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transport that lay across Setting Sun Avenue. The access door slid up into the curved top of the vehicle and a juggernaut rolled into view, twenty-two meters’ worth of weapons and heavy armor, moving a little awkwardly on its ten wheels as it maneuvered itself onto the road. It had stabilized itself and started toward the city when the second tank appeared, following in the track marks of the first. It, too, made it onto the road just as the one behind it emerged into view.
     
    Fel nodded to himself and turned into another curve back toward the city. If the first three juggernauts had made it out all right, he had no doubt that the remaining six would do likewise.
     
    Meanwhile, his TIEs had another job to do. “Gray Squadron, form up around me,” Fel called into his comlink. “Blanket sweep over the city. Let’s see what sort of holes we can find to shoot through.”
     
    The fourth of the nine juggernaut tanks had emerged in the distance when Lhagva’s squad rolled out of their transport on the first of the attack force’s three A-rack carriers.
     
    The A-rack was a simple device, one that Lhagva was told had been adopted from one of Thrawn’s other liberated worlds. It looked very much like an A-frame, fold-up clothing roller of the type he’d seen being pushed or pulled along busy walkways back in his own home city’s garment district. The A-rack, though, was much sturdier than those, with
    oversized wheels, a top-mounted E-Web/M heavy repeating blaster, a center-mounted engine, and enough room on each side for five stormtroopers to stand facing outward. With the pair of cramped seats in the center section for the driver and gunner, the carrier could transport a full stormtrooper squad quickly and efficiently across medium-rough terrain.
     
    The downside, which Lhagva always thought about when he rode one of the things, was that it also left the squad bunched close together and thus vulnerable to ambush.
     
    But so far the enemy here hadn’t made any such moves. The houses the three A-racks rolled past were showing no signs of life, not even the occasional furtive peek by a curious face at any of the windows. The Workers were apparently all out of the city as usual for this time of the morning, laboring in the fields, forests, and mines stretching out beyond the urban area.
     
    As for the Soldiers, most of those Lhagva could see from his angle were gathered in clumps along the juggernauts’ line of travel a few hundred meters to the north. Their backs were to the incoming A-racks, with no indication that they were even aware that three squads of stormtroopers were coming toward them from the south. It was as if Thrawn had completely blindsided Nuso Esva and the Queen of the Red.
     
    Lhagva didn’t believe it for a minute.
     
    “Tighten it up, troopers,” Sanjin called from the A-rack’s gunner’s seat. “Things are about to get hot.”
     
    Lhagva shot a quick look upward. They’d reached the outer circle of Midli houses, and the sky above them had gone dark and shimmery as they passed beneath the edge of the city’s new patchwork of umbrella shields. From this point on, Commander Fel’s TIEs would be unable to provide the stormtroopers with any cover fire.
     
    Readjusting his grip on his BlasTech E-11 blaster rifle, Lhagva returned his attention to the houses and open areas on his side of the A-rack.  Whatever Nuso Esva was planning, he knew, the battle was about to begin.
     
    “Excellent,” Nuso Esva said, his lips curled back, his faceted yellow eyes intent on the line of eight large monitors the other Storm-hairs
    had set up in the Dwelling of Guests gathering area. “Thrawn is nothing if not always precisely on schedule.” He gestured to one of the monitors. “Observe, O Queen. Here come his soldiers.”
     
    The Queen leaned closer toward the image. Surreptitiously, Trevik did the same. The white-armored soldiers were heading northward through the..southwestern part of the city,