“Unless it was first softened up by a primary assault,” Shawnkyr finished grimly. “In time, they could bring down the shields. The central dome is strong, but not impervious.”
They were silent for a moment, listening to the continuing bombardment and the crunch and shriek of the mistreated structure.
“Stent did not say whether your father survived the attack on his outpost,” said Shawnkyr.
“He didn’t need to. Why else would Stent have come, unless my father survived? My presence here shows how little trust Stent has in my father’s honor.”
“That is harsh, but logical,” she agreed. A particularly powerful blast hit the dome, and the room shook. The Chiss glanced up toward the ceiling and grimaced. “We may be pinned down here for some time. Indulge my curiosity: Exactly how did you come to be here, at the academy?”
It was a question Jag had heard for most of his life. He’d spent much of his childhood at the Hand of Thrawn, the Chiss admiral’s hidden base. He had been raised among Chiss, all of whom had shown the same curiosity about the Fels’ presence and purpose.
For several years, this had been easily explained. “My father serves Grand Admiral Thrawn,” was something all could understand. So Jag was accepted, after a fashion; and he’d played with solemn, blue-skinned children, and he’d watched them mature before his eyes like swift-blossoming cannu flowers. One day they were children; the next, young adults. Ten-year-old Chiss put on the uniform of cadets and left for one of the military academies, whose locations were guarded as jealously as that of the Hand of Thrawn. Year after year, Jag had watched them go with longing eyes.
During the last monsoon season, Jag had grown with almost Chiss-like speed. Relentless training had packed muscle onto his lengthened frame, so he was not quite as gawky as other teenaged humans. His voice changed nearly as precipitously, plunging downward in direct opposition to his soaring height.
Jag remembered his father’s face when he’d approached him about a commission to the academy. Baron Fel had been unusually distracted in recent months, and he did a shocked double-take as he focused on the young man standing at attention before his desk.
“Wedge,” he’d muttered in disbelieving tones.
Wedge Antilles was his mother’s brother, one of the Rebels’ heroes and a pilot in their famous Rogue Squadron. Jag supposed he did resemble him somewhat--his hair was the same shade of near-black, and his face defined by black brows, strong features, and a square chin. Once, Jag might have thought to emulate the famous pilot. At the moment, he felt only blank astonishment that his own father did not recognize him, if even for just one moment.
He pulled his thoughts firmly back to the present moment, and the watchful Chiss. “It was a political matter,” he explained. “My presence here gives the Chiss leadership a sense of security. Humans are known to be emotional, so the logical assumption is that Baron Fel, though he is currently a liaison between the Chiss and the Imperial Remnant, would protect the hidden Chiss bases from Imperial exploitation for fear of retaliation against his son. With that assumption in place, he is free to maneuver as needed. Without rancor, I can assure you that my safety would be only one of many factors entering into his decision.”
Shawnkyr nodded thoughtfully. “I had not thought humans capable of such tactical decisions.”
“And that’s exactly why we’re stuck here like spine rats in a burrow,” he retorted.
“Explain.”
“Tactics...” Jag said curtly, holding up his left hand, fingers splayed. “A knowledge of past military tactics,” he said, curling his thumb and third finger into his palm.
“Knowledge of the enemy...” this point he underscored by furling his index finger.
“... an understanding of their expectations,” he added, ticking off this point by curling his middle finger. He shook his hand, the pinkie still extended. “And what is left?”
“A hidden plan that contradicts and confounds these expectations,” Shawnkyr recited.
Jag nodded grimly, shaking the fist his hand had become. “A rational process, a well-reasoned solution. An obvious solution.”
He thrust out his right hand, stiffened fingers diving for Shawnkyr’s throat. The Chiss batted the attack aside just short of impact. Chagrin mingled with anger on her azure face.
“You have a dangerous way of making point,” she said, “but it is effective for all that.”
“The Chiss exiled Thrawn for his repeated offenses. Have you never wondered how this brilliant tactician failed to measure the tolerance of the Chiss ruling houses?”
She hesitated, then inclined her head. “I have pondered this, yes.”
“The answer is simple: He didn’t miscalculate. He used seeming defeat to further his objectives. Did you know that the Empire made recruitment overtures before Thrawn’s exile? He could not honorably accept, not as long as he was attached to the Chiss Expansionary Defense. What could he do but engineer his own disgrace?”
Shawnkyr stared at him.
“My father told me of Thrawn’s subterfuge. He considered this information part of my training. Surely he was in a position to know. Stent confirmed it when he told me of my commission and explained the purpose of this particular academy. We were to be a hidden phalanx, a weapon for Thrawn to unleash at a moment of his choice.”
As Shawnkyr assimilated the information silently. Jag suspected that Stent’s name gave his words a weight that they otherwise would not have had.
He glanced at the red piping on the Chiss female’s uniform. This presented the Iced Flame--the essence of courage, cunning, and discipline, an the ideal state of perfection that could be aspired to if never quite achieved. Quite a contrast from the blue piping on his own uniform. In the eyes of Jag’s fellow cadets, his impossible aspiration was something rather different. His uniform was a constant reminder that he could never be a Chiss.
“Tell me more,” Shawnkyr prompted.
Jag sternly banished the bitterness that followed these thoughts like fumes from a bad exhaust. “My father left the Imperial service for a time to pursue a personal matter. Admiral Isard later captured him, and he disappeared from public view. Most people inside the Empire and beyond assumed that he had been executed for treason. This was also Thrawn’s plan, carried out by Admiral Voss Parck.”
Shawnkyr’s eyelids flickered, the Chiss equivalent of a gaping jaw and an astonished gasp.
“Yes, the same Imperial officer who ‘found’ the exiled Thrawn and brought him to Coruscant,” Jag said impatiently, “and the captain of the Star Destroyer who accompanied Grand Admiral Thrawn to the so-called Unknown Regions after his supposed fall from Imperial grace. Thrawn planned each step, drawing Imperial forces into Chiss territory for the protection of his people. The Imperial Remnant gained outposts and alliances, and Thrawn gained a conduit for ships and weaponry.”
Shawnkyr nodded slowly. “I have never considered the matter in this light, but your interpretation is logical. Continue. Speak now of the enemy-- not Thrawn’s, but the one we face.”
“Opportunists,” Jag said. “Carrion birds who follow warriors and pick the battlefields clean. They want a quick fight, if they must fight at all. How old are you, Shawnkyr?”
She negotiated the rapid change of topic without hesitation. “I have twelve standard years.”
“In human years, you’re a child. To human eyes you’re a grown woman, a seasoned warrior. That’s what the enemy expects to find down here. That’s why they’re attacking from a distance. lf the ships hadn’t been destroyed and the Chiss met this attack in an air battle, our enemy would have scattered and run. Every cadet they encountered would affirm their perceptions. Every cadet but one.”
“Ah!” Understanding set her crimson eyes aflame. “And what could lower their expectations more swiftly than a Human boy?”
Jag wasn’t sure whether to wince or grin. Since both responses would be equally incomprehensible to the Chiss, he did neither. “I’m taking up Blue Fl
ame. That should lower their expectations to a manageable level.”
Her eyes flicked to the aging, battered ship. “An excellent choice,” Shawnkyr said without a trace of humor. “And I will prepare the others for a ground assault.” She rose in a single smooth movement.
Jag nodded and headed for the old ship.
“Lieutenant Fel,” she said sternly.
He glanced back. One corner of her lips quirked up, an almost imperceptible gesture of approval. “We want the enemy to land and seek easy plunder. Do not dissuade them by flying too well.”
This time he did smile, but as Thrawn might have done: coolly confident, utterly superior. “Defeat can be the shortest path to deception.”
Jag hauled himself onto the repair dock and regarded his clawcraft. The mechanics had added a coat of metallic silver- blue paint after one of his mishaps. This covered some of the scars but cast every dent into bright relief. He disengaged the locks on the cockpit. He had to shoulder-slam the rounded dome a couple of times before the mechanism fully turned over.
He climbed in and began to power up the repulsor lifts. The ship wheezed as its engines fired, and it rose from the dock with all the grace of a drunken Gamorrean, but at least it rose, and the controls showed that the weapons had been fully charged.
Jag eased through a broad passage and carefully maneuvered the ship into the hangar.
There was little left but rubble, but at least the invaders had moved on. The sky over the shattered dome still shone red with the laser barrage, but the enemy was now targeting other sectors of the dome.
Jag urged his clawcraft swiftly up toward the breeched dome. The hole was much larger than it had appeared from the ground. Huge panels of the thin, mirrored transparisteel hung from the edges. As Jag passed, one of them tore loose. It drifted down, looking nearly as weightless as a leaf in a soft breeze. Any sound of its impact was muted by the noise of Jag’s engine, and the continuing assault from above.
He rose up into the open sky, engaging the controls that spread four sweeping weapon arms into firing position. These framed the pod, splaying out in a formation similar to that of an X-wing’s S-foils. He wheeled the Blue Flame in a tight circle, surprised and pleased that so unreliable a ship could remain so maneuverable.
The three moons were in rare summer convergence. The forest moon was edging across the face of the large. primary moon. A small, more distant moan, glowing a faint blue against the distant nebular haze, closed in.
As a result, the sky was nearly as bright as in twilight. Even with his lights dimmed, he would soon be noticed.
A passing X-wing changed course and veered sharply toward him. The pirate ship was painted in a garish red-and-black design. Jag punched the atmospheric engines to full power. His clawcraft darted away, barely evading a stream of crimson laser fire.
The enemy ship followed, dipping and swaying and it pursued the Blue Flame. Jag avoided it, but only barely.
He headed toward the main force: five old X-wing fighters surrounding a battered corvette. The pirates had seen the ruin of the Chiss fleet, Jag concluded, and they’d probably concluded, quite rightly, that since the Chiss hadn’t used any land-to-air missiles yet, they didn’t have any.
Even so, this battle meant one not-particularly-fast Chiss ship against several professional space pirates. They had every reason to expect his defeat.
Jag threw the Blue Flame into an erratic, zig-zagging pattern, firing seemingly at random. Nearly all his laser fire went ridiculously wild. He hoped that would convince the pirates to overlook his two proton torpedoes.
Both missiles struck their targets, and two fighters dissolved in brief, bright explosions. Jag headed directly into the flying rubble, jinking past the worst of it and accepting a few solid hits. The pursuing X-wing peeled away, circling back at a safe distance.
The alarms on Jag’s console began to flash. The hyperdrive had taken a hit. There was some fuel leakage, and danger of volatility. He’d worry about that later, when lightspeed was a necessity--or for that matter, an option. The battered ship had no hope of achieving hyperspace.
It occurred to him that this situation had potential as a deceptive defeat. His fingers danced over the controls, pouring power into the damaged hyperdrive, demanding lightspeed acceleration. At the same time, he armed the eject-hyperdrive mechanism that all Chiss vessels employed-- although few ships could match a clawcraft for sheer maneuverability, their hyperdrives were known to malfunction.
The Blue Flame began to shake as it picked up speed. Jag watched the gauge climb steadily as the overtaxed hyperdrive unit approached critical level.
“It’ll be close,” he muttered, dodging a laser stream as he careened drunkenly toward an oncoming Z-95.
At the last possible moment, he veered away, rejecting the red-hot hyperdrive into the path of the fighter.
The edge of the explosion slapped the clawcraft hard, throwing it into a spin. Jag let the Flame go, knowing better than to pit the old frame against that sort of force. He eased the clawcraft away from the battle, slowly widened its spiral until he could pull it without harm into controlled flight.
Three fighters down, he noted grimly. Only the corvette and two X-wings remained.
The red-and-black ship circled the wreckage the way an ocean predator might examine a storm-wrecked vessel. It appeared that this pilot, at least, was not convinced by Jag’s feigned ineptitude.
Jag adjusted his mask and squared his shoulder. He had to convince these men that he was the best the Chiss had remaining, and that their best was none too good.
Again his warning lights flared. This time the maneuvering jets were dangerously close to overheating. He was running out of time.
“Defeat is the shortest path to deception,” Jag muttered as he threw the clawcraft into a screaming dive.
He hurtled toward the dome, streaking past the pirate vessels and throwing all his repulsors on full force.
The Blue Flame slowed. How much and how fast would be hard for the higher-altitude ships to gauge. It was none too easy for him to calculate, either.
The blue clawcraft plunged through the shattered dome, knocking huge sheets of mirrored transparisteel loose.
Jag fell in a drift of giant silvery leaves.
He landed hard enough to bounce.
The impact took out his repulsors, so he landed harder the second time. Pain sang through his every nerve, and the sky above was still red with enemy fire. Even in the darkness of the hangar, all seemed as bright as blood. Jag shook aside these dazed perceptions and forced the cockpit open. He tugged off his flight helmet, ignoring the throbbing pain, and squinted up at the sky.
Above him, silhouetted against the pale green moon, was the red-and-black X-wing. It had shut down its engines and was preparing to follow the Flame into the dome.
Jag tried leaping from the clawcraft and settled for falling. He stumbled to his feet and brushed shards of transparisteel from his uniform. His head hurt even more now, and a cut on his forehead was bleeding profusely.
The ship was in worse shape than he. Two of the arms had broken off, and much of the blue paint had been scraped off by the impact with the transparisteel. It looked like a fatal wreck. Jag felt an unexpected twinge of regret as he glanced around for the last thing he’d need to complete the grim picture.
One of his fellow cadets lay nearby, no longer recognizable as male or female, human or Chiss. Jag dragged the body toward the ruined Flame and draped it over the side of the open cockpit. His lips thinned to a grim line as he observed the convincing scene.
He nodded once, then turned and stumbled toward the forest.
He disappeared into the thick foliage, finding a path that no one unfamiliar with the terrain could discern. Even so, he didn’t see Shawnkyr until she stepped from the shadow of a vine-shrouded bindoin tree directly into his path.
“They’re coming?”
“On their way,” he said, and then he fell flat onto his face.
; Dimly he was aware of Shawnkyr dragging him into the vine thicket.
Every part of him felt numb, so he didn’t mind when she flopped him over onto his back, none too gently. For a moment she regarded him with grave, measuring eyes. Her fingers skimmed his forehead and then dove into his short black hair, probing for wounds.
As she did, sensation began to return.
Jag gritted his teeth and forbade himself to scream.
“You will fight no more today,” she announced. “A head injury, and serious. It’s a wonder you made it this far.”
Jag lifted weirdly tingling fingers to his forehead. He felt the wet edge of a deep gash that ran from his right eyebrow and well into his hair.
Shawnkyr pulled a knife from her boot and deftly scraped off a strip of hair on either side of the gash. She reached into a utility pocket and pulled out a small ring of tape, such as a mechanic might use for a short-term splicing repair. Ripping off a length with her teeth, she pinched together the edges of the wound and pressed the tape into place.
“It will serve for now,” she said in response to his incredulous stare. “I need you awake. Someone must plan tactics.”
The soft ping of charric fire sang through the forest. Shawnkyr lifted her weapon and hunkered down.
“How many?” she asked, her voice just above a whisper.
“Two one-pilot fighters. Those are both down by now. There’s another ship, a corvette, that could be holding anything from two to fifty.”
“Too many,” she said.
A soft birdcall drew her attention. “Both the humans are down. We must prepare the cadets for the larger invasion.”
“How many?” he asked in return.
Her face went grim. “Only seven cadets remain able-bodied, myself included. Even in the forest, it will not be easy”
Jag forced his dazed thoughts, to focus. The image of drifting transparisteel plates came back to him and with it, a Thrawn-like deception.
His lips curved in a feral smile; and Shawnkyr saw the cunning there.
“Tell me,” she demanded.
Star Wars: Hands of Thrawn Stories: Red Sky Blue Flame Page 2