Abandon ship.
She makes the call. It’s the right thing to do. And they’re going to have to move fast—worst thing is, they can only use the pods on the starboard side. Otherwise, they’d launch right into the wave of wreckage.
Red lights pulse. Klaxons blare. A flurry of activity rises around her as the people of the bridge do as they have been trained to do, streaming efficiently and effectively toward the exits—the capital command crew have escape pods all their own and within spitting distance of the bridge.
Her artificial eye focuses on the screens. She sweeps her finger ahead, fast-forwarding the expected consequences of what’s coming—the computer is predictive and models the likeliest outcome. The debris will damage, but not destroy, the Concord. It will, however, leave them open to attack from the dreadnought. And they’re close enough to the top of Jakku’s atmosphere that the ship will likely drop toward the surface. Crashing into sand and stone. They will lose the Concord one way or another.
Spohn grabs her elbow. “Commodore, it’s time.”
“I’m coming,” she says. “I’ll be right there.”
But it’s a lie.
“Commodore—”
“I said go. I’ll be along.”
Ackbar starts to ask her what she’s doing. She ends communication with him. I am sorry, Admiral. But she realizes something:
If the destruction of the Punishment and the Amity open up her ship to attack by the dreadnought—
Then it also opens up the dreadnought to attack by the Concord.
She has her chance.
It’s one she likely cannot survive. But the costs of war are heavy, even in victory. That has been one of her guiding, governing principles. It is a grudging reality that informs all that she does in battle.
Her hand is no longer trembling. It has been stayed, perhaps by the first moment of certainty she’s felt in a very long time. How about that.
She uses her newly steady hand to urge forward the Concord’s throttle so that it seizes the gap in the Star Destroyer barricade, thrusting hard toward the dreadnought. Above her head, lights flick from red to green: pod bays launching one after the other as her people abandon ship.
Good. Go. Get safe.
She takes a moment to look around her. She’s alone. Like a little island in the center of a calm, quiet lake.
Her screens light up. As expected, the dreadnought is unleashing hell—right as debris from the two eradicated ships begins slamming into the Concord. Lights go dark, then bright, then dark again. The ship shakes and bangs as if it’s a toy held in the hand of a careless child.
From Agate’s bridge console, she flicks over to the weapons consoles. She prepares everything they have, every bit of ordnance this ship has to bear.
Bring hell to my door, I’ll bring it to yours.
She fires everything. Banks of turbolasers. Ion torpedoes. Concussion missiles. Bright lines of death streaking through the black. Lines of the same—fire, castigation, heat—launching from the Ravager toward her. Like threads of light seeking each other. But they will pass each other, instead, each heading onward to an act of destruction, not creation.
The Concord roars toward it, even as its deflector shields begin to fail on the side. The ship tilts starboard. Debris punches through the hull. The engines gutter. She wills the ship to keep going.
Hope is a fire fast extinguished inside her. She sees the fury unleashed from the dreadnought—predictive analysis shows the Concord losing this fight. Her volley cannot match that from the Ravager. The Ravager is a beast and will not be sated. She will damage it. To what extent she cannot say, but if she opens it up to attack—even still, her mind attempts the calculations. If she opens up a hole in the side of that thing, it’s something, but it’s still not enough. And if the other Star Destroyers close the gap and protect the injury made against the Ravager, then what?
Out there, through the cathedral-like arches of glass, she sees the weapons streaming toward her.
This is it.
But then: Agate has a new idea.
—
War brings with it moments of inevitability. A sinking ship. An onrushing horde. A mortal wound. The worst kind, Ackbar thinks, are the moments when you watch friends die. Especially those times when it happens slowly, too slowly, as if all the moments leading up to it are drawn out and given time like images flash-pulsed into your mind’s eye.
This is one of those times. Agate cuts communication with him, and he sees the Concord burn hard and move toward the dreadnought as both it and the monstrous Ravager launch everything at each other.
The problem is, the Ravager’s weapons are far greater than those of a single Starhawk. The Starhawk’s weapons are prodigious and better than even he has on the Home One. It is the uttermost of their tech: bleeding-edge armament. But by itself it can only hope to wound the dreadnought.