by James Luceno
The glancing impact knocked the Falcon into a flipping whirl like a cred chip spinning on a sabacc table that sprayed the surrounding area with molten chunks of titanium from the gash in its armor plating. The TIE fighter collector’s leading edge missed the front viewpanel of the Falcon’s cockpit by roughly the diameter of a Wookiee’s nose hair. Han was too busy saying Whoa! and being generally astonished to find himself still alive while trying to wrestle the Falcon back under control to even distantly worry about the other TIEs streaking toward him, not to mention the concussion missiles that looped toward them indiscriminately, having lost their targeting locks when the Falcon had disappeared into the cloud of metallic fog.
The Falcon’s spin, though, brought the intersecting contrails of the oncoming missiles through Han’s visual arc just in time for him to wrench the yoke and stand the Falcon on its tail, side-on to the missiles, for one flash of a ghost of a second … just long enough for the lead missiles to whip past so close that he would later swear he could smell them before they continued down into the murk in pursuit of the largest energy signature their targeting sensors had found to relock on: the exploding TIE interceptor. The following missiles had already located the ion signatures of the other TIEs, since the atmosphere apparently also presented enough EM interference to screw up the missiles’ reception of IFF transponder signals. While the TIE pilots struggled with that problem, Han was able to bring the Falcon back under control and angle it toward the folds of lava where the Mindorese had taken cover.
Over their position, he kicked the Falcon onto its side and circled them at high speed, while both Chewie and Leia fired their quads at full power into the ground, raising a huge cylindrical cloud of blasted-up rock and metal that Han figured would cloak them from the oncoming gunships for at least a minute or so; then he set down in the clear middle and dropped the Falcon’s boarding ramp as he activated the exterior loudspeakers. “Okay, let’s go! Mount up—we’re at B minus thirty, and B stands for Bagload of Bad Guys!”
The Mindorese scrambled for the boarding ramp, some of them limping, some carrying or dragging wounded comrades. The redhead paused just long enough to send a sardonic grin toward the cockpit and follow it with a blown kiss that somehow managed to look grateful and sarcastic at the same time.
Han canceled the loudspeakers and keyed the turret comm. “Chewie. Leia.” Even though the Mindorese couldn’t possibly overhear, he kept his voice low, just above a whisper. “Secure the turret access bulkheads, and don’t come out till I tell you.”
Those bulkheads would stand up to anything short of a mining charge.
Chewie growled assent, but Leia said, “Han—these aren’t enemies. I can feel—”
“I believe you,” Han said. “Do it anyway.”
“Han—”
“Leia!”
“All right. I’ll stay put.”
“And get ready to shoot, huh?” Without waiting for her answer, Han keyed the comm channel for the Falcon’s cargo hold. “Hey down there! You people inside? We’re out of time!”
“We’re in! Are we taking off sometime today?” Had to be the redhead. “Is this a ship or an artillery target?”
“Little bit of both,” Han muttered as he kicked power into the thrusters and swung the mandibles toward vertical.
The Falcon broke clear of the dust and smoke cloud. “Here they come!”
The interceptors hadn’t gone anywhere in the meantime; immediately the battered freighter bounced and shuddered under the impact of multiple cannon hits, and Han spotted the flight of heavy assault gunships circling into formation for a new attack run. “I hope somebody’s got a good idea, here!”
“Hrowwwroor!”
“Of course keep shooting!” Han replied. “I said a good idea!”
The intercom crackled with the redhead’s voice again. “Seventy-seven points off true north, and punch it!”
Han scanned the horizon from north to east: desert, featureless but for low rolling hills. “There’s nothing there!”
“If you want, we can argue about it while the Imps blast your ship to scrap.”
“Or maybe we could mount you on the hull and use your nerve for armor plate,” Han muttered, but he kicked the underjets and fired the thrusters. Six interceptors hurtled past, and Han pumped the missile trigger by instinct, snarling to himself That’s it, knucklehead, waste your time firing dry tubes. The TIEs weren’t his main problem anyway; the big issue was the flight of heavy assault gunships skimming the ground straight toward them … from east by northeast. “Do you know you’re sending us straight for them?”
“Hey, sorry. You feel safer here?”
“You and me, we’re just never gonna get along.”
“Stop it, you’ll make me cry. Get the TIEs in a tail chase so—”
“—they’ll be in the gunships’ line of fire, and the gunships in theirs.” Han was already doing so, swinging high to place the Falcon squarely between the enemies behind and those in front. The TIEs’ cannons would do even less to the distant gunships than they were doing to the Falcon, but the gunships had to hold fire on their missiles, and Han was starting to let himself believe that he just might get the Falcon clear. “This isn’t exactly my first scrape, y’know.”
“Could’ve fooled me. How we doin’ up there?”
“Not bad,” Han admitted—then changed his mind as another salvo from the TIEs rocked the ship. Hard. “But they’re gaining on us—pretty soon they’ll be close enough that those cannons will start doing real damage. And the gunships are wheeling to join up on the tail chase when we pass them in about five seconds, at which point we’re pretty well f—”
“Pull up!”
“What?”
“Climb, dammit! Full power!”
“You can’t even see out there!”
“I know this planet like your rear knows your pants, flyboy. Climb or die.”
“You want to come up here and drive? No, forget I asked.”
Han gritted his teeth and hauled back on the control yoke. The Falcon lurched and bucked and whipped for the sky fast enough to overload its inertial compensators; acceleration squashed him into the pilot’s couch and pinned him there, and he caught himself indulging an uncharitable fantasy that one particular Mindorese had failed to secure herself and had fallen and broken something.
Preferably her mouth.
The pursuing TIEs climbed with them, spreading wide to open a window for the gunships, which obliged by launching a spray of concussion missiles. The Falcon’s missile-lock alert blared. Han cursed under his breath as he forced the yoke forward and twisted it to yank the ship into a looping spiral. Just then the whole sky flashed scarlet and the whole ship thoommed with magnetic resonance harmonics that sounded, to Han’s all-too-experienced ear, like a near-miss by a really, really big turbolaser blast. “Where the hell did that come from?”
Leia’s voice, from the ventral turret: “Quarter-roll to your left and you’ll see it.”
Han kicked the ship through the quarter roll, got a look at what Leia was talking about, and started swearing. He kept on swearing for some considerable time, even while wrenching the ship through ridiculously violent evasive maneuvers as the whole sky kept flaring around them and the ship rang with a near-continuous whang-ng-ng-ng like a Ruurian beating a dinner gong with all fourteen hands.
The sudden climb he’d undertaken on the redhead’s advice had cleared them over the horizon of a vast rounded mountain that bulged up into the orange sky, like some kind of young volcanic dome that hadn’t yet blown its crater, and the whole blasted place was studded with rings of huge turbolaser towers, which were powerful enough that the interference from Mindor’s atmosphere had no effect except to spread the blasts wide enough to vaporize his entire ship, instead of just blowing holes in it.
“Oh, brilliant. Oh, this is just great,” Han shouted into the intercom. “You sent us straight for their main base!”
“Quit whining. Those turbo batteries�
�ll keep the TIEs off our tail, and probably dust some of the missiles, too.”
She was right, which only made Han hate her even more. No one that annoying had any business being right about anything.
“There should be three parallel box canyons about five klicks off your left front. See them?”
“Yeah.” Three long gouges in Mindor’s crust, shallow at this end and deepening as they extended off to planetary east until they came to sudden ends—looked like maybe three pretty good-sized chunks of meteorite had come in at the same time a few years back. “Now what?”
“Hug the deck straight in to the right-hand canyon. Once we’re below ground level, there are side canyons and caverns and all kinds of places to hide. Blast some rocks, kick up some dust, and you won’t have any trouble losing these guys. There’s too many places to look, and they’ve got bigger problems than us.”
Han gave a slow nod as he nosed the Falcon into a screaming dive toward the canyons through the storm of intersecting cannon and turbolaser fire. “Not bad,” he admitted grudgingly. “You do seem to know your way around.”
“What do you think kept us all alive out here? Good looks?”
“Nah,” Han said. “I figured it was your winning personality.”
A hundred-some planetary diameters from Mindor the Slash-Es were moving.
Asteroid clusters had been drifting toward them, accelerating as they came, following lines of gravitic interaction between the Slash-Es’ gravity-well projectors and the thousands of gravity stations scattered through the asteroids. This effect had been clearly visible on the heads-up displays of the Lancer’s starfighter pickets, which was what had sparked the idea in Captain Tirossk, who, as the senior commander still active in the theater, was now unexpectedly in command of the entire RRTF.
As he explained it to Wedge and Tycho in encrypted transmissions, the combined effects of the inbound asteroid clusters and the gravity wells would produce semicoherent planetoids. With seat-of-the-pants reckoning, Wedge and Tycho had guesstimated that a dozen of these planetoids, moving in the proper orbits, would be enough to clear a brief hyperspace window that might allow some of the task force to escape. The Lancer’s navigational computer had put the minimum number at close to eighteen hours … and the window would open only briefly and unpredictably several times until it finally stabilized, if all went well, in about twenty hours.
However, all was not going well. Very little was going well.
Asteroid impacts on Taspan’s stellar sphere had already begun, owing to the ongoing perturbation of the asteroids’ unstable orbits, and radiation levels were rising. The Imp officers directing the TIE fighter wings had known what was up the instant they detected the Slash-Es moving out of planetary interdiction configuration—and they had a seemingly limitless supply of interceptors piloted by an equally seemingly limitless supply of suicidal psychopaths, which meant that the Slash-Es were doing their best to perform this delicate and intricate set of maneuvers while plowing through clouds of enemy fighters that swirled and spat plasma blasts as if somebody had armed a swarm of Gamorrean thunder wasps with laser cannons.
For the original model of CC-7700s, this would have been a suicide mission, and a brief one at that. The Slash-E series, however, was clad in the latest carbon-nanofilament armor to supplement their six shield generators; they had eight quad turrets each, and their power output had been upgraded to nearly the level of a Clone Wars–era turbolaser. Further improvements included a pair, dorsal and ventral, of 360-degree proton torpedo turrets and a staggering number of anti-starfighter cluster bombs—essentially shaped charges set into the hull that would explode outward into clouds of bomblets when they sensed the approach of enemy fighters—all of which meant that the only way TIE fighters could have a serious shot at taking out a Slash-E was to swarm it in enough numbers to overload its defenses so that a few could slip in for full-speed headers. But even a direct impact wouldn’t generate enough kinetic energy to take out a CNF-armored frigate unless the TIE was traveling at very close to its maximum realspace velocity.
Making sure no TIE reached that cataclysmic velocity on an intercept course with one of the Slash-Es was the job of the X-wing pilots.
Though the RRTF fighters were outnumbered hundreds to one by the TIEs, they had a few advantages that shaved the odds a bit. First, the Imperial forces could not make a full-commitment assault, because that would have required pulling fighters from all over the system, which would have exposed their gravity stations to the RRTF’s capital ships. Second, the interceptors had to focus all their firepower on the Slash-Es to have any hope of taking them out; they had very little to spare for dogfighting. Third, despite being at a substantial disadvantage in speed and maneuverability versus the interceptors, the X-wing—the Incom T-65 Space Superiority Starfighter—had one key feature no TIE fighter could match.
It was rugged.
This went deeper than the combat defenses loaded onto this model; it was a feature of quality construction and attention to detail, and it meant that the X-wing could survive certain physical stresses that would rip the collector panels off a TIE. Like, for example, the extreme tidal stress created by a very close pass through a very steep gravity well.
Which was why each new wave of interceptors found itself under fire from flights of X-wings whipping out from around the gravity-station planetoids a great deal faster than X-wings were supposed to be able to whip. Rogue Squadron had the point, and their path between the planetoids became a looping chain of gravity-assisted slingshots that could, with no more than a twitch of the controls, send them toward whichever one or two or three of the five Slash-Es the Imps had decided to concentrate on.
Even with all these advantages, the overwhelming odds took their toll. Some X-wings were lost to friendly fire, as they were traveling too fast for the Slash-E gunners—or even their own superb reflexes—to react as they swept through the quad turrets’ fields of fire. Some were lost to simple collisions, flying at near-relativistic speeds through very, very crowded space. Almost half of the Twenty-third’s Green Squadron was taken out by a mass of asteroids that didn’t cohere into a planetoid as quickly as the navicomps had predicted.
They didn’t have anything like a count on the enemy fighters they’d destroyed; the TIEs just kept coming. “These guys never stop!” Wes Janson groaned through his teeth during the far side of his twentieth or thirtieth bruising way-too-tight slingshot. “It’s like all these beggars want to die!”
“They’re already dead,” Hobbie said from two hundred meters off Janson’s starboard wing. “Think about it, Janson—no shields. No hyperdrive. They can’t hide and they can’t run. All they’ve got is the chance to take us all with ’em.”
That stopped Janson cold. For a moment, he had no words at all. Then he set his jaw and rolled his starfighter starboard.
“I’ve got it!” he said, pointing his X-wing toward a TIE flight and holding down his triggers. “I know exactly what we need.”
“Yeah?” Hobbie said. “What’s that?”
“A miracle.”
“Seal that chatter!” Wedge snapped from the point. “And check your midrange scans.”
When Janson did, he discovered that a brand-spanking-new Mon Cal–designed Republic battle cruiser had just dropped out of hyperspace through that half-opened mass-shadow window, and was currently disgorging what appeared to be a full starfighter wing.
“Hot staggering—” For the second time in a few moments, Janson found himself entirely at a loss for words. “Where in eight Stalbringion hells did that come from?”
The comm crackled with the voice of the current director of Special Operations, General Lando Calrissian. “Did somebody order a miracle?”
The cavern Han had been directed to by the redhead was roomy, looked acceptably dry in the bleached glare from the Falcon’s exterior lights, and was deep enough within a mountain that Han didn’t have to worry about being detected. That didn’t stop him from worrying, though
.
First, he didn’t like having a hold full of armed strangers, no matter how much they might hate the Empire. Second, this mountain looked way too much like a dormant volcano. And third … well, he just didn’t much like parking in caves. Call him superstitious. Somehow landing his ship inside a big hole in a rock never seemed to work out that well.
On the other hand, the Mindorese might have brought along something to eat.
He keyed the intercom. “Okay, everybody. Looks like we’re clear. You in the hold? No offense, but pile your blasters and other weapons in the number-six hopper, will you? It’s not that I don’t trust you, it’s just that I don’t trust you.”
The comm responded with the sound of the redhead’s voice. “What about that Jedi? Where’s he?”
“That’s what we wanted to ask you.”
“Like that, is it? Well, I’ll tell you what—we’ll down weapons and have our Jedi chat if you can help us out with bandages and bacta. I’ve got a lot of wounded in here.”
“Fair enough. I’ll be with you in a nanosec.”
When he reached the forward cargo hold, the place looked like a field hospital way too close to the front lines. On the losing side. People sat or lay sprawled every which way, some wrapping their own bandages, some twisting or moaning softly, others just staring blankly at the bulkheads as if they couldn’t believe they were actually alive. Leia and Chewie were already hard at work treating the wounded. Han hurried over to Leia’s side. “Hey, hey, hey, take it easy with the bacta, huh?”
“Han, he’s hurt.”
“Sure, I know. But he’s not dying, is he? Do you know how much that stuff costs?”
A woman’s voice came from behind his left shoulder. “You can bill me.”
Han rounded on her, then stopped, making a face. “Oh, it’s you.”
“Yeah, it’s me,” the good-looking redhead said, and offered him a lopsided smile that made her, if anything, even better-looking. She stuck out her hand. “Aeona Cantor. You the pilot of this scow?”