Wilhuff Tarkin's face instantly turned ashen. He walked over and stared at the screen.
On the hyperspace navigation system display, a mass of garbled characters and numbers began flashing wildly. The calculated time to complete the hyperspace jump kept changing as well—hundreds of hours one moment, a few minutes the next. At one point, a jump scheduled to begin one second later even appeared before Tarkin.
For that instant, Wilhuff Tarkin almost wanted to pray to the Force. But in the end, the number settled at—150 hours.
Wilhuff Tarkin felt fury surge within him, anger rising uncontrollably until he nearly roared aloud.
He took a deep breath, spun around, and snarled at his adjutant, "Immediately... clear those things out for me!! And those fighters and drones! I don't care what methods you use! In half an hour, I want to leave this place!!"
"Yes... yes!" The adjutant hurriedly saluted, then ran to the Staff Department on the other side and shouted at the staff team, "Quick! Begin calculations and simulations immediately! No matter what it takes, destroy all those drones!"
At this moment, the APOD-33 Transport Aircraft had completed their mission after installing the Hyperspace Inhibitors in concealed locations within the Death Star's Equatorial Trench. Piloted by battle droids, these transports began flying wildly throughout the Death Star's shield interior, creating opportunities for the Protoss Interceptor drones to attack.
In truth, most of those Interceptor drones had little energy left by now. The distance between the two main fleets was simply too great. Even though they had never intended to return after launching this attack, and even with long-range energy transmission technology, many Interceptor drones had still become scraps of metal after running out of power.
At the same time, the Death Star's staff team finally came up with a