Star Wars - X-Wing - Iron Fist

by Aaron Allston

  Phanan said, "Amelkin versus Tovath." That was the name of the classic Quadrant game that had given them access to the hangar.

  "What? The shift password, you idiot."

  Tactic When no other options present themselves, shoot

  everything in sight. Face straightened, grabbed the top edge of the chest armor of the stormtrooper before him to hold him in place, and shot the man in the stomach. Phanan shoved his own stormtrooper back and fired, catching the man in the helmet.

  Face dragged his dead or dying target to him, holding him up as a human shield, and, one-handed, swept fire across the occupants of the skimmer. He saw at least two men, including the lieutenant, hit, but there would still be only a split second before the stormtroopers brought their own weapons into line and fired-

  To Face's and Phanan's blasts were added lethal cross fire from the door into the hangar. Face hazarded a glance. Two Wraiths stood there in stormtrooper armor-he couldn't tell who-and then advanced, firing as they came.

  A bad tactic, Face thought, abandoning the shelter of the doorway, but he understood when their place at the door was taken by more Wraiths.

  The pilot of the skimmer banked up and away from the

  firing Wraiths, a maneuver sharp enough to shake the surviv-

  ing stormtroopers in back but skillful enough to place the

  skimmer's bottom between them and the Wraiths for a few

  long moments. The skimmer's maneuver carried it across the

  wide lane between buildings. It had to level out or smash into

  the face of one of the buildings, but when it did so it was far

  enough away, and moving fast enough, that the Wraiths' con-

  centrated fire was not so lethal. With all the blasts they poured

  into the moving target, Face saw only one more strike a storm-trooper, and assumed that the anonymous Wraith who fired it was Donos, their sniper. The skimmer made a corner and was gone.

  The stormtrooper at the door was Wedge; his shout was distinctive. "Two, get the hangar doors open and lock them that way; we can't afford for the central computer to lock them closed. Do you have a distraction ready?"

  "My number two distraction is ready. My best one will take a couple of minutes more."

  "Go with the number two. Then join Six, Eight, Nine, and

  Eleven, get out of here on foot-"

  Castin's voice rose in something like a whine. "But I was going to fly one of the interceptors!"

  "Pipe down. We only have five. Move out in any direction but the one those stormtroopers took, running in Imperial for-mation, and get in contact with Ten for whatever transport she can provide. The rest of you, to your interceptors."

  "They have the hangar door open," reported the skimmer pi-

  lot, now standing at the corner of a building not far away. "I

  can hear ion engines inside firing off. I've got my men scatter-

  ing to firing positions. I-"

  His next words were lost in the wail that rose all around him. It was the anguished cry of some long-forgotten god, a moan that rattled his bones despite his armor; he saw trans-paristeel viewports on the buildings around him vibrate under the fury of that sound.

  It was, in fact, the base's air-raid siren system, an anti-quated measure to inform every person on base and anyone within several klicks that enemies were coming by air. In the days when this base was first built, those enemies were the Em-pire; after the Empire took over, the base operators maintained the system. Just in case.

  And now the impossible had happened, someone was at-

  tacking the base from the sky. The stormtrooper saw columns

  of light crisscross the sky in search of targets, then heard and

  saw the base's huge automated turbocannons begin firing at

  targets high up in the air. He couldn't see the targets... but if the big guns were firing, they were up there.

  Distracted by the aerial show, the stormtrooper did not see the first of the interceptors emerge from the hangar.

  Face broke formation to draw abreast of Castin as they trot-ted. He had to shout to be heard over the siren wail. "Two, what did you do?"

  Two's body language momentarily suggested an aw-shucks

  embarrassment. "I found some of their old wargame projec-

  tions about Imperial raids. They weren't under much security;

  they were just archives. But I was able to patch the data into

  their sensor net, as though it were data being received now, and

  it triggered an automated response. Any second now-"

  In the distance, two squadrons of TIE fighters lifted, rac-ing toward the sky and the presumed enemies waiting there. Instead of continuing his thought, Castin just pointed. Face said, "Six, do we have anything from Ten?"

  "We have. She is coming. We have given her our vector."

  "Coded, I hope."

  "Coded." The Wraiths' code for this mission included a

  very simple method for transmitting locations, in case their scramblers were decoded Locations were given in standard Imperial grid format, but with the values reversed, south for north, east for west. It might take only one visual check by stormtroopers to confirm that the locations were incorrect, but the time tolerances for this mission were so tight that this might be all the help the Wraiths needed.

  Kell and Phanan, the pilots least experienced with TIE

  fighters-and experienced not at all with TIE interceptors,

  even in simulators-were the first to emerge from the hangar. Running close to the ground on repulsorlifts, they crept out tentatively from the hangar's interior. Even with their caution, Phanan failed to decelerate correctly and slowly glided into the building across the lane, stopping with a bump.

  Wedge, Janson, and Dia, more sure of their control over

  the vehicles, emerged next. On Wedge's cue, they turned, ori-enting back toward the open hangar door, and fired, destroy-ing the three interceptors remaining within. Then they turned up the lane and cut in their twin ion engines, accelerating far faster than their X-wings. Phanan and Kell fell into position behind them.

  "Stay next to the ground," Wedge ordered. "Keep repul-sorlifts running at full until I give the word." He glanced over his sensors. They showed his small squad of five interceptors running at just above ground level, plus another thirty-six TIE fighters, three squadrons' worth, rapidly ascending toward presumed enemies.

  One switch gave him access to the sensor data being broadcast by the base. It showed a sky crowded with enemies. Initial telemetry identified them as somewhat antiquated TIE fighters and some other Imperial-style support vehicles. Though they were Imperial vehicles, their sudden appearance, their aggressive pattern of approach, and their lack of response to normal hails had caused the base computer to flag them as probable unfriendlies. The three squadrons of base TIE fight-ers looked decidedly overmatched in numbers, but as Wedge watched, another two squadrons rose to join them.

  As buildings flicked by right and left, Wedge locked down the broadcast sensor signal and transmitted its source to the others. "All right, Wraiths. We're doing one pass, then we're going home." He pulled back on the stick, popped up over the rooftops, and angled toward the source of that signal. The oth-ers fell into formation behind him.

  They came within firing range almost instantly. Wedge linked his four lasers for quad fire. The interceptor's weapons screen initially had a little difficulty identifying the base's com-mand center, a huge, rounded bunker, as the intended target, but once it locked the target in, it managed to define the build-ing, its bristling gun emplacements, and its numerous sensor emplacements as discrete targets. Wedge tagged the nearest set of sensors as his first target and said, "Fire."

  The interceptors roared toward the bunker, their twenty

  lasers acting as five channels of destruction, laying waste to the

  surface of the bunker, tearing through the sensor arrays and gun emplacements as though the met
al were so much paper. Wraith Squadron screamed across the bunker, mere meters above its now nearly molten surface, and then banked off toward freedom.

  There was now traffic on all the base's lanes-skimmers carry-ing stormtroopers to ready areas, civilian workers running on foot, some of them only partially dressed, to their duty stations.

  But no one seemed inclined to question a well-disciplined

  group of five stormtroopers running with purpose.

  Up ahead, two squads of stormtroopers, more than twenty, turned onto the Wraiths' lane and headed toward them. "Stay alert," Face said. "If they address us, respond on the run. If they challenge us, open fire and run harder."

  But a skimmer with an enclosed bed turned onto the same lane behind the dual squadron and accelerated into them, flat-tening some of the stormtroopers, knocking others hard out of the way. The skimmer accelerated toward the Wraiths. Runt said, "We think our ride has arrived."

  The skimmer pulled up and swerved as it settled, placing its port and rear sides between the Wraiths and the nest of an-gry stormtroopers. The door was already half down when the skimmer touched the ground.

  "Good work, Ten," Face said. "I'11 take gunner position. Everyone else in back." Face slid into the seat beside Shalla; the rest trotted into the bed.

  Face heard one of them, Donos from his voice, trip, fall, and swear. He glanced at Sha!la. She shrugged. "I had to leave a couple of casualties back there," she half explained. A mo-ment later, the first of the blaster shots from the pursuing stormtroopers hit the vehicle's rear and side armor, and Donos came over the corem "Go go go!"

  They exited via the same gate by which they'd entered. This time,

  though, they didn't stop to get authorization or for the guards to

  open the gates. As they approached at full speed, Face raked the guardhouse with blaster fire, forcing the officer on duty to duck, preventing him from activating the magnetic locks, magnetic containment fields, repulsor-activated land mines, or other traps the Imperials routinely had laid out for vehicles approaching or departing a base in an unfriendly fashion.

  They hit the spare metal gates, slamming them open and off their hinges, and roared up the road out of the base.

  But a mere half klick away, around the first of the bends in the road and sheltered from sight by the very hill Wedge had earlier used for reconnaissance, Shalla set the skimmer down again. The Wraiths scrambled out. Shalla keyed a code into the keypad on the control panel and the skimmer rose once more, winging off into the night toward the distant lights of the city.

  "What course is it taking?" Face asked.

  Shalla shook her head. "I wrecked most of its higher

  processes when I destroyed the comm system. All I was able to do was give it a ballistic course toward the city."

  "That should be enough. Let's get out of sight."

  The Wraiths were in a ditch, helmets off, only the eyes and

  the tops of their heads showing, when the three pursuit skim-mers flew by, following the skimmer's course.

  A minute later, they were with Piggy at the site of the civil-ian skimmer that had brought them here. Captain Wanatte, still unconscious, was trussed up in back.

  The Wraiths peeled out of their stormtrooper armor, leav-ing them in sweat-drenched street clothing appropriate to the world of Halmad. They quickly loaded all the armor compo-nents into a plastic crate in the back of the skimmer. Then they boarded. "Back to the spaceport," Face said. "Slowly. Sedately. As befits a bunch of tourists who've been off drinking and recreating all evening and are now too tired to twitch."

  Shalla nodded. "Pretty close to an accurate description."

  Hawk-bat Base was situated on a large spherical rock deep in the asteroid belt of the Halmad system.

  Years before, it had been the Tonheld Mining Corpora-

  tion's Site A3, tasked with bringing high-quality metals up from the depths of a large asteroid formed during the long-ago destruction of one of the Halmad system's outer planets. The asteroid had a thick outer shell of stone and a center made up mostly of cooled nickel and iron. Tonheld Mining Corpora-tion, all too efficient, had removed the majority of the useful metals, leaving only those that were trapped in veins and pock-ets within the stone shell. Then the company had dismantled its machinery and housing modules and departed, leaving the site deserted and cold for forty years.

  Now, when approached by spacecraft, it still seemed the same. Its thick stone sheath, still intact, was sufficient to block sensors from detecting the life-forms and vehicle emissions now within it.

  Halfway down the main shaft, a side tunnel, once a stag-ing area for the mining corporation, turned off at a ninety-degree angle, running parallel to the asteroid's surface. This was now sealed off by a duracrete plug perforated only by large motor-driven doors at either end.

  Beyond, inside, where the side shaft was broadest and tallest, was the hangar area where the Hawk-bats' vehicles rested. There were two TIE fighters and five TIE interceptors, and the biggest vessel on site, a Xiytiar-class freighter named Sungrass.

  Among the least elegant of all cargo vessels serving in the galaxy, the Xiytiar-class freighter consisted of a long blocky bow that was mostly cargo space, an equally long connective spar in the middle, and a short blocky component that was mostly engines at the stern. Sungrass didn't improve the vehicle line's reputation for stylishness; scarcely a centimeter of its once-gleaming surface was unmarked by scrapes, sloppy paint-work, ion scoring from too-close passes alongside other ves-sels, or old blaster burns.

  But its hull was solid, its engines were recently rebuilt and in fine tune.

  Once it had belonged to an Imperial shipping corporation.

  It had been in dry dock in a repair hangar when the entire site

  was destroyed by elements of New Republic Intelligence. Its

  bow cracked, its superstructure buried under the wreckage of the hangar, it had been reported as destroyed by reconnais-sance units of the Empire. Now, after a couple of seasons of re-pair, it flew again, its name changed, its history fabricated, its mission to support Wraith Squadron.

  On its bridge, Wedge Antilles snorted. He supposed that was symbolic of the New Republic as a whole. Making use of the Empire's castoffs, getting a few extra years of functionality out of them, almost always making do with scraps and crumbs in a way that confounded the remnants of the Empire. Yet it was a far cry from the pretty vision of an Empire-free future that the New Republic still doggedly pursued. He wondered if that image, where everything was new and gleaming and free of any memories of the Empire, would ever come to pass.

  He glanced over at the man in the captain's chair. Captain Valton seemed ideally suited to command of this ship. He, too, looked weathered and battered but still fit for many years of useful service. His long, tanned face was unmemorable, though his eyes were sharp, possessed of intelligence. Wedge thought that if they put him in a janitor's uniform he'd blend right in with the service personnel of any New Republic or Im-perial station, and wondered if the Wraiths might someday make use of that fact.

  And, mercifully, he didn't apparently have a need to hear himself talk. He saw Wedge's side glance, looked over in case Wedge were trying to get his attention, and when he saw that was not the case, returned to the datapad on which he was cal-culating fuel-mass ratios, all without saying a wor d.

  Wedge turned his attention to his Wraiths, visible through Sungrass's forward viewports, hard at work painting the stolen interceptors. The one Tyria and Kell worked on was now deco-rated with a red spiderweb pattern, a design that was at once rakishly dangerous-looking and a little unsettling. Phanan and Face left the basic paint job of their interceptor unchanged but had added a ludicrous number of kill silhouettes to the hull- including a number of X-wing silhouettes to rival the genuine kills of Baron Fel, the Empire's greatest ace after Darth Vader.

  Shalla and Donos were painting theirs with fake blaster scor-

  ings and had even painted the engine to lo
ok as though it were

  slightly askew, as if knocked out of alignment by enemy fire. Wedge wondered about the advisability of that; it would proba-bly convince some enemies the interceptor was damaged, per-haps persuading some opportunistic pilots to finish it off when otherwise they might treat it with more caution.

  He decided not to interfere. It was an experiment. They'd see how the enemies responded to their "damaged" interceptor.

  His personal comlink crackled into life. "Commander."

  "Yes, Runt."

  "Narra returning. ETA fifteen minutes."

  "Thank you. Please set up the conference module. Out."

  He exited Sungrass through its docking tube and passed

  through the hangar, where the sharp smell of the paints

  scratched at his sinuses and the chatter of his pilots was so much more immediate. Good men and women in a brief respite from making war. He wished such respites were the norm.

  Then, passing their interceptor, he saw Tyria finish an-other line of red spiderwebs, set her brush down atop her paint can, and wrap her arms around Kell to kiss him.

  Wedge stopped short, a rebuke on his lips, a reminder that public displays of affection were not appropriate... and then he turned away and kept walking.

  Such a warning might have been appropriate for other units, but not elite squadrons under his command. There were no restrictions against relationships between pilots, even when there was some disparity between their ranks, as was the case with Tyria and Kell. There were no regulations against demon-strations of affection in off-duty and most light-duty situa-tions, such as this little painting exercise. They were doing no wrong.

  Then why was he so annoyed? Why had he been ready to drop kitchen duty on either of them, had his warning been protested?

  He passed through the third set of motorized doors, lead-ing deeper into the shaft, into what Wraith Squadron called the Trench.

  It had been a squarish tunnel bored out of solid stone, a