X-wing_ Iron Fist Part 15

"I have a flexible escape course plotted, lacking only the crucial variable-the exact point we join up and prepare to exit."

"Good. Get ready."

9.

When the incoming TIE fighters were only a handful of kilo-meters away, Wedge announced, "S-foils to attack position. Break by pairs, choose your targets, make it fast." He suited action to words by rolling out, a smooth maneuver that carried him directly toward the enemy force.

Lara followed suit, with Face Loran a split second late but equally sure-handed. The sound of someone's breathing, harsh and ragged, filled her ears, then she realized she was listening to herself. She forced her breathing to slow, forced herself to concentrate.

The first part would be a head-on confrontation between TIEs and X-wings, the two forces approaching at maximum speed, firing as they came. Once the lines crossed, the more maneuverable TIE fighters would whip around to try to get on the slower X-wings' tails-simple strategy. And the X-wing pilots would be doing everything they could, using all their combined experience, to shake this deadly pursuit.

She put all shield power to her bow shields for the head-to-head approach. Wedge and Face had to have done the same by now.

That was an interesting thought. Wedge Antilles, flying mere meters ahead of her with no power to his stern shields. She could put a quad-linked laser blast into his engines and erase his name, so hated by Imperial pilots, from the roster of New Republic warriors.

Rebel warriors, that is. Then - what? Take out Face Loran with an identical shot, transmit a surrender to the Lavisar forces, get an escort down to the planet's surface... and live the rest of her life in the fame that belonged to the pilot who shot down Wedge Antilles.

Such an odd feeling. Wedge Antilles was under her guns, yet he trusted her with his life.

He had no reason not to, of course. But he did. No one had in - how long?

Forever.

She could eliminate him with a twitch of the finger. It should have been tempting. Yet, somehow, it wasn't. Such an attack would be treacherous.

She laughed. Listen to yourself. There's no such thing as treachery. Only efficiency. That was one of the basic tenets of Imperial Intelligence, and she had lived by those words. But at a certain point she had decided that Admiral Apwar Trigit was treacherous. He'd chosen to sacrifice a shipload of dedicated servicemen so their vessel would not fall into the hands of the New Republic, and she had engineered his destruction because of that decision. She had taken revenge on him for a concept as simple, and as out of place for an Intelligence officer, as personal honor.

Tonin beeped a warning. The range meter dropped to two kilometers, the distance at which New Republic targeting systems could begin to place shots in an almost accurate fashion. The numbers continued to drop, and Wedge and Face both fired, their red laser blasts, quad-linked beams of pure destruction, lashing out toward Lavisar's defenders. Her breath became ragged again as something, a fog that thoughts couldn't quite penetrate, closed down over her brain. Defend your wingman. Can't kill Imperial pilots. The price on Wedge Antilles head means years of security. Zsinj is the same as Trigit.

She switched her lasers to single fire, fast cycle, which would allow her to fire an almost continuous stream of low-powered blasts, and brought up her targeting computer. Immediately the system's yellow brackets settled in a jittery fashion around one of the oncoming TIE fighters and turned green, indicating a lock. The c.o.c.kpit audio system howled in confirmation.

Reflexively, she fired. Her red laser streaked past the on-coming TIE fighter, but she held the stick down and the system cycled, blast after blast emerging. She shook the yoke in her hand, spraying fire around as though using a nozzle to water a patch of gra.s.s, and saw one of the beams strike home, charring a hole in the starfighter's port solar array wing.

It was so close - she tried to keep her spray of fire concentrated on it, and then there was a tremendous bang and her X-wing shook from bow to stern. The module holding the S-foil configuration switch popped out of its housing and dropped before her eyes, swaying there, held to the upper bank of controls by wires.

She swatted it out of the way, tried to look out the viewports, at the diagnostic display, at the sensor display all at the same time. The viewport showed Wedge rolling out up and to port. She gave up on the viewscreens and followed.

"Tonin, give me a loud beep if we're badly hit."

No beep.

"Good job, Thirteen." That was Three, she thought.

"That's a confirmed kill."

"Thanks, Three." His words hovered outside the shield of stray thoughts that seemed to be insulating her brain.

Behind-the enemy would be coming up behind. She looked back, saw only the top of Tonin's dome head, and checked the sensors again. Yes, two TIE fighters were coming around fast, trying to take up positions behind her.

But they were making a broad loop to do it, perhaps intimidated by the firepower they'd just come through. She could try to cut hard to starboard and might be in position for another head-to-head by the time they got their guns fixed on her... No. Her job was to follow her wingman. Protect him.

Wedge cut hard to starboard. She followed, her turn not quite as precise.

The maneuver was too much for the X-wing's inertial compensator and the metal box holding the S-foil configuration switch swung on its wires, slamming into the side of her helmet.

She ignored it, tried to stay with her leader, and held to his port rear quarter, though s.p.a.ce opened up between them. A glance out her own port viewport showed Face there, struggling to maintain formation.

A green laser blast appeared, blindingly bright, between her and Face.

Wedge finished his maneuver, firing already at the two oncoming TIE fighters. Lara tried to place her targeting brackets on one of the two, couldn't manage it-the starfighter was too maneuverable, jittering out of the way. She fired anyway, her spray of single-shot lasers slicing through vacuum near the TIE fighter's starboard wing.

The TIE pilot jerked away from the bombardment of red fire, drifted to port... straight into Wedge Antilles's quad-linked blast. The quartet of lasers sliced cleanly through the fighter's spherical c.o.c.kpit. The TIE fighter disappeared in a glorious explosion of red, orange, and yellow, and Lara heard clanks and pings as her X-wing sliced through the cloud.

There were also the echoes of a scream. Lara shook her head.

She couldn't have heard the pilot.

Unless he was transmitting. "Tonin, cut my reception of Imperial comm traffic at once."

DONE.

"Two for Leader, one for Thirteen." That was Two again.

Lara swatted at his intrusive voice as though it were that d.a.m.ned configuration switch. She tried to find the other TIE fighter on her sensors, but the closest enemy was outbound, head toward the cloud of red blips representing the two full squadrons from Lavisar's surface.

In fact, all the remaining TIE fighters-five of them-were outbound.

"Wraiths, Leader. Form up. Twelve, make your calculations and get us out of here. I make it less than a minute before they overtake us. Give me status reports by number."

"This is Three. No kills. Minor damage to port topside fuzial engine. I'm shutting it down."

"Four. Two kills. No damage."

It was there, battering at her head as insistently as the switch housing swinging into her helmet, a thought that wouldn't let her go. Zsinj is the same as Trigit. Why had she thought that?

Because it was true. Raptor forces had not risen against the Wraiths. Had this been a Zsinj-controlled planet, Raptors would have been the first forces up - they had to maintain their reputation for brutality and efficiency. So this world was independent and the intercepted Raptor transmission a false lead, as the Wraiths had said.

And since the forces of Lavisar weren't set up for the Wraiths - else there would have been a lot more of them - this was just what Commander Antilles had said: a plan by Zsinj to have New Republic....

Rebel... Rebel forces hurt the planer's defenses, maybe knock them down.

So Zsinj could move in, either as a conqueror or a defending hero. Those two choices were the same: Zsinj in control.

She wanted to admire the plan, especially as it extended to the other worlds Mon Remonda had been a.s.saulting. It was clever, efficient.

But those pilots, who'd just been sacrificed, who'd died to satisfy Zsinj's sense of efficiency. It was like Admiral Trigit. And it wasn't...

"Thirteen."

...honorable. There was no honor in it.

And the last fifteen years of Gara Petothel's life closed in around Lara Notsil like a coffin. Her parents' work for Imperial Intelligence. Their arrest and execution for unspecified treason. How Gara had hated them, missed them. How she'd learned, so eagerly, and demonstrated such loyalty, so that nothing like that would ever happen to her.

"Thirteen."

All her life, she'd known not to believe the Rebels and their simplistically optimistic propaganda. Now she could no longer put her faith in the forces that had taken her, trained her, shaped her. There was nothing for her.

Tonin's irritable beeping finally caught her attention.

LEADER WANTS TO KNOW IF YOU'RE HURT.

"Oh. Uh..." She keyed her comlink. "Sorry, Leader. Thirteen reporting..."

She finally scanned her diagnostic board.

"Forward shields down to forty-seven percent but climbing. I think I took a hit in that first head-to-head. Some gauges out."

She grabbed the S-foil switch where it hung and switched it.

Her S-foils did not close up into cruise configuration. "S-foil actuator seems to be out. And I think I hit my head."

"Drop your shield, you don't need it. Don't worry about your S-foils.

Just acknowledge receipt of the new course and prepare to enter it on my mark."

"Understood, Leader. Um, I've received the course and it checks out."

"Three, I want you to engage hyperdrive five seconds after the rest of the squad launches, in case battle damage has knocked out anyone's drive."

"Got it, One."

"On my mark, three, two, one... Jump."

They returned to Mon Remonda's port hangar much as they'd left it, a little more battered, with Piggy's fuselage scored by a laser graze, with Lara's S-foils unable to a.s.sume cruise position, but otherwise unhurt.

Lara climbed out into a chaotic sea of backslaps and embraces, handshakes and congratulations.

Everyone seemed to move in slow motion. Words were slowed, almost incomprehensible, and sounds were muted. Tyria's blond ponytail swayed with the sinuous motion of a snake. Piggy's reserved arm motions, as he described some complicated maneuver or another, seemed to be those of a Gamorrean in low gravity.

01Yet the one thing Lara understood was the expressions turned on her.

They were the eyes of a group to whom she belonged. Not since her parents' loss had she seen that expression.

And the Wraiths and Rogues weren't saying it, weren't deliberately expressing the thought, "You are one of us."

No, it was implicit, a backdrop to whatever else they were saying. Good job noticing that backup squad. Nice shot; how'd you manage it with your lasers on single fire? Your first kill silhouette, congratulations and condolences.

One of us.

She worked her way out from the midst of the crowd and walked, still somehow insulated from the words and physical sensations of the world around her, to the pilots' quarters she now shared with Tyria.

Maybe she could do it. Maybe she could just be Lara Notsil, forever, with Lieutenant Gara Petothel, that poor, unhappy creature, truly among the dead of the Star Destroyer Implacable.

One of us.

She slept, and in her dreams Gara and Lara argued with one another, speaking words she could barely hear and couldn't understand, exchanging thoughts that would make no sense when she awoke, and she did not know which of the two wore her face.

When the Wraiths returned to Hawk-bat Station, with their new member in tow, they found that the other members of the squadron had not been idle.

On his own initiative, Kell Tainer had plotted and led two missions, all because of Runt.

"We determined that they, the people of Halmad, had made a mistake," the long-faced alien said, pride in his voice. He stood at the head of the cargo module that served as the Wraiths' conference room; the pilots were packed in around its narrow oval table. "They had installed a new set of sensor stations on the west coast of Hullis's continent and decommissioned the older sensor stations out in the western islands. But when we examined the specifications of those new sensors, we discovered that their effective range was a couple of hundred kilometers short of the area they were supposed to cover.

Meaning that we now possessed a narrow corridor of airs.p.a.ce we could drop into without any real likelihood of detection. After that, with terrain-following flying to make other sensor tracking difficult, we were able to stage raids on ground emplacements."

"Raid number one," Kell said, "was on a port warehouse district in the city of Fellon. Not much booty there, I'm afraid. We picked up a large stock of recreational holos being produced by the Imperials, propaganda dramas to make Face blush..."

"That'd take some doing," Face said. "I'm shameless."

"True. But also, in taking off, we strafed the marina where the recreational water vessels of the city's wealthy-and other people, including the wealthy of the city of Hullis and the officers of Victory Base there-were docked. Did a few dozen million credits' worth of damage to some very pretty vessels.

"In our second mission, we struck at Hullis herself. We put Castin on the ground the day before to do what he could with security systems, and then Phanan and I flew in, blew a hole in the side of a building, and flew out with as much cargo as we could load without sacrificing the flying speed of our TIE fighters."

"What cargo ?" Wedge asked.

"Imperial credit notes, coin, gems. We hit one of the offi-cial money-exchange sites used by the Imperial base."

Wedge gaped. "You robbed a bank."

"We did. It was fun, too. Getting clear was a little tricky - that close in, it's impossible to elude their sensors - but we just took off straight for s.p.a.ce, suffered their antiaerial-invasion gun barrage, and outflew the TIEs they sent in pursuit. End result, a few dings and pits in Phanan's starfighter."

"To match," Phanan said, "the few dings and pits in its pilot."

"Tell them what I did," Castin said.

"Oh, that's right. In the day or so he had before his extrac-tion, Castin managed to forge us a high-level account on their global information service. We're now being bounced visual and sensor data from their planetary defense satellite network.

It's not being beamed straight at us, don't worry-we've set up a relay near one of the existing satellite-belt mining colonies. If it's detected, we can detonate the retransmitter before they're likely to get it open. Anyway, we've picked up signs that they're constructing a couple of small starfighter bases, possibly as a counter against our ground missions. One of them is near Fellon, the other way out east of Hullis in a region that doesn't seem to need the extra protection, so now we have to wonder what is out there." Kell smiled, his expression reflecting a simple pride in the Wraiths' accomplishments while most of the officers were gone. "Castin has also modified the comm systems in all our TIEs so they distort our voices more effectively-the new computer-controlled distortion actually modi+fies accents and changes genders, making it even harder for listeners to identify our voices."

"That's good work," Wedge said. "But on this pirate ac-tivity, I just wish you all didn't look as though you'd enjoyed yourselves so much."

Phanan snorted. "A happy worker is a productive worker."