Starfighters of Adumar (29 page)

“People of Adumar,” he said. “That’s the phrase I have to use to address you, because it’s not appropriate to refer to you by the nations of your birth. Today you’re flying as pilots of your world, with the goal of keeping personal greed and ambition from ruining your world.

“Today, from this base and countless others, we’re going to lift off and form the greatest air force your world has ever seen—except one. The forces of Cartann are greater. They’re bigger. So to defeat them, we’re going to have to be better. Here’s how we’re going to do that.

“Every pilot you line up in your weapon brackets is someone concerned with what he’s going to get out of this conflict. How he’s going to profit. Most plan to profit in the accumulation of honor. Honor bought with your blood.

“That pilot is thinking about himself. You’re not going to do that. You’re going to stay focused on your objective. Don’t permit yourself to think about personal
duels, about the accolades you’re going to receive. Don’t respond to challenges or personal remarks from the enemy; they don’t deserve your answer. Don’t worry about becoming heroes. The moment you committed yourself to defeating your enemy, at the possible cost of your own lives, you became heroes. That part is done. Now we move on to something more important.

“Focus on your enemy. How he moves. How he fires. What he must be thinking. Where his thoughts will take him. Shoot both at him and at where he’s going. Fight now and a few moments in the future. That gives you the chance to kill him twice. That gives you twice as many guns as he has. And that’s the only way you’re going to win.

“If you let your thoughts stray from your enemy, focus them on what’s waiting for you at home. Not the adulation. The wives, the husbands, the children, the parents. If we fail, they will be defenseless before the forces of Cartann. That should be enough to put your concentration back where it belongs … on the enemy.

“It’s time to go. I salute you, Adumar.” He paused, then said it again: “Adumar.”

A moment later, the nearest fringe of people, including Tycho and Iella, took it up as a chant: “Adumar. Adumar. Adumar.” It rolled across the assembled air armada, gaining in strength and volume.

Wedge let it go only for a few moments, only long enough for every one present to be caught up in it. Then he nodded to Tycho. Tycho thumbed his own comlink, and suddenly the air was split with the sound of a keening siren.

Like an insect mound suddenly disturbed by a giant intruder, the air base abruptly became a sea of running bodies as pilots returned to their fighters, mechanics scrambled to get last-second details in order, flight workers rushed to get late-arriving missiles loaded into aircraft.

Wedge stepped down to the duracrete. Iella came up
to him. “You understand,” she said, “if you let yourself get hurt, it’s going to go very badly for you. I’ll make you regret it.”

“I had that figured out,” he said.

She waited as if hoping for him to say something more. The smile she gave him was an uncertain one. “That’s Wedge. So honest he can’t even reassure me.”

He looked around to make sure no one was close enough to hear. “Here’s some reassurance,” he told her. “Two reasons why I’m not going to let anything happen to me. One: I’m the best there is. Two: I finally have someone to come back to.”

She wrapped herself around him. “Don’t forget that.”

“I won’t.”

“I have to get to my station.”

He kissed her, then watched her run—or perhaps flee—toward the large aircraft that was her assignment for the mission. It was built like a spoke-and-wheel space station whose every joining of spoke and wheel was a spherical sensor array.

He climbed back up to his cockpit. His mechanic, a middle-aged woman whose face was striped, tattoolike, with Blade-32 greases, was astride the fuselage, just behind the cockpit, dogging down the rear of the canopy with a hydrospanner. “How’s it look, Grembae?” he asked.

“They gave you the best,” she said. “And it’s in as fine a shape as I can make it.”

His helmet lay in the pilot’s seat. He picked it up to put it on, then noticed the decorations upon it. Recently dried paint in gold on the dark red surface showed up as a succession of delta-shaped wedges, the decorative motif Wedge had added to most of the helmets he’d worn throughout his career. “Who did this?” he asked.

“My son,” she said. “A mechanic on my team. Your lady said you’d like it.”

“My lady.” He put the helmet on, cinched it under his chin. “My lady.” The words weren’t new to him, but they were in a new combination, a configuration that had never meant anything to him before. He decided he liked them.

He levered himself into the pilot’s chair. “She was right. Thanks, Grembae.”

12

They rose from the Yedagon City air base, hundreds strong, fighters and bombers and fortresses and aircraft of all colors and description, and they were only one group of several involved in this all-out assault on Cartann and her satellite nations. One of the Blade units moving ahead of the group as a skirmish line was Running Crimson Flightknife, now being led by Wedge and Tycho.

This was a much faster flight than Wedge’s departure from Cartann, and much more agreeable—it had just felt wrong to be in a vehicle he wasn’t piloting. He watched moonlit forest tops and cultivated fields flash by beneath him. It was oddly peaceful, despite the fact that he was at the spearpoint position of hundreds of engines of war, for there was no comm chatter.

A few klicks from the Cartann border, the lightboard offered up a throbbing noise, indicating that he’d been hit by a lightbounce from ahead. Wedge nodded. That would be a border sensor installation. As the noise continued, Wedge got a fix on it with his lightboard. He
looped away from the Running Crimson formation with Tycho tucked in beside him and headed straight for the source of the lightbounce signals.

The enemy sensor operators tried to save their installation: The lightbounce signals cut off. But the installation’s coordinates were already locked into the Blade-32’s computers. Wedge brought it up on his sensor board and designated those coordinates as the sole target. He armed his lasers, and as soon as the sensor board solidified the lasers’ targeting brackets, he fired. He saw his lasers and Tycho’s flash down into the forest below, and some hard target erupted into flaming explosion.

On the way back, they took a closer look. They’d hit a squarish bunker, perhaps fifteen meters on a side, and it was burning fiercely. Elaborate sensor gear on top was now char and slag. Satisfied, Wedge headed back to rejoin Running Crimson Flightknife.

All down the line, other members of the advance screen of Blades would be doing the same thing. They couldn’t conceal their own approach to Cartann, but they could—if they hit enough sensor stations, and hit them early enough—conceal the size of the force approaching the enemy nation. The military forces of Cartann would have to go to an extra effort to get an idea of what was assaulting them.

Ahead, the sky was growing lighter. Wedge checked his chrono. The operation was still on schedule. And it was midday on the
Allegiance;
he supposed that the Star Destroyer’s sensor crews would be having an interesting day of observation.

Minutes later, with the lightness in the east broadening and climbing, comm silence was finally broken. “Group One Leader, this is Eye Three.” It was Iella’s voice. “Electrocution Death Flightknife, at the extreme north edge of the group, reports an assault by a squad of Cartannese Blades. The furball’s still continuing, but a unit of
Scythe
-class bombers tracked the enemy back to
their base, a previously unknown one, and are pounding it flat. They say they caught another squadron on the ground.”

Wedge looked northward. He could see distant, tiny flashes, and he wished luck to the members of Electrocution Death. “Thanks, Eye Three.”

Minutes later, his lightboard lit up with signs of incoming squadrons—lots of them. They approached from north and south, from the major Cartannese cities in those directions.

Standard Cartannese tactics, had this just been a fighter raid, would have been to veer toward one or the other force, whichever seemed more prestigious, and engage it, with the hope of dispatching it before the other caught up … but Group One continued straight on its course, which led straight to the great city of Cartann. In minutes, those two Cartann units’ lightboards would detect Groups Five and Twelve headed straight for their respective cities, and would be torn between the need to pursue Group One and to defend their cities. Wedge grinned. Cartannese society seemed to be tooled to keeping its people from having to address difficult questions. He planned to present them with quite a few more before this day was done.

“Eye Three to Red Leader. Main force detected from Cartann City air bases. Forming up and heading this way. Estimated strength twenty squadrons and growing.”

“Thanks, Eye.” That meant the enemy strength in fighters was already equal to Wedge’s. “How’s our pursuit?”

“Still pursuing. Groups Five and Twelve should just now be reaching their respective cities’ lightbounce range.”

“Acknowledged. Red Leader out.”

The enemy would appear on the lightboard, Wedge knew, as a ragged line of tiny bright blips, each representing an enemy formation. As they neared, the blips would
grow, gradually breaking down into clouds of dots representing individual fighters. And that’s exactly how it happened, moments later. That’s all Wedge would see until they were much closer; the enemy would be flying at them out of the rising sun, which was already peeking above the horizon.

Wedge lowered the goggles on his helmet. Yes, it was a disadvantage to fly into the sunlight. But it was a momentary disadvantage; as soon as the two forces broke up into individual dogfights, everybody would be at equal disadvantage. And the Cartann pilots’ disadvantage, being too quickly roused after too short a night of sleep, would linger.

When the enemy force was about sixty seconds from distant firing range, when enemy squadrons were beginning to diffuse into individual enemy fighters, Wedge switched his comm board over to group frequency. “Red Leader to Group. Forward screen, slow to one-third to allow main body to catch up. North Horn, South Horn, begin your move into position. All other flightknives, slow to one-half standard cruise velocity and maintain formation.”

He heard acknowledgments from the two horn formation leaders. On his lightboard, he saw the group’s formation change shape. The leading edge, a thin line of fighters, dropped back until it was absorbed into the leading edge of the main body, an inverted triangle. The two leading corners of the triangle stretched forward, suggesting a pair of horns. Ahead, the roughly oval formation of Cartannese fliers continued toward them, not yet adjusting for the appearance of the horns, which would be to either side of them within seconds.

By squinting, and with polarization increased as high as it would go on his goggles, he could see traces of the oncoming force, little black dots at the heads of needle-thin white contrails.

Then specks of fire rose with blinding speed from the
forest. As they reached the heart of the Cartann force, they expanded out into ball-shaped clouds of fire.

Wedge jolted. That was Hobbie and Janson’s force, Blastpike Flightknife, sent on ahead to do just this thing—and Wedge, nearly overwhelmed by other planning details, had all but forgotten about them. He saw the Cartann force begin to mill, with whole squadrons spiraling down toward the source of the missiles … missiles that kept rising into the group.

Wedge said, “North Horn, South Horn, that’s your cue. Close and fire. Main group, advance. As you close, break by flightknives and fire at will.” He accelerated back to cruise speed as, ahead, the first laser and missile crossfire by the two horn formations began.

He switched his targeting system back on and it immediately began howling at him, a wavering cry as distant targets flashed into and out of his brackets. He switched to missiles and fired every time the musical tone suggested a clean lock. Ahead, the Cartann force looked like the intersection of four sets of target practice, but lasers and missiles were now pouring back out of the cloud of enemy fighters. Wedge was rocked when a Blade to his port, Running Crimson-3, detonated; the blast buffeted Wedge and drove him meters to starboard before he recovered.

Then the two forces met, blurred into one wide-ranging engagement, clear distinctions no longer possible between them.

Wedge caught sight of an incoming Blade-32, on what looked like a collision course with him. He switched to lasers, fired, then looped to port, diving to get out of the madman’s flight path. His sensor board howled that he was in an enemy’s targeting brackets; he continued the dive, flashing between two enemy Blades, and the howl cut off. He began to pull up. Behind him, the sensors showed one of the two Blades he’d passed between now
stitched with laser fire, its port side opened by a blast; the Blade was shaking violently as air hammered its way into the now-unaerodynamic vehicle.

His wingman was no longer beside him. “Tych?”

“Busy, boss.”

Wedge said “Tycho” into the microphone of his targeting board. One blip on the lightboard began to blink. It was half a kilometer above him, directly between two enemy Blades. Wedge climbed.

He could pick out Tycho and the man’s enemies, even against the dark sky, by the flashes of light between them. Tycho was in pursuit of a Blade, being pursued by another, and was sending laser fire in both directions, meanwhile slewing about in evasive action.

Wedge rose, caught the lead Blade in his targeting brackets, ignored it. He let his brackets flash back across Tycho and to the pursuit Blade. He opened fire, his first barrage of lasers missing the vehicle, his second chewing through its stern fuselage.

The tough Blade-32 did not explode, but its stern dropped away. The vehicle rolled, out of control. Wedge saw the canopy tear free and the pilot punch out a moment later. Wedge grinned; he must also have wiped out the repulsorlift system, else that pilot could have brought the Blade down to a safe landing.