didn't get to finish.
As if popping out of a snuffbox, ships began to appear in the positions the Implacable and the nearest Dominion starships had just occupied.
One Star Cruiser, another, a third, a fifth, assault frigates, Corellian gunships...
Reinforcements had arrived for the Galactic Alliance.
"May I live on nothing but field rations for the rest of my life!" Alex exclaimed as the first explosion tore apart the crews of several Alliance Star Cruisers at once.
The enemy had brought the second part of its invasion and occupation fleet into the Makem Te system.
But General Kota's plan to pull these starships out onto the flank of the Implacable group had first been foiled by the destruction of the Alliance's interdiction cruisers.
Then, General Kota, intending to use the Dominion interdictor's vector for this purpose a second time, first made a micro-jump with half of his original forces.
And after the vector for deploying the artificial gravity zone shifted, this reinforcement ended up not inside the territory where the laws of hyperspace physics didn't apply, but at its edge.
Exactly where the newly arrived reinforcement ships of the Galactic Alliance exited their jump.
The fleets merged into a single chaos.
Ramming in space is not the same as a side-to-side collision of two speeders.
Starships, enormous multi-ton giants, collided with each other, crushing each other's hulls and detonating.
Two detachments, trapped by the gravity mine situation, rammed each other with minimal chances of surviving such collisions without tens of thousands of deaths.
Before Tomax's eyes, the first Star Cruiser, barely out of hyperspace and unable to slow down, punched its streamlined bow through the long side of the second Home One, causing both ships to simply explode in a chain of secondary detonations.
The vaunted Mon Calamari precaution of distributed, multiple power generation sources throughout the hull, in this situation, only served as a catalyst for the vaporization of one ship and the detonation of the other.
The inertia imparted to the parts of the exploding and exploding ships turned entire sections of the destroyed starships into deadly grapeshot and shrapnel, which crippled other ships arriving from hyperspace one after another and falling into the deadly trap.
Time and again, those starships that managed to avoid destruction in the first moments were subjected to hurricane fire from Rear Admiral Mor's ship group.
The enemy's second fleet found itself squeezed on the right by General Kota's ships, which were exchanging fire with the Implacable detachment, and from the front by a second unit of the same forces.
From "above" and from the right flank, Rear Admiral Alexander Mor's starships pressed them.
Judging by the explosions among the trailing ships of the newly arrived formation, the Scimitars were also contributing to the rapid destruction of the radiation-battered Galactic Alliance starships, blowing up enemy ships with half-salvos of proton torpedoes.
"This is going to haunt my nightmares," Alex whispered. "Bren... Bren, are you seeing this?"
"Alex, twenty Star Cruisers mutually annihilated in a few seconds!" said the commander of the Scimitar-01's crew, with a hint of awe and superstitious horror. "I'm not even talking about the other Galactic Alliance ships—they're just being mixed with vacuum. This... This isn't even a fire sack, this is a trap for a rancor, and it walked right into it..."
The sensors flickered with new contacts.
In the rear of the enemy detachments, Dominators appeared one by one. Having made micro-jumps, they found themselves in the path of those who couldn't stand the sight of the carnage and tried to retreat.
"A slaughter, just a slaughter," Alex said hoarsely, watching another Star Cruiser shattered into pieces by a damaged Mk-I assault frigate that hadn't survived the collision. "Tomax, remind me, if we survive, to make a copy of our ship's log. I'm going to show this to my kids later, to show them what happens to the Dominion's enemies."
"Don't worry, you won't need the ship's log," Tomax said. "Every one of our systems is packed full of spy satellites and reconnaissance droids that provide objective monitoring of events. I'm sure footage like this will be shown on the HoloNet sooner or later. If that thing ever works..."
"Tomax," Alex, holding his breath as he watched everything happening in orbit of the fortress planet through the tiny porthole in the back of the cockpit, pressed his face against the transparisteel, looking at what could be called the final act of the Makem Te Massacre. "How long have our Golan III stations been equipped with W-165 planetary turbolasers?"
"That's classified information, actually," Tomax grumbled, fiddling with the communication system to send a distress signal. "I don't know who came up with it, but the illegal copies of the Golan III produced by the Dominion are fitted with extra reactors and, along with reinforced artillery, long-range planetary turbolasers."
"Which fire much farther than the maximum seventy units of ship-mounted turbolasers, right?" the flight mechanic clarified, watching the salvos from the orbital defense stations.
"Yes," Tomax confirmed. "But the energy consumption for sustained fire is such that for the sake of a couple of W-165s, all other weapons and defense systems are deprived of power. And how did you find out about this?"
"Well, right now I'm watching how long green energy bolts are shredding the Galactic Alliance ships closest to the orbital defense stations," Alex explained succinctly.
"What do you mean?" Tomax looked in the indicated direction and whistled softly.
Half of General Kota's first fleet, which had served as the "anvil" that the "hammer" of the second fleet had struck from one side, was now absorbing dozens of salvos from the planetary W-165 turbolasers mounted on the Golan IIIs, once foolishly purchased by Captain Hoffner.
Given that even a single such gun was capable of punching straight through a heavy cruiser, the fate of the Alliance starships was unenviable.
Even though the collisions had stopped and General Kota had lost almost forty ships from his combined fleet.
Even though the survivors were fighting back fiercely, dreaming of destroying the indestructible Implacable and its escort (which, after "waving goodbye" to the Alliance, had moved with the rest of Rear Admiral Mor's ships from their position to the enemy's rear, using the gravity mines of their Dominators), the outcome of the battle was obvious.
The Dominion had lured the enemy into its territory.
It had broken their attack plan.
It had caught them using gravity mines and, turning this to its own advantage with effortless ease, the Dominion was now squeezing the enemy between the defensive stations and its fleet.
And it was slowly ironing out the Alliance soldiers and officers doomed to die in a ring of fire.
"Tomax!" Alex cried out. "It looks like the enemy is going to storm the nearest orbital defense station!!!"
And indeed.
It seemed General Kota had figured out the weakness of the Dominion's Golan IIIs that were destroying his fleet and now intended to exact revenge, redirecting his efforts in that direction.
A desperate gesture from ten Home One class Star Cruisers, supported by a similar number of Corellian corvettes—to inflict at least some damage on the enemy in this shameful battle of one-sided extermination.
But even on this front, only disappointment and frustration awaited them.
Because, as soon as the leading Alliance ships approached the defense structure stoically spitting fire from its planetary turbolasers...
To the naked eye, it was clear that the enemy was perfectly fine with the fact that they wouldn't have to organize a full-scale invasion of the defense structures.
The attackers' lack of a strict action plan was compensated for by the perfect timing of the reinforcements' deployment.
* * *
Even if the plan to lure the enemy into a deadly trap is good, and thanks to his own actions becomes simply ideal, transforming from a "beating" into a "rout," one should not underestimate the enemy's psychology.
Where others would have thrown up their hands and tried to break out, having seen or participated in what is happening to our enemies in the Makem Te system, General Kota, so to speak, "took the bit between his teeth."
As expected, he almost immediately identified a serious flaw in the design of our orbital stations.
Namely, the drop in power during prolonged use of the planetary turbolasers.
Yes, the Alliance has its newest interdiction cruisers operating on the same principle—when their potential is used to the fullest, the ships are completely defenseless.
And they also had a Jedi who could easily have detected the Guardian under its cloak.
That's precisely why we urgently needed to do what we did to ensure the safety of the Dominion.
The Guardian dropped its cloak, finally giving General Kota the answer to where our Super Star Destroyer was.
I don't know how General Kota himself reacted to this news, but the fact remains.
While he was using the Force to try and detect the hidden ship, as expected.
According to the Protector Sabre De'Luz, Kota used the Force and succeeded in many things.
But not in understanding that the Guardian was holding position between the line of orbital defense stations and the planet's surface.
To be even more precise, in a geostationary orbit on the far side of the planet from the enemy.
As I assumed—the range when Kota tried to detect the Guardian prevented him from doing so accurately.
To him, it was something like part of the planet's population, lost against the general background of many sentient lives.
And now, when Kota and his ships had themselves solved the problem of closing with my flagship, the Guardian, as if reluctantly, returned to Makem Te's orbit.
The engines straining to accelerate the nineteen-kilometer giant, an invisible prosecutor, judge, and executioner approaching the attacked orbital stations from the rear, ceased their laborious roar.
The stygium cloaking field allowed us to do everything necessary without fear of "blindly" ramming our own allies.
Therefore, by the time Rahm Kota's fleet reached the range for confident engagement of our orbital platforms and began a massive bombardment of the nearest Golan III from a distance of fifty units, we were already there.
Squinting, I watched the enemy begin to panic as they realized the stations were tougher than they appeared at first glance and the bombardment wasn't shattering them into pieces.
The Galactic Alliance starships began to scatter, understanding that the now-silent Golans had only restored their shield fields and now intended to respond with their standard artillery.
I just watched as General Kota made an unforgivable mistake.
The very Dominator that had facilitated such a precise placement of half his first fleet hadn't even been attacked by him after the starship collision.
Captain Fulik's Binder was calmly holding position under the protection of the third orbital station from us, engaging the enemy's flanks with its artillery and not drawing any attention to itself.
Well, it was time to deprive the enemy of even the hope of getting out of here alive.
"Captain Pellaeon," I addressed the Guardian's commander. "Inform Captain Fulik to activate the gravity well generators on vectors six, nine, ten, and eleven. Then warn Rear Admiral Mor to be ready to close with the enemy rearguard on my command."
This cut Rahm Kota off from hyperjumps to the sides and to the rear, and Makem Te's own natural gravity prevented him from doing so straight ahead along his chosen course.
As soon as the Binder carried out my order, my gaze fixed on General Kota's flagship.
The MC90 battlecruiser Tatooine.
Covered in soot, marked by several dozen breaches.
Surrounded by a dozen ships no more combat-capable.
But they still pressed forward, determined to die but harm the Dominion.
This wasn't the logic of sane people.
This was fanaticism.
Doom and collapse.
Well, now everything would fall into place.
Looking at the personal datapad displaying confirmation of readiness to strike the enemy commander, I knew it was time.
"Inform Rear Admiral Mor to begin the maneuver in ten seconds," I ordered, turning to Pellaeon. "And, if you would be so kind—open a communication channel with the enemy flagship, Captain."
* * *
The Force howled in agony.
The hundreds and thousands of voices of suddenly killed sentients were literally driving Kota mad, preventing him from thinking clearly.
Therefore, he didn't fully understand what the Tatooine's commander was telling him the first time.
"Connect them," after the third repetition, he finally decided.
And even though he couldn't see everything with his own eyes, the Force allowed him to do so in equally minute detail.
However, when the holographic terminal formed the figure of the one who wished to speak with him, the Jedi thought that for the first time in so many years, the Force had failed him.
"Grand Admiral Thrawn?!" he gasped, feeling his heart beat faster and his mind struggle to analyze what was happening.
"It seems my reputation precedes me," the blue-skinned humanoid with burning eyes replied in a suave tone. "General Kota, allow me to inquire—what kind of mental disorder led you to believe you had the right to attack the territory of the Dominion?"
'This... some kind of trick!' was all Kota could think about what was happening.
"Well," Thrawn said a couple of seconds later. "Obviously, you are not in the mood for a dialogue. Fine. In that case, you and your subordinates will be exterminated as aggressors. You may begin."
With that, Thrawn's hologram dissolved.
No, it all made perfect sense now; all the mysterious events happening in the galaxy were falling into place.
But... How could this be?!
"Sir!" the Tatooine's commander cried out, appearing beside him. "The enemy fleet has made a micro-jump and emerged behind our formation."
"Oh, my dear uninvited guests," Grand Admiral Thrawn's calm voice carried the crackle of the frosts of Hoth, "Rear Admiral Mor's ships are the least of your worries at this moment..."
A siren wailed.
"Executor-class Super Star Destroyer!" someone roared. "Distance forty-five and closing!"
"Where did it come from?" Kota barked, shaking off his stupor and addressing his flagship's commander. "And who did Thrawn say 'You may begin' to?!"
"The Guardian has been waiting for you for a long time," a muffled voice came. "As for the last part... That's the signal for us."
"What do you mean, Captain?" Kota barked impatiently, feeling the Force seethe around him.
But the Tatooine's commander didn't answer him.
He simply couldn't, because a moment earlier, with a characteristic and painfully familiar hiss, a white-blue energy blade materialized out of thin air, severing the officer's head.
The next moment, a figure emerged from thin air, clad from head to toe in dark brown armor representing some kind of animal.
An instant later, two figures appeared to the right and left of the stranger—a man and a woman, gripping crimson lightsabers.
This surrealism shocked everyone on the bridge.
"Bantha poodoo," Kota cursed, igniting his own lightsaber and assuming a defensive stance. "Who the hell are you?!"
"Protector of the Dominion," the armored stranger introduced himself, in the same hollow voice with which he had announced the presence of the Executor in the Makem Te system long before the Galactic Alliance fleet arrived.
"Sith," Kota practically spat the word.
"Jensaarai," the armored being corrected him. No matter how hard Kota tried, he absolutely could not sense him in the Force!!!
"The same damn thing," Kota recalled the name of this sect. "I'll kill every last one of you and send you to Thrawn in pieces!"
At least now it was clear why he couldn't sense their presence right under his nose.
"Master, what's with this aggressive blind jerk?" asked the burly man covering the armored wearer on the right.
"Oh, this, my dear students, is a common Jedi," the armored one replied, exploding with a flurry of strikes in response to Kota's lunge towards him.
Simultaneously, the bridge crew seemed to snap out of it, grabbing for their weapons, while the Jensaarai Protector's accompanying students began to clear the combat bridge of superfluous beings.
A full-fledged massacre had begun on the bridge of the battlecruiser Tatooine, the most protected place in General Rahm Kota's fleet.