Rogue Squadron (44 page)

Corran punched his comm unit over to the frequency the freighter was using. “
Vengeance Derra IV
, this is Lieutenant Corran Horn of Rogue Squadron. Stop now. Stand by for boarding.”

The freighter did not even slow, much less stop. “Is there a problem, Lieutenant?”

Corran shifted the targeting crosshairs of his heads-up display over to lead the freighter, then sent a quad burst of red laser fire across the ship’s bow. “
Vengeance
, stand by
for boarding. There will only be a problem if you make one.”

“Standing by.”

The freighter began to roll to port, exposing its top toward Corran’s ship.
Not good
. “Five and Six, prepare proton torpedoes. Link fire and lock on the freighter.”

“Nine, they’ve done nothing.”

“Yet, Five, yet.”

Swinging up and around from the belly of
Vengeance
, four TIE starfighters raced in toward Corran’s X-wing. Without waiting for them to start shooting, he slapped the stick to the right and brought the fighter up onto its starboard S-foil. The TIEs started their own turns to port and began to dive, anticipating his escape maneuver. Corran punched his left foot on the etheric rudder pedal, skidding the stern of his ship to starboard, then shot off straight in the opposite direction from his pursuit.

“Nine, we have two TIE bombers deployed.”

“Five, fire on the
Vengeance
, then take the dupes. I’ve got the eyeballs. Let Borleias base know we have trouble.” He knew the Y-wings would have little trouble out-flying the dupes—pilot slang for the double-hulled bombers. If he could keep the TIEs occupied, they wouldn’t be in any position to harass the Y-wings. If the missiles the Y-wings launched at
Vengeance
were enough to take down the forward shields, the freighter’s captain would have to think about running, which would distract the TIE pilots, since without him, they were stuck in the Pyria system.

Lots of
ifs
there. Time to make some of them certainties
. He used a snap-roll to bring the fighter up on the starboard stabilizer again, then dove into a long loop that took him down to where
Vengeance
’s bulk hid him from the TIEs. Rolling his ship and applying some rudder, he arrowed straight in at the freighter. This put him in position to watch as the quartet of proton torpedoes launched by the Y-wings nailed the ship’s bow. Each missile exploded against the shields like a star going nova.

The astromech droid whistled up a requiem for
Vengeance’
s bow shield.

Corran tightened on the trigger and sent a quad burst of fire toward the ship’s bridge. Without waiting to see if it hit or did damage, he barrel-rolled to port, moving toward the middle of the freighter, and pulled back on the stick to bring the fighter’s nose up. His targeting crosshairs hung just above the horizon of the freighter’s hull.

A TIE starfighter, shying from the series of explosions against the forward shield, streaked over the freighter’s edge and right into his sights. Corran triggered a quad shot that caught the eyeball on the port side quadanium steel armored solar panel, slicing the hexagon into a dozen or more pieces. A secondary explosion suggested a failure in one of the ion engines that the fighter’s subsequent careening off through space confirmed.

Corran rolled up on the left stabilizer foil and drifted to port for a heartbeat before snapping over onto the starboard S-foil and hauling back on the stick. The maneuver allowed him to evade the fire coming in from
Vengeance’
s lasers. It also put him on the vector the TIE had used coming in over the freighter’s hull. Adding a bit more to the starboard roll and pulling back on stick again took him out past the ship’s damaged bow and let him swoop in on the tail of another TIE.

The eyeball broke back left, but Corran rolled his ship through a corkscrew that kept him on target. He fired twice. The first quad shot missed, but the second tagged the ball cockpit full on. The lasers blew through the engine, then an explosion ripped the fighter apart. Corran dove into and flew through the expanding ball of incandescent gas, then rolled and dove again.

“Five, report.”

“One dupe dead, one sleeping.”

Corran laughed aloud. “Nice shooting, Five. Good thinking.” The Y-wing pilots had shown the presence of mind to engage one of the bombers while using their ion cannons. The weapons were inferior in power to lasers,
but they had the advantage of knocking out a ship’s electronics by overloading the electrical system. The ion cannons could render a ship inoperable, allowing the pilot to be picked up later.

Chances are, though, this Imp pilot will kill himself to avoid capture. Still, the ship might teach us something
.

“Nine, the freighter is turning to run. Do you want help with the eyeballs?”

“Negative, Five.”

Whistler scolded him with a harsh blatty sound.

“It’s not that I think I’m that good, Whistler, it’s that I know they aren’t.” Refusing assistance to deal with enemies that outnumber you was usually ascribed to unending egotism or terminal stupidity, but Corran had a third reason in mind. The Y-wing pilots, while enthusiastic and decently trained, were insufficiently experienced in dogfighting to be much help to him. If they entered the fight, he’d have to worry about hitting them. Without their intervention, his only possible targets were Imperial ships, and that fact gave him some freedom.

“Nine, we’ll take
Vengeance.
”

“Negative, Five, definitely negative.”
If they go in on the freighter it will pick them apart
. “Hang off there and try for torp locks on the TIEs.”

Glancing at his sensor displays, he marked the positions of the Y-wings, then rolled his ship and dove. Angry green laser bolts slashed through the blackness in front of him, but neither of the TIEs’ shots hit. The sensors reported the last two eyeballs had just pulled through a crisscross maneuver and were looping up and around to make another pass on him. That told him the last two pilots were good enough to have survived more than one fight in their ships.

They rolled through their double-helix maneuver and Corran shot through the center of their spiral. Rolling out to the right he cut in front of one, inviting a hastily snapped shot. The TIE pilot took it, splashing lasers against the X-wing’s aft shield. Ignoring Whistler’s shrill
shriek, Corran reinforced the rear shield, then rolled and began a dive.

The eyeball rolled and started after him. Corran chopped his throttle back, then rolled and dove sharply. He remained in the dive for a couple of seconds, then rolled again and climbed. Rolling back out onto his original course, he popped in behind the TIE that had previously been on his tail and took a shot of his own.

The eyeball juked at the last second, so the four laser bolts only clipped the top of one of the solar panels. The TIE starfighter began to whirl away, but it never exploded. Damaged as the ship was, it would be an easy target to follow and finish, but the last TIE sprayed laser fire against the X-wing’s shields, giving Corran a more immediate threat to deal with.

Because it was coming in from the left, Corran rolled right, then cruised down through a diving turn that aimed him back along its inbound course. The TIE looped up, then rolled and came down through an inverse loop to cut across Corran’s tail. Corran let the X-wing sideslip right, but not before the eyeball had taken a shot at him. Whistler screamed, then a bank of lights started flashing on the fighter’s command console.

Sithspawn! My shields are down
. Corran stomped on the right rudder pedal, swinging the X-wing’s nose in that direction, then rolled up on the port stabilizer and pulled back on the stick. As the ship started to climb, another snap-roll to the left broke it off at right angles to the climb and away from pursuit. “Whistler, get the shields back up, fast.”

A counter appeared on his main screen and began counting down from one and a half minutes.

“Not good, not good at all.”

The major advantage an X-wing had over a TIE starfighter was shields. The two fighters matched each other in speed and the TIE actually had the edge in maneuverability. Shields allowed the X-wings to survive more hits during a fight, and in dogfighting, the goal was surviving to the end and beyond. Corran felt he could
outfly the TIE pilot, but engaging in combat while naked was not something that made him feel at all confident.

He punched the throttle to full and pushed the fighter through a series of twists and loops that carried it away from the TIE, but no closer to the Y-wings. Time seemed to be passing very slowly to Corran, with each second on the counter seeming to take a minute to click off. The TIE pilot seemed content to circle around, trying to close with Corran, then he broke off and streaked in toward the Y-wings, coming up from beneath them.

“Heads up, Five. Invert, you have incoming.”

The Y-wings executed the flip in good order as Corran allocated power that would have normally gone to shields over to propulsion. That provided him a bit more speed, which let him close the gap with the eyeball.

“Nine, I have missile lock.”

“Shoot, Six, shoot.”

The Y-wing let a proton torpedo go at point-blank range, but it shot past the eyeball and would have hit the X-wing had Corran not rolled fast. “Break outside, Champions!”

The Y-wing pilots complied with Corran’s order, but did so slowly. The TIE spun in on Champion Five, pouring verdant laser bolts into its shields. The Y-wing pilot continued his roll and dive, and the TIE corrected to follow him, allowing himself to fly a level arc as he pursued his quarry.

You’re mine, now
. Corran eased back on his stick, millimeter by millimeter centering the Imperial fighter on his targeting crosshairs.

Whistler shrilled a warning.

Behind me? Who?
He glanced at his sensors and saw the other TIE closing in on him and he wanted to break away.
Can’t, Five is history if I do
.

Corran hit his trigger, tracking ruby energy darts along the TIE’s flight path. Even as he saw the lasers hit the eyeball’s wings and cockpit, he braced for the other TIE’s lasers burning through his ship. He saw his target
explode and knew, as green laser bolts scythed down toward his ship, he was a dead man.

He prepared himself for nothingness.

He was not wholly disappointed.

Nothing happened.

Corran rolled left and climbed. “Find him, Whistler.”

The droid gave back a negative report.

“What about
Vengeance
?”

Whistler reported it had gone to lightspeed.

At least we’re clear there
. Corran felt a shiver run down his spine. His left hand rose up and, through the fabric of his flight suit, touched a gold medallion he wore.
It appears all my luck has not run out
.

“Five, Six, what happened to the other eyeball?”

“I got him, Nine.”

“With what, Six?”

“The missile I launched.”

It took Corran a second to make sense of the reply, then he remembered the missile that had almost hit him as he had come in on the TIE starfighter. “Six, you were aiming at the
second
TIE?”

“Yes, sir, Lieutenant. Did I do something wrong?”

Corran wanted to yell at him about choosing targets that have a higher threat factor—by virtue of being closer and, therefore, more likely to hit their target—but he stopped before he gave in to temptation. “Not wrong, Six, but it could have been more right.”

“Yes, sir,” came a sheepish reply that remained full of nervous energy. “Next time, sir.”

“Yeah, at least we can all be thankful there will be a next time.”

Whistler tootled triumphantly as the X-wing’s shields came back up.

Corran smiled. “Yes, I do appreciate your shaving seven seconds off the estimate, Whistler.” He keyed his comm unit. “Five, Six, mark the coordinates of your sleeping dupe, then we head in. We’ll have reports to fill out but the fact that we
can
fill them out means this has been a very good day.”

THE OLD REPUBLIC
 (5,000–33 YEARS BEFORE
STAR WARS: A NEW
HOPE
)

Long—
long
—ago in a galaxy far, far away … some twenty-five thousand years before Luke Skywalker destroyed the first Death Star at the Battle of Yavin in
Star Wars: A New Hope
 … a large number of star systems and species in the center of the galaxy came together to form the Galactic Republic, governed by a Chancellor and a Senate from the capital city-world of Coruscant. As the Republic expanded via the hyperspace lanes, it absorbed new member worlds from newly discovered star systems; it also expanded its military to deal with the hostile civilizations, slavers, pirates, and gangster-species such as the slug-like Hutts that were encountered in the outward exploration. But the most vital defenders of the Republic were the Jedi Knights. Originally a reclusive order dedicated to studying the mysteries of the life energy known as the Force, the Jedi became the Republic’s guardians, charged by the Senate with keeping the peace—with wise words if possible; with lightsabers if not.

But the Jedi weren’t the only Force-users in the galaxy. An ancient civil war had pitted those Jedi who used the Force selflessly against those who allowed themselves to be ruled by their ambitions—which the Jedi warned led to the dark side of the Force. Defeated in that long-ago war, the dark siders fled beyond the galactic frontier, where they built a civilization of their own: the Sith Empire.

The first great conflict between the Republic and the Sith Empire occurred when two hyperspace explorers stumbled on the Sith worlds, giving the Sith Lord Naga Sadow and his dark side warriors a direct invasion route into the Republic’s central worlds. This
war resulted in the first destruction of the Sith Empire—but it was hardly the last. For the next four thousand years, skirmishes between the Republic and Sith grew into wars, with the scales always tilting toward one or the other, and peace never lasting. The galaxy was a place of almost constant strife: Sith armies against Republic armies; Force-using Sith Lords against Jedi Masters and Jedi Knights; and the dreaded nomadic mercenaries called Mandalorians bringing muscle and firepower wherever they stood to gain.