Chewbacca rumbled a reply.
“No, now is the time to talk about it. You’ve made me a participant in this fight! I’ve actually done damage to other beings! I’m not allowed to do that. I don’t know if I can cope.”
Face brought the seven X-wings of Wraith Squadron, including Kell in Donos’s snubfighter, around the Reprisal’s stern along its starboard side, putting them on the same side of the conflict as the Falsehood and her pursuit. The X-wings were already in attack position, their S-foils spread and locked. “Fire One,” he said.
Fourteen proton torpedoes launched toward the mass of enemy TIEs. As close as the Wraiths were to their targets, the torpedoes crossed the intervening distance almost immediately. As tightly packed as the TIEs were, when those on the leading edge were able to veer out of the way and break a torpedo’s targeting lock, the TIEs behind them were not. Ten kills registered on Face’s sensor screen, then the TIE force was spreading, scattering, breaking by twos and preparing to engage the Wraiths.
“That won’t work twice,” Face said. “Change Target Two to the Dreadnaught’s bow. Fire Two.” Fourteen more proton torpedoes leaped away. Face saw detonations all around the Reprisal’s bow, couldn’t determine if they were penetrating the damaged Dreadnaught’s shields. “Break and engage by pairs.”
On the bridge of Mon Remonda, Han Solo sat in his command chair, his stomach threatening to knot ever tighter, while he watched the holocomm broadcast from the Falsehood. The sensor-display portion of the broadcast showed the Falsehood on her outbound flight and all the vehicles around her.
At the moment, only two TIE starfighters assailed the Falsehood. The Dreadnaught was not firing, its command crew obviously thrown into disarray by the detonation of the bomb.
“They’re going to escape, Zsinj,” he said, his words intended for no one’s ears but his own. “You can’t have that. Jump in. Bring Iron Fist in. Come on, Zsinj.”
“Sir,” Squeaky said, “do we tell the Wraiths about Lara?”
Wedge hesitated. If they broadcast an encrypted message telling the Wraiths that one of the TIEs was Lara and she was conceivably an ally, the message would eventually be broken. A voice signal like that simply offered too much data. “Tag her as a friendly on the sensor board and transmit only that information, and only as data,” he said. That might do it—a tiny data update was much less likely to be intercepted by the enemy or decoded.
“Yes, sir.”
“Me up, you down,” Kell said.
“We’re your wing,” Runt responded.
They aimed straight for the Millennium Falsehood, Kell approaching above the level of the freighter’s top hull, Runt beneath her keel, both firing at the TIEs pursuing the freighter.
Kell kept his fire a little high so no slight deviation in his progress would bring his lasers down onto the Falsehood. But his target’s erratic motion brought it up toward his field of fire …
And then, on his targeting computer, his target changed color from red to blue. Kell swore, took his finger from the trigger, and the Falsehood and its pursuit blasted past underneath him. He began as tight a turn as was possible to come up behind the Falsehood again. Below him, Runt was doing the same.
The Falsehood rocked more violently than before and suddenly air was howling through the freighter. Wedge’s ears popped as the air pressure changed.
Squeaky’s voice, for once, contained alarm. “We are breached! Shields are down on the keel!”
“Chewbacca, roll her!” Wedge shouted.
Outside his viewport, the universe rotated 180 degrees. Fel was abruptly in his gunsights instead of Lara. He opened fire on Fel. “Donos, lock down that hull breach. Chewie, keep our good shields between us and Fel. Maybe Lara won’t vape us.”
What a thing to have to count on. Squeaky’s assurance that they shouldn’t destroy Lara—and now, with the Falsehood’s unprotected keel exposed to her guns, she could vape them with no effort.
Lara saw the Falsehood rotate, exposing its belly, and her sensors showed its shields there were gone.
She could fire, or she could reveal herself to Zsinj to be a traitor to his cause.
Or she could—
She deliberately twitched the pilot’s yoke a little too hard and her maneuver carried her forward, right into the Falsehood’s keel. Suddenly she was spinning out of control, and there was an ominous cracking noise as a jagged line appeared on her viewport.
“Petothel?” It was Fel’s voice. “Petothel, are you hurt?”
She didn’t answer.
Zsinj watched, his mouth slack and expression disbelieving, as the holocomm display from the Reprisal continued.
The bridge view was gone, of course. It had vanished when the bridge was destroyed. But sensor data continued to pour in.
The Reprisal was breaking up. The initial explosion had breached her hull, smashed her bow shields, and temporarily deprived her of effective command. The proton torpedoes that followed had inflicted massive structural damage on the old Dreadnaught.
Now she continuously vented atmosphere into space, her crumpling bulkheads preventing airtight doors from sealing. Her captain had sent her into a turn just before the bomb’s impact, doubtless to track the Millennium Falcon with her guns, and the stress of the maneuver was cracking the mighty old ship open like a nut.
Zsinj sagged against the bulkhead. “I can’t kill him. I can’t kill Han Solo. I don’t know the formula. I don’t have the plan.”
Melvar, in his ear, said, “The One Eighty-first is disconnected. I’ve ordered them to break away from the attacking force. But we can send in another capital ship and get them coordinated again.”
“No. Throw good money after bad? Besides, Solo will be in hyperspace before another ship can get into proper position. This assault is over.”
Melvar saluted and moved over to look down into the crew pit, where his starfighter director was. “Send the starfighters down to a planetary base.” His voice was heavy with regret.
Zsinj knew that regret.
He knew frustration, too. Nothing was working. Nothing was working.
The TIEs were still swarming, but abruptly they were swarming in another direction, back toward the planet.
With no TIE fighters close enough to see in the cockpit viewport, Squeaky dispensed with the human-face mask he wore. It served merely to conceal the gold tone of his face and was only effective against distant or fast-moving observers. At Wedge’s direction he returned to his Han Solo voice and activated the comm unit. “Wraiths, form up, prepare for hyperspace. Polearm Seven, it’s time for you to return to dock with the Falcon.”
“Coming in, General.”
Wedge leaned in over Squeaky’s shoulder. “Now say, ‘Good shooting out there.’ ”
“Doesn’t she know she shot well?”
Wedge glowered. “Just do it.”
“Good shooting out there, Konnair.”
“Thank you, General.”
Dorset Konnair’s A-wing sidled in toward the Falsehood’s starboard. Delicately, she maneuvered it alongside the docking station temporarily installed where one of the freighter’s escape pods should be. A moment later, Squeaky felt the thump of contact. “All ready,” he said, in his own voice.
“Go back and help Donos patch that leak, would you?”
“If I must. One minute a general, the next minute a sheet-metal worker.”
Wedge smiled at him. “That’s life in the armed forces.”
“Petothel, come in.”
Lara stirred, trying to convey with body language that she was dazed. She stared out the forward viewport. Fel’s TIE interceptor cruised there, mere meters from her. It seemed to be spinning, though she knew that it was her own interceptor that was rolling. “What? I, what?”
“Are you injured? We can bring in a shuttle with a tractor to get you out of there.”
“No, I’m good to fly.” That was the pilot’s automatic response, whether Imperial or New Republic, whether truth or sel
f-delusion. She sat upright. “Did—did we get him?”
“Almost,” Fel said. “Come along, you’re my wing.” He vectored away and moved planetward, away from the burning wreckage of the Reprisal, only a few kilometers away.
She’d spent her time “unconscious” productively. The datapad that had transmitted its unusual commands to her laser weaponry was now back in a pocket. She’d hammered her helmeted head against the side of the cockpit until it really was sore, until she was almost as dizzy as she claimed to be—she’d need the telltale physical signs of injury when she got back to Iron Fist.
She’d done it. She couldn’t keep a smile off her face as she followed in Baron Fel’s wake.
Captain Onoma stood before Solo. “We have found the position Iron Fist held throughout the engagement. A wingpair from Mon Delindo detected her a few minutes ago.”
Solo came upright. “Alert Rogue and Nova Squadrons, tell them to stand ready. Communicate with Mon Delindo. We’ll converge on Iron Fist’s position—”
“Sir, Iron Fist has already jumped out of system.”
Solo sagged into his chair. “Abandoning his pilots? Not even bothering to pick up survivors off the Reprisal?”
Onoma nodded in the awkward Mon Calamari fashion. “Doubtless he’s relying on planetary forces for rescue, and will send a freighter back for his TIE squadrons. He’s gone, sir.”
Solo offered him a disbelieving shake of the head. “He just won’t come in close enough to a system for its mass shadow to delay his departure. He’s that spooked.”
“You should be honored, General. You’re what’s ‘spooking’ him.”
“Failures don’t get honored, Captain.” He shook his head, looked away from the captain. “I have to think about this.”
The crew of the Millennium Falsehood—two Corellian men, a Wookiee, and a 3PO droid in a general’s uniform—descended the loading ramp more hastily than usual, as though they expected the battered craft to burst into flame, and turned to look at the freighter.
She had new laser scoring all over her hull. Smoke drifted from beneath the keel and rose to the hangar’s ceiling.
“Not bad,” Wedge said. “I’ve flown worse.”
Squeaky said, “You are joking, I hope, sir.”
Wedge turned his attention to the droid. “And now that we have a moment or two, Squeaky, would you mind telling me why you said we should allow Lara Notsil to blow holes in our hull?”
“Well, I thought she was trying to tell us something.”
Wedge blinked. Then he turned to the Wookiee. “Chewbacca, go ahead. Pull his legs off and hit him with them.”
“Wait!” Squeaky threw up his arms as if to ward off the blows to come. “Let me explain.”
And he did.
General Solo, Captain Onoma, and Wedge were already in the briefing room when Donos arrived. Within a minute, they were joined by Shalla and Face.
“This meeting concerns Lara Notsil,” Wedge said. “Each of you is here for a different purpose. General Solo and Captain Onoma are here because this pertains to mission planning. Shalla, because of your knowledge of Imperial Intelligence techniques … and mentalities. Donos, because of your familiarity with Lara. Face, because of your training as an actor; we assume that you can recognize your own kind.”
Face managed a smile. “From time to time,” he said.
Wedge said, “Earlier today, the Falsehood was fired upon by Lara Notsil, who was acting as a TIE interceptor pilot for Zsinj’s forces. Squeaky, acting as communications officer, noticed that every time she hit us with laser fire, our comm unit stored fragments of a transmission.”
Donos frowned. “Her attacks were also transmissions?”
“That’s right. She had apparently rigged one of her laser cannons to pulse in the fashion of a line-of-sight laser communicator. She had also, according to what we can determine, reduced the strength of her lasers somewhat—else we would have suffered more damage than we did.”
Shalla said, “This is sort of what Donos did with his laser rifle at Halmad.” Above that world, needing to trigger an explosive device but prevented from doing so by comm jamming, Donos had modified the output of his laser sniper rifle to transmit the detonation signal.
Wedge nodded. “That may have been what gave her the idea. Here’s the message. It’s voice only.” He reached over to the terminal keyboard beside the conference table and pressed a button.
First, a hiss suggesting a low-quality recording, then Lara’s voice emerged from the air around them. “This is Lara Notsil, transmitting to Wraith Squadron and Mon Remonda.”
Donos tensed. Knowing that the message was from her hadn’t prepared him for actually hearing her voice; he felt almost as though he’d been physically struck. Then he became aware of Shalla’s gaze on him. Face’s, too. They were evaluating him, his reaction.
Once, he would have washed all expression away from his face, giving them nothing to read. But he didn’t care about that anymore. It hurt to hear Lara. It didn’t matter if they could see the bleakness of his expression. He closed his eyes to listen more carefully.
“I was the one who suggested to the warlord that he’d encounter you at Comkin Five. If you did show up there, I hope it’s because it’s part of your mission plan—that you were hoping to engage him. I told him you might also appear at Vahaba. You might want to keep that on your schedule. You should be able to engage him there as well.”
Donos opened his eyes to glance at Solo and Wedge. They were exchanging a look, and Solo shook his head, a trace of confusion to his expression.
“I’m working on a plan now whereby I might be able to transmit you Iron Fist’s location, just as we did with the Parasite plan.” That mission, in which Wraith Squadron had planted a program in the computer of a new Super Star Destroyer, Razor’s Kiss, had led to the new ship automatically sending its location to Solo’s fleet. Ultimately, it had resulted in the ship’s destruction. “If I die, the plan might be able to continue in my absence, so don’t just give up on it if someone manages to shoot me down. Attached to this message is a data package showing what I’ve done, what conclusions I’ve reached. I hope you can use them.
“Please tell the Wraiths that I’m holding faith with them.” There was a long pause, the distinct sound of Lara swallowing with difficulty. “The rest of this message is for Myn Donos.”
Wedge tapped a key on the terminal and her voice cut off. He looked apologetically at Donos. “I’m sorry. I’ve heard it already, and it does pertain to her state of mind. We’re all going to have to hear it.”
Donos nodded, not trusting himself to speak.
Wedge tapped the key again.
A little background hiss returned to the air, but Lara didn’t speak for several seconds. Then, “Myn, it’s not likely that we’ll ever see one another again. So I wanted to take this opportunity to say good-bye. Well, more than that. I wanted to explain. About what I did.
“I was fighting a war, the way I’d been trained, and that involved infiltrating the enemy and getting their secrets back to my superiors, or sabotaging the data the enemy possessed. There was never a time I saw a file labeled ‘How to Destroy Talon Squadron’ and thought to myself, ‘Oh, that’s what I want to do.’ To me, it was just data about occupied territories and interplanetary borders.
“Then I infiltrated Wraith Squadron, just a ploy to make myself more valuable to prospective employers, and things started happening. All the furniture that made up the way I’d thought and felt about things all my life started coming loose in my head. Nowadays it slides around and breaks into pieces and I have no idea what parts of it are real and what aren’t.” There was a waver to her voice now, a suggestion she was having trouble keeping it under control. “It hurts, and a lot of the time I don’t know who I am anymore.
“But I know what I have to do. Whoever I am, I’m staying here, like a vibroblade right next to Zsinj’s vitals, and when the right time comes I’m going to stab him deep. That’ll pro
bably be the last thing I do.
“I don’t have any friends here, except one droid, and I don’t have any where you are, or anywhere else in the galaxy, so when I’m gone there isn’t going to be anyone to remember me kindly. So I was just sort of hoping you wouldn’t hate me anymore. I really can’t stand thinking that’s the only way I’ll be remembered.”
There was a long silence, the sound of a sniffle. Her voice finally returned, quieter than it had been. “I wish I’d been someone else. To give you that chance you wanted.
“Lara Notsil out.”
Donos felt his eyes burning. He put his hand over them. He felt tears under his fingers.
They were silent a long moment. Then Wedge, regret in his voice, said, “All right. Opinions. Shalla?”
Shalla cleared her throat. “Tough call. At a certain level, I think Corran Horn was right. Mentally and emotionally, Lara’s not all together. But she seems to be sticking to her plan, to her perception that Zsinj is the enemy. And if I read her words right, she’s resigned herself to death in this effort. That makes it more likely that her words can be trusted.
“Add to that the very interesting way she transmitted data. It was complicated, it was unreliable. It was a desperation measure. If she really was an agent of Zsinj’s, she could have just shot us a tight-beam transmission from her interceptor’s comm system. We would have known that there was very little chance of such a message being detected. The approach she actually used suggests to me that she’s afraid that her interceptor’s comm system is tapped, recording, something, and she wanted to get around whatever measures had been taken that way.”
“All right. Face?”
“She’s a pretty good actress,” Face said. “In her line of work, she’d have to be. But there was a lot of what seemed like very genuine strain in her voice. I’d lean toward the side of her telling the truth.”
“Donos?”
Decorum demanded that he look at them when he answered. To do that, he’d have to put his hand down. If he did that, they’d see his tears. They’d know he wasn’t in control of himself. They’d know—
Star Wars: X-Wing VII: Solo Command Page 27