Star Wars: X-Wing V: Wraith Squadron

by Aaron Allston

  She gave him her most infectious grin, the private smile she never turned to crowds or official assemblies. She spoke quietly enough that her words would not carry to the amplifiers. “You looked as though you’d been practicing that formation flying for weeks.”

  “We were,” he said, straight-faced. “Liberating Thyferra didn’t take up much of our time.”

  “You’re such a liar. Go talk to these people so we can all go home.”

  Twelve X-wing snubfighters roared down into the atmosphere.

  This was a dark world with a polluted sky, its atmosphere formed from gases and smoke hurled from hundreds of active volcanoes. Four kilometers ahead, the TIE interceptor, fastest fighter of the Imperial forces, was distantly visible; it stayed well ahead of the X-wings, though the fact that it was not now outrunning them was a clear indication that its engines were damaged. Further evidence were the sparks and gouts of smoke issuing from its engines, too far away to see except with visual sensors; if the engines failed, the pursuing X-wings could catch the interceptor.

  Myn Donos, the X-wing squadron commander, toggled his comm system. “Talon Leader to Talon Eight, any change?”

  His communications specialist answered, “No, sir. He’s not broadcasting. As far as I can tell, he’s not homing in on any sort of a signal. And I’m still not picking up any engine emissions, other than his or ours, on the scanners.”

  “Very well.”

  The interceptor’s speed suddenly dropped and the vehicle began bobbing as if hit by heavy turbulence. It lost altitude, veering to starboard toward a cleft between two enormous volcanoes. Talon Leader saw glittering orange threads of lava crawling down the near slope of one of the black, fire-capped mountains.

  “Leader to squad, it looks like he’s losing thrust and going low to lose us with terrain-following flying. Don’t give him the opportunity. Get close and force him down.” He led his squadron in a lazy arc toward the same gap. He watched the numbers changing on his distance-to-target register: three kilometers, two point five; the interceptor was now emerging from the gap on the far side as the X-wings were entering it.

  Talon Eight’s voice broke, high-pitched and nervous, over the comm system: “Engines powering up, sir! Directly ahead! I count four, seven, thirteen—”

  “S-foils to attack position!” Donos shouted. “Scatter and—”

  Shiner, his R2 unit, issued a sharp squeal of alarm. Donos’s console echoed it with beeps and indicators showing that someone ahead had a sensor lock on him—two locks—three locks—

  Donos veered sharply to port—directly toward a volcanic flue and the impenetrable stream of gray-black smoke belching from it. As he hit the cloud he pulled back on the stick, rising straight up the concealing smoke. The sensor locks on him disappeared.

  He heard explosions, some near, some far, and the excited comm chatter of his pilots. He added to it: “Talon Two, go skyward in the smoke screen; we’ll hit them from above.”

  No answer.

  There was other comm traffic: “Five, Five, he’s on your tail!” “Can’t get clear, vape him for me, Six—” “Can’t, I’ve got—I’ve got—” “Nine banked into the volcano wall, she’s gone—” Another explosion.

  Moments later, at two thousand meters Donos angled to starboard, getting clear of the smoke and emerging directly over the gap between volcanoes.

  No one was on his tail. He checked the sensor board—didn’t believe what it showed him, checked it again.

  He and Talon Twelve were the only New Republic forces remaining on the board. He counted twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five Imperial blips. A dozen were veering toward Twelve, the remainder toward Donos.

  In a matter of seconds, Talon Squadron had been all but destroyed. Glittering pieces of X-wings were still streaming down toward the planet’s broken surface. In another few seconds, he and Twelve would be vaped, and the destruction would be complete.

  Through the shock of it, he said, “Talon Twelve, dive for the surface. Trench Run Defense. Omega Signal. Acknowledge.”

  “Omega Signal understood. Diving.” The sensor register on Talon Twelve showed decreasing altitude. Donos followed suit, standing his X-wing on its nose and blasting toward the ground.

  He hadn’t even gotten a shot off at the enemy. Ten pilots dead and he had a full rack of proton torpedoes left, laser batteries charged to full. Time to change that.

  The sensors showed an ominous cloud of TIE fighters—eyeballs, in Alliance fighter-jock parlance—pursuing Twelve toward the ground. If she reached the planet’s broken surface, which was pocked with craters and crisscrossed with rifts, she might be able to elude them; there, her piloting skill rather than the relative speeds of the fighters could allow her to lose pursuit, and any pilot who tried to follow her from above would quickly lose sight of her—this was the classic Trench Run Defense used against the first Death Star. But for now, Twelve would remain within the enemy’s weapons range for long, deadly seconds.

  Within moments his sensors indicated that he was coming within range of the weapons of the rising cloud of TIE fighters. He switched his lasers over to dual fire, giving him greater recycling speed, and put the rest of his discretionary power on forward shields, then began firing as quickly as his targeting computer gave him the bracket color changes and pure audible tones of good target locks. He put his X-wing into a corkscrew descent, making it harder for him to hit his enemies, but making it much harder for them to hit him.

  Most of his shots hit the ground. One missed his intended target but vaped its wingman. Two more shots hit their intended targets, one shearing off a wing and sending the fighter spinning into the nearest volcanic mountainside, the other having no immediate effect Donos could see—but the TIE fighter ceased all evasive maneuvering, its flight path becoming an easy-to-calculate ballistic curve. Donos almost smiled: It had been a surgical strike, the pilot killed by a beautiful shot straight into the cockpit, leaving the rest of the fighter craft unharmed.

  His assault had its desired effect. The oncoming cloud of TIEs spread out and he shot through the gap in the center of their formation. They wheeled, an angry insect cloud, to follow, but now the TIEs pursuing Twelve into the rugged terrain below were in sight. Donos continued firing, vaping one starfighter before the others knew he was upon them; that fighter’s wingman, startled by the sudden explosion, reflexively banked rightward, directly into the side of the rift in which they were flying. His fighter also detonated, filling the rift with flame and shrapnel.

  Donos dropped into the rift, pulling out of his dive just before he could scrape his keel on the ground. He had stone formations to either side of him—black rock so blurry from his speed that he could make out no details. “Leader to Twelve, report condition,” he said.

  “Minor damage to lower port strike foil,” she answered. “It’s giving me a little vibration, which should go away if we can get out of atmosphere. Some starring on the canopy. Pursuit is hanging back—Wait, here comes one! He’s trying to get a lock on me!”

  Donos put on more speed, increasing the risk that he would not be able to make some difficult turn ahead. He whipped around a bend in the rift and almost slammed into the ion engines of a slow-moving TIE fighter immediately ahead. He snapped off a laser shot out of reflex, saw it lance straight into the starfighter’s starboard engine.

  The TIE fighter instantly became a glowing fireball of yellow and orange flame and debris. Donos’s X-wing rocked as he roared through the fireball; his helmet and hull were barely sufficient to keep the sound of the explosion from deafening him. Then he was through.

  One more turn, a tight starboard bank that almost flung him into the rock wall to port, and he had Twelve in sight. Twelve, and the vehicle pursuing her—the interceptor that had led them into this trap. This was the first time Donos had seen it visually, and he fleetingly noted the nonstandard red stripes painted horizontally on the starfighter’s wing arrays before something else occurred to him: there were no sparks or s
moke plumes emerging from its engines now. With the deception done, all the false signs of the interceptor’s weakness had been shut off.

  The interceptor had crept up to within meters of Twelve’s aft end and was now skillfully matching all of the X-wing pilot’s frantic maneuvers. This was a demonstration of superior flying technique, a show of contempt by one pilot for his enemy, and there was no doubt that the interceptor could begin firing on the defenseless Twelve at any second.

  Donos fired off a desperate snap-shot. At the same moment, the interceptor took its kill shot.

  Donos saw his lasers strike and play across the interceptor’s main body, slashing across the engines and burning into the cockpit.

  The interceptor’s lasers intersected at Twelve’s X-wing, hitting her aft shields in spite of her desperate maneuvers … and then they penetrated. Both of Twelve’s starboard engines flamed out. The starboard strike foils, softened by the lasers’ intense heat, began to deform under atmospheric friction.

  The interceptor slowed. Sparks and flame, real ones now, issued from the engines. It rose, jumping out of the rocky rift, and was immediately lost to Donos’s sight.

  Twelve’s X-wing began a portward roll. Donos’s next command was half a shout: “Twelve, bail out! Twelve, eject!”

  “Ejecting now! Leader, get out of here!”

  Donos watched helplessly as Twelve’s cockpit filled with the fire of an ejection thruster, but the canopy failed to open. The ejector seat smashed Twelve into it. Its transparisteel construction kept the canopy in one piece as the X-wing continued to rotate to port. Under continued pressure from the thrust of the ejection seat, the cockpit finally broke away from the X-wing, but Twelve sat limp in the seat as the ejection seat carried her mere meters from the doomed snubfighter, slamming her into the rift wall to port. In a split second she was gone, lost behind Donos, and her X-wing was nosing over to crash into the rift wall below.

  Donos forced himself to look away, to return his mind to mission parameters.

  A few minutes of terrain-following flying and he should be able to jump free of these rifts and head for space. But suddenly the prospect of survival didn’t appeal much to him.

  Donos’s R2 shrieked at him. Startled back to attention, he looked around, saw that a pair of TIE fighters had gained on him during his reverie.

  He could stay and be killed, or flee and describe his failure to his commanders in cruel, humbling detail.

  He’d prefer to die. But the families of eleven good men and women deserved to know how their loved ones had met their fates. With an anguished cry, Donos hit the thrusters again and rounded the next turn.

  2

  The New Republic guard, his face as emotionless as a ferrocrete bunker, admitted Wedge to the office. Within, the walls were a soothing blue, the furniture smooth and rounded with colors of the sea, the air cool but uncomfortably moist. Still, Wedge was back in New Republic uniform, and that alone made him more comfortable than the office’s environment conditioner could have.

  Behind the desk, Admiral Ackbar, commander in chief of the New Republic’s military operations, returned Wedge’s salute. Like other Mon Calamari, with their outsized heads and rubbery skins, he looked to most people like a bipedal and intellectual fish, but Wedge knew him to be far more humane and courageous than many who fought for the New Republic.

  Ackbar gestured toward the visitors’ chairs. “Commander Antilles. Please, sit. Is it too humid for you? I can make adjustments.”

  “Not at all.” Wedge took the seat indicated. “Thank you for making time in your schedule for me so soon.”

  “It is not an imposition.” Ackbar leaned closer, focusing on Wedge, his two widely separated eyes sometimes moving independently. “I see no signs of hangover on you, Commander. Must I conclude that you did not celebrate adequately?”

  Wedge smiled. “Very adequately. Meeting old friends and new, old Rogues and new, and telling stories until we couldn’t string two words together. But I left the heavy drinking to the younger pilots.”

  “Wise of you. Younger pilots. I notice I did not recognize all their names.”

  “Rogue Squadron is catching up from attrition, sir. At the end of the Thyferran mission we were down a few pilots. Since then, we’ve brought our numbers up again. We’re still one pilot light, but Aril Nunb rejoined us temporarily for yesterday’s celebration.”

  “I’m sure you will employ your customary skill in finding extraordinary replacements. Well, allow me the impatience of office. What brings you to me? Your message hinted at—what was it? ‘Recommendations for a new type of unit, particularly well suited to the search for Warlord Zsinj.’ ”

  “That’s correct.” Warlord Zsinj, a onetime Imperial admiral still in possession of a Super Star Destroyer, an eight-kilometer warship capable of pounding a planetary surface flat, was now the New Republic’s most important military objective. His hit-and-run missions against New Republic sites were increasing in bold effectiveness and destructiveness, and the danger that he might assume Ysanne Isard’s role as the center of an Imperial resurgence was not an empty one. “I’d like to form a new X-wing group, sir.”

  Admiral Ackbar’s mouth bent in an approximation of a smile. A learned behavior—Mon Calamari did not communicate amusement that way. But Ackbar was well versed in human body language. “Rogue Squadron is no longer good enough for you?”

  “Rogue Squadron will always be good enough for me, sir. But in the last several years I’ve bumped repeatedly into a glaring weakness in our military. I’ve tried to address it before and want to try again.”

  “Please elaborate.”

  Wedge leaned back, settling in for a lengthy discussion. “You’ll remember when I reorganized Rogue Squadron a few years back, I took the best pilots I could transfer or steal … but when it came down to choosing between pilots of equal skill, I always chose the one who had useful ground-based skills as well.”

  “Yes. You wanted pilots who could also be commandos.”

  “I got them. And they got quite a workout as commandos, especially in the liberation of Coruscant from the Empire and then of Thyferra from Ysanne Isard.”

  Ackbar managed to smile again. “You have certainly justified our faith in your experiment. Rogue Squadron performed magnificently.”

  “Thank you. Speaking for my men and women, I have to agree. But I’d originally thought that Rogue Squadron would be used opportunistically: a strike mission would reveal a ground-based weakness, and we’d have the training and supplies to go down and perform the necessary ground mission. The way it turned out, we keep landing full-fledged commando missions. So I think we need another commando X-wing squadron, one where we choose pilots so as to have a full range of intrusion and subversion skills. Rogue Squadron was designed as a fighter unit first, commando unit second; this time, I want to go the other way around.”

  Admiral Ackbar’s expression, so far as Wedge could read it, was dubious. “Historically, we’ve had few problems coordinating the efforts of commandos on the ground and fighter pilots for aerial support.”

  “I don’t agree. Commandos can communicate strike locations to the pilots, but the pilots still won’t have the familiarity with these locations that the intrusion team will. Commandos who’ve had their extraction plans busted might want to seize enemy spacecraft to escape; the way things stand, they can’t count on having enough pilots to make that escape, while commando-trained pilots could. Normal pilots follow orders and conform themselves to standard tactics—and should! But a commando X-wing unit might develop new tactics. New ways of mounting even ordinary raids and pursuits. New ways of anticipating assaults and ambushes.”

  Ackbar abruptly leaned back from him, his eyes half closing; it looked to Wedge like a frown of concentration. “What made you say that?”

  “Thinking about the subject on the long flight home, and during the time we were garrisoned on Thyferra before that,” Wedge said. “Even though the garrison assignment was cut short from
the two months originally planned, it still gave me plenty of time to think.”

  “You haven’t heard any news?”

  “No, sir. About what?”

  Ackbar shook his head. “Please go on.”

  “Well, that’s actually about it. I can dress it up in a formal report for you. But one other thing I think is important—I can give you a unit like this for free.”

  Ackbar snorted, the sound emerging as a series of rubbery pops. “Can you, now?”

  “Yes, sir. First, the replacement Rogue Squadron is being disbanded, its pilots and X-wings being returned to their original units. Correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “So you’ll be issuing a dozen new X-wings to us, won’t you? To the original Rogue Squadron.”

  “Why would we? Your X-wings are in functional shape, are they not?”

  “Well, yes, but they’re not New Republic property any longer. They were sold to my second-in-command, Tycho Celchu, at the start of our operation against Thyferra. They’re his personal property, held in trust for all of us, until and unless he decides to vest ownership in their pilots.”

  “How uncharitable of you. You could donate their use to the New Republic. I believe one of your pilots has been using his personal X-wing all along.”

  “Yes, sir. Lieutenant Horn. And Tycho would be glad to loan his snubfighters to the New Republic, for the use of Rogue Squadron, if …”

  “If the next dozen X-wings out of the factories are assigned to your new commando squadron.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That’s blackmail. It’s unbecoming.”

  “Most unconventional tactics are unbecoming until they succeed, Admiral. I direct your attention to the planet Thyferra …”

  “Be quiet. There’s still the matter of pilots. Fresh out of the Academy, their training costing hundreds of thousands of credits apiece. That is not ‘free.’ ”