Star Wars - X-Wing 02 - Wedge's Gamble

by Michael A. Stackpole

The technician made an entry on his datapad. "Even the stormtroopers are slipping. They tried to prevent me from coming into this sector this evening, but I would not be dissuaded by them, no, sir. I bulled on through and they let me go!"

  "Stormtroopers?" Wedge shook his head, then pointed at Gavin. "Do you hear that, son? Even stormtroopers are becoming so undisciplined that you could join them. Perhaps those outside could tell you where their recruiting office is."

  The technician looked surprised. "Son? Is he your boy?"

  "Takes after his mother." Wedge guided the man to­ward his repulsorlift truck. "Don't want to keep you."

  Suddenly sparks shot from the loading dock side door and rained down from the warehouse ceiling. A halo of brilliant white fire surrounded the door, then imploded leaving a smoking hole through which stormtroopers be­gan to run. Duracrete and steel rained down from above as teams blasted their way in through the roof and de­scended on slender lines. Out past the nose of the com­puter center truck Wedge saw a Mekuun Hoverscout's blunt prow batter the far gate. It bounced back, fired one burst with its laser cannon, then came on again over the molten remains of the gate.

  Wedge gave the technician a shove forward, then spun on his heel and started running back into the ware­house's shadows. He hurdled a line of memory cores, then cut left and back right as blaster bolts exploded all around him. Leaping over another line of crates, Wedge crouched down behind cover. From his right Iella slid him a blaster carbine, then activated her comlink. "Shiel, Ooryl, Wedge is clear. Open up."

  From deeper in the warehouse both the Gand and the Shistavanen started firing with a pair of Merr-Sonn E-Web Heavy blaster cannons. The weapons were mounted on tripods and had very specific fields of fire.

  Ooryl raked a stream of fire over the loading dock and out at the Hoverscout. The scarlet blaster bolts burned their way up over the vehicle's nose and punched through the cockpit windscreen. The cockpit exploded in fire and smoke.

  Shiel concentrated his fire on the stormtroopers de­scending on the lines from the roof. The high rate of fire allowed him to track his shots and pick stormtroopers off the lines. Wedge and Iella added their fire, but concen­trated it near the holes to shoot people just beginning their descent.

  The exit over at the far corner of the factory ex­ploded. Wedge hit his comlink. "Corran, report." He got nothing in reply and could see nothing but fire and twisted metal where a stairway had once been. The orig­inal evacuation plan had designated that stairway and the area beyond it, which Corran, Mirax, and some of the Black Sunners were holding, as their primary exit. Not anymore.

  He looked at Iella. "Plan two. Fall back." She passed the signal along via her comlink. Portha, Pash, and Gavin pulled back from their positions first while Iella and Wedge provided covering fire. Once they were set, Iella and Wedge pulled back, but they didn't get far. Even with covering fire from the heavy blasters and the others, the stormtroopers managed to concentrate enough fire to make it impossible for him to move.

  Lying prone on the ferrocrete, with his left cheek pressed against the cool floor and sparks from burning crates stinging his right cheek, everything seemed to col­lapse in on him at once. Wedge knew that being in the warehouse in Invisec on Coruscant was utterly and com­pletely insane—more so even than sending snubfighters out to destroy a Death Star. He should have been in an X-wing if he was going to be fighting Imperials. Having a firefight with stormtroopers was still one of the best ways he knew of committing suicide, and he was afraid he was going to prove it in the next three or four minutes. In setting up their operation they had taken into ac-

  count what would happen if a stormtrooper patrol hap­pened to make a sweep of the Palar factory—and the two heavy blasters should have been more than enough to take care of the threat. The presence of so many stormtroopers meant they'd been sold out at least twice— once so the Imperial operation could be planned and again so the scouts they'd had outside the plant wouldn't warn them of the impending raid. Corran said having Thyne organize the lookouts was a big mistake.

  More blaster bolts scorched the air above him. If I don't do something fast, we're done. Wedge pushed up on the bottom of his comlink and gave it a twist, setting the device on a new frequency. "This is Rogue Leader. Things are breaking up here. Track and recover on this signal. Come ready to shuck stormies."

  "I copy."

  Iella crawled over to him and glanced at the comlink. "Do I want to know?"

  "I don't like working without backup." He smiled, then ducked his head as a blaster bolt scorched the air. "If we hang on we may get out of this fine."

  "You're the Rebellion's hero, so I'll trust you." She gave him a confident smile. "Thyne sold us out, I'd bet."

  "No takers." Another trio of bolts burned through the air above them. "Can't wait here. Let's move."

  "How?"

  Wedge grinned. "Call Shiel. Get him to use that can­non to burn us a path through this maze."

  "Consider it done." Iella gave Shiel the command and the line of thick red bolts cut over and down. Memory cores exploded casting fiery debris everywhere. The mem­ory platters whirled through the air, hit, and rolled throughout the warehouse. Smoke already coated the ceil­ing with a grey cotton cloud, but more rose to take it from benign to a darkly menacing thunderhead.

  As nearly as Wedge could determine later, Shiel's fir­ing on crates to clear a path for Iella and him was inter­preted by the computer technician as an attempt to destroy the memory cores in the back of the repulsorlift

  truck. Whoever was driving it started the engine and ran power into the repulsorlift coils. The truck rose from the warehouse floor and started forward gingerly. The aft end began to drift left, but that was clearly preparatory to swinging around the burning Hoverscout.

  Suddenly the truck lurched forward. Its right front fender slammed into the edge of the loading dock access port. The truck spun around to the left and backed into the burning Hoverscout. It rode halfway up onto the mil­itary vehicle before the repulsorlift coils shorted, dropping the truck down to crush the Hoverscout.

  A titanic explosion shredded both vehicles and sprayed shrapnel throughout the loading dock area. The blast's shock wave sent crates flying and tossed Wedge around like a Chadra-Fan wrestling with a rancor. He landed hard on a crate, shattering it and the memory core it had contained. At the same time he felt something pop on his left side and got a sharp pain with each breath. Ribs, but at least I can still move.

  He grabbed Gavin's proffered hand and got to his feet. The two of them sprayed blaster fire into the black cloud choking the far end of the warehouse, but very little in return fire headed in their direction. The stormtroopers clearly had gotten the worst of the blast, being closest to it when the Hoverscout's magazine of concussion missiles had blown.

  Iella, Pash, and Portha had taken up stations around the doorway heading deeper into the factory complex. Be­yond it Nawara Ven and Shiel were wrestling with their heavy blaster cannon. Rhysati and Erisi were out in front with Ooryl close behind. He sported a blaster carbine.

  Wedge winced as he waved everyone on. "Go, go! This place is crawling with Imps. We were sold out so now we have to get clear."

  Gavin's eyes grew wide. "But you're hurt, sir." "I can still move, Gavin, and that's what we have to do." Wedge shoved him on ahead. "If we don't we're all going to be hurt a lot more."

  35

  Waiting in the plant supervisor's office Corran had a bad feeling about how things were unfolding out in the ware­house. The supervisor's holopad had been wired into the warehouse surveillance holocams. Wedge, the technician, Pash, Gavin, and Portha all marched around on the desktop like pieces in a hologame. Though everything seemed to be going well for his team, he couldn't shake the feeling that they were somehow losing.

  Mirax sat behind the heavy steel desk and watched Wedge force the technician's choice of a new core with a big smile on her face. "Oh, the smuggler you could have been, Wedge Antilles! He's got this guy thinking
he's made a totally random choice when Wedge had a core picked out from the beginning for him to take."

  "I'll take your word for it." Corran paced back and forth behind her. The supervisor's office had two doors. The one at the front of the office led to a waiting room with a window that overlooked the warehouse. The other door, built into the office's back wall, led to a private stairwell and the private parking area below the ware­house floor. To avoid being spotted through the window, Mirax and Corran had taken up a position in the office.

  Down below, in the parking area, Inyri and several other Black Suns waited with airspeeders to whisk the Rogues away.

  "Take it easy. We're almost home free."

  "I'll believe it when we're away from here and Win­ter's people can test the code." He again dropped a hand to the heavy blaster he wore on his hip, just to check how it was seated in the holster, then looked at the blaster car­bine he held and made sure the safety switch was off. "Wait, what's that?"

  "I don't know." Mirax leaned forward and poked at a sparking light at the edge of the hologram. "Someone's burning through the door!"

  Corran smelled smoke and knew he was too far from the loading dock to be getting it from there. Something else is burning. Too close. He reached out with his right hand and roughly shoved Mirax from her chair. "Get down."

  The wall between the waiting room and the office ex­ploded inward. He saw it fragment and fire poured through the cracks. The pieces of wall disintegrated, breaking into smaller and smaller bits until they were nothing but pebbles and dust. The fire blacked the alumi­num studs, ripping them free from the floor and ceiling, then propelled them into the office, gnarling and twisting them as they flew.

  The force of the explosion lifted Corran off his feet and blasted him into the office's rear wall. Wallstone sagged and buckled, studs bent, but the wall did not col­lapse. The door leading into the stairwell crumpled and tore free of the hinges, allowing a great deal of the explo­sive force to blow out through it. The desk slammed back against the wall and Corran's legs fell across the top of it. His head and shoulders tipped down, his feet came up, and he crashed to the debris-strewn floor with blood streaming from his nose and an incessant ringing in his ears.

  Through the dust and smoke he saw what appeared to be a quartet of stormtroopers dropping through a hole

  in the floor and standing on the ceiling. Dazed as he was it took him a moment to realize his perspective came from his still being upside down. Slightly more surprising than that discovery was the far more welcome realization that he still held the blaster carbine in his left hand.

  He let his body sag to the right, then he rolled for­ward onto his stomach. The world swam into focus a mo­ment later. He slid his right hand forward and got it wrapped around the weapon's pistol grip. His left hand moved up to grasp the barrel and he tightened down on the trigger.

  His first shots hit a stormtrooper in the knees and dropped him back into his fellows. Only one of them turned toward him, the other two looked out at the ware­house floor that was lit by back and forth fire from doz­ens of blasters. The stormtrooper who had made the correct guess brought his carbine up and over, but only managed to trace a line of fire across the wall above Corran's head.

  Corran walked his fire up the stormtrooper's midline, burning three holes navel, heart, and throat before a fourth knocked the man's helmet flying and dumped his body to the floor. The helmet bounced off the back of one of the other stormtroopers and clipped the helmet of the last one. Both men spun, their weapons coming around with deliberate and lethal intent.

  Corran managed to rip off a burst that hit one of them in the thigh, then his blaster carbine stopped firing. The man he'd hit spun around and went down to one knee, but still appeared to be full of fight. Corran hit the power pack release button and reached down into his pants pocket for a replacement, but all he felt was tat­tered fabric and his own flesh.

  Next to him the desk rose two centimeters off the floor, then tipped forward. It rolled awkwardly, half eclipsing him, and caught the full force of the last stand­ing stormtrooper's fire. Corran rolled to his right, trying to take advantage of the cover. As he did so, Mirax rose up on one knee and scythed blaster fire back and forth

  across the last two stormtroopers. Her shots took the standing man in the middle, doubling him over, and blew apart the helmet of the one Corran had only wounded. Corran saw her look down at him and saw her lips move, but he couldn't hear her past the ringing in his ears. He took a guess at what she was saying and forced a smile through the blood he could taste on his lips. "I'll live. They used concussion munitions but the wall stopped us from being knocked out." He scrambled up on his hands and knees. "Let's get out of here."

  Mirax crawled over to the open doorway and slid down the door to the first landing. Corran followed, then the two of them ran down the remaining flights. Corran kicked the door to the basement garage open. Mirax went through low and he followed. What they found made her curse and the only good thing about it was the fact that he heard her oath.

  Off to the right, heading out through the shadows, he saw four airspeeders going away. From the left, racing down a ramp and into the garage's dark interior, came six Imperial stormtroopers on Aratech 74-Y military speeder bikes. Five peeled off their formation to go after the airspeeders and one swung around toward them.

  "Mirax, go!" Corran cast aside the useless carbine and drew his blaster pistol. She darted off toward the left and got behind one of the garage's massive pillars. She waved him toward her and made to come around and cover him, but a laser bolt from the speeder bike gouged a chunk of duracrete from near her head.

  He shook his head and ran toward the approaching speeder bike. He cut to the right, snapped off two shots, then ducked his left shoulder and rolled to the side as the speeder bike's laser bolts sizzled over his head. He came up into a crouch with only twenty meters separating him from the speeder bike. As his blaster came up he saw the stormtrooper's right hand curl back, cranking the throttle. The bike roared forward and Corran knew the man in­tended to impale him on the spikes that jutted forward of the speeder bike's vector-control surfaces.

  Corran twisted to the right, willing his body to flow out around the sharp spearhead mounted on the front of the craft. The vector-control surface shredded the left side of his jacket, passing just beneath Corran's left arm. He tried to bring his blaster around to get a shot off at the stormtrooper, but all he managed to do before the storm-trooper's knee caught him in the hip and spun him to the ground was slam the weapon down hard on the driver's left hand.

  The blow to the man's hand jerked the vector-control back making the speeder bike's nose veer sharply upward. It struck sparks from the ceiling and a moment later the bike's tail joined in producing fireworks as it scraped along on the ground. The forward control surfaces buck­led and curled in as the bike jammed them hard against the ceiling. The bike began to invert, spilling the rider, then bounced against the floor and ceiling before it stopped and hovered.

  The stormtrooper skidded along on his armored back, spinning around like a top. His legs finally smacked up against a pillar stopping his spin. He shook his head and tried to climb to his feet, but Mirax stepped out from behind the pillar and dropped him with a kick to the head.

  "Now what, Corran?"

  A muffled explosion from above shook the garage. Dust and peeling paint fell from the ceiling. Smoke and dust billowed out of the doorway from above. "I know we're not going back up there."

  She frowned. "Okay, one choice down. Care to pick another?"

  He shrugged, then saw blaster bolts darting through the garage. One of the airspeeders had turned off at the last moment and was racing back toward them, with a speeder bike in pursuit. The airspeeder's driver neatly wound the vehicle around and through a complex course, never giving the stormtrooper a clean shot. Even so, be­cause of the speeder bike's shorter turning radius, it ate up the distance between them, making it only a matter of


  time before he drew close enough to cripple and kill the airspeeder.

  Corran pointed toward the pursuit. "Fire at the speeder bike. Let the airspeeder know there's cover over here."

  "What are you going to do?"

  "Get luckier than I've been already, I hope." Corran ran over to the hovering speeder bike, grabbed the con­trol handles, and started pushing it toward one of the open rows between columns. He swung into the seat and checked the weapon's control monitor. It's good to go. Now I just need a target. He hit the thumb switch on the vector-controller and sent a ruby laser bolt screaming out into the distance.

  Mirax laid down a solid pattern of fire that hemmed the speeder bike in and the airspeeder driver took full ad­vantage of it. She whipped the wheel to the right and shot straight down a row toward the end where Mirax and Corran stood.

  The airspeeder passed in front of the hovering speeder bike and the second it was clear, Corran hit the firing switch. The speeder bike's laser cannon spat out a steady stream of scarlet energy darts. He expected the pursuing stormtrooper to fly his speeder bike right through the hail of bolts, but the pilot cut sharply to the left and swung wide of Corran's trap.

  Fortunately that left him in the open for Mirax. Her burst of fire caught the man in the left flank and knocked him from the saddle. He hit hard, with his helmet split­ting like the rind of an overripe meiloorun. His body rolled along, almost coming upright again, when it col­lided with a pillar and fell back to the ground slowly.

  The airspeeder came to a stop between Corran and Mirax. "C'mon, get in."

  Corran looked somewhat agog at the pilot. "Inyri, you came back for us?"

  "Stay if you like, Horn, or come with me."

  Mirax grabbed Corran by the shoulder and dumped

  him into the rear seat, then hopped in beside Inyri. "I think he got hit in the head. Go."

  Lying in the back of the airspeeder, Corran swiped a hand across his mouth and it came away bloody. He tore a chunk of the lining out of his jacket and started mop­ping up the blood. "What happened back there?"