The missiles ripped into the battlefield indiscriminately, crushing akks but also shredding the soldiers they fought. The akks’ only defense against concussion missiles was evasive action, and they scattered into the trees. Seeing a chance for a daring stroke, the unit commander ordered a charge by his five GAVs: they would drive right up the tunnel ahead with his own in the lead, crushing grassers and knocking aside akk dogs. More heavily armored than the gunships above, he felt they had little to fear—a feeling which he had less than one second to regret as a pair of proton torpedoes streaked from the tunnel’s mouth and blew his GAV to scrap.

At this point, finally, the partisans deployed their one and only piece of mobile artillery: Twelve metric tons of ankkox lumbered from the mouth of the tunnel.

The drover who stood on its armored head was a Korun as tall as a Wookiee, with shoulders like a rancor’s and a pair of ultrachrome teardrops fastened to his forearms.

The Korun gestured, and the twisted pile of smoking scrap that had been the unit commander’s GAV squealed as it flattened beneath the ankkox’s massive feet. He swung one arm, and the ankkox’s tail mace blurred through the air, knocking the turret gun of the next GAV spinning so that its point-blank shot instead detonated against the armor of the one behind.

Two pairs of Korunnai, nearly as large as the one on the ankkox, and similarly armed, crouched on either curving flank of the beast’s dorsal shell; one of each pair wore the bulky, unwieldy shoulder unit of a proton torpedo launcher, while the other tended their supply of disposable loader tubes. They had four apiece, and they seemed to have no interest in conserving them. Torpedo after torpedo streaked from the launchers, first destroying the remaining GAVs, then curving upward to blast gunships from the sky.

A few heroic soldiers of the militia tried to scramble close enough to the ankkox to attack the Akk Guards with small arms, only to be sent spinning through the air, chests crushed with blinding efficiency by blurred blows of the ankkox’s tail mace.

At the crest of the ankkox’s dorsal shell, where once had stood a howdah of polished lammas, a heavy repeating blaster had been bolted directly to the beast’s armor. Its power generator was tended by a young Korun male with vivid blue eyes and a manic grin, and it roared a continuous song of destruction, spraying high-energy particle beam packets across the field of battle.

The gunner on this weapon was a Korun girl with pale skin and startling red hair, whose feel for the weapon was such that she could be seen to fire with her eyes closed, unerringly hammering the cockpits and cannon turrets of even those gunships that screamed past on transsonic strafing runs. Streaking concussion missiles were met tens of meters away with bursts of blasterfire; not one got through.

Nor could the gunships stand off and pound her in a laserfire duel; not only did her every shot rock their ships, spoiling their target locks, but she was defended by a Korun man and a Chalactan woman who handled Jedi energy blades as though they’d been born with them in hand.

Two gunships that tried to attack went down in flames.


- Shatterpoint, Chapter 18