And it will die in service of that act.
Agate is still on board. He knows this. She is going down with her ship—a dramatic gesture that he hopes has purpose behind it. He suspects she feels that she must command every moment between now and her end, that it should be her hand directing the ship and its fusillade of fire.
But the Starhawk makes an unexpected turn.
The Concord banks sharply to the starboard, maneuvering quickly to turn that side of itself toward the incoming attack. The port is already damaged by the debris field. The starboard side taking the hit—with the shields already gone, Ackbar sees—may not destroy the Starhawk outright, but it’ll sink it. Already its engines are damaged on the far side. Atmosphere will grab that vessel like mud sucking on a soldier’s boot.
A hologram flashes over his console.
It’s Agate.
“Agate! Get off that ship—”
“Admiral, listen. Get everyone you can to hit that dreadnought from aft. Take out its engines. Send every starfighter, every CR90, anyone—”
“Commodore, I command you to abandon that vessel.”
“Admiral, it literally pains me to deny your order. But please, trust me. Listen to me. The engines!”
Out the viewport and on his screen, he watches the fusillade from the Ravager close in on the Concord.
“What are you doing? Hitting those engines—the Ravager is not moving. The engines aren’t where we need to be concentrating our fire—”
“Just trust me.”
“Commodore—”
“Thank you, Admiral. It has been the highest honor.”
“Kyrsta!”
And then she’s gone again.
Just trust me.
War brings with it moments of inevitability, yes. But it also carries with it the opposite: moments of grave uncertainty bridged only by acts of blind faith. When they say to one another, May the Force be with you, it is precisely this that they mean: It is a wish that when the time comes to leap into the void and to make a decision based on instinct and trust, you are rewarded for that act and not punished. The hope is that if you meet the galaxy halfway, it meets you in the middle and carries you the rest of the distance. Ackbar decides to trust and to leap…
And to pray that the Force is with them all.
—
The exchange of destruction is a mighty one. The Concord’s barrage slams into the Ravager, ripping a hole in the side of the gargantuan ship with the ferocity of a biting, rending rancor. The injury is black and deep, but not fatal. And the dreadnought’s own weapons strike the Concord, slipping past what little is left of the deflector shields and punching clean through it. Oxygen whistles out into the void. Fire plumes as chemicals off-gas into space. The ship groans. Somewhere in the belly of the ship, explosions start going off—fuel cells and magna-batteries chain-reacting, boom, boom, boom. It won’t detonate the whole ship. But it has gutted it.
The ship is dead in the water.
And without the repulsors from underneath keeping it aloft, the atmosphere of Jakku is like a reaching, claiming hand. She feels the ship drift downward, drifting as it goes.
But the Starhawks were designed with one thing in mind: upgrade. So long did the rebels endure an aging, piecemeal fleet that when the time came to finally design something new to serve the nascent Republic, they went all-in. Every internal system, every external design feature, every weapon—all of it was upgraded beyond the watermark set by the Mon Cala ships prior and beyond the known capabilities of the Empire’s extant ships.
One of the features that saw the largest boost in ability?
The tractor beam.
The role of the tractor beam is simple: to grab an object in space, usually a spacecraft, in order to usher it safely into a docking bay or to seize the vessel and pull it closer. The tractor beams on a Star Destroyer were notoriously vicious, with the strength to draw a Corellian corvette into its bay—or to stop a Nebulon frigate from making the escape to lightspeed.
The tractor beam on the Starhawk is ten times that. Magnite crystals amplify both the range and the strength of the beam. A Starhawk could capture and move a ship many times its own size.
Agate dials up the tractor beam, points it at the Ravager—
She fires.
If I’m going down to the ground, she thinks, you’re coming with me.
—
Grand Moff Randd sits in a chair on the bridge of the Ravager. Up until now, he has felt supremely in control of this battle. The Ravager is a vessel whose might is presently unparalleled in the Imperial fleet, and to have been given command of it by Rax himself is an honor he will not squander. His forces have stopped the rebel-born False Republic fleet at every turn—though he is no true tactician, he has many great minds working for him, and their plan of forming a perimeter of vessels around the dreadnought was a sound one.