A grizzled older pilot looked at him. “Your bet, Klick.”
Corran slid his other two cards facedown on top of the ace of flasks. “I’m locked. I’ll bet two hundred credits.”
Two of the pilots tossed their hands in, but the older man squinted at his cards, then tossed two gold credit chits onto the hand pot pile. “I call.”
“Twenty-two.” Corran slowly flipped his cards over so the others could read them. “Can you beat it?”
“No.” The older man snarled. “Emperor’s Black Bones, you are the luckiest cardplayer I’ve ever met.”
“Not luck, skill.” Corran glanced at the sabacc table’s data readout. It indicated the pot contained 2,500 credits, 250 of which he skimmed off and fed into the sabacc pot, which currently stood at 15,000 credits. A two-card 23—which was known as a pure sabacc—or another three-card combination of 0, 2, and 3—the idiot’s array—would win that pot and end the game. “My deal, I believe.”
Corran gathered the cards and reached up to feed them into the LeisureMech RH7 Cardshark dealer-droid. The dealer-droid—which hung down from the ceiling—shuffled the cards, then extended its body so its manipulator arms could drop a card before each player. It swiveled around noiselessly and the twin stun pikes—which most players called “cheater prods”—remained retracted. After a second circuit, the cylindrical body withdrew into its base. Its with-drawal triggered the flux, shifting the value of the cards.
Corran reached for his cards, but before he could get them off the table, a siren began to rise and fall in tone and volume. Yellow lights began burning over every doorway. The other players immediately looked up, scooped up their winnings, then turned away from the table.
“What’s going on?”
The old man shrugged. “Report to your ship.” He gestured at a holographic imaging station at the far end of the hangar. “If it’s like before, the Prince-Admiral will tell us what’s going on.”
“What about the pot?”
“We give sabacc pots to the Survivor’s Fund. You have a problem with that?”
“Not me.” Corran stuffed his winnings into the pockets of his flight suit. “Get going, I’m right behind you.”
They ran from the ready room and Corran split off to the right where the whole Defender squadron had been assembled in the back of the hangar. He found the rest of the Rogues already there, with Hobbie and Myn rubbing sleep-sand from their eyes, and Tycho rubbing his wet hair dry with a towel from a refresher station. The only person he couldn’t find was Wedge.
The imaging station at the other end of the hangar filled with bright light that resolved itself down into the face of Prince-Admiral Krennel. “Greetings loyal warriors of the Hegemony. I would apologize for summoning you so abruptly, but this is a call to war and one I imagine you will relish. Our enemies have made a mistake and have provided us an opportunity that is quite rare. With one blow we can end the tyranny of the New Republic and send their shattered forces scurrying home.”
Corran glanced over at Tycho, then tapped the chronometer on his left wrist. By my count, we’ve got a couple of hours yet before Isard’s people and the New Republic get here. “Any guesses?”
Tycho shook his head. “Too soon for guesses.”
Krennel smiled magnificently. “All squadrons will be getting their assignments. You will be on board your appointed ships as fast as possible, and then we will depart to fulfill our destiny.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
“Colonel Roat!” Lorrir’s voice echoed through the nearly empty hangar. “Why aren’t your people in the air yet?”
Wedge spun on his heel and hooked his thumbs through the blaster belt he wore outside his flight suit. “I believe, Colonel Lorrir, we had an understanding about that. My Defenders are equipped with hyperdrive, we don’t need to be loaded on the Reckoning or any other ship to reach our destination. If we are to be loaded in the launching racks, it makes sense for us to be the last in and the first to be launched because of our capabilities and, you noted yourself, that the loadmasters on the capital ships are still reviewing procedures for our ships to be loaded.”
Lorrir’s face tightened into a scowl. “That is no excuse for you to still be here in the hangar.”
“But, Colonel, your Interceptor is still here.” Wedge held a hand up. “Perhaps we should be discussing this in an office, away from the troops?”
The Hegemony officer nodded. With his helmet under his arm, he led Wedge off to a small office with a single, rectangular window as tall as the door built into the wall beside it. The legend on the door proclaimed it to be the operations room.
Once inside, Lorrir perched himself on the desk and shook his head. “This cannot be tolerated, Colonel Roat.”
Wedge closed the door, then dialed down the opacity of the window, taking it all the way to black. “No, Colonel, I expect it cannot.”
“You have been given your orders and I expect you to follow them.”
Wedge nodded solemnly and looked at his chronometer for a second. “I am following orders, Colonel.” He tugged the gloved construct off his right hand, then flexed his fist.
“What are you doing?” Lorrir blinked with surprise. “What is going on here?”
“You remember you told me about Brentaal the other night at dinner. You told me how the Empire had been betrayed by Baron Fel?”
“Yes.”
Wedge reached up and pulled off the prosthetic over his eye, then peeled the piece off his throat. “Ah, much better. And you recall mentioning that you’d killed plenty of Rogue Squadron members on Brentaal, and that Wedge Antilles would be back.”
The man’s voice quaked. “Y-yes?”
“You were right. I’m Wedge Antilles. I’m back.”
The couple of seconds it took for Wedge’s statement to blossom with all its import in Lorrir’s brain proved to be about a second longer than it took for Wedge to draw his blaster and shoot the Hegemony officer. The blue stunbolt hit Lorrir dead center in the chest, pitching him backward over the desk. His helmet clattered against the floor and a metal chair skidded back beneath him and bounced off the room’s rear wall.
Wedge holstered the blaster and pulled the desk back. He stooped down, found a strong pulse in Lorrir’s neck, then yanked Lorrir’s right glove free of his hand. Wedge slid the glove on and picked up Lorrir’s helmet. “I need a mask for a moment, so I’ll keep this. You won’t be able to go up without it, but then I won’t have to shoot you down again. Sleep well.”
Donning the helmet, Wedge slipped from the office, locked the door, and closed it behind him. He walked sedately over to the rest of the Rogues, then waggled his fingers at them.
Tycho looked surprised. “Things didn’t go well?”
“Lorrir developed a new sense of irony. He found my revelations stunning.” Wedge pointed to the Defenders. “Get in, get these things going. Fly in formation to the southern shield projector facility. We’ve got ten minutes for incoming and I want us ready to go.”
Everyone split to their machines and Wedge climbed into his. He brought the power up, then locked the restraining straps in place. As the Defender cycled power to systems, his communications console lit up with positive check-ins from the rest of the squadron. The fleet frequency button flashed, so he punched it.
“Colonel Roat here.”
“This is Reckoning Flight Control. When are your people going to report for loading?”
“I understood we were to head up after Colonel Lorrir. His Interceptor is still here. Do you want me to find him?”
“Negative, Colonel, just get your people airborne and headed this way. Someone else will deal with Lorrir.”
“As ordered, Control. On our way.”
The clone of Ysanne Isard did not realize she was a clone. She was possessed of all the original’s memories, her entire life history up to a point just prior to the Lusankya’s escape from Imperial Center. Along with these memories came the original’s attitudes, which included a he
althy dose of skeptical contempt for things mystical, including the Force.
Yet, despite those prejudices, something struck her as very wrong about the message she’d gotten from Krennel. He asked her to dispatch someone to find Colonel Lorrir. She would have sent a subordinate, but she actually wanted to locate Lorrir for herself and pass on the message of Krennel’s displeasure. In Lorrir she had seen a grasping man who was abrasive with his inferiors, and fawningly obsequious with his betters. Because she stood outside the military establishment, he had treated her with cautious courtesy, which she knew would be stripped away and replaced with subservience once he knew how much power she commanded.
She reached the hangar in no time and saw Lorrir’s Interceptor still sitting on the ferrocrete deck. She knew it was his because he’d painted red stripes on each wing, just as the 181st used to do. She thought it a pity that a man’s life should be so paltry that he had to cling to a hideous defeat as the high point of his existence.
The clone called a tech over and asked if he’d seen Lorrir. The man pointed toward the closed operations room door. She walked over to it, tried the handle, and found it was locked. Glancing at her chronometer, she mentally calculated the security override code for that quarter hour, punched it into the keypad, and entered the office.
She took immediate notice of the ozone stink in the air which, combined with Lorrir’s body lying on the floor, told her the man had been stunned with a blaster. She squatted down and batted one of Lorrir’s feet aside, then pulled a black glove from beneath it. The glove only had two fingers and had been fitted with metal parts to make it appear to be a prosthetic replacement.
“Colonel Roat.” If Roat’s hand had not been genuine, then neither had he. This meant he and his group of Defenders had been inserted into Ciutric, but for what purpose? They could do no good on Ciutric, she reasoned, unless…
Throughout the building and the entire city of Daplona, sirens began to squeal with a pulsating message of warning. Red lights strobed and out in the hangar techs began scurrying around.
She slapped Lorrir to wakefulness, then hauled him to his feet. “Come with me, I need you.”
“Madam Director!” The man blinked his eyes in surprise. “It was a traitor, it was…”
“Yes, yes, no time for that. You’re under my command now.”
“What?” Lorrir straightened up and smoothed the breast of his flight suit. “I’m a pilot.”
“So you are, and now you’ll be flying for me.”
“For you? Why?”
“Listen to the sirens, fool.” The clone smiled and nodded a salute toward the sky. “There is a military operation planned. It’s coming here. They don’t care about Krennel, they’re after me and my prisoners. We’ll have to see they end up very disappointed.”
The primary monitor on Wedge’s Defender flashed brightly for a moment as image after image of ships filled the screen in rapid sequence. He caught a glimpse of a Mon Calamari Cruiser on the scanner screen, then an Imperial Star Destroyer Mark II, which matched the Reckoning in firepower. After that came three Nebulon-B Frigates, a half-dozen Corellian Corvettes, and a couple of fast little freighters. That’s pretty much the taskforce description I sent Admiral Ackbar, and it would have been more than sufficient for taking on Reckoning and Binder.
The problem was that Krennel had called in Emperor’s Wisdom and Decisive, giving the Hegemony forces a hideous edge in firepower. The Victory-class Star Destroyer, Emperor’s Wisdom, had eighty concussion missile launch tubes on it. Any single salvo could bring down the Mon Cal cruiser’s shields, leaving it open for raking fire from the ship’s energy weapons. Decisive and Reckoning both could pound on Emancipator—an Impstar Deuce the New Republic had captured at Endor. While it could severely damage any of the opposing ships, it would be lost.
Wedge shivered, then punched up the squadron frequency. “You’ve all seen the scans, Rogues. It’s not going to be pleasant. One Flight, we take out the shield generators down here, then we go to the spaceport and heist a freighter big enough to get the prisoners out of here. Two Flight, as planned, you neutralize prison defenses.”
“As ordered, Lead. How do we take the prison? I didn’t see Telik’s commandos or Vessery’s fighters in the mix.”
“I don’t know, Tycho. I hope they’re just late. First things first, then we do whatever we have to do.”
“On it, Lead. Two Flight on me. May the Force be with all of us.”
Wedge rolled his Defender up onto the port side and peeled off toward the south. As he leveled out, Hobbie appeared on his starboard wing, Gavin and Myn on his port. The Defender cockpit gave him a great view of the cityscape over which they flew. Bulbous tan buildings alternated with green belts and parks, the tall skyscrapers of the municipal center giving way to smaller residential buildings and individual homes. Out beyond the residential areas he saw the massive edifices of the factory district and right in the middle lay the shield generation facility.
“Three and Four, you have the towers on the east, Two, take the ones on the west. I’m going straight in.” Wedge thumbed his weapons-selector to concussion missiles. He set them for linked fire, then settled his crosshairs on the central dome. His rangefinder put him two kilometers out, with distance falling away fast.
The ion cannons mounted on towers around the facility had been cranked skyward. They pulsed out massive blue bolts that shot upward at the invading fleet, pouring out through momentary gaps opened in the shields by fire-control computers. Below them, on the same towers, turbo-laser cannons traversed their muzzles across the landscape. Three sets of four cannons had been stacked at twenty, forty, and sixty meters on the towers, with the ion cannons at the top. Bristling with weapons, the towers made formidable targets.
But targets nonetheless. Myn and Gavin let fly with the concussion missiles. Four incandescent rockets shot out at the eastern towers. Myn’s hit a second before Gavin’s, since Gavin’s traveled a bit further, but all four were on target. They nailed the lowest gunnery station, demolishing the turbolaser cannons in a brilliant flash of light and heat. The force of the explosion expanded outward and up, jetting superheated plasma up through the next gunnery station. The ferrocrete slabs forming the intervening section buckled, then burst outward. The tops of the towers wavered, then began a tortured fall to the ground. To the west the first tower Hobbie targeted likewise crumbled in flame and smoke.
Wedge’s targeting reticle went red, so he pulled the trigger and sent two concussion missiles flying toward the shield generator. The pink missiles bored through the ferrocrete dome, then detonated. Twin gouts of argent fire shot back out of the holes the missiles had made. The fire expanded and linked them into a single, larger hole, then proceeded to gnaw up into the dome until it collapsed in on itself. Windows and doors on the shield facility blew out and flaming debris rode a shockwave out to be scattered over the well-manicured landscape.
“Break port, Lead.”
Wedge immediately rolled his craft left and saw an ion bolt the size of a small freighter sizzle past. The only intact tower’s ion cannon had tracked him on his approach and had almost gotten him. Before he could apply some rudder and correct for an attack run, Gavin and Myn came in on a strafing run that pumped a pair of quaded-up laser bursts into the ion cannon.
The cannon exploded like an overripe fruit hit with a gaffi stick. A huge chunk of its armored shell fell away like a rind and collapsed a corner of the burning shield facility. Secondary explosions in the facility itself pitched the armor off onto shrubbery, which ignited when the hot metal touched it.
Wedge punched up a sensor scan just to confirm that the southern quadrant shield over Daplona was down. The city now lay open for Telik’s commandos. If they ever get here.
He keyed his comlink. “Lead to Five, we’re clear here. What’s your status?”
“Busy, Lead, and could use some help. The guys on the ground won’t go away, and I’ve got a dozen TIEs inbound our position.” Tych
o hesitated for a moment. “Better get here fast, or there may be no reason to come at all.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Admiral Ackbar, on the bridge of the Mon Calamari cruiser Home One, glanced with one eye at the holographic display of the near-space sector, and with the other looked out the viewport at the array of ships Krennel had brought to the fight. Only the unconscious twitching of his barabels betrayed his surprise. From the depths always comes amazement.
“Weapons, shields up and concentrate all fire on Reckoning. Fighter Command, deploy the A-wings and have them try to pick off the missiles that will be incoming from the Vic. After that, they’re free to go after the TIEs and Interceptors.”
“As ordered, Admiral.”
“Helm, reverse course. Start pulling us back out on our exit vector.”
“Yes, Admiral.”
Ackbar looked at the small brown Sullustan serving as his communications officer. “Lieutenant Quiv, tell Emancipator to withdraw, but concentrate fire on Reckoning. Tell Peacemaker, Pride of Eiattu, and Thunderchild to go after the Vic. Relay those same orders to all the Corvettes. I want an orderly withdrawal. Krennel has to know we didn’t expect this much strength here.”
The Sullustan cheebled his assent and relayed the orders.
The smaller ships in the taskforce all curled out and around from the two main ships and drove hard at the Emperor’s Wisdom. Ackbar knew that the Nebulon-B Frigates and the half-dozen Corvettes couldn’t do that much damage to their target, but he wanted the Vic’s gunners, especially those manning the concussion missile launchers, to have a lot of targets to deal with.
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