Wraith Squadron (30 page)

He reversed his lateral slide, turning portward again, gaining altitude, and spinning into a corkscrew.

Falynn shot out ahead of him, then abruptly climbed into a loop. In a moment she’d be inverted, then diving, firing. It
was a canny move, considering her inexperience in the TIE fighter: If she maintained a course without the slightest port or starboard deviation, regardless of how she gained or lost altitude, she wouldn’t suffer the buffeting TIE fighters took in atmosphere and could keep her engines at full thrust, full speed.

One of the oncoming Uglies, a ball-shaped TIE fuselage attached to a top-mounted fixed wing and a rear-mounted rudder, took the bait and climbed to follow. Wedge oriented toward him, fighting with his stick, and almost immediately got the jittery glow of a laser lock. He fired into the Ugly’s underside, scoring a direct hit on the ionic engines. The Ugly detonated into a brilliant shower of sparks and flaming debris.

At less than a klick, the third Ugly, which looked like a wingless, rudderless Imperial shuttle, fired on Wedge—thin streams of red lasers, a seemingly endless number of them. He juked left, continued that way as the broadening pattern of energy pursued.

He saw the Ugly’s side gout—a side-mounted tube firing a concussion missile. There had been no warning from the TIE’s sensor-lock alarm and the missile came in straight at him at less than a klick’s distance, a blur accelerating so fast there was no chance he could maneuver out of its way.

“Ten, you’re my wing. Let’s go high road.” Kell stood his X-wing on its tail and bled power from his bow shields into his thrusters. He’d have to trust his sensors to warn him of weapons locks for a few long moments.

“Five, acknowledged.” Tyria followed his maneuver almost point for point.

“Nine is away. Two, I’m your wing.”

“Nine, understood.”

Sensors reported twin concussion missile launches from the oncoming squads of Uglies. Kell put on a bit more speed, but Thirteen gave him no indication they were coming after him. Two fighters at the rear of the Ugly formation were
showing increasing altitude, however—climbing after him and Tyria.

“Six are away! Bring on your Uglies, your wretched rigs of cast-off parts, your—”

“Six, Twelve. No recitations.”

“Yes, Twelve.”

Kell frowned. Runt wasn’t in his pilot mind; that personality never spoke intelligibly. More changes going on in his usual wingman’s mental processes …

“Four away. Six, I’m your wing.”

Wedge relaxed the pressure on the pilot’s yoke. In the split second his twin ion engines lost thrust, he dropped back into the wash of laser fire he’d been avoiding.

Lasers splashed across him. The concussion missile flashed past his viewport, missing him by maybe ten meters. Then he emerged from the other side of the laser pattern … unscratched.

He smiled grimly. He’d realized almost too late that there were two ways a fighter that size could fire lasers so continuously. One was to have a highly advanced, experimental power generator worth a squad of A-wings. The other was to fire targeting lasers, beams bright enough to see but not to do damage … bright enough to spook a fighter into fleeing before them in a predictable path, right into the line of a fixed missile tube.

Falynn’s TIE fighter roared down from above, linked lasers firing. Her shot hit the shuttle fuselage, crisping a black circle at the aft end. Wedge expected the shot to destroy the shuttle’s engines, sending it into a helpless dive, but the Ugly merely lost altitude, trailing smoke. Its movement suggested that it had been flying all along on high-altitude repulsors.

Falynn dove past, firing once more, hulling the craft at nearly the same point. She leveled off below it, inverted, and climbed toward its belly.

“TIE fighter, break off. We surrender!”

She must have heard; she broke off her firing run, climbing in a dizzying spin until she was on station above and aft
of the craft. Wedge grinned, imagining the volatile Tatooine woman cursing at having to give up a kill. Her voice, over the comm, was a furious sputter: “You Kowakian-ugly flying wreck, get to ground right now or I’ll vape you, surrender or not.”

“TIE fighter, we acknowledge. Don’t shoot.” The bizarre shuttle heeled over and began a faster descent.

At the top of his arc, Kell inverted and dove.

The two Uglies that had been climbing to engage abruptly broke off and fled at ninety degrees to his flight path. He rolled down onto his port wing and pursued.

“Five, Ten. I don’t think they’re running. This is strategic.”

Kell eased back on his stick. “What makes you think so?”

“I don’t know.”

Strategic. What would this strategic retreat bring the enemy?

He eyeballed their flight angle, calculated that it would take them beyond the engagement zone, over a series of craters, over one large crater in particular—

“Pig Trough,” he said.

“Five, what?”

“Ten, tighten up. Stay on me.” He dove to the lunar surface and headed through the broadening engagement zone, angling to reach the far side of the battle and beyond.

Jesmin kept up her streaming fire against the nearly stock Headhunter in her brackets. Finally the atmospheric fighter’s durasteel armor gave way under her lasers. The deadly red beams penetrated into the fighter’s aft end. A moment later the Headhunter bent, arching its back like a wounded animal, as the engines detonated, venting through the craft’s belly, tearing the fuselage in half.

“Good shooting, Two.”

“Thanks, Nine. That’s five!”

“Five here.”

“No, Kell. I mean, that’s five kills. I’m an ace!”

“Two, wait for the debriefing. In this unit, your wingman may get credit for your kills. But congratulations.”

“Very funny, Five.” Jesmin vectored toward a pair of oncoming Uglies at the far side of the formation. Abruptly they veered away at right angles to her flight path.

She rolled up perpendicular to the ground and followed. Nine stayed on her wing.

Janson smoked a double-hulled monstrosity that had been firing eight-way-linked laser cannons—firing them inaccurately, fortunately for Janson—and took a look around.

At the very center of the engagement, two X-wings were in trouble, juking and weaving their way through the heaviest fire, diving out of the path of one set of Uglies only to find themselves immediately in the path of another. Janson’s sensors identified the Wraiths. “Seven, Eight, how are you doing?”

Face’s voice: “Not good, Eleven.”

“Seven, what are you doing here?”

“My job in the comm center was done. Do you mind? I can go back if you like—”

“Never mind. Hold tight. I’m coming in to help.”

But help was even faster than that. The entire sky seemed to light up and one of the Uglies—a huge ball that seemed to be made up entirely of TIE fighter solar wings—evaporated, leaving behind only a glowing afterimage and tons of falling liquefied metal.

Janson leaned away from the painful brightness. “What the—” Then he caught sight of the vehicle that had scored the kill. “Good shooting,
Night Caller.
”

Lieutenant Tabanne’s voice came back, “Can’t let you toy drivers score all the kills, Twelve. Hold tight.” The oncoming
Night Caller
fired again, her laser cannons converging on a wingless TIE ball that had been firing concussion missiles indiscriminately. The spherical craft emerged from the
beam intact, or so Janson thought at first; then it rotated and he saw that one half had been burned entirely away.

Half a pilot drifted out of the cockpit and joined it in its plummet to the lunar surface.

Kell heard two more Ugly pilots surrender. His snubfighter roared over the moon’s surface, mere scores of meters above the irregular ground, occasionally dropping closer as he and Tyria headed over deep impact craters.

They skipped over the ridge that was a common border between two such craters and saw them—treaded vehicles peering just over the far rim. Even as large as this crater was, they were already in weapons range, only a couple of seconds away.

“Switching to torps,” he said. “Firing.”

“Firing,” Tyria repeated.

Their proton torpedoes flashed almost instantly across the distance separating firer from target.

Almost
instantly. The treaded vehicles also fired, lasers and concussion missiles, aiming at distant targets. Then the torpedoes caught up to them. Kell’s hit the big one on the left, the too-tall construction body atop a military crawler’s treads, while Tyria’s hit the smaller laser-cannon-armed crawler in the middle. All three vehicles were caught up in the dual blast. They dropped out of the bottom of the resulting ball of smoke and fire, tumbling down the crater’s slope, throwing off treads, doors, shreds of weapon components, chunks of armor, all charred and warped almost beyond recognition.

The comm crackled with Jesmin’s pained voice. “I’m hit.”

Kell and Tyria cleared the crater a moment later and vectored in behind Jesmin and Donos.

The Mon Calamari pilot and her temporary wingman were still together, but both were hit, trailing smoke, and drifting apart.

Jesmin seemed to be the one damaged worst. Kell guessed that the blast had been one of a pulse barrage; nothing else was likely to have been able to knock down her shields and penetrate before the shields came back up. A laser blast had hit her on the port side of her cockpit; from the angle and the deepening black score along the cockpit’s flank, Kell gauged that the blast had done the majority of its damage just behind and below the pilot’s chair. Jesmin also could have caught some of the wash of damage.

Her X-wing was also standing on its starboard strike foils and was in an arc heading toward one of the nearest hills. “Jesmin, straighten up. Two, can you hear me?”

“Hear … you … Five …” If anything, her voice sounded worse than before.

“Level off, Two. Right now.”

“Can’t … reach … stick …”

She was too badly hurt to reach the pilot’s yoke? That was bad, but—then he realized the truth. Her words, and the way she was struggling to say them, added up to one thing: her inertial compensator was shot. The device that made pilots immune to the centrifugal effect of fighter maneuvers was no longer working, and she was being crushed back into her seat by the high-speed arc she was performing.

She was seconds from hitting the hillside. He said, “Thirteen, instruct her R2 to cut her fighter’s thrust by half.”

Thirteen’s answer came up immediately:
HE CAN’T, HIS LINKS TO COCKPIT CONTROLS ARE GONE. HE SAYS GOOD-BYE
.

“No! Jesmin, punch out!”

There was no answer.

There was other comm traffic going on. Kell ignored it. He was aware only of Jesmin’s dying X-wing meters in front of his own. Of the rapidly growing hillside beyond that.

He closed his strike foils into cruise position and goosed his thrusters until he was just to the side of and beneath Jesmin’s X-wing.

Janson’s voice: “What are you doing, Five?”

Wedge’s: “Let him go, Eleven. I see what he’s up to.”

With his port wing a meter beneath Jesmin’s starboard wing, Kell rolled gently to starboard. His wing contacted hers
with a scrape, putting a shudder through his snubfighter, checking and reversing her roll. He drifted to starboard and continued his roll until he nearly completed a three-sixty.

Now he stared at the bottom of Jesmin’s fighter, at the damage to her side and at cables trailing out of it. Because the impact of wing against wing had rolled her, her fighter had gone through nearly ninety degrees of a rotation to port. For the moment, her X-wing was angling away from the hillside, but the roll was continuing. As delicately as he could, Kell rose toward the underside of her fighter.

The hillside flashed below him and was gone. Jesmin’s roll brought her port wing down on top of Kell’s. The stick under his hands shuddered. Behind him, Thirteen shrieked and Kell felt the bump of the R2 unit’s impact with the underside of Jesmin’s fighter.

As Jesmin’s rotation forced his port strike foils downward, Kell’s flight stick jerked and his fighter tried to roll to port. He fought it, trying to keep his fighter in line through sheer strength. If he could just bring Jesmin’s nose up, he might angle her out of the atmosphere, enable the
Narra
to catch up to her—

He heard a crackle, felt his body tingle. Thirteen made another noise of dismay.

His text display lit up with diagnostics reports:

ETHERIC RUDDER NONFUNCTIONAL
.

PORT FUSIAL THRUST ENGINES NONFUNCTIONAL
.

STRIKE FOIL CONFIGURATION HYDRAULICS NONFUNCTIONAL
.

REPAIRS COMMENCING
.

Kell’s port-side engines whined and shut down. Jesmin’s X-wing, now headed in a long arc toward the ground, leaped out ahead of him.

“No! Five to Two, come in.”

Nothing.

“Thirteen, can you query her pilot chair’s electronics?”

THEY REPORT LEVELS CONSISTENT WITH UNCONSCIOUSNESS IN MON CALAMARI
.

“
Night Caller
, can you snag her with your tractor?”

“She’s out of our line of sight, Five. I’m sorry.”

Jesmin had only ten or fifteen seconds to live unless he managed something. “Ten, where are you?”

“Five, this is Leader. Ten is with Nine. She can’t help you.”

“But I’ve got—I’ve got—”

“I’m sorry, Five.”

Jesmin’s fighter hit the lunar surface. It didn’t detonate; it shredded instantly into tons of shrapnel, rolling across the rocks and pockmarks of the moon below, coming to a rest in a swath of litter half a kilometer in length.

Kell wiped tears away from his cheeks. Then the real pain of his failure hit him.

“Nine, answer me.” Tyria tried to keep her voice calm and level. Flying above and behind Donos, she could see that damage to his X-wing was minimal—unless she counted the charred crater that was what was left of his R2’s docking station. If there were any fragments of Donos’s astromech, Shiner, remaining, they would have to be dug out of a deep layer of slag and carbon scoring.