#tractor beam

“Twenty-four capital ships,” the bridge officer replied. “They’re… the warbook is showing them as Starhawk class.”

“Starhawks,” Pryde muttered. “Thirty years out of date. Do they have any escorts?”

“Fighters only,” the bridge officer replied – Pryde couldn’t remember his name, and frankly he didn’t much care. “They’re maintaining a close formation and altitude, our primary guns can’t target them.”

Pryde smirked. “Then we’ll show them how much we don’t need our primary guns,” he said. “Ready the turbolasers!”

“We’re outside normal effective range, Sir,” his flag captain warned. “It’ll take time to batter down their shields, but we can do it.”

“Then advance to range, of course,” Pryde said. “Don’t let them get away, Captain.

“I’m reading a power surge, sir,” the bridge officer – Trach, that was his name – reported. “It looks like they’re firing up their main batteries?”

The whole of the Steadfast lurched, and Pryde staggered. The initial turbolaser volley missed entirely, none of the targeting systems ready for when the ship suddenly jolted by fifteen degrees.

Then there was an almighty crunch, and Pryde stared out the window.

Because the front of his ship had just been torn off.

“What just happened?” he demanded.

“It… it’s their tractor beams,” Trach said, and Pryde turned his attention left and right. Other Final Order ships were being torn to pieces, ripped apart or crumpled by the intense power of the tractor beam arrays being used by the Starhawks, and Pryde tried to focus.

Tried to think.

How was this happening? The New Republic couldn’t be this-

Then he watched as the front of his ship was launched by three Starhawk tractor beams right through the Sutta, causing a massive secondary explosion which gutted the Star Destroyer entirely, and something about that sight – besides the incredible contempt that it was displaying – made him realize something.

The Starhawks were operating in groups. Squadrons.

The Xyston-class had been equipped with upgraded shields, he knew that much… but, now that he thought about it, the original Starhawk’s one battle with an operational tractor array had seen it throwing around a Star Destroyer without significant difficulty and from outside conventional turbolaser range… through its shields.

And, yes, the Final Order’s battleships had had their shields upgraded so that a Starhawk couldn’t do that, but they hadn’t been upgraded to be literally three times too dense to let a Starhawk do that.

It was… humiliating. Intolerable. Decades of Imperial engineering and toil had been entirely circumvented by the simple expedient of the New Republic using more than one ship on the same Imperial ship.

There was another huge secondary explosion, this time on the Yarmosa, and Pryde’s eyes snapped to the main tac plot.

The Starhawks were using the forward part of his line as ammunition. Tearing off chunks of Xyston-class Star Destroyers, and his own Resurgent-class,and then flinging them right through other Imperial ships… aiming, by the looks of it, for the axial superlasers.

“All ships, full speed,” he said. “All ships that can still move, full speed! We need to close the distance, there’s not that many of them!”

The Steadfast jolted again, and someone shouted in fear from the engineering station.

“Quiet!” he shouted. “You are an officer of-”

“Reactor shutdown!” the engineer said, and Pryce paled.

Because the repulsorlift systems were powering down. He could feel it, feel the odd floating sensation of free fall – and knew what would happen at the far end.

Which would take, based on their altitude, about fifteen seconds.

“Commander, that one’s starting to rotate,” Syndulla said, tapping one of the Star Destroyers on her display board, and a few seconds later the Yavin, Galaan and Noctu shifted the focus of their beams. The indicated Star Destroyer shivered, surrounded by shield scatter as it tried and failed to hold off the assault, then all three Starhawks shoved in a synchronized manoeuvre and forced the targeted Star Destroyer back to crash into one of its fellows.

“Echelon four, shifting targets,” the force commander reported. “That one on the right suffered shield failure.”

“They’re getting lined up,” Syndulla noted. “There – Echelon two, Echelon three, push one into that knot of capital ships there, you should do significant extra damage.”

All six ships followed her commands, and Syndulla shook her head.

“For some reason, the Empire always assumes that everyone’s terrified of them,” she said. “You’d think they’d have learned otherwise… did they think the Starhawks evaporated?”

“I think they’re technically not Imperials any more,” Ezra pointed out.

Hera snorted.

“Yeah, but they’ll always be the same to me,” she said. “Echelon five, retask – that one looks like a command ship…”

Entirely separately to all that, of course, there was a rather wonderful irony in using a ship built around a single very powerful central weapon to defeat the Final Order.

The Empire had spent decades and untold billions of credits trying to make a superweapon starship work. And the New Republic had done it in months.