Though the Taskmaster waited with bated breath, his forces poised to intercept Orcana's attack and duel high in Coruscant's skies, no further maneuvers by the NIO commander were forthcoming. Tu'teggacha shrugged; he was not here to break a fleet, but to ravage a world. If the opposition was distracted, that would only free up his forces to unleash their full power on the planet below. With Sularen and the Final Dawn distracting the Alliance ships, the Brotherhood fleet closed in, preparing bombardment positions. The World Devastators, already en route, would cause terrible havoc if even
one of them reached the surface.
The Ebruchi aimed to add to that havoc with his own guns.
Of course, there was
one particularly persistent gnat that seemed determined to buzz around the Brotherhood fleet: the ships of Commodore Herlock. To the Taskmaster's utter shock and amusement, the two tiny frigates refused to break off their attack when confronted by
twice their number in Star Destroyers six times their size. Some of the guns that the Brotherhood fleet was using to fire at Herlock's ships were nearly as big as the ships themselves. The orbital autocannons mounted on each
Crucifix I-class Star Destroyer could vaporize a city block in a single shot, and were often used to blow apart capital ships. These were
frigates.
And the
frigates, attacking without any fleet support, were
outnumbered.
If the
Pride of Anaxes and
Courageous had attacked as part of a full battle group, supporting larger (or at least a larger number of) NIO craft and helping to wear down the shields of the Mawite star destroyers, they could have had an impact on the tide of the battle. But charging in alone? They were like to the
Crucifixes like small rodents were to humans - irritating, but hardly threatening. If the firepower of a 300 meter frigate could have any significant impact on the shields and armor of an 1,800 meter Star Destroyer, no fleet in the galaxy would build any big ships. They would all stick to their tiny superweapons instead.
The comparison was even more ridiculous when it came to the
Silencieux attacking the
Fatalis. The corvette had managed to inflict good subsystem damage over Korriban by attacking from stealth and using shield-bypassing anti-capital torpedoes... but the Brotherhood had been ready when they'd tried the same thing a second time. Now the
Silencieux was trying a different attack: its laser cannons.
Medium laser cannons,
starfighter grade, mounted on a 144 meter corvette... against a 10,000 meter Super Star Destroyer. The shields of the
Fatalis were designed to withstand capital ship barrages. This? Not even
noticeable.
As far as Tu'teggacha could see, there were really only two outcomes to this foolhardy attack. Herlock could break off and retreat, perhaps to return with reinforcements that would make this a more even fight, and count his lucky stars that he
somehow hadn't been blown to shreds already.
Or he could continue to attack an entire fleet that
vastly outnumbered and outgunned him all on his own, in which case he would surely perish. If he did neither, if he somehow held his position and kept shooting without taking a scratch, he was surely some kind of Force god; the Taskmaster could not see any other way to survive such odds.
But he was no longer paying the brave but foolhardy Commodore any mind. Instead, the Ebruchi was beginning to conduct the symphony of suffering that was to come. The
Fatalis and the four
Praetorian-class vessels drifted into bombardment positions, targeting their weapons on districts far from where the Mawite marauders had landed... districts untouched by the attack, until now. There were residential districts, full of apartment buildings and public parks; entertainment districts, studded with trendy nightclubs and fancy restaurants; business districts, full of corporate offices and megamalls. Ordinary places, full of ordinary people.
They weren't military targets. Not remotely. And that was
exactly the point. The Maw was here to strike
terror into the heart of the galaxy, and sometimes the recipe for that was massive, indiscriminate destruction. Orbital autocannons locked their firing solutions, peering down at the terrified masses of innocents far below... and began to open fire. Their goal: level everything they could reach. Strip away the urban tangle of life and commerce, melt the towers of transparisteel and duracrete, until all was scoured clean down to the planet's very bedrock. They would cause as much devastation as they could before the Brotherhood withdrew.
But the Taskmaster knew, just as The Mongrel did, that even the most egregious scars inflicted by big guns from orbit were ultimately temporary. Coruscant had faced such bombardment before, and although the ruin and death had been terrible each time, the Jewel of the Core had always risen again. The Coruscani were a resilient people, a melting pot that came together in time of crisis and stubbornly rebuilt again and again. So the Brotherhood had decided to leave them a
lingering gift.
"Deploy the creature pods," Tu'teggacha ordered. At his command, cargo bay doors opened... and huge metal containers dropped to the surface.
Each container, fitted with microthrusters to ensure a relatively soft landing, bore a terrible gift for Coruscant: a belly full of the Maw's savage warbeasts. There were swarms of
skitterwings, spiderlike horrors that would climb and glide through the underlevels, gorging themselves on the unwary. There were fearsome
branchlurkers, savage ambush predators capable of ripping apart
tanks and gorging themselves on pounds and pounds of raw, wriggling meat. There were tall, slimy
bogaranths, normally mounts for Mawite cavalry, now loosed without direction to cause mass confusion and fear as they spread their caustic saliva
everywhere.
Many would die in the crossfire of this battle, launched as they were among the wild marauders and heroic defenders... but others would likely escape into dark, dank places deep within the mazelike planet-city. There they would breed, and new generations of monsters would be born in the underlevels, a fresh supply of horrors to terrorize those who worked to rebuild their world. That was the Taskmaster's vile present to the city planet, a little something to remember him by... and with every moment that his bombardment went on unchallenged, the scars would grow larger, and the creatures would burrow deeper and multiply.
Atlas Drake
Ikenna Tahj
