Timothy Zahn - Outbound Flight

he said. “You—order the Keeper to move toward the aliens.”

“Careful, Vicelord,” Doriana cautioned as the comet operator turned to his board. “Let’s not be too quick to split up the fleet.”

“I have been more than patient,” Kav countered. “It is time to end this. Signal the Keeper to advance, and to launch the rest of its starfighters into shield configuration—”

“Hold it,” Doriana cut in. Suddenly the scenario had changed. The fighter was again retreating with starfighters in pursuit, but this time the rest of the alien force had leapt forward, driving hard toward the gap that had opened up between them and the main task force.

“And so they make their final mistake,” Kav said with satisfaction. “Signal the starfighters to attack.” The Neimoidian acknowledged and tapped at his board.

But to Doriana’s disbelief the droids didn’t respond.

Instead, they continued in pursuit of the retreating fighter.

“Order them to attack!” Kav snapped again. “What are you doing? Call them to the attack!”

“They do not respond,” the other Neimoidian called back. “Impossible,” Kav insisted. “They cannot possibly be jamming our signal.”

“They’re not,” Doriana said grimly. “If the starfighters weren’t getting a signal, they’d have shut down and gone dormant. But they’re still flying at full power.”

“But they are flying away from us. How can this be?”

Kav demanded in clear bewilderment.

“Never mind the how,” Doriana spat. “Here they come.”

“I don’t believe it,” Car’das murmured as he watched the droid starfighters ignore the incoming Chiss shipscompletely as they headed mindlessly toward deep space. “How did you get them to do that?”

“The command signal uses a rolling encryption,”

Thrawn explained as the Springhawk shot forward past the now vanished outer defense screen. “But with so many fighters requiring signals, I knew the rotation would have to be a limited one. It turns out that there are only three separate encryption patterns for this group. I simply recorded the version the droids would be expecting next, then broadcast it to them with enough power to override whatever their masters in the battleship were trying to send.”

“But how could you figure out—oh,” Car’das interrupted himself as it finally clicked. “With your fighter always going in on the same vector, and the droids’ command always the same come-out-ofthis- formation-and-attack-the-enemy-on- this-vector code, the only part that ever changed was the encryption pattern itself.”

“Which allowed us to isolate the command we wanted and duplicate it,” Thrawn confirmed. “The secret to successful analysis, Car’das: whenever possible, reduce matters to a single variable.”

Ahead, the nearest starfighters in the inner screen were starting to shift positions, moving from their general defense pattern onto intercept vectors. “I don’t think that’s going to work on the rest of them, though,” Car’das warned. “They’re coming from different initial formations, and there are probably entirely different codes and encryptions for them.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Thrawn assured him. “All I needed was to get past the outer group and into closer range.”

He tapped a key on his board. “All vessels: attack pattern d’moporai.”

“Here they come,” Doriana muttered, his fingers digging tensely into the couch cushion beside him. On the face of it, there was still no way Mitth’raw’nuruodo’s pitiful collection of patrol ships could do anything against the combined might of the Trade Federation task force. No way at all.

But the alien commander had just gotten past three groups of droid starfighters without firing a shot, and that was supposed to be impossible, too. Whatever Mitth’raw’nuruodo had in mind for his next trick, Doriana had a strong suspicion he wasn’t going to like it.

Yet even through his apprehension, a small detached part of him was looking forward to seeing what that trick would be. He didn’t have long to wait. The incoming aliens were widening their formation now, sacrificing the protection of overlapping shields to gain extra maneuvering room. Swarms of starfighters from the nearer parts of the defense screen were breaking their own formation in response, sweeping in over a wide, three-dimensional wavefront toward the intruders. The two groups were nearly within laser range of each other…

And then each of the alien fighters launched a single missile.

There was a subtle flicker in the indicator lights of the Darkvenge‘s computer command board as the starfighters’

sensor information was collected, compiled, and analyzed, and the proper response formulated. The response was translated into a hundred updated commands, which were then sorted, encrypted, and transmitted back to the primitive droid brains riding in their armored casings. A sliver of a second later the starfighters responded to those commands with a rain of concentrated laserfire that blew all nine missiles into shrapnel.

“A foolish waste of effort,” Kav commented. “The range was clearly too great for—”

“Hold it,” Doriana said, frowning at the displays. There was something still moving along the shattered missiles’ lines of flight, filmy spots of nearly invisible haze that seemed to be growing larger as they sped toward the incoming starfighters.

“Call them back,” he told Kav urgently.

But it was too late. Even as the alien attack formation abruptly came apart, with all eleven ships shooting off in all different directions, the hazy spots intersected their target starfighter groups. There were multiple flashes of subdued light.

“They do not respond!” one of the Neimoidians called from the computer board. “Nine groups of droids have gone silent!”

“Connor nets,” Doriana snarled, digging his fingers even harder into the cushion. Nine groups of starfighters, neatly and efficiently knocked out of action.

Out of action, but not out of the fight. Their momentum was still carrying them onward… and as he watched in helpless fascination, they slammed squarely into other groups that had shifted their own vectors to chase the dispersing aliens.

There were more multiple flashes, this cluster much brighter than the last.

And suddenly the gaping hole in the task force’s defensive screen no longer had any starfighters left to fill it. “This is impossible,” Kav said, his five-cornered hat bobbing as he swung his head back and forth around the bridge. “How can he do this?”

“Get the rest of the starfighters into space,” Doriana ground out. “Now.”

Kav didn’t need any prompting. “Order Keeper to activate all remaining droid starfighters,” he called. “They will launch when ready. And move all those already launched to intercept.”

“Wait a minute,” Doriana objected. “You can’t leave our other flanks unguarded.”

“Against what?” Kav retorted. “This is the battlefront.

If we do not defend it, there will be no other flanks left to guard.”

He gestured across the bridge. “Obey my order.”

“Here they come,” Car’das murmured, wondering if Thrawn had finally sliced off more than he could serve. The Chiss had dispatched those first few groups of droid starfighters with relative ease, but tricks like that only worked once against agiven opponent.

And now all the rest of those hundreds of starfighters were sweeping around the flanks of the Trade Federation fleet, heading straight toward them.

Unless that was exactly what Thrawn had been waiting for. Car’das shifted his eyes across the displays, looking for the cruiser that had slipped away from them just before the fighting started. If the main Chiss force was merely a diversion…