The Essential Novels

by James Luceno

  “Whistler, do you think they’re closing on one of our assault shuttles?”

  A crisp note answered him as Whistler tagged the shuttle as the Devonian.

  “Yeah, I thought so.” Yanking his stick back to his breastbone, Corran brought the snubfighter over in a big loop. “Page, you’re going to owe me big time for this one.”

  The droid tootled at him with low tones.

  “Yes, I do know what I’m doing. If I let my dive drive me instead of burning up fuel, we’ll be fine.” Corran eased his throttle back. “And, no, I don’t want you to calculate the odds on this. I’ve never asked for the odds before, and I don’t want them now. Odds only matter when you’re engaged in games of chance, and if Page’s people are going to have any chance, this can’t be a game.”

  Corran’s dive was bringing him high, hot, and on an angle at the rear arc for the Interceptors. He focused his attention on the second squint. He couldn’t switch over to proton torpedoes because a target lock would warn them of the threat they faced. If he was going to succeed, he needed things to be fast and that meant the first Interceptor had to die on his first pass.

  Just over a kilometer out, Corran pushed his throttle forward and leveled out to come straight in at the Interceptors. A bit more angle and maybe I can get both of them at the same time. He switched his weapon over to lasers and linked them so they would fire in tandem. He dropped his targeting crosshairs on the rear ship and when they flashed green, he pulled the trigger and kept it down.

  Four pairs of red energy darts perforated the slant-winged Interceptor. The first hits on the right wing started the ship rolling, then it jinked up into Corran’s line of fire. Four laser bolts converged, puncturing the cockpit and filling the interior of the ship with fire. A roiling explosion blasted the squint apart and forced Corran to roll and dive to avoid the worst of the debris cloud. Snapping back to his previous orientation, he looked up at where the other Interceptor should have been. He didn’t see it, but before he could even begin to wonder if it had somehow died, too, laser fire carved into the strength of his aft shield.

  Great, all I need is some Sithspawn hotshot pilot in that squint! He reinforced the aft shield, rolled, then hit the left rudder and slewed his ship around to try to give him an angle on the Interceptor. He couldn’t see it on his forward or rear scope, so he hauled back on the stick and started a climbing loop.

  The Interceptor appeared dead-center in his aft scan and again laced his aft shield with green fire.

  Who is this clown? Corran came over, rolled up onto the port S-foil, then chopped his throttle back and let the X-wing drop toward the planet. “Whistler, comm to one klick radius. Tell the transport to go to ground as soon as possible because this guy is good. I want room to operate.”

  A harsh whistle stung him. A question appeared on his display.

  “Yes, of course I’m better. I’m toying with him. Now reinforce those shields and hang on.”

  The Interceptor began to close on Corran’s tail. Pulling back on the stick, Corran leveled his ship out and the Interceptor swooped in behind him. The Corellian waited until the Interceptor closed to five hundred meters, then sideslipped his ship to starboard. Hitting hard left rudder and bringing his throttle back up, his X-wing’s nose swung back toward the squint.

  Though more maneuverable than their vertically winged predecessors, the Interceptor’s broad wings still gave them yaw problems. The squint’s sideslip came slow and presented Corran with a wonderful target. His first shot hit solidly on the starboard wing, lasing two angry holes in it. The squint began to roll and Corran shot again, but the scarlet bolts shot fore and aft of the ball cockpit.

  The Imperial pilot finished the roll and dove. Corran kicked the X-wing up on the port S-foil and dove after the Interceptor. The pilot in front of him let his ship jerk and juke back and forth, but the drag from the damaged wing’s solar panels made all moves to the right quicker and harder to recover from.

  Corran dropped his targeting reticle just to starboard of the stricken fighter. The Interceptor drifted to the right and he fired. The lasers took the right wing clean off. The squint immediately whirled off into a flat spin to port, uncontrolled and unrecoverable. Corran pulled up before he saw the Interceptor crash and part of him hoped the pilot had the intelligence to eject before he died.

  He glanced at his monitor and angled his ship onto an intercept for the rest of the squadron’s outbound course. “Nine to Rogue Leader, I’m still here.”

  He heard plenty of anger pulsing through Wedge’s reply. “You’re supposed to be leading, not following, Nine.”

  “Copy, Lead. I was getting clear, but two squints made a run.”

  “So you made a run.”

  “Avenging General Kre’fey.” Corran figured Wedge would catch the reference and realize the Interceptors were closing on a transport when he picked them off. He looked at his fuel indicator. “Lead, I have a problem.”

  “I know, Nine, your astromech just answered an inquiry I sent.”

  The Twi’lek’s voice broke into the frequency. “Lead, another dozen squints have launched and are following the wave behind us.”

  “Lead, this is Four. Let’s stay. It’s only twenty-two of them.”

  “Lead, Five here. I’m game.”

  Corran smiled. “Thanks, guys.”

  “Quiet. This isn’t a democracy and what we want to do doesn’t matter. We have orders and others are depending on those orders being obeyed.” Static filled the speakers for a moment, then Wedge spoke again. “We do have some leeway in obeying them, though. Change in plans. We’ll go sunside and draw the Imps with us. Nine, you will go in on the dark side and go to ground. The atmosphere is thin, but your life-support equipment can concentrate it enough for you. If you can avoid them, we’ll be back for you.”

  “I’ll do my best, Lead.” Corran brought his X-wing into position with the rest of the squadron. “Four, how many did you vape?”

  “I got six. You?”

  “Three, if we count the one in the canyon.”

  “It counts, Nine. Unconventional, but it counts.”

  “Thanks, Commander.”

  Rhysati broke into the conversation. “What did you do, Nine?”

  “It’s complicated. I’ll explain it later.” Even as he pronounced the word “later,” it turned to dust in his mouth. “I’m only at seventeen. You’re plus two on me, Four. I’m going to count the ones I get on the dark side in our contest.”

  “I would not have it any other way, Nine.”

  Nawara Ven spoke. “Nine, Gavin’s an ace now.”

  “Never doubted it for a minute. Good going, kid.” Borleias’s moon loomed large overhead. “Welcome to the club.”

  “Ten seconds to break, Rogues. Nine, don’t feel you have to be a hero.”

  “Have to be? I’m a Rogue. I thought hero came with the territory.”

  “It certainly does, Nine. Break now.”

  Corran banked off to the left as the rest of the squadron went right and filled his aft sensor scope. “Later, my friends.”

  If there was any reply it didn’t make it over the horizon to him.

  Corran throttled back and took the X-wing down close to the lunar surface. He cut off his comm unit and flipped his sensors over to passive mode. “Okay, Whistler, it’s just you and me. Let’s find us a hole to crawl into. No, not one to hide in, but one to ambush out of. The Commander knew as well as we did that this split wouldn’t fool all the Imperial pilots. They’ll come for us eventually. I’ve never had a desire to die alone, and taking a bunch of them along will suit me just fine.”

  37

  As certain as taxes and as slow as paperwork they come. With his X-wing nestled in a frozen lava tube on the side of a volcano, Corran watched as paired Interceptors flew search patterns over the lunar surface. They’d pushed enough power to their sensors that even with having them focused directly downward, enough energy bled off to register on his passive receptors.
<
br />   Whistler had detected differences in the energy signatures of each sensor unit and had isolated a dozen different Interceptors. That means ten squints didn’t make it back from their pursuit. Given that the Rogues had only fifteen minutes to play, that’s very good work.

  He reached up and tapped the transparisteel at the rear of his cockpit. “Whistler, they’ve been at this search stuff for nearly half an hour. Have you got the solution worked up yet?”

  The droid piped a jeer at him.

  “Hey, just asking.” Corran started his engines and shunted power to the weapons control. He armed two proton torpedoes. “Ready when you are.”

  A countdown clock appeared on his console and slowly started running down. The squints continued their back and forth grid search pattern, moving ever closer to his position. From the second he saw what they were doing he asked Whistler to time the runs. They remained constant for speed and duration, which told Corran the pilots had done exactly what he would have—they programmed the search pattern into their navigational computers and let it run on autopilot.

  Which means we know where they’ll be in thirty-five point three seconds. He nodded grimly. I’m dead, but you’ll be dead sooner, and that’s a bit of a victory, to be sure.

  It occurred to Corran that he was angry about dying. That emotion seemed, on the surface, to be rather logical, but emotions rarely were. Had someone described his current situation to him and asked him how he’d feel, he would have told them he’d have been scared out of his wits. The fact was, however, that the anger overshadowed the fear.

  He took a deep breath and forced himself to relax. Fear and anger aren’t right here. He knew that going out to bring the Interceptors down just so he’d take more of them with him when he died was wrong. He didn’t know if the pilots were clones or volunteers or conscripts or mercenaries—and who they were didn’t really matter. The only reason he had for fighting against them was the same one he’d had for going after the squints down on Borleias.

  I want to stop the Empire from taking lives. I’m not an avenger; I’m here to protect others. He smiled. Somehow it seemed right that he, son and grandson of men who protected others in CorSec, had followed them into CorSec and had ended up here, with the Rebellion. His life, his father’s life, his grandfather’s life, had all been devoted to safeguarding others. And now the guys on the ground and Salm’s bomber jocks will get protected.

  The timer went to zero.

  Corran hit the trigger.

  Two proton torpedoes streaked out from the launch tubes on either side of the X-wing. Because they were programmed to reach a certain point at a certain time, Corran did not need a target lock on the pair of squints flying past. A kilometer separated them from the X-wing and the torpedoes went from launch to target in under half a second.

  The first torpedo stabbed through the closest Interceptor and detonated. The explosion vaporized the squint, reducing it to its component molecules. The second torpedo actually overshot its target, but went off when it reached its programmed range. The blast crumpled the starboard wing. The Interceptor began to roll through a tight downward spiral, then slammed into a basalt monolith and exploded.

  Shoving the throttle forward, Corran held the stick steady as his snubfighter shot from the lava tube. Once clear he hauled back on the stick and climbed. He saw other Interceptors break their search patterns, but none of them immediately moved after him. Their sensors are still oriented toward the ground.

  He flipped his weapons controls over to lasers and set them on quad fire. It would slow his overall rate of fire, but a solid hit was a kill and he needed all the help he could get. Inverting the X-wing he took a quick look at the Interceptors as he flew past the volcano’s crater. Spotting a pair of targets moving toward where the first squints had gone down, he rolled the fighter up on the starboard S-foil and came around in a wide curve.

  He dove and leveled out in a small valley between the volcano and a meteor crater. Climbing at the last second, he rose up over the broad lunar plain and sent two bursts of laser fire into the belly of a squint. The starfighter obliged him by melting into a metallic fog that instantly condensed and rained down on the moon.

  Whistler hooted proudly.

  “Darned right, Horn pulls ahead of the bacta boy.” Corkscrewing his ship into a weave, Corran avoided the retribution of the squint’s wingman. He leveled out for a second, then cut the fighter hard right. Ninety degrees from his original track, he leveled out again, then climbed and did a wing-over to port that pointed him straight back at the Interceptor that had tried to stay on his tail. Corran rolled, shot, melted some armor from the squint, and broke hard right again.

  He shook his head in response to Whistler’s question. “No, I didn’t think I killed it. Burned him a bit, though.”

  Corran rolled the X-wing through inversion and hit the left rudder to again carry himself back across his own trail. Green spears of laser light crisscrossed through the moon’s thin air as the Interceptors converged on his ship. Whistler toted nine up on the monitor and made the closest ones flash red on the screen. Static hissed through Corran’s helmet as occasional hits weakened his shields, but energy shunted from lasers reinforced it quickly enough.

  He glanced at his fuel indicator. “As much as we could teach them something about flying, it’s time we change some of the rules here.” He broke left and climbed, then came over, inverted, and pointed his fighter at the volcano’s cone. “We’ll see if these guys are such hot stuff in the place where hot stuff used to spew!”

  The astromech droid splashed a message on console.

  “Yes, inviting them into the caldera will be fine. The enclosed area will hurt them more than it does me, just like it hurt the TIEs that Wedge nailed on Rachuk.” Corran brought the fighter down into the crater and throttled back to zero thrust. He cut in the repulsorlift engines and powered them up so he hung suspended in the middle of the obsidian arena.

  As he pointed the fighter’s nose toward the sky, he glanced at Whistler’s reply to his earlier statement. “Yeah, nine to one odds are hardly fair.”

  The X-wing shook violently, as if a titanic child had grabbed it in an invisible fist. Whistler hooted anxiously and Corran felt his stomach turn inside out. Tractor beam! It’s all over.

  The astromech droid wailed piteously.

  Corran read the message on his console and shook his head. “Hey, it’s not your fault. Your telling me the odds isn’t why they evened them.” He brought his torpedo control up again as the first Interceptors streaked over the lip of the volcano’s crater.

  “Sensors forward, Whistler. Time to remind them that trapping a Rogue doesn’t make him dead, just deadlier.”

  38

  Locked in the silence of hyperspace, Wedge glanced back over his shoulder and frowned. “Are you absolutely certain about the timing on this search pattern thing?”

  Mynock spun his head around and bleated imploringly.

  “Fine.” The droid’s numbers indicated that a standard Imperial square-klick search pattern would take two and a half standard hours to scour the dark side of the moon. If Corran managed to stay ahead of them and slip over to the light side, then they’d have to search it, too. That means he could still be hiding from them. If not … Wedge glanced at his fighter’s chronometer. If not, they found him a minimum of an hour and a half ago.

  Frustration balled Wedge’s hands into fists. He knew they’d done everything they could within mission parameters to help Corran. The first set of ten Interceptors had caught up with them because they had throttled back and waited. The five Rogues had easily dispatched their foes, but the dogfight took them to critical fuel levels. They went to light speed, leaving a dozen squints to hunt for Corran.

  At the first transit jump he’d ordered everyone to spend the trip into Noquivzor working up plans to go back and get Corran out. For the past three hours he’d put together a rescue operation and had figured out all sorts of contingencies depending upon what
intelligence they could get from Borleias. Defender Wing would not yet have arrived at Borleias by the time the Rogues landed at Noquivzor, but there was an outside chance that Page’s people could have some news and have tapped into the Imperial holonet to deliver it.

  That was a long shot, but getting information from the holonet was not. Borleias would certainly have reported being under attack, and that report might contain details that would indicate Corran’s status. The second he reverted to realspace he’d have Emtrey search out the latest information from Borleias. I need to know what to expect when we go back.

  His core plan was risky, and he knew Ackbar would never approve it. The mission risks had been pointed out in advance. Corran had volunteered to go. He would be missed, but jeopardizing other people to effect a rescue that probably would not work would be foolish.

  As much as he knew Ackbar would be right in pointing all those things out, he also knew he couldn’t abandon one of his people. I’ve lost too many friends to the Empire not to do everything I can to save others. He knew his insistence on Tycho Celchu’s inclusion in Rogue Squadron was just such a rescue. He smiled wryly. And saving him from Salm was tougher than pulling Corran out of Borleias ever will be.

  At Noquivzor the Rogues could be refueled and head back out inside a half hour. He assumed their return trip would actually go off in an hour because he recalled that being the minimum amount of time techs needed to put the lasers back in the Forbidden. With Tycho flying the shuttle and the X-wings as escort, they’d be more than a match for the dozen Interceptors in the Borleias system.

  Dozen? I’ll bet Corran will leave us half that number.

  Wedge sat back for a moment. He realized he thought of Corran as Corran, not Lieutenant Horn. The distance he had placed between himself and Corran had collapsed in on itself. He’d purposely chosen to distance himself from all the new recruits to maintain authority over them. As loose as Rogue Squadron was, that detachment was necessary if they were to follow him.