Wraith Squadron (3 page)

Most of his shots hit the ground. One missed his intended target but vaped its wingman. Two more shots hit their intended targets, one shearing off a wing and sending the fighter spinning into the nearest volcanic mountainside, the other having no immediate effect Donos could see—but the TIE fighter ceased all evasive maneuvering, its flight path becoming an easy-to-calculate ballistic curve. Donos almost smiled: It had been a surgical strike, the pilot killed by a beautiful shot straight into the cockpit, leaving the rest of the fighter craft unharmed.

His assault had its desired effect. The oncoming cloud of TIEs spread out and he shot through the gap in the center of their formation. They wheeled, an angry insect cloud, to follow, but now the TIEs pursuing Twelve into the rugged terrain below were in sight. Donos continued firing, vaping one starfighter before the others knew he was upon them; that fighter’s wingman, startled by the sudden explosion, reflexively banked rightward, directly into the side of the rift in which they were flying. His fighter also detonated, filling the rift with flame and shrapnel.

Donos dropped into the rift, pulling out of his dive just before he could scrape his keel on the ground. He had stone formations to either side of him—black rock so blurry from his speed that he could make out no details. “Leader to Twelve, report condition,” he said.

“Minor damage to lower port strike foil,” she answered. “It’s giving me a little vibration, which should go away if we can get out of atmosphere. Some starring on the canopy. Pursuit is hanging back—Wait, here comes one! He’s trying to get a lock on me!”

Donos put on more speed, increasing the risk that he would not be able to make some difficult turn ahead. He
whipped around a bend in the rift and almost slammed into the ion engines of a slow-moving TIE fighter immediately ahead. He snapped off a laser shot out of reflex, saw it lance straight into the starfighter’s starboard engine.

The TIE fighter instantly became a glowing fireball of yellow and orange flame and debris. Donos’s X-wing rocked as he roared through the fireball; his helmet and hull were barely sufficient to keep the sound of the explosion from deafening him. Then he was through.

One more turn, a tight starboard bank that almost flung him into the rock wall to port, and he had Twelve in sight. Twelve, and the vehicle pursuing her—the interceptor that had led them into this trap. This was the first time Donos had seen it visually, and he fleetingly noted the nonstandard red stripes painted horizontally on the starfighter’s wing arrays before something else occurred to him: there were no sparks or smoke plumes emerging from its engines now. With the deception done, all the false signs of the interceptor’s weakness had been shut off.

The interceptor had crept up to within meters of Twelve’s aft end and was now skillfully matching all of the X-wing pilot’s frantic maneuvers. This was a demonstration of superior flying technique, a show of contempt by one pilot for his enemy, and there was no doubt that the interceptor could begin firing on the defenseless Twelve at any second.

Donos fired off a desperate snap-shot. At the same moment, the interceptor took its kill shot.

Donos saw his lasers strike and play across the interceptor’s main body, slashing across the engines and burning into the cockpit.

The interceptor’s lasers intersected at Twelve’s X-wing, hitting her aft shields in spite of her desperate maneuvers … and then they penetrated. Both of Twelve’s starboard engines flamed out. The starboard strike foils, softened by the lasers’ intense heat, began to deform under atmospheric friction.

The interceptor slowed. Sparks and flame, real ones now, issued from the engines. It rose, jumping out of the rocky rift, and was immediately lost to Donos’s sight.

Twelve’s X-wing began a portward roll. Donos’s next command was half a shout: “Twelve, bail out! Twelve, eject!”

“Ejecting now! Leader, get out of here!”

Donos watched helplessly as Twelve’s cockpit filled with the fire of an ejection thruster, but the canopy failed to open. The ejector seat smashed Twelve into it. Its transparisteel construction kept the canopy in one piece as the X-wing continued to rotate to port. Under continued pressure from the thrust of the ejection seat, the cockpit finally broke away from the X-wing, but Twelve sat limp in the seat as the ejection seat carried her mere meters from the doomed snubfighter, slamming her into the rift wall to port. In a split second she was gone, lost behind Donos, and her X-wing was nosing over to crash into the rift wall below.

Donos forced himself to look away, to return his mind to mission parameters.

A few minutes of terrain-following flying and he should be able to jump free of these rifts and head for space. But suddenly the prospect of survival didn’t appeal much to him.

Donos’s R2 shrieked at him. Startled back to attention, he looked around, saw that a pair of TIE fighters had gained on him during his reverie.

He could stay and be killed, or flee and describe his failure to his commanders in cruel, humbling detail.

He’d prefer to die. But the families of eleven good men and women deserved to know how their loved ones had met their fates. With an anguished cry, Donos hit the thrusters again and rounded the next turn.

2

The New Republic guard, his face as emotionless as a ferrocrete bunker, admitted Wedge to the office. Within, the walls were a soothing blue, the furniture smooth and rounded with colors of the sea, the air cool but uncomfortably moist. Still, Wedge was back in New Republic uniform, and that alone made him more comfortable than the office’s environment conditioner could have.

Behind the desk, Admiral Ackbar, commander in chief of the New Republic’s military operations, returned Wedge’s salute. Like other Mon Calamari, with their outsized heads and rubbery skins, he looked to most people like a bipedal and intellectual fish, but Wedge knew him to be far more humane and courageous than many who fought for the New Republic.

Ackbar gestured toward the visitors’ chairs. “Commander Antilles. Please, sit. Is it too humid for you? I can make adjustments.”

“Not at all.” Wedge took the seat indicated. “Thank you for making time in your schedule for me so soon.”

“It is not an imposition.” Ackbar leaned closer, focusing on Wedge, his two widely separated eyes sometimes moving
independently. “I see no signs of hangover on you, Commander. Must I conclude that you did not celebrate adequately?”

Wedge smiled. “Very adequately. Meeting old friends and new, old Rogues and new, and telling stories until we couldn’t string two words together. But I left the heavy drinking to the younger pilots.”

“Wise of you. Younger pilots. I notice I did not recognize all their names.”

“Rogue Squadron is catching up from attrition, sir. At the end of the Thyferran mission we were down a few pilots. Since then, we’ve brought our numbers up again. We’re still one pilot light, but Aril Nunb rejoined us temporarily for yesterday’s celebration.”

“I’m sure you will employ your customary skill in finding extraordinary replacements. Well, allow me the impatience of office. What brings you to me? Your message hinted at—what was it? ‘Recommendations for a new type of unit, particularly well suited to the search for Warlord Zsinj.’ ”

“That’s correct.” Warlord Zsinj, a onetime Imperial admiral still in possession of a Super Star Destroyer, an eight-kilometer warship capable of pounding a planetary surface flat, was now the New Republic’s most important military objective. His hit-and-run missions against New Republic sites were increasing in bold effectiveness and destructiveness, and the danger that he might assume Ysanne Isard’s role as the center of an Imperial resurgence was not an empty one. “I’d like to form a new X-wing group, sir.”

Admiral Ackbar’s mouth bent in an approximation of a smile. A learned behavior—Mon Calamari did not communicate amusement that way. But Ackbar was well versed in human body language. “Rogue Squadron is no longer good enough for you?”

“Rogue Squadron will
always
be good enough for me, sir. But in the last several years I’ve bumped repeatedly into a glaring weakness in our military. I’ve tried to address it before and want to try again.”

“Please elaborate.”

Wedge leaned back, settling in for a lengthy discussion.
“You’ll remember when I reorganized Rogue Squadron a few years back, I took the best pilots I could transfer or steal … but when it came down to choosing between pilots of equal skill, I always chose the one who had useful ground-based skills as well.”

“Yes. You wanted pilots who could also be commandos.”

“I got them. And they got quite a workout as commandos, especially in the liberation of Coruscant from the Empire and then of Thyferra from Ysanne Isard.”

Ackbar managed to smile again. “You have certainly justified our faith in your experiment. Rogue Squadron performed magnificently.”

“Thank you. Speaking for my men and women, I have to agree. But I’d originally thought that Rogue Squadron would be used opportunistically: a strike mission would reveal a ground-based weakness, and we’d have the training and supplies to go down and perform the necessary ground mission. The way it turned out, we keep landing full-fledged commando missions. So I think we need another commando X-wing squadron, one where we choose pilots so as to have a full range of intrusion and subversion skills. Rogue Squadron was designed as a fighter unit first, commando unit second; this time, I want to go the other way around.”

Admiral Ackbar’s expression, so far as Wedge could read it, was dubious. “Historically, we’ve had few problems coordinating the efforts of commandos on the ground and fighter pilots for aerial support.”

“I don’t agree. Commandos can communicate strike locations to the pilots, but the pilots still won’t have the familiarity with these locations that the intrusion team will. Commandos who’ve had their extraction plans busted might want to seize enemy spacecraft to escape; the way things stand, they can’t count on having enough pilots to make that escape, while commando-trained pilots could. Normal pilots follow orders and conform themselves to standard tactics—and should! But a commando X-wing unit might develop new tactics. New ways of mounting even ordinary raids and pursuits. New ways of anticipating assaults and ambushes.”

Ackbar abruptly leaned back from him, his eyes half closing; it looked to Wedge like a frown of concentration. “What made you say that?”

“Thinking about the subject on the long flight home, and during the time we were garrisoned on Thyferra before that,” Wedge said. “Even though the garrison assignment was cut short from the two months originally planned, it still gave me plenty of time to think.”

“You haven’t heard any news?”

“No, sir. About what?”

Ackbar shook his head. “Please go on.”

“Well, that’s actually about it. I can dress it up in a formal report for you. But one other thing I think is important—I can give you a unit like this for free.”

Ackbar snorted, the sound emerging as a series of rubbery pops. “Can you, now?”

“Yes, sir. First, the replacement Rogue Squadron is being disbanded, its pilots and X-wings being returned to their original units. Correct?”

“Correct.”

“So you’ll be issuing a dozen new X-wings to us, won’t you? To the original Rogue Squadron.”

“Why would we? Your X-wings are in functional shape, are they not?”

“Well, yes, but they’re not New Republic property any longer. They were sold to my second-in-command, Tycho Celchu, at the start of our operation against Thyferra. They’re his personal property, held in trust for all of us, until and unless he decides to vest ownership in their pilots.”

“How uncharitable of you. You could donate their use to the New Republic. I believe one of your pilots has been using his personal X-wing all along.”

“Yes, sir. Lieutenant Horn. And Tycho would be glad to loan his snubfighters to the New Republic, for the use of Rogue Squadron, if …”

“If the next dozen X-wings out of the factories are assigned to your new commando squadron.”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s blackmail. It’s unbecoming.”

“Most unconventional tactics are unbecoming until they succeed, Admiral. I direct your attention to the planet Thyferra …”

“Be quiet. There’s still the matter of pilots. Fresh out of the Academy, their training costing hundreds of thousands of credits apiece. That is not ‘free.’ ”

“No, sir. I don’t want new pilots. I want experienced ones.”

“Which is an even more significant expense.”

“No, sir, not with these pilots. I want pilots no one else wants. Washouts. Pilots staring court-martials in the face. Troublemakers and screwups.”

Ackbar stared as if he couldn’t believe his tympanic membranes. “In the name of the Force, Commander,
why
?”

“Well, some of them, of course, will be irredeemable. I’ll wash them out, too. Some of them will be good men and women who’ve screwed up one time too many, who know their careers are dead but would give anything for one more chance …”

“You’re more likely to get a proton torpedo up your engines than you are to get a functional squadron out of such pilots. The torpedo might be launched accidentally … but that’s no comfort to a widow.”

Wedge spread his hands, palms up, and smiled. “Problem solved. I’m not married.”

“I know you’re not. You know what I mean.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What would become of Rogue Squadron?”

“I’d be happy to remain in charge officially, but for all squadron activities, Captain Celchu is more than qualified to lead … and now that he’s been cleared of the formal charge of Corran Horn’s murder and the informal charge of being a brainwashed double agent, there shouldn’t be any responsible objection to his full return to duties. I’d return Lieutenant Hobbie Klivan to Rogue Squadron as second-in-command and take Lieutenant Wes Janson as my own second-in-command. Once the new squadron is established, of course, I’d hope to return to direct command of Rogue Squadron.”

“You’re committed to this idea, aren’t you?”

“Yes, sir.” Wedge considered what he was about to say. “Since the battle at Endor, the military’s public relations groups have represented Rogue Squadron as if we were the lightsaber of the New Republic. A bright, shiny weapon to cut down any dark Imperial holdovers who still stand against us. But, sir, not all battles call for lightsabers. Some of them are fought with vibroblades in back alleys. The New Republic needs those vibroblades too, and doesn’t have them.”