Starfighters of Adumar (31 page)

But that was almost the only good news. As the leading edge of the engagement zone began to drift over the
western edges of Cartann, attrition was beginning to swing the tide of battle in Cartann’s favor. Despite the fact that Wedge’s tactics seemed to be keeping the united Adumari force focused, despite the fact that Adumari pilots and gunners were outfighting their enemies, the greatly superior numbers of Cartann defenders were taking their toll. Squadrons and partial squadrons were still lifting off from the city, doubtless composed of retired pilots and the aircraft they personally owned, and the Adumari force was growing low on fuel, owing to the hundreds of kilometers they’d had to cross before firing their first shots. Too, the three remaining TIE Interceptors were racking up a gruesome kill score, and had adjusted their strategy to head off the sort of mass-fire tactics Red Flight had employed against them. Any formation moving against them caused them to flash off at a new and unpredictable angle, making the TIEs impossible for the Blades to target and hit. It wouldn’t be too much longer before the attrition from the TIEs made the Adumari force too weak to have any chance at victory.

A two-seater Blade-30, the canopy over its rear gunnery position shattered and its fuselage patched from numerous previous military engagements, rose to join Red Flight. The gunner wore New Republic orange and gestured at Wedge, a thumbs-up.

“Welcoming Blastpike Ten to Red Flight,” Wedge said. “Pilot, be ready to fly low and evasive. We’re entering Cartann.”

“Understood, Red Flight.”

The four Blades broke away from the engagement zone and headed east over Cartann City … and the sky lit up like a celebration for them, as countless ground laser batteries unloaded their energy into the sky. Wedge and his pilots dove almost to rooftop level to give the enemy gunners less time to spot and track them. “Red Leader to Holdout.”

“Holdout here.”

“We’re inbound.” A bank of lasers cut in just to starboard of Wedge’s Blade. He felt heat from the flash of light, then his Blade rocked as the minor shock wave from expansion of superheated air hit him. The shock wave nearly slid him into Blastpike Ten, flying to his port; he corrected hastily.

“I’ll transmit your destination.” A moment later, a map of a portion of central Cartann City appeared on Wedge’s main display. He gave it a quick look. Their destination, marked by a blinking X, was only a block from the
perator
’s palace. He whistled.

Before he could comment, Cheriss continued, “The area is
very
heavily defended. You can see why. And we need you to do something. To arrive at a particular time … and shoot something.”

“Happy to oblige, Holdout.” Red Flight flashed over a street; below, he could see a standard repulsorlift transport, this one with a small laser battery permanently mounted in the bed. The operator pointed up at him but had no time to fire before Red Flight was safely over the rooftop. Wedge glanced at his main board; the map graphic now included a countdown.

The permanent and mobile laser batteries were becoming more numerous, and were better-advised of Red Flight’s course. Twice Wedge reacted to the body language of people on balconies, sending Red Flight into a sudden veer in a new direction, barely eluding a laser emplacement’s sudden fire from street level. He sent Red Flight on a more unpredictable and dangerous course, dipping down to street level and flying just above the mostly empty avenues, risking the cables but making it that much harder for laser batteries to get word of their path.

Only once were they threatened by fighters. A pair of older Blade-28s, classic machines lovingly maintained by their owners, dropped down behind Red Flight and opened up with lasers. Hobbie and Janson destroyed them with sustained rear laser fire. The ruins of their
Blade-28s, burning, arced down to crash into the streets. They slid to smash into building fronts. “Old men,” Janson reported, a catch in his voice. “Old men wearing big smiles.”

As they reached the royal and governmental quadrant of Cartann City, the defenses become more capable and more numerous. Laser batteries arose from pods within building tops and could swivel to target enemies from the skies to the streets below. Reluctantly, Wedge rose to rooftop level again so as to see the pop-up batteries before they could target him. Red Flight fired upon and were fired upon by twenty of the installations before he lost count, and Wedge’s Blade, though not even grazed, was so badly rocked by shock waves from laser blasts that he could hear mechanisms shattering within the craft.

Then it was before him, the gray, innocuous building beyond which was the
perator
’s palace. Laser batteries atop the palace tried to target him, but on this final portion of the run Wedge stayed down at street level, allowing the target building to shield him. Ahead, he saw hangar-style doors grinding open on the gray building, saw flashes of laser fire as men and women in dark, innocuous garments were fired upon by defenders within it.

A pair of laser batteries rose with breathtaking speed from within the gray building, turned to target Red Flight. All four Blades fired, three at the battery to port, Hobbie at the battery to starboard. The port battery exploded in a shower of sparks and fire. The starboard battery, though chewed and blackened by Hobbie’s lasers, continued to sweep around and orient toward them; Hobbie launched a missile instead and the installation detonated, leaving behind only rubble and smoke.

Now they only had small-arms fire to contend with; shooters atop the gray building and clustered on balconies all around poured blaster fire into the four Blades.
The impacts rang like off-key musical notes; Wedge felt as though a brigade of mechanics were hammering on his hull with hydrospanners, but the armored fuselage held up against the barrage. Still, there was an ominous new signal on the lightboard, a swarm of fighters and a pair of larger vehicles following them.

He descended on repulsorlifts to the duracrete just outside the hangar doors, intending to whirl around and present his missiles to their pursuers, but his comm unit kicked in with Cheriss’s voice. “Holdout to Red Flight, please come into the hangar.”

“We have incoming—”

“They’re ours. We need you in here.”

Wedge glided forward. As he crossed into the comparative darkness of the hangar, his goggles depolarized and he could see the building’s contents.

It was a spacious hangar, the duracrete floor meticulously clean, completely absent of the sort of lubricant spills he associated with a hangar that saw real use. He would have rated it as being spacious enough for two and a half to three squadrons of Blades, but there were only eight vehicles present: the four X-wings clustered against the back wall, toward the center, three Blade-32s lined up for quick departure to the left, and a brilliant gold Blade-28 all alone to the right.

The hangar’s living occupants included at least a dozen men and women in unmemorable dark clothing. There were dead occupants, too, six guards in the livery of the
perator
’s palace, lying motionless on the duracrete. The members of the Holdout invasion force clustered near the hangar doors, returning blaster fire against the balcony snipers across the avenue.

Cheriss stood near the fabulous gold Blade-28. She held a comlink in one hand and a blaster pistol in the other. “We need you to hit that with missiles before you go.” She pointed with the pistol to a bunkerlike cube of
duracrete in the right rear of the hangar, then fired on it to illuminate it better. Her blaster shot did no perceptible harm to the hardened metal door at the front of the bunker.

“Will do,” Wedge said. He gained a little altitude, putting his Blade halfway between floor and ceiling, and said, “Take cover.” He waited until Cheriss ran to what he estimated to be a safe distance, then targeted the bunker and let fly with a missile.

The shock wave rocked his Blade-32, but when the smoke cleared, the bunker was merely singed.

“That’s really reinforced, Cheriss.” Wedge armed both missile ports and carefully targeted the front of the metal door. “What’s behind it?”

“A tunnel … we think.”

He glided backward on his repulsorlifts until he was nearly at the exit once more, and incoming sniper fire hammered away at his rear fuselage. Red Three, Red Four, and Blastpike Ten set down on the far side of the hangar, near Cheriss.

Wedge fired again. The shock wave actually pushed him halfway out into daylight. But when the smoke cleared, the metal door was gone and the bunker’s ceiling was blown out. Wedge saw the roof lying atop one of the Cartann Blade-32s, which was now crushed.

Wedge’s sensors showed that pursuit flight arriving. He turned around to see them: A half-dozen Blades in Yedagon red, most of them thickly decorated with burn marks, several of them trailing smoke, came across the near rooftops and set down on the duracrete outside, spinning on their repulsors to land with their missiles faced outward.

“Gate, begin power-on sequence and run through the portions of the start-up checklist you can handle. Instruct the other astromechs to do likewise.” He waited for the astromech’s confirmation, then shut down most
power systems to his Blade-32. He raised his canopy manually and levered himself out to drop to the duracrete. The other members of Red Flight hurried to join him, but Cheriss reached him first. “What is all this?” he asked, and gestured at the destroyed bunker.

“When Gate broadcast the image of the inside of this hangar to us, we saw
that
.” She pointed to the gold Blade-28. “There’s only one Blade like it in existence. The Golden Yoke,
Perator
Pekaelic’s own Blade, in which he won his greatest military victories. If it’s here, this is the
perator
’s personal hangar … and you can be sure the
perator
is not going to be crossing the street and waving traffic to stop whenever he wishes to visit his favorite fighter.”

“Meaning that tunnel has to be a direct access …”

“To the palace itself. If we act fast enough, perhaps they won’t be able to array defenses against us like they have on the surface.”

Outside, a
Farumme
-class transport in Halbegardian blue settled down to the duracrete. Its front portions were afire. Side hatches opened and ground troops wearing the uniforms of Halbegardian elites poured out, streaming into the hangar in spite of the small-arms fire from the distant balconies. Ricochets flashed through the hangar sounding like bad musical notes when they hit metal, like meat sizzling when they hit duracrete.

“Good luck,” Wedge said. There wasn’t time for more. He hurried to his X-wing and its canopy rose for him.

It took moments to strap on the flak vest, systems controls, helmet and gloves, a ritual he could undertake in his sleep … and then he was behind the controls of his X-wing once more. “No time for full prep,” he said. “Be prepared to go unless you spot a critical failure. Red Leader has four lit and looking optimal.”

“Red Two. Four on-line, ready to fly.”

“Red Three. Anxious to show ’em what we can do.”

“Red Four. Four lit and in the green.”

Wedge’s sensor board howled, announcing an enemy target lock. He could see two black Blade-32s just coming over the horizon of buildings ahead of him. “Launch, S-foils to attack position, fire at will!” He rose on his repulsorlift, too fast and jerky, and saw incoming laser fire flash beneath him to strike the hangar wall. Flame erupted behind him. He couldn’t tell whether Cheriss or any of the troops there had gotten clear, and there was no time to wait and find out.

He kicked the X-wing forward, firing as his strike foils locked in attack formation and his targeting brackets flickered from yellow to green. He saw the red pulses of his quad-linked weapons flash toward the incoming Blades, hammering through the bow of one of them, chewing mercilessly through its contents. That Blade banked to starboard and disappeared once more behind the line of buildings; even at this distance Wedge heard a tremendous impact, saw the fireball erupt from the crash site.

He was first out of the hangar, with none of the other members of his flight firing—they were too close in behind him. The lasers of the surviving incoming Blade hit his front shields. Reduced to negligible power, the laser strike played across the fuselage just in front of his canopy, doing nothing more than burning away at paint. He replied with another linked laser blast, a miss as the incoming pilot veered … then a laser shot from behind him caught the Blade-32, shredding the port wing. Wedge saw the pilot punch out. The Blade seemed to aim straight in toward the hangar, a ballistic course, and flashed by over Wedge’s head, over the hangar roof, straight toward the
perator
’s palace. In his rear viewport, Wedge saw the bank of palace guns swing toward the out-of-control vehicle and burn it from the sky.

Wedge added power to acceleration. “Good shooting, Red Three. Now let’s see what we can show General Phennir.”

After so much work with the Blades, flying the X-wing again was more than mere improvement—it was a delight. He sent it up in an ascent that no Adumari vehicle could match, jinking and juking to give the laser battery gunners fits, and did a roll just for the sheer joy of it. This wasn’t just flying; it was dancing in the air.

“Red Two, this is Three. Am I crazy, or is the general doing what he tells us never to do?”

“Three, Two. Yes you are, and yes he is. Pay no attention.”

“Understood.”

Wedge grinned and set his course due west.

In the time it had taken Red Flight to retrieve its X-wings, the engagement zone had drifted over the western portions of Cartann City. There, the laser batteries were silent, but they were the only thing that was. The sky was rocked from second to second by missile detonations, the ripping noise of Blades crossing the sky at full speed, the deadly scream of doomed fighters making their final, uncontrolled descents.

Red Flight came at the engagement zone from a higher altitude, the sun at their backs, and Wedge’s sensors were quick to spot the three remaining TIE Interceptors, now making another lethal run through the thickest part of the zone. He plotted their likely return course and transmitted a simple intercept course to his pilots. “Between here and there,” he said, “shoot anything in Cartann colors.”