Doriana probed carefully.

"No, this part was my idea," Roshton said. "Master Tories simply reminded me of another of our objectives." He craned his neck.

"There they go."

Doriana eased an eye around the truck's push plate. Outside, the C-9979's heavy clamshell deployment doors were swinging open, the foot ramp starting to slide down toward the ground. In the relative darkness behind the doors, he could see the slightly bulbous nose and blaster cannon of a MTT armored droid transport waiting in the landing pedestal. "Stand by," Roshton ordered calmly.

"Target is starboard laser capacitor."

Doriana frowned; but before he could ask, the MTT gave a brief snort of cooling system ground vents and began to slide forward toward the ramp.

"Fire," Roshton said calmly.

And with a thunder of weaponry that echoed deafeningly through the huge room, the clone troopers opened fire.

Doriana squinted into the glare as the hundreds of energy weapons focused their fury on the thick armor behind the MTT's leftmost blaster cannon ball turret, wincing at the noise and the waves of heat that rolled over him. The MTT's armor was incredibly thick, he knew, but the transport's designers could never have anticipated a situation where so much firepower would be focused on such a small spot. The sun-bright glare around the power capacitor began to diffuse outward as the casehardened metal alloy vaporized into superheated plasma...

And barely two seconds into the assault, the Republic weapons burned through the armor to the high-energy capacitor behind it.

The entire left front of the MTT vanished in a gigantic fireball that writhed its way upward to billow across the leading edge of the C-9979's forward wing. A series of smaller blasts erupted from behind the first as secondary systems went up in a chain reaction. A few seconds later, with an earsplitting scream, the repulsorlifts disintegrated, and the blackened shell that had once been a fully loaded MTT collapsed onto the ramp.