Solo Command (44 page)

Red lights flashed across more portions of
Mon Remonda’
s diagnostics display.

The numbers on the gauge showing the distance between
Mon Remonda
and
Iron Fist
slowed their rapid descent. The numbers stopped and then began climbing.

Mon Remonda
was falling behind.

Lara’s sensor board had shown the Rogues and Wraiths descending into Selcaron’s atmosphere, and the ten strange TIEs she pursued did likewise. She entered the moon’s atmosphere at the angle necessary to keep air friction from burning her alive, then set her S-foils to attack position.

When she broke through the cloud cover she could see, ahead and below, the unusual fighters split up by pairs, most heading to the main engagement, four vectoring to the south.

Her sensor board said Rogue One, Rogue Two, and one unfriendly lay in that direction. Then it updated and only Rogue One and the unfriendly were left.

She looped around to the south and dropped nearly to the surface of the water.

Janson hit his trigger and the distant TIE interceptor detonated in a brilliant flash, leaving behind one of the hundred-meter-diameter fireballs the Rogues and Wraiths were coming to expect. The jamming technique had been a spectacular success—this unit
of droids and humans had been trained to function under coordination and fell to pieces without that benefit. In the first thirty seconds, the Rogues and Wraiths had reduced the number of interceptors by half. Then they sustained a one-minute jamming period … and the last of the interceptors had now fallen to Janson.

The communications jamming fell away. “Group, Wraith Eight. We have incoming traffic descending from high altitude from the east-northeast.”

Janson veered in that direction and climbed. Yes, there were more starfighters coming in.

He gave them a second look. “What in the world are those?”

Wedge swung his legs over the lip of his cockpit and slid with reckless haste to the ground. He drew his blaster and moved at a full run across the sand toward Baron Fel.

Fel, evidently injured, was crawling at a good pace away from his smoking interceptor. Fel was not in a traditional TIE fighter pilot’s gear; the black jumpsuit was standard, but the red featureless mask, gloves, and boots, and the poisonous yellow piping on those accouterments were pure Raptor uniform.

Wedge reached him and prodded his boot with his toe. Fel rolled over on his back. His right leg did not turn the way it should have; Wedge could see it was badly broken beneath the knee.

Wedge aimed his blaster. “Mind answering a few questions?”

“Not at all.” Fel’s voice was muffled. He reached up to pull his helmet free.

Wedge blinked. The man under his gun had Fel’s height and build, but his blond hair and homely features were not Fel’s. “Who are you?”

The man offered him a pained smile. “My name is Tetran Cowall.”

“I know that name.” Wedge frowned. “Some sort of actor. Face Loran doesn’t think much of you.”

“That’s because he is my inferior in every way,” the man
said. His voice did not resemble Fel’s. It was higher in pitch, though melodious.

“You used computer voice enhancement to sound like Fel.”

“Very good.”

“Where is Fel?”

The man shrugged. “You should know. You had him last. Where was he when you last saw him?” He gave Wedge a smirk. “Really, we have no idea.”

“So this was all a ploy.” Wedge felt sudden exhaustion begin to eat at him. All these months, hoping that this man would have some word of his sister … and this man turned out to be the wrong one. “Why?”

Cowall slowly put his hands behind his head, a posture of relaxation and contentment that was belied by the sweat on his face and the odd angle at which his right leg lay. “Well, you, actually. Scuttlebutt had it that Fel had deserted you and that you’d taken it rather personally. Had arranged for him to be looked for since then. The warlord decided that his reappearance would be a mystery you just had to solve. He put together a new One Eighty-first. Half with human pilots, half with flying bombs that could sidle up next to you and detonate—making hash of the famous Wedge Antilles despite your overly vaunted skills.”

“So your only job was to lure me out and kill me.”

Cowall smiled. “And it worked.”

“Not exactly.”

Cowall pointed eastward. Wedge sidestepped to be sure he could keep the actor under his gun while he looked.

In the distance, two or three kilometers off, TIE fighters, their outlines unusual, were looping around from east to south, obviously intending to turn northward near or at the shoreline.

“TIE Raptors,” Cowall said. “New design, nice to fly. They’ll be on us in a few seconds. And you can’t get into the air by then. You’re dead, Wedge Antilles.”

For a quarter second, Wedge debated shooting the man, then sheathed the blaster and made a sprint for his X-wing. He heard the actor laugh behind him.

Cowall was right, of course. He could hear the distant shriek of the TIEs. They’d be in firing position about the time he was sliding into his cockpit.

He reached his X-wing, leaped up to swing himself in, dropped into his chair.

There were three incoming TIEs, and they were of a type he’d never seen before. They had the standard TIE ball cockpit, but lacked wing pylons. Instead, four trapezoidal wings, smaller than half the size of a regular TIE fighter’s wings, protruded from the cockpit at even intervals. They rolled to port to line up along the straight section of beach and came on, their engines shrill, a second from firing.

Then Wedge saw something blue flash over his head from behind and the center TIE exploded. The other two broke left and right, momentarily abandoning their run.

Wedge finished shutting his canopy and got his X-wing up on repulsorlifts. He had his S-foils locked into attack position before he’d drifted ten meters forward.

Another X-wing flashed by mere meters overhead. It was painted in the darker gray of Wraith Squadron and had no astromech. Wedge put power to acceleration and checked his sensor board. The X-wing wasn’t returning a transponder signal.

The X-wing looped in pursuit of one of the alien-looking TIEs, climbing in its wake. Wedge turned in the direction of the other, coaxing his X-wing up to speed. “Lara, is that you?”

“Sorry I was late.” She was banking hard, trying to get her X-wing around at an angle that could fire on her target. “Had to hit one of these weird TIEs that was trying to strafe a downed Rogue.”

“Tycho—is he—”

“He’s under cover now. Hopping mad, I think.”

“When you come around north, you may get crosswinds. He’ll get them worse. They may blow him back across your path. Hold tight.” Wedge turned after his target TIE Raptor, saw that the unusual vehicle was now looping around to get behind Lara. “I owe you, one,” he said.

“I owe
you
” she said. “I—there!”

The Raptor pilot hit a bad patch of crosswind and was
tumbled eastward. Lara fired, her lasers creasing the rear of the TIE.

A plume of smoke emerged from her target. The starfighter dropped tumbling into the sea, hitting with enough force to turn anything within it into something resembling jelly.

But the last Raptor dropped in behind Lara and began stitching her rear with laser fire. Wedge put all discretionary energy into acceleration, hurtling toward the engagement.

The TIE Raptor fired again. This was no laser—a concussion missile detonated just below Lara’s X-wing. Wedge saw her stern leap up, and then the X-wing was tumbling, unaerodynamic, slinging components in all directions as it dropped.

“Punch out, punch out,” Wedge said, but had no time to watch. He turned after the TIE Raptor.

That pilot tried an immediate roll to port, diving toward the water, a frantic effort to shake Wedge from his tail. Wedge flicked his targeting brackets back and forth but was unable to get a lock.

So he fired directly over the TIE Raptor’s hull, immediately above its top viewport.

The pilot dodged out of reflex.

Straight down.

The leading edges of its odd wings dipped into the surf. The TIE rolled forward, its wings breaking free and being flung into the air with more speed and violence than anything coming off Lara’s X-wing.

Wedge looped around, looking for Lara.

He found her X-wing fifty meters offshore. It was a twisted, broken thing, slowly rolling over from its belly onto its side.

He cruised over it at a slow rate of speed, running on repulsorlifts, and looked into the cockpit. Then he shook his head and banked back toward Tycho and the colony.

“On my command,” Piggy said, “Wraith Nine and Ten, begin straight-line flight but maintain evasive maneuvering. Rogue Three and Four, climb at a thirty-degree angle, target their pursuit, and fire. Ready … now.”

Two kilometers below him, Shalla and Janson discontinued their efforts to get around behind the unusual TIEs pursuing them. They accelerated into straightforward flight toward the west. Their pursuit accelerated, swinging into firing position behind them.

A kilometer below that, Pedna Scotian and Hobbie Klivian rose toward the engagement now passing above them. Piggy could tell the exact moment they acquired targeting locks: both pursuing TIEs suddenly wobbled in flight as their pilots were alerted to the danger they were in.

But it was too late. Both Rogues fired. Hobbie’s lasers sheared through the lower portion of one TIE’s forward viewport and continued cycling against that target. A moment later, Piggy saw his lasers emerge from above the TIE’s engines. The TIE hurtled forward ballistically for half a kilometer, then detonated.

Scotian’s lasers missed the second TIE. It veered abruptly upward. Shalla and Janson looped around in tight maneuvers and gave pursuit.

Piggy turned away from that engagement, looked again at the swirling colored dots on his sensor board. Flight vectors, acceleration rates, probabilities ran through his mind like unregulated data streams. He saw the blip designated Rogue One returning. That would begin to figure into his calculations in two minutes. He saw another blip, yellow for unknown, descend from low lunar orbit toward Wedge’s earlier engagement zone. He dismissed it. It wouldn’t factor into his equations until it came closer to his current engagement zone.

His comm system lit up, indicating reception of a recorded message. He glanced at the data portion of the screen. It was a lengthy message, flagged as low priority, going to all vehicles on New Republic frequencies. He dismissed it from his mind.

Numbers and formulae clicked into place in his mind. “Wraith Seven, two targets will be crossing over your space from the east in six-point-four seconds.” Dia, her fuzial thrust engines malfunctioning, was now running on repulsorlifts only; Face had directed her to stay under cover, and she now hovered within a half-ruined colony dome, able to swivel her guns toward any one of three large holes in the dome. “Wraith Five, please make your course due east and come up to full speed. You
should pull two of the new intruders … yes, you have.” Kell veered as Piggy had requested, momentarily abandoning his slower-moving wingman, and both new TIEs that had been lining up for a run on Wraiths Five and Six opted to pursue him. Kell blasted across Dia’s position and the lead TIE pursuing him was suddenly illuminated from the dome, painted and then penetrated by Dia’s lasers. It rolled, a deceptively pretty corkscrew, and then hit rubble that had once been a duracrete street.

Piggy started to speak again, then saw Kell’s TIE interceptor vector back at a sharp angle toward Runt’s position. Kell and Runt closed on one another as though they planned a head-to-head, but when Runt fired, it was Kell’s pursuit he hit. The unusual TIE fired, too, its concussion missile flashing past Kell and hitting a ruined wall, before Runt’s lasers punched through the TIE’s hull. It became, to Piggy’s eye, a tiny, pretty ball of red, yellow, and orange.

Piggy sat back and nodded to himself, satisfied. He loved math.

“We’re in open space, Warlord,” the captain announced.

Zsinj offered him a tight, unhappy smile. “Make your course directly toward
Second Death
. Instruct
Second Death
to deploy the Nightcloak in a channel long enough for us to make a hyperspace jump from. And to finish this masquerade, I’m going to have to stand by in a shuttle. The fleet is in your capable hands.”

“Yes, sir.”

In his shuttle bay, Zsinj and his pilot found his personal shuttle unharmed, but Melvar and Gatterweld were there in much less intact condition. Both men were tied, bleeding, unconscious.

He clucked over them but didn’t delay. Time was pressing. He called in a medical team as he and his pilot prepared the shuttle for flight.

“
Iron Fist
is outbound,” Onoma said. “And as much as the debris field is delaying us, we’re not going to be able to catch her.”

Solo looked at the damage diagnostics projections, which showed an ever-mounting damage total for
Iron Fist
. “Keep the starfighters on her. There’s a chance they can crack her open before she can jump. See, concentrate there on the forward top shield projector and the starboard engines. Both systems are faltering like mad. Her hyperdrive is damaged, too. There’s got to be a chance it will fail when activated.”

Mon Remonda’
s own damage totals were mounting, too. Numerous asteroid impacts had reduced her shields, battered her bow hull in several places, even vented atmosphere from portions of the bow near the keel. And
Iron Fist’
s starfighter screen had been insane in its prosecution of
Mon Remonda
.

But suddenly the enemy starfighters were running, fleeing in the wake of
Iron Fist
.

Solo sat, his muscles knotting, uncertainty burning at his gut. It didn’t matter that he and his force had just destroyed or captured the rest of Zsinj’s group. It didn’t matter that they’d survived each trap Zsinj had set, each ploy he had initiated. Nor did it matter that they’d sent
Iron Fist
fleeing for the second time in the mighty destroyer’s career.