Wraith Squadron

by Aaron Allston

  Cubber, floating beside Ton Phanan's cockpit, pressed his faceplate against the transparisteel and began speaking. The words didn't come over the squadron frequency. From the slow pace and deliberate way he was shaping his words, Kell assumed he was shouting; the sound would conduct through faceplate and canopy, and Phanan would be able to hear him. He saw Phanan nod listlessly.

  "Leader, this is Eight. I say we leave Seven's X-wing up in orbit for them to find, and when they pull it in, we board and seize them."

  "Thanks much, Eight. Anyone else?"

  "Sir, I'm serious. I've been thinking about this."

  ". . . Very well. Give it to me step by step."

  "Well, we leave the fighter in orbit broadcasting a distress signal. Put up some debris with it to suggest that maybe another X-wing has been destroyed. Among the debris we have someone in one of the extravehicle suits, carrying Donos's laser rifle for maximum firepower."

  "And they draw the suit in and the pilot inside starts shooting?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "They do this even when their sensors say there's a live body in the suit?"

  "Uh ... I'd forgotten about that."

  Atmosphere began venting from around the seals of Phanan's cockpit. Kell saw Phanan check and recheck the integrity of the bandages he'd slapped onto his pilot suit where shrapnel had cut through it.

  "Next plan?"

  Kell keyed his microphone. "Sir, wait a second. We could put our intruder in the Narra's smuggling compartment. Its systems will conceal the presence of a living person. Pull it out of the shuttle, attach a battery pack to maintain its electronic countermeasures, and float it among the debris."

  Squeaky's voice was distinctly irate: "Cubber, we have an additional compartment in here and you didn't tell me? I could have packed more gear, more supplies—"

  Wedge cut him off. "Continue, Mr. Tainer."

  "Well, that's all I was going to say."

  "And what do we do if they don't tractor in our intruder?"

  "Make sure he can play some solo games on his datapad?"

  "Not funny, Mr. Tainer."

  Face cut back in. "Could we mount a propulsion unit to the compartment? The thrusters from an ejection seat?"

  Kell said, "Yes."

  Wedge said, "But it would be pointless. Can you imagine trying to aim a rig like that before firing off the thrusters? Odds are a hundred million to one that he'd miss and shoot off into space. And those are odds even a Corellian will pay attention to."

  Kell said, "Put the thrusters at one end and an astromech at the other end. The astromech can feed visual data to the intruder's datapad. The intruder steers with the datapad, and the astromech translates that into precise thruster control. That makes the odds pretty good that he'd make it where he was aiming."

  "That's crazy, Mr. Tainer."

  "With all due respect, no it's not, sir. It's merely desperate. Speaking of which, the sniper rifle may not be rated to hard vacuum and the cold of space. It might freeze up. And we can give our intruder a much better weapon anyway."

  "Such as what?"

  "Well, if we're using a battery to keep the smuggling compartment powered, we might as well use the 04-7 power generator off Ton's X-wing. And if we have that much power available, we could pull the guts out of one of the laser cannons, cable it to the power generator, and rig it with a trigger. That'd give our intruder a few shots with something powerful enough to cut through bulkheads, much less through storm-troopers."

  "A laser cannon is nine meters long, Five."

  "Not the essential components and housing, sir. Strip out all the computerized aiming and synchronization equipment, the diagnostics, the flashback suppressor, I think we could chop it down to a meter and a half, two meters."

  The canopy on the X-wing came up and Phanan clambered out, surrounded by the distinctive glow of a personal magcon field. He immediately began to drift away from the craft. Kell saw from Phanan's expression that cold was already eating its way through the atmosphere around his compromised suit. Kell and Cubber closed on him, each grabbing one of his arms, and began to maneuver him toward the Narra's emergency airlock.

  Wedge took a long time to answer. "Face, Kell, that's the craziest idea I've heard in a long time."

  Face said, "Maybe, sir, but we've answered all your objections. We can do this."

  "Let's say you're right. We have one pilot with a powerful, crude, prone-to-failure weapons rig, and he's in a hangar on an Imperial Star Destroyer. What then?"

  "Leader, Eleven. A couple of ideas. If he could get to a computer interlock, he might be able to load in a program that would broadcast a distress to the New Republic. The rest of the pilots might be able to hide out until rescue. Or it may not be Implacable. It could be one of their support vessels, and we might be able to take it."

  "You, too, Wes?"

  "Yes, sir. I think this plan is marginally better than dying of asphyxiation or starvation out in empty space, and it has the virtue of novelty. Implacable couldn't anticipate we'd do it. Only crazy people could anticipate we'd do it."

  "True." Wedge's voice sounded resigned. "Cubber, your professional opinion: Can you do this? Patch this aberration together in an hour or two at most and make it work?"

  Cubber shut the airlock hatch on Ton Phanan as he answered. "With the kid's help . . . yes, sir."

  "The chrono's running, gentlemen. Do it. And may the Force be with you. You need it."

  Face said, "I have some Force here in my pocket. Kell, Cubber, you can have it if you need it. Oops, no, it's gone. Maybe it's in my cargo."

  "Eight?"

  "Yes, Leader?"

  "Be quiet."

  Weary, Wedge sat back in his pilot's chair. He switched the comlink over to his private connection with Janson. "Wes?"

  "Here."

  "They're doing it to me again."

  "That's right."

  "I haven't reached my thirtieth birthday, Wes. And once again I feel like the conservative old man in charge of a new generation of insane young pilots."

  "That about sums it up."

  "Thanks for the moral support, Wes."

  11

  They had to tell Squeaky and Phanan to squeeze into the shuttle's tiny airlock—fortunately, both were thin—then depressurize the Narra's interior and open its main boarding ramp. Cubber and Kell could then enter and disassemble the mounting concealing the smuggling compartment. As soon as they had the compartment unplugged and towed back out into space, they saw where their plan couldn't succeed.

  "It's not big enough," Cubber said. "These suits, with all the thrusters and life support, are too damned bulky to fit into the compartment. And I don't recommend we cut 'em down to fit."

  "Good point." Kell sighed. "Well, our intruder will just have to wear a standard pilot's suit. This compartment is supposed to be airtight, that'll help."

  "Airtight enough to fool mechanical sniffers, true, but it's only rated for pressurized environments. The seals aren't strong enough to hold in atmosphere against hard vacuum. Also, we're going to be drilling holes in it to mount the thrusters, to cable the battery to the countermeasures, to get the data feed from the R2 . . ."

  "So we don't put the intruder into our fake debris field until the last possible moment."

  Cubber shook his head. "And if they just take a few extra minutes to creep up on the site, our intruder freezes to death. It's not going to work, kid."

  A new voice cut in, a strong and harshly mechanical one. "It can work."

  Kell smiled. "Piggy! They got your voice working again."

  "Grinder and his datapad got it started. I feel much better. And I should be the intruder."

  "Why is that?"

  "Physical structure, Kell. My body is swathed in heavy layers of fat. Humans find it unappealing, and it is a detriment in hot environments, but my fat will sustain me against starvation and will insulate me from cold temperatures. In an ordinary pilot's suit, I'm rated at half an hour's survival after ejection i
nto space, rather than a few minutes. Too, my suit is intact."

  Kell whistled. "Well, unless we get a better idea, Piggy, I think you're our man."

  "Your Gamorrean."

  While Cubber and Kell assembled the jury-rigged vehicle, which they nicknamed the Lunatic, Grinder and Piggy worked out the programming of the R2 unit and control datapad. Occasionally Kell listened in on the conversation— Grinder and Piggy had to work from within their cockpits and communicate via comm.

  "What sort of targeting model do we use?" That was Piggy.

  "Visual pattern recognition, I think. With the starfield as the primary element—it will be static. Perhaps we can limit it to stars of a certain brightness; that will reduce the amount of data to be processed. If the ship is a recognizable type, the R2 can add a detailed map of its configuration to the pattern; otherwise you'll just have to aim at what you think is a cargo hatch and pray."

  "What if imbalances or faulty thrusters throw me off course?"

  "Well, we have to have some sort of correction built in to the R2's programming. The crudest way is to have it evaluate its visual input and correct—overcorrect, really, with the time involved—if the visual image traverses too far."

  "Very crude. Prone to error. And to overcorrecting, as you say."

  "Yes. Hey, Kell?"

  "I read you, Grinder."

  "Is there any way to put some sort of mass sensor in our insertion vehicle? Something to calculate load balance, center of gravity, that sort of thing, to improve flight accuracy?"

  Kell thought about it. The X-wings had such a system, of course, which used pulses from the inertial compensator to calculate the snubfighters' mass characteristics several times per second. "No. Not a chance. I'd have to have exact data on all the components going into this cobbled-together rig, I'd have to have a precise graphical model of it, Piggy would have to remain as still as if he were in a pilot's seat, and you'd have to have even more time to do all the physics-heavy programming."

  "Forget it, then. Thanks."

  Within an hour the Lunatic took shape. The storage compartment, roughly the size of a large coffin, was the main element. At one end, Phanan's R2 unit, Gadget, was mounted by way of crude brackets—metal strips cut from some of the cargo crates on the Narra, attached to the compartment's hull through simple bolts. At the other end were mounted the fuel pods and some of the thrust nozzles from Phanan's ejection seat; other nozzles were attached near the R2, pointed in four directions horizontal to the plane on which Gadget was standing, to give the rig as much maneuverability as was possible. Metal tubing carried fuel from the pod to the nozzles. A data cable ran from one of Gadget's ports through a hole drilled in the compartment; inside the compartment, it was attached to the datapad that now held Grinder's and Piggy's maneuvering program. A power cable ran from the electronic countermeasures socket on the outside of the compartment, through another hole, into the compartment; it currently floated free.

  When Piggy was placed in the compartment, he'd be carrying on his belt the bulky main components of the Novaldex 04-7 power generator from Phanan's snubfighter. The cable powering the electronic countermeasures would be inserted temporarily in the power regulator fitted to one of its power-out sockets, while another socket was fitted with a cable running to the crude, six-foot-long cylinder that was what remained of one of Phanan's laser cannons.

  "This is, without doubt," said Cubber, "the most inelegant rig I have ever had the pleasure of working on. Not counting the first still that I ever built, which was even more dangerous."

  "Tests all show in the green. I think we're done."

  "Call it in to the commander, kid."

  In his cockpit, watching the universe spin around the asteroid on which he'd landed, Wedge relaxed with the calm of the seasoned New Republic pilot. He knew the others, excepting Janson and maybe Donos, would be fretting, ready to go; if they lived long enough, they'd learn to conserve their energy, to catch catnaps whenever they could.

  The Wraiths' X-wings, as repaired as they could be during their stay on the ground, now rested on some of the planet's larger asteroid satellites in power-down mode. The Narra waited with power up, ready to go, with Piggy standing by in the airlock. Phanan's X-wing, some stony debris retrieved from the asteroid ring, and Lunatic spun lazily in an orbit closer to the planet's surface than the asteroids. The X-wing's comm system continuously broadcast a distress signal, a plea for help recorded by Face; Wedge could not but admire the skill of Face's performance, the realistic pain and fear he injected in his voice as he begged for rescue.

  The comm unit popped. With power output turned so far down, no ship entering the system would be able to pick up their transmissions; in fact, some of the X-wings were having trouble reading them. "Narra, this is Five."

  "Go ahead, Five."

  "Cubber, wasn't Seven's fighter the one designated 3-0A when it came in?"

  "That's right."

  "Do you remember some sort of attachment mounted toward the aft end of the cargo bay? A rectangular thing, no ports or screens?"

  "No. None of the X-wings have anything like that."

  "Well, one of them did. It was about twenty-five centimeters long, maybe six broad and four thick. It was painted in standard Alliance gray."

  "I'm telling you, kid, there's nothing like that on any of the X-wings. Wait, hold on."

  A long silence, then Cubber's voice was replaced by Squeaky's. "Flight Officer Tainer, there is an attachment like that at the bottom of the main drive unit of the Narra. I noticed it because it wasn't identical to the drive units on other Lambda-dass shuttles. I saw it several times during the many, many trips I made loading the Narra up with the pilots' personal gear."

  "Cubber, I've serviced the Narra. There's nothing like that back there."

  "I know, kid. Something's very wrong."

  Wedge started to request that one of the X-wings ease out of the asteroids and make a visual check of Narra's aft end. But before he could speak, his wingmate's voice came in: "Wraiths, this is Two. I have faint chatter on Imperial frequencies. Encrypted."

  Wedge finally did speak. "Narra, this is Wraith Leader. Place your package, then scram back to one of the big rocks and power down. Wraiths, observe communications silence. Piggy, good luck."

  He watched as the Narra drifted to within a few meters of the insertion vehicle. The shuttle's airlock opened and Piggy pulled himself out, hampered by the bulky belt he wore and man-height pole he carried. He shoved off from the airlock with confidence and drifted over to the insertion vehicle, which he grabbed.

  The impact of Piggy's mass sent both pilot and Lunatic drifting away from the wrecked X-wing and debris. But, as Piggy pulled open the compartment's door and began to squeeze in, the drift suddenly stopped. Lunatic moved slowly back to its original position relative to the X-wing.

  It hung there, rigidly unmoving in the grip of the shuttle's tractor beam, as Piggy hooked up his belt power generator to the compartment's electronic countermeasures, then pulled the compartment door shut.

  Wedge breathed out a sigh. Now it was all in Piggy's hands.

  The compartment interior was lit only by the glow from the datapad's screen. Piggy patted at the gut of his flight suit, assuring himself that his blaster and the one Grinder had given him were still tucked away there, that the datacard containing the program that might force Implacable's computers to send out a rescue message was still in his pocket, that the suit's seal was still intact. Then he seized Lunatic's control datapad. "Status?" he said. His suit comlink was at minimal output power and set to the standard datapad channel.

  Gadget's reply appeared as text on the datapad screen: OPERATIONAL. I CALCULATE A CHANCE THAT I WILL NOT REMAIN OPERATIONAL.

  "I'll get you out alive, Gadget."

  The words MOVEMENT DETECTED appeared. The screen switched from pure text to graphics on top, text at the bottom, and Piggy got a crude, monochrome view of the stars. From the way the starfield was moving, Piggy supposed
that the Lunatic was now rotating slowly, and that Gadget was turning his hemispherical head to keep the camera within it aimed at his target.

  A tiny white dot moved across the starfield and slowly began to grow.

  More text appeared: THEY WILL DETECT THAT I AM OPERATIONAL.

  "That's all right. They won't consider an astromech droid to be a threat. R2s are built for hard-vacuum repairs, so many of you have survived the ejection of their pilots into space."

  The dot grew until Piggy could make out its shape. It was not the Implacable, nowhere near so formidable a vehicle: it was a Corellian corvette, a long, narrow vessel with a blocky engine housing at one end; at the other end, the bow looked like an ancient war-hammer head turned sideways.

  Even at this distance and through the crude imager of the datapad, Piggy could see a bright vertical slit of light appear at the bow as the hold doors there were opened. Two large silhouettes emerged from the light and rapidly grew as they came closer.

  They resolved themselves into TIE fighters.

  The two starfighters roared past Phanan's X-wing and its debris cloud, close enough that Piggy imagined he could feel their wake. They looped and came back, then decelerated for a close view of the X-wing.

  THEY ARE QUERYING ME.

  "Respond truthfully, but only with data you have in your defaults. You don't know what happened to your pilot, you don't know how you came to be here." Piggy magnified the image of the corvette on his datapad screen, focusing in on the open bow hold. "What's our range to target?"

  THREE HUNDRED METERS.

  "Can we make that?"

  THE VEHICLE IS COMING STRAIGHT AT US ON AN UNVARYING COURSE. IF WE MAKE NO MISTAKES, WE CAN.

  Piggy took a deep breath and brought up the crude targeting brackets Grinder had added to his cobbled-together flight program. He set the brackets in the center of the open bow hold and hit the execute button.

  He felt faint pressure against his back as one or two of the Lunatic's top thrusters fired, orienting its "bow," Gadget, toward the corvette. Then it was as though he were in a turbolift, sudden weight as the thrusters beneath his feet fired off, and the image of the corvette's open hold began to grow.