Star Wars: X-Wing I: Rogue Squadron (25 page)

“Yes, sir.”

“If you don’t mind, General Salm and I will fly over with you in the
Forbidden
to attend ourselves.”

Wedge smiled, more at the Admiral’s offer than Salm’s clear look of surprise. “We would be honored, sir.”

“And we will honor your dead.” Ackbar turned to the bomber pilot. “And you will want your Defender Wing pilots there, too, yes, General?”

Salm hesitated, then nodded. “Perhaps if we mourn together before we fly together, our units won’t have so much to mourn after we hit Vladet.”

Kirtan Loor ducked involuntarily as he felt the tremor rip through the soil. A muffled report reached his ears a second later. The comlink clipped to his lapel hissed with static, then calmly reported, “Four-Eighteen and Four-Twenty are down.”

The Intelligence agent shivered, and it wasn’t the cool Talasean night that shook him. The stormtrooper making the report had reacted as if the Rebels’ little booby trap had killed droids, not people.
Of course, stormtroopers are hardly people, are they?
Brought up to be fanatically loyal to the Emperor, most of them seemed slightly distracted by his death. While this did not dull their efficiency, it did seem to make them care less about their own lives.

On Talasea care for one’s continued well-being seemed to be a required skill. The Rebels had rigged up a lot of explosive surprises for whoever followed them to Talasea.
Just
who
that would be was not difficult for them to figure out
.

Loor straightened up. “Not that it matters how many stormtroopers die. There must be a factory that stamps them out.”

He started to smile at his own whispered comment, but a cold dagger of fear plunged into his guts. Two stormtroopers in white armor emerged from the fog like wraiths risen from the grave. They stopped directly in front of him, but neither one bothered to crane his neck back to look up at Loor’s face. “Agent Loor.”

Kirtan nodded and did his best to wear a mask reminiscent of pictures he’d seen of Tarkin. “Yes?”

“Priority message relayed from Vladet. You are ordered to return to Vladet immediately and await further orders.”

“What does that idiot Devlia think he’s playing at?” Kirtan had been furious when he learned Devlia had sent a single stormtrooper platoon to check Talasea. He had recommended using a probe droid and then following it with a full-scale attack. Devlia had ignored his recommendation and had sent stormtroopers because they were, in his words, “a renewable resource.” The same could not be said for probe droids.

Nor could it be said of stormtrooper transports
. Kirtan stared down at the stormtrooper. “Send a message back to Admiral Devlia and tell him I will return to Vladet when I am finished with my survey of this base.”

“Sir, the message came from Imperial Center, not Admiral Devlia.”

He purposely, slowly, raised his head and stared off above the white domes of their helmets. He knew his efforts to hide his shock and fear were useless.
I suspect stormtroopers smell fear the way animals do
. “A ship has been sent for me?”

“You’re to take one of the shuttles, the
Helicon
, directly to Vladet. It is waiting for you in the landing zone.”

“Thank you for relaying the message.” His voice carried no conviction with it. “Carry on.”

The two stormtroopers marched off through the swirling mist, leaving Kirtan to be assaulted by cold air outside and cold dread inside.
Iceheart must have already gotten my message about this fiasco. If she’s looking to place blame for this disaster, it won’t be on my head
. He forced himself to smile and bolstered
his effort by visualizing a trembling Admiral Devlia. “Tremble you shall, little man. In ignoring me, you have angered my mistress and I suspect her anger can be decidedly lethal.”

The seven caskets lay atop a repulsorlift platform, each one draped with white cloth to which had been afixed a blue emblem. For six that emblem was the Rebel crest. Lujayne Forge’s shroud bore the Rogue Squadron crest with one of the dozen X-wing fighters cut away. The caskets had been laid out in the center of the starboard fighter bay aboard the
Reprieve
, with Lujayne’s in the middle.

Directly behind them stood all the members of Rogue Squadron save one. Andoorni Hui had been allowed out of the bacta tank for the duration of the ceremony but she was still too weak to stand unaided. She lay back in a hoverchair, her dark eyes half-lidded and her limbs nearly lifeless. She looked, to Wedge, the way he felt inside—all crushed down by the squadron’s loss.

Behind the pilots stood the techs and crew who had been evacuated from Talasea. Flanking them were the men and women of Salm’s Defender Wing, as well as some of the crew and medical personnel on the
Reprieve
. The gathering reminded Wedge of the assembly held on Yavin 4 to honor Luke, Han, and Chewbacca for their destruction of the Death Star.
I only wish this occasion were as happy a one as that had been
.

Wedge stepped out from between Admiral Ackbar and General Salm, looked down at the caskets, then back up again. “Over seven years ago many of our brethren were gathered together in the aftermath of a great battle to commemorate the heroism of our friends. None of us thought, at that time, of how desperate our situation was, or how
long our battle against the Empire would continue. The future was, for us, the next minute or hour or day or week. Life expectancy, especially among pilots, was measured in missions and seldom were multiple digits involved in the calculations.

“At that gathering, on Yavin 4, we were able to celebrate our victory as if, with the destruction of that one terrible weapon—the first Death Star—we had brought the Empire crashing down. We knew it wasn’t true—we knew we would abandon Yavin shortly thereafter—but for that time we were able to forget how desperate and difficult our fight for freedom would be.

“We could forget how many more of our friends would die pursuing the common dream of freedom for all people, all species, within the galaxy.”

Wedge swallowed hard against the lump thickening in his throat. “That dream still lives. Our fight continues. The Empire still exists, though its strength ebbs, its tenacity slackens, and its grasp on its worlds weakens. Dying though it is, it can still inflict death and these, the bodies of our comrades, make that fact abundantly clear.

“I will not tell you that Lujayne or Carter or Pirgi or the others would want you to keep fighting, or that your fighting will make their sacrifice worth it. That’s trite, and our friends deserve more than trite. They have given up what we fight to preserve. Our duty, and their silent charge to us, is to continue to fight until the Empire can never again strip life from those who want nothing more sinister than freedom for all.”

He stepped back, then nodded to a technician near the launching bay’s external port. At his signal the repulsorlift platform gently rose and floated toward the vast opening. The ranks of pilots and ground crew parted to let the bier drift past, then
closed up again as the platform entered the magnetic containment field around the external port. Once outside the ship, the platform dropped away from beneath the caskets and they hung there, surrounding by stars and vacuum.

The technician used a tractor beam to impel the caskets, one by one, on a gentle course toward the red dwarf burning at the heart of the star system.
Off on a final convoy
 … As the white shrouds picked up the sun’s red highlights, the string of seven caskets took on the appearance of laser bolts, traveling in slow motion, on a looping arc that would stab them into the distant star.

Ackbar rested a hand on Wedge’s shoulder. “It is never easy to let your people go.”

“No, and it never should be.” Wedge gave the Mon Calamari a firm nod. “If it is, then we’ve become the enemy, and I’m not going to let that happen.”

Corran’s first glimpse of Vladet after coming out of hyperspace revealed a blue ball streaked with white and stippled with dark green. “I think we ought to take it and keep it, Whistler. It looks a lot more pleasant than Fog-world ever did.”

The astromech piped agreement, then brought the tactical screen up on Corran’s monitor.

Corran glanced at it, then keyed his comm. “Three Flight is negative for eyeballs.” He raised his left hand and flipped a switch above his head. “S-foils locked in attack position.”

“I copy, Nine. Stand by.”

“Standing by, Control.” Ahead of him, speeding in at the planet, two of Defender Wing’s Y-wing squadrons flew with an escort of four X-wings each. Because his flight was two ships shy of full, he and Ooryl were assigned to Warden Squadron. Champion, with General Salm flying lead, and Guardian squadrons were to go in first and soften things up so Warden, with its “understrength” defenses, could sweep through unmolested.

From the briefing Corran knew the base on
Grand Isle would be no match for two squadrons of Y-wings. In addition to two laser cannons, the Y-wings sported twin ion cannons and two proton torpedo launchers. Each ship carried eight torpedoes, which meant either of the squadrons packed enough firepower to turn the lush, verdant landscape of Grand Isle into a black, smoking mass of liquid rock.

“Rogue Nine, continue to follow Two Flight, then orbit at Angels 10K.”

“As ordered. Call us if you need anything.”

“Will do, Control out.”

Corran thought he caught a hint of his own frustration reflected in Tycho’s voice. The orders he had just given Corran were being relayed to the members of Warden Squadron by Salm’s own controller. The dual command chain was supposed to guarantee good command and control during the operation, but Corran doubted it would do anything of the sort.
In CorSec, when we were working a joint operation with Imperial Intelligence, the dual control became
duel
control, and that didn’t work well at all
.

The ride down through the clear atmosphere got a little bumpy, but having a little resistance to fight with the controls felt good after six hours of doing nothing during the hyperspace run. Corran leveled the X-wing out at ten kilometers above the surface of the planet. “Control, Three Flight on station. Can you send me tacvisual from below?”

“Here you go, Nine. From Rogue Leader—returning the favor.”

Corran’s cheeks burned as he recalled his sensor data being used by the rest of the squadron on Folor. “Relay my thanks.”

The visual feed from Wedge’s X-wing showed four Y-wings swooping in at the northern face of the
volcano’s crater. From about a kilometer out, each of the slow craft launched a pair of proton torpedoes, then peeled off. The blue balls streaked out toward the mountainside. They exploded against it at a point where the abundant rains had already eroded and weakened the rock.

The rippling series of explosions cast smoke, rock, and burning plants into the air. The visual feed went vector, with green grids representing the land hidden by the smoke. Where there had been a gentle, curved dip in the crater’s rim there now existed a sharp, jagged rift that looked as if some titanic vibro-ax had been used to chop the rock away. As Corran watched, the gap grew larger and he suddenly realized it was because Wedge was going in.

“Tighten it up, Deuce.” Wedge’s X-wing plunged through the smoke. “Mynock, make sure Control is getting a topo-scan of this trench.”

The smoke cleared almost instantly, showing him a bristle of shattered volcanic rock a dozen meters off each wing.
Wide enough for the bombers, but not much room for error
. He nudged his throttle forward, distancing himself from the Y-wings following in his ion wash, and emerged from the split rock faster than any prudent pilot would have flown.

The laser shots from a quartet of TIE starfighters illuminated the air behind him as he came into the crater beneath the shield’s protective dome. He immediately inverted and dove toward the base of the crater. Wind whistled from the S-foils. He rolled 180 degrees, filling his cockpit canopy with sky and pulled back on his stick to level the X-wing out.

The astromech behind him shrieked a warning.

“I know, I have two eyeballs on my tail.” In the
vacuum of space the presence of two TIEs behind him would have been very serious because their superior maneuverability made them difficult to shake. In atmosphere, however, their less-than-aerodynamic design and the turbulence produced by their twin engines’ exhaust meant they had significant yaw problems. This made them no less deadly in a dogfight, but it did open up a myriad of strategies for dealing with them.

“Deuce, help here.”

“On my way.”

Bror’s voice crackled through Wedge’s helmet. “Three, on me. I have them.”

Okay, time for me to gouge at least one of the eyeballs
. Wedge brought the left wing up at forty-five degrees, then feathered his throttle back. The lessened thrust and atmospheric drag slowed him enough that his X-wing slid fifty meters down and twenty to the right.

The TIE pilot tried to follow him and remain at his back, but the hexagonal wings killed the sideslip. The drag slowed the TIE considerably, and it started to dip toward the jungle carpeting the crater floor. The pilot did the only thing he could to avoid a stall and crash. Diving his ship, he picked up speed and shot ahead of Wedge’s X-wing, but not so far in front to allow Wedge to sideslip left and come in behind.

Not that I wanted to do that anyway
. Wedge punched the left rudder pedal down and slewed the fighter’s stern around to the right. Goosing the throttle straightened the ship out, then Wedge’s crosshairs spitted the TIE and burned green. He hit the trigger and the quad lasers converged to blow bits of TIE fighter all over the Grand Isle landscape.

“Vaped one.”

He saw a smoking TIE slam into a crater wall. “You’re clear, Leader.”

“Thanks, Deuce. Report, Three.”

Nawara Ven’s voice seemed tinged with some disgust. “Four got a pair. Island is blind to my sensors.”

“Rogue Leader to Control, Champion is clear to run.”

“Relaying that message now. Nine sends thanks for the feed.”