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| - The skies of Metastrato Prime were ablaze. It was impossible to tell just how fierce the fighting was until one was actually in the thick of it. Until one saw the turbolaser blasts streaking from ship to ship, terajoules of coherent light powerful enough to turn a small town to slag, either dissipating against shields, or tearing into hull and deck and person. And the starfighters, too; ducking and wheeling about each other, avoiding blasts as wide around as they were, stitching each other’s flight paths with cannonfire, hoping against hope that they’d score a hit before their enemies did. Metastrato Prime had seen its share of trouble before; but nothing like this. Two hundred identical battlecruisers had come out of hyperspace right on top of the planet’s unprepared defense web. They were of an obsolete design that looked like a hold-over from the ancient Sith wars; bulbous and long, studded with massive turbolaser cannons and bristling with smaller point-defense turrets. Before the Metastratens even knew what was happening, the battlecruisers had arrayed themselves into an aggressive cone-shaped formation, the better to concentrate their impressive firepower. Starfighters by their hundreds had spilled from the cruisers’ hangar bays; tiny, ultrafast and shield-less. In a matter of minutes, Metastrato Prime, at peace for nearly four years, was at war. At first, the planetary defenses had been sluggish in their response. The initial picket line, one of the fleet’s Loronar Strike Cruisers, three Corellian DP20 gunships and a pair of starfighter squadrons, had been quickly dispatched to meet the battlecruisers; the first five in their formation had picked the ships apart, while the enemy’s swarms of starfighters had easily overwhelmed the picket’s. Their sacrifice, however, had bought time. The Metastraten fleet had been scrambled from drydock, and had hastily assembled itself in a rough bowl shape, strung out between Metastrato itself and its sole moon. Within minutes, the two fleets had met. It had been twenty minutes since the invading fleet had popped out of hyperspace. Already, three hundred Metastratens were dead. And still, the enemy fleet had made no effort to identify itself. All over Metastrato, a calm sort of panic set in; government warnings pleaded with people to remain in doors, while at the same time calling up every security force officer, every single being in the military. As the vast majority of the citizenry crouched in their homes, watching live coverage of the battle on any one of the planet’s multitude of newsfeeds, hundreds of people swarmed throughout Central Command in the planet’s capital city of Segreddo, trying to find some way of breaking the enemy fleet, of weakening them just enough to force a retreat, or at least buy the planet time. Those people were not, however, blind. They saw the Metastraten fleet begin to fall back; they saw them score a few hits, but take just as many. They knew, somewhere in their hearts, their souls, that the fleet was losing. They needed hope. Ironically enough, the very thing that would bring them that hope was the only thing the newsfeeds weren’t showing. A lone starfighter, a thirty-year-old, twice rebuilt ARC-170, slinking behind the Metastraten lines. This starfighter, and the three crewers aboard her, was the centerpiece of a bold, decisive plan, that would either keep the Metastraten fleet from being totally overrun, or doom them to complete destruction. It was a last-ditch, desperate effort. That starfighter would cut through the Metastraten lines, and fight its way to the battlecruiser that had been identified as the centre of the enemy’s fleet, the one that had received the most comm. traffic since fighting had begun. The pilot would land the starfighter aboard the battlecruiser, and the crewers would fight their way through the ship, before planting proton bombs around the ship’s fusion core. It was a crazy plan, so prone to failure that it had been decided that there were only three people on the entire planet that had any kind of a chance at success. And they would succeed. They had to.
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