Solo Command

by Aaron Allston

  Squeaky said, "Flight Officer Konnair, you are free to de­ tach when ready."

  Lara and Fel looped back quickly, getting back into position behind the Falsehood. They continued their erratic, side-to-side motion, which made it all but impossible for the ship's gunners to target them.

  Lara heard Fel report, "There's something attached to the Falcon where that piece of debris just detached. It's—oh."

  Lara saw the "something" break free of the Falsehood. It was an A-wing fighter. It drifted free of the freighter with the puff of small explosive bolts detonating; then its engines lit off and it vectored away at the kind of speed only an A-wing could manage.

  "Don't be distracted, Petothel," Fel said. "Stay with the primary target."

  "Don't worry about me," she said, and opened up again on the Falsehood.

  Fel's wingman veered away in pursuit of the A-wing.

  On the bridge of the Reprisal, the captain and crew watched the Falsehood's movements.

  "He's vectoring to sweep around us," the weapons opera­tor reported. "He'll probably return to his primary course when he's clear of our guns."

  "Order the TIEs to herd him back in toward our side," said the captain, a burly man who could not return to his home on Coruscant until Rebels like Han Solo were purged from the galaxy. "We can't keep Fel from firing on her, but maybe we can steal the kill. What's the status of that debris?"

  "On a collision course with us," the sensor specialist said. "But its speed and tonnage are insufficient to do us harm. Our shields will repel it."

  "Very well," the captain said.

  Lara and Fel continued to pour laser fire into the Falsehood's stern, all the while dodging with the mad speed and maneu­ verability of which only TIE interceptors were capable. The remaining TIEs swept out ahead of the Falsehood, forming up in her path, dictating a run through their gauntlet or a turn— either toward space, along the Dreadnaught's flank, or back toward the planet.

  But Dorset Konnair in her A-wing flashed along behind the line of TIEs, firing her blaster cannons continuously, vap­ing two of the TIEs before she emerged from the other side.

  Fel's wingman pursued her, firing at maximum range, unable to overtake the starfighter.

  Donos kept up ineffectual fire at Lara whenever she was under his sights, while trying with all his skill to tag Fel when­ever that pilot came within view. He had no more success hit­ting the pilot he wanted to kill than he did the one he wanted to miss. And shot after shot from the pursuing TIEs rocked the Falsehood, sounding alarms as shields threatened to fail.

  Chewbacca veered back toward the escape course short of the gauntlet of TIEs. His maneuver left them too close to the Dreadnaught; the Falsehood would be running under the guns of the Reprisal. Donos shook his head and stayed focused on his more immediate problems. If the Reprisal hit them, he'd be dead before he felt anything.

  Zsinj watched the Corellian freighter's run. He rapped his knuckles against a bulkhead, trying to bleed his nervousness away with activity. "Why isn't Mon Remonda jumping in?" he said. "Petothel said that these Millennium Falcon missions had cruiser support."

  Melvar said, "Maybe she was wrong. Or they changed tactics."

  "No, it makes sense. He just isn't calling in his cruiser. Why isn't the Reprisal dealing with that debris?"

  Melvar glanced at the data feed from the Dreadnaught. "It's not real ship's construction. Too light. Their shields will handle it."

  Zsinj glanced away from the transmitted view from the Reprisal's bridge to the data feed. Cold suspicion clawed at him. "Contact the Reprisal! Tell them to blow that debris now!"

  The rumbling piece of space junk that had been attached to the Falsehood made contact with the Reprisal's bow shields.

  Inside, a sensor attuned to sudden shocks and gravita­ tional variances registered impact. It triggered the large cache of explosives fastened within the debris's hull.

  The bomb, originally intended for a drop onto one of Zsinj's production facilities on the surface of Comkin Five, ex­ ploded with far more force than the Dreadnaught's shields could withstand.

  A bright glow washed over the Falsehood from the side. Donos glanced away from Lara's TIE interceptor to look.

  The entire bow of the Reprisal seemed to be awash in bright light and flame.

  His comm unit crackled. Squeaky said, "We have good news to report. The Wraiths are incoming."

  Squeaky turned off the comm mike and glared at Chew­ bacca. "You didn't tell me it was a bomb."

  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 be­ ings! 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 in­ tended 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 starfight­ ers 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 acti-

  vated the comm unit. "Wraiths, form up, prepare for hyper­ space. 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, Genera!."

  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 es­ cape 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 self-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 data­ pad 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 ex­ pected 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 commu­nic
ator. She had also, according to what we can determine, re­ duced 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.