CHAPTER THREE
When the stars rushed back into existence, Anakin put his XJ X-wing into a lazy tumble and cut power to everything but sensors and minimal life support. Ordinarily he wouldn't play it so cautious; after all, someone would almost have to be watching for the hyperwave ripples of an X-wing entering the system to have any chance of detecting it. But given the feeling in his gut, there might just be someone doing that.
The hyperspace-realspace reversion creates "hyperwave ripples" that can be detected and warn about the arrival of hypercraft (even one as small as an X-Wing starfighter), but powering down most systems lessens the chance of detection.
The planet Yavin filled most of his view, its vast orange oceans of gas boiling into fractal, elusive patterns. Its familiar face had marked the days and nights of much of his childhood. The praxeum-his uncle Luke's Jedi academy-was located on Yavin 4, a moon of the gas giant. He could remember watching Yavin in the night sky, a colossal mirage of a planet, wondering what could be there, pushing his evolving Force senses to explore it.
He'd found clouds of methane and ammonia deeper than oceans, hydrogen so stressed by pressure it became metal, life crushed thinner than paper but still thriving, cyclones heavier than lead but faster than the winds of any world habitable by humans. And crystals, sparkling Corusca gems climbing those titan winds, spinning in an ancient dance, capturing what light they could find in the thinner upper atmosphere and gripping it tight in their molecules.
He saw none of this as one might with eyes, of course, but over the nights, through the Force he had felt them, and with references to the library gradually understood them.
Force-sensitives can use the Force to "perceive" non-living things (winds, gas clouds, crystals) from a distance of several hundred thousand kilomteres minimum, but the information cannot be understood without background knowledge. This suggests that the input provided by this remote sensory power is not visual.
In his imagination he had seen more. Pieces of the first Death Star, which had met its end in these very skies, pounded into monomolecular foil by fierce pressure and gravity. Older things, relics of Sith, and species even more lost and distant in time. Once a planet like Yavin swallowed a secret, it wasn't likely to give it up again. Given the other secrets that had turned up in the Yavin system- and the Sun Crusher Kyp Durron himself had once managed to pull from the belly of the orange giant-that was for the best.
Reference of a fairly high end Force feat. Kyp Durron (powerful for NJO Jedi standards) aided by the Force ghost of Exar Kun (powerful ancient Sith) managed to use telekinesis to pull the Suncrusher out of the depths of a gas giant.
I don't know how to calculate this, but surface gravity would be the very minimum and using Jupiter's (despite Yavin being considerably bigger), Durron would have had to generate at the very least 25,000 Newtons/ton. Unfortunately the total mass is unknown, but the minimum figure is likely to be well into the meganewtons of force.
They tumbled into sensor range, and his computer built a silhouette from the magnified image.
"That's not so bad," he murmured. "One Corellian light transport. Maybe it is one of Karrde's bunch." Or maybe not. And maybe there were a hundred Yuuzhan Vong ships on the other side of the gas giant or Yavin 4, invisible to his Jedi senses and hidden from his sensors. Whatever the case, waiting around wasn't going to improve matters. He powered up, corrected his tumble, and engaged the ion engines.
[...]
He dropped toward Yavin 4 and the transport at full thrust, spinning and dancing as he went, and when he felt his target firmly enough in the Force, he sliced the night of vacuum with ruby red. The transport returned fire and began its own evasive maneuvers, but that was like a bantha trying to dodge a mace fly.
They had good shields, though. As Anakin completed his first pass, his opponent was still essentially untouched. To make matters more interesting, four winks of blue flame and his instruments agreed that the transport had just fired proton torpedoes at him. Anakin had been preparing to turn for another pass; instead he continued his noseward plunge toward the moon.
"Four proton torpedoes. These guys really don't like us, Fiver."
the transport seems hostile, Fiver acknowledged. Anakin sighed. Fiver was a more advanced astromech than R2-D2, but he missed his uncle's droid's personality at times. Maybe he ought to do something about that.
Two laser blasts hit his shields in quick succession, but they did their job. On his tracker, the proton torpedoes continued to close as Anakin met resistance from the atmosphere. He plunged on, and the ship began to vibrate faintly. His nose and wings were starting to heat up from the upper atmosphere. If he didn't time this exactly right, he would scatter all over the jungle kilometers below.
The sensors of an advanced model of X-Wing fighter would not be able to detect a Vong fleet hiding in the opposite side of a planet. Also, this lone fighter is a more or less credible threat against a Corellian light freighter (like the Millenium Falcon?) and can survive a couple hits from the laser guns of said freighter (likely to be far less powerful than the Falcon's that Han Solo stole from the military), but proton torpedoes are regarded as Really Bad News.
When the lead torp was almost on him, he cut his engines and yanked the nose up. The atmosphere, still thin, was nevertheless able to give the XJ X-wing a good strong slap, hurling him away from the moon. Servos whined and something somewhere made a startling ping. Using the momentum from the atmospheric skip, Anakin turned further spaceward, blood rushing from his head as the g's mounted, then he kicked in the engines again.
Behind him, the proton torpedoes didn't fare as well. They tried to turn after him, of course. Two didn't make it, and continued plunging moonward. The other two skipped along wildly different courses than Anakin and would never find him again before running out of fuel.
"Nice try," Anakin said grimly. Now he was climbing uphill, out of the gravity well, his lasers pumping a steady rhythm. He took another hit from the enemy's more powerful gun, and for an instant the lights dimmed in the cockpit. Then they flared back to life as Fiver rerouted, and Anakin took a hammer to the transport. Their shields faltered, and he slagged their primary generator. Looping around them nose to tail, he drilled laser turrets, torpedo ports, and engines.
The freighter shields, hurt after Anakin's first attack run, collapse after the second round and the fighter can blast weapons and engines with impunity. I might be wrong, but the description of this doesn't seem to match with the "heat sink" shield model advocated by the ICS.
HYPERSPACE JUMP DETECTED. 12 VESSELS HAVE ARRIVED, DISTANCE 100,000 KILOMETERS.
"Sith spit!" Anakin muttered, bringing his sensors to bear.
They weren't Yuuzhan Vong ships, he saw that immediately, just a motley collection of E-wings, transports, and corvettes.
They were hailing him. He opened the link.
"Unidentified vessel, this is the Peace Brigade," a voice
crackled. "Stand down and surrender, and you won't be harmed."
They were too far away to hit him. Soon they wouldn't be. Anakin closed his S-foils, rolled, opened the throttle, and raced toward the distant viridian of Yavin 4.
The aforementioned X-Wing sensors can detect with ease incoming ships from a distance of one hundred thousand kilometers and even identify the type of craft. At the same time, it is plainly stated that one hundred thousand kilometers is outside the effective weapons range for all these ships, although not by a lot.
"I came against orders, actually," Anakin corrected. "That's not important now. Getting the students to safety, that is."
"Of course," Kam agreed. "How long before the Peace Brigade can land?"
"An hour? Not long."
As soon as he saw the enemy, Anakin headed at best speed for the Praxeum, so he should have kept at least the initial advantage of one hundred thousand kilometers. If the Peace Brigade needs about an hour to cross that distance, while decelerating to enter the planetary atmosphere, their results are going to be in the order of 1.5 g. Not particularly awe-inspiring, even if that is only a very low end. If they had thousands of gravities worth of acceleration, then the distance could be crossed in a little over two minutes (141 seconds, to be accurate).
