X-wing_ The Krytos Trap Part 3

"Exactly." Wedge nodded slowly. The pressure is not on you right now, but it will come. Borsk Fey'lya likes having a Bothan in Roque Squadron, but at some point he'll want to exert control over you.

Her head came back up. "Do you want me to make those decisions right now?"

"I want you to make them when you feel they need to be made. I trust you, and I want to continue to trust you. If you find you can't be part of the squadron, you can walk away and I'll have been proud to have you as one of us."

Asyr arched an eyebrow. "No threat of retribution if I betray you?"

Wedge shook his head. "If you decide to betray us, I can't imagine we'll survive long enough to avenge ourselves on you. On the other hand, Rogues tend to take a lot of killing, so you can't be sure of how things will turn out."

"I'll keep that in mind." Asyr smiled and Wedge took it for a good sign.

"And, Commander, concerning Gavin, there is no hidden agenda. His wide-eyed way of looking at every-thing is refres.h.i.+ng and, perhaps, even energizing. I've lived a long time in the shadows, so moving into the light feels very good. I'll do nothing to hurt him."

"Good." Wedge waved her toward the door. "Go get your stuff and get to the briefing. I'm trusting you'll see the holes in this plan and help us plug them before Zsinj accom-plishes what the Empire could only dream about: the de-struction of Rogue Squadron."

6.

Corran Horn let his joy at again being in the c.o.c.kpit of a starfighter consume him. It did not matter to him that he did not know how he'd gotten into the s.h.i.+p. He did not let the fact that he was flying a TIE Interceptor concern him. He thrust aside anxiety born of his ignorance of his location. None of those things were germane to his present situation.

The only relevant facts in his life were these: he was flying and, he knew, if he flew well enough he would be allowed to fly again. He had no idea how he knew his perfor-mance would be rewarded with more flight time--that fact seemed as fundamental to him as his need for air and food and sleep. His desire to continue flying blazed hot in his gut and burned from him the annoyance at the squint's ineffi-cient controls and sluggish reaction time. "Nemesis One, report."

It took Corran a moment to realize the comm unit call had been directed at him. He glanced at his scanner win-dows. "One is clear."

"One, we have two eyeb.a.l.l.s vectoring in on a heading of 239 degrees at a range of ten kilometers. They are hostiles. You are free to engage and terminate them."

"I copy. Nemesis One outbound." Corran hit the left rudder pedal and swung the s.h.i.+p around onto the proper heading. The starfield whirled around him, then froze in place again. He could recognize none of the constellations, but that did not concern him. His mission was to destroy the enemy, and that he would gladly do no matter where he found himself.

His breathing reverberated loudly in the full helmet he wore. The sound came rhythmically. It betrayed no nervous-ness. It was not the quickened breathing of prey, but the strong steady respiration of a predator on the hunt. He had already killed more TIE starfighters than he cared to remember; these would just be two more.

And yet, in the back of his mind, he knew he could not actually remember his previous kills, and this amnesia began to nibble away at his emotional well-being.

With a thumb he flicked the Interceptor's quad lasers over to dual-fire mode, then pulled back on the steering yoke and brought the s.h.i.+p up in a slight climb. A quick starboard snaproll onto his head turned the climb into a dive, and suddenly he was upon the eyeb.a.l.l.s. His index finger tight-ened on the trigger and a stream of verdant laser-bolts sliced through the lead eyeball.

Because of his angle of attack, the bolts scored black furrows in one wing, then pierced the ball c.o.c.kpit from the top. On the other side they freed the wing, but the s.h.i.+p's explosion shattered the hexagonal panel.

It blasted debris into the flight path of the second TIE, causing it to roll to starboard and dive. The maneuver succeeded in saving the second s.h.i.+p from a collision with its dying wingman, but dropped it straight into Corran's sights.

Corran cut the throttle back by a quarter, matching speed with his prey.

The pilot he hunted juked right and left, but made none of the hard breaks and sharp turns needed to shuck Corran from his tail. Without remorse, but full of contempt, Corran flicked the squint's lasers over to qua& fire, then impaled the TIE fighter on his crosshairs and hit the trigger with a delicate twitch of his finger.

The four green laser-bolts converged and merged into one a nanosecond before they burned the top from the c.o.c.k-pit, sheering it off just above the engine a.s.sembly. Corran imagined he could see the pilot's blackened body in silhou-ette for a second, then the eyeball exploded and seared that image into his brain. Exultation at having been victorious swept through Corran, though in its wake came the feeling that those two pilots had been so inexperienced that he had not really fought them, but had just slaughtered them.

"Nemesis One, we have two uglies at five kilometers, heading 132 degrees.

They are hostile. Engage and termi-nate."

"As ordered." Corran brought the squint up and around, then punched the throttle to full power. He wanted to close quickly so he would be able to get a look at the s.h.i.+ps he faced. Uglies were hideous, hybrid s.p.a.cefighters cobbled together from various salvage parts. Smugglers and pirates used them fairly often. He couldn't pinpoint how he knew that, but he did know he'd fought uglies before. Given that he was alive, he a.s.sumed they had not proved too much of a problem for him.

Something about that a.s.sumption niggled in the back of his mind. He knew it was not incorrect. He was a good pilot and he knew it, but his a.s.suming superiority seemed wrong. He hadn't made the a.s.sumption on the basis of the fact that uglies seldom had the performance characteristics of the fighters from which they were created. He realized he'd as-sumed anyone flying uglies would be pirates or smugglers, and had instantly a.s.sumed they were his inferiors. While he could find no facts to dispute his a.s.sumption about his foes, he knew there was something wrong with his having made it.

A warning klaxon blared in the c.o.c.kpit, alerting him that one of the uglies had gotten a torpedo lock on him and had launched a proton torpedo. Corran banished thoughts about his enemies' combat-worthiness, rolled the s.h.i.+p up onto its port wing, then dove. His abrupt maneuver hurled his s.h.i.+p onto a course at right angles to the one he'd been traveling previously. The proton torpedo, which was travel-ing roughly twice as fast as he was, shot past his starboard wing and started on a long loop to head back at him.

A proton torpedo has thirty seconds of flight time. I can't outrun it, but I can out-maneuver it. Corran smiled. Or deal with it more directly!

He reversed the squint's thrust and hit the port rudder pedal. This threw the Interceptor into a flat spin that brought the nose around to face back along his flight path. Where the proton torpedo had been coming straight at his back before, now it was coming straight in at his c.o.c.kpit. He killed the thrust and glanced at his scanner monitor--750 meters and closing fast.

At 400 meters he flicked the lasers over to dual-fire and tightened his finger down on the trigger. Pairs of laser-bolts burned green through s.p.a.ce seeking the torpedo. One bolt hit the torpedo at 250 meters out. It failed to destroy it, but did melt its way into the body and ignite a fuel cell. The subsequent explosion pitched the torpedo off course. When the onboard computer calculated the torpedo would not hit its target, it detonated the warhead, but the Interceptor re-mained a hundred meters outside the blast radius.

Switching thrust forward again, Corran throttled up to full and punched up profiles of the uglies. One was an X-T1E. It had the body of an X-wing fighter with the hexagonal wings from a TIE starfighter. Corran found the s.h.i.+p hideous to look at and would have dismissed it immediately except it had launched the proton torpedo.

The other s.h.i.+p looked fairly ridiculous. It mated a TIE's ball c.o.c.kpit with the engine pods from a Y-wing. This partic-ular hybrid was rare because it combined the TIE's lack of s.h.i.+elds with the Y-wing's lumbering, slothful handling. Cot-ran knew this type of ugly was often referred to as a TYE-wing, though DIE-wing was a common nickname for it as well.

Corran cut his Interceptor on a course that shot him past the X-TIE, then broke on down into a series of maneuvers, twisting and turning, that left the TYE-wing far behind. The X-TIE hung with him long enough for Corran's scanners to pick out details. X-wing fighters had two torpedo launching tubes in the nose and four lasers, one mounted on each end of the stabilizers that supplied the s.h.i.+p with its name. Lack-ing those S-foils, the X-T1E had replaced one proton torpedo launch tube with what Corran guessed would be a laser can-non.

Undergunned and overmatched. Cotran rolled his way down through a corkscrew dive that lengthened his lead on the X-TIE and the TYE-wing.

The X-TIE's pilot began to pull the fighter's nose up, as if he intended to return to his wingman's side and the safety the TYE-wing would provide him. Corran watched him turn away, then inverted and pulled the Interceptor through a tight turn and shot back up and in at the X-TIE's exposed aft.

Clearly unaware of Corran's maneuver, the X-TIE's pi-lot inverted and headed back toward the TYE-wing. Corran saw the pilot's head come up as he scanned s.p.a.ce for signs of the Interceptor. Coming in from behind made spotting the squint difficult. The pilot never managed it, though Corran did see the R5 unit's head swivel around and spot him.

Corran hit the trigger and walked laser fire from stern to nose on the ugly. Two bolts blew the R5's flowerpot head off, theft.two more punctured the c.o.c.kpit, exploding it into a cloud of transparisteel and duraplast fragments. The last bolts. .h.i.t forward and touched off a proton torpedo's fuel cells. The fuel's detonation filled the slender craft with fire and sent the nose spinning wildly off into s.p.a.ce.

Pulling back on the yoke, Corran brought his nose up and spitted the DIE-wing on the crosshairs. The ugly began a roll, so Corran matched him and tightened up on the trigger. Green laser-bolts slashed at one of the Ywings, but the ugly flashed on past beneath him. Corran prepared to invert and loop, but a hail of angry red laser-bolts sliced across his flight path.

"What? Who?" He kicked the squint up on its right wing, wrenched the wheel right, and tugged back on the yoke. The maneuver pulled him sharply out of line with his previous course, but he wasn't content with just doing that. He broke again, to port and up, then searched his scanner monitor for whomever had shot at him.

The scanners reported two s.h.i.+ps, both of them X-wings. "What's going on here?"

"Nemesis One, we have two hostiles. X-wings. It was an ambush. Engage and terminate."

Ambush me, will you? Corran translated his outrage into fluid maneuvering. Cutting and jumping, he bounced his Interceptor through a series of jukes that shook the X-wings from his tail and brought him around on the DIE-wing. Without really thinking about it, he pumped laser-fire into the ugly's ball c.o.c.kpit, then pulled up and away as the misbe-gotten fighter exploded.

Two on one--same odds I've had all day. Despite that hasty a.s.sessment, he knew the odds were actually quite dif-ferent in this battle. The squint's speed and maneuverability gave it an edge over the X-wings, but they had s.h.i.+elds. They could take more damage than he could, and the ability to survive damage had a very direct relations.h.i.+p with the ability to survive in combat. More importantly, the two X-wing pilots seemed determined to operate together. They flew in tight formation and seemed familiar enough with each other that he wasn't so much fighting two foes as one meta-foe.

The X-wings came around on a vector that brought them straight at him.

Corran knew head-to-head pa.s.ses were the most deadly in dogfighting, and given the enemy's superi-ority of numbers, he had no intention of engaging in such a duel. He cut his throttle back and dove at a slight angle so he would pa.s.s beneath their incoming vector. They made a slight adjustment in their courses, apparently content to get a pa.s.sing deflection shot. Corran then goosed his throttle for-ward, forcing them to sharpen their dives, yet before they could get a good shot at him, he had pa.s.sed beneath them and had started up again.

One X-wing inverted and pulled up through a loop to drop on Corran's tail while the other broke the other way. The second X-wing's looped out and away from the Inter-ceptor, momentarily splitting the two fighters.

Corran knew the second pilot had made a mistake and instantly acted to make the most of it. Cutting his throttle back, he turned hard to starboard and then back again to port.

Corran's sine-wave maneuver brought him back on course, but the X-wing that had been following him now hung up and out in front of him. The X-wing's pilot had continued on his course, a.s.suming the Interceptor had been trying to evade him. It wasn't until he shot past the Intercep-tor and it dropped into his aft arc that he realized his error.

Corran throttled up and closed with the X-wing. You're mine now, all because your buddy made a mistake. He pushed the Interceptor in to point-blank range and started to fire---then he saw a blue crest on the X-wing's S-foils. It appeared to be the Rebel crest with a dozen X-wings flying out away from it. Though no words accompanied the crest, Corran knew they should have. Rogue Squadron!

The second he recognized the crest, his finger fell away from the trigger. He didn't know why he didn't fire. Fear crystallized in his belly at the sight of it, but he knew he wasn't afraid of the Rogues. It was something else. Some-thing was wrong, hideously wrong, but he could not pierce the veil of mystery surrounding that sensation.

Suddenly something exploded behind him, pitching him forward. He slammed hard into the steering yoke, crus.h.i.+ng his life support equipment and driving the breath from his lungs. His chest burned as he tried in vain to catch his breath. He caught the fleeting scent of flowers, then a painful bril-liance filled the c.o.c.kpit. He waited for the pain in his chest and the fire in his lungs to consume him, but those sensations dulled, and his ability to focus on them or anything else eroded.

A woman's voice spoke to him. "You have failed, Neme-sis One. You are weak." Her words came tinged with anger, bitten off harshly and clearly meant to hurt him. "Had this been other than a simulation, your atoms would be floating through s.p.a.ce and the rabble would be laughing at you.

You are pathetic."

Corran's right hand rose toward his throat and pressed itself against his chest. The shattered remains of his life sup-port gear prevented him from touching his breastbone, but he knew something was missing, something that should have been laying against his flesh. He did not know what it was, but he knew he would draw comfort from it.

In its absence, despair flooded through him.

"I had thought you worthy, Nemesis One. You told me you were, didn't you?"

Though he recalled no such declaration, he confirmed it. "I did. I am."

"You are nothing unless I say you are something. Now I say you are nothing, nothing but a failure!" In the light he saw the silhouette of a tall, slender woman. The sight of her made him s.h.i.+ver more than her words. He knew he feared her, but he also wanted to please her. Pleasing her was very important to him, the only thing that was important in the world. "You have failed me and yourself."

"Please," he croaked, but her silhouette gave no indica-tion she had heard him.

"One more chance, perhaps."

"Yes, yes."

"If you fail again . . ." Corran shook his head adamantly. "I won't, I won't."

"No, for your next failure will be your last, Nemesis One." The silhouette folded its arms together. "Disappoint me again and what is left of your life will be spent in agoniz-ing atonement, disgrace, and, after a long time, death."

7.

The reversion to reals.p.a.ce brought Wedge and the Rogues out into a situation that just seemed like another simulator run, with one minor variation. As he expected, Wedge saw the s.p.a.ce station slowly revolving in a star-stained void. Way off toward the right, closer to the yellow star burning at the center of the solar system, sat Yag'Dhul. The planet's grey cloud cover made it only slightly more colorful than the Givin who called it home.

The only variation from the opsims was the appearance of a flight of four TIE starfighters patrolling the area around the s.p.a.ce station. Mynock, the R5 unit in Wedge's X-wing, immediately screeched out a warning when he noticed them off to port. Wedge glanced at his monitor, noted how the TIEs moved into an attack formation, and smiled.

Action beats inaction every time. He keyed his corem unit. "One flight, on me. Rogue Twelve, take the Defenders in."

"As ordered," Aril Nunb replied.

Committing only one flight of fighters against an equal number of TIEs, especially when he could have had two dozen Y-wings and seven more X-wings join the fight, might have seemed the height of arrogance, though Wedge knew it was quite the opposite. While TIE pilots seldom managed to ama.s.s the experience of their Rebel counterparts, they were quite competent, and more than capable of killing in a dog-fight. Warlord Zsinj's pilots had proved to be good fighters in the past, and Wedge expected them to be nothing less in this engagement.

The reasons he only pulled one flight from his formation to deal with the TIEs were twofold. First, and most impor-tant, their operation demanded that the threat to the station caused it to scramble its fighters. The X-and Y-wings were to draw the TIEs out and away from the station to a point in the system where the B-wings would come in. The B-wings were in hypers.p.a.ce, already on their way, so if surprise were to be achieved, Zsinj's troops had to be lured into position in a timely manner.

The second reason to match forces with Zsinj was be-cause having too many fighters involved in a battle tended to wreak havoc on the efficacy of the pilots. The difference be-tween a good pilot and a bad one, all other things being equal, came down to situational awareness. A pilot who could handle more variables, and keep track of more s.h.i.+ps in his mind would do better in combat than one who could only deal with less in the way of distractions. Wedge had seen statistical a.n.a.lyses that showed that kill ratios fell as the number of fighters in a dogfight increased; so by keeping the fight small, he made it easier for his people to grasp all the aspects of the fight.

"Three, you and Four have the trailers. Two, I have lead. Target the second TIE."

"As ordered, Rogue Leader." Rhysati Ynr led Erisi Dlarit in a dive and sweeping turn that brought them around toward the following pair of TIEs.

Rhysati's attack vector was intended to push the TIEs farther from the s.p.a.ce station and the rest of the Rebel force. Wedge saw the TIEs begin to react to her maneuver, but they seemed content to let her dictate the direction of the fight.

Wedge flipped his weapon's controls over to lasers and set them for dual-firing. He pumped his s.h.i.+elds up to full and picked the lead eyeball as his target. They started to close, coming head to head, with their wingmen off starboard and hanging slightly back, each formation being the mirror image of the other. He smiled. Just where I want him. "Rogue Two, do you have your target?"

"Confirmed, lead." Asyr's voice came through the comm unit cool and steady.

"Get ready. On my mark, I'm going to foul your target. Shoot immediately after that with a proton torpedo."

"As ordered."

"Three, two, one, mark!" Wedge rolled the X-wing up and over in a barrel-roll to port. His target did the same thing, sweeping his fighter across his wingman's flight path. That momentarily blinded the second TIE and caused him to shy. Wedge glanced at his monitor and saw a report of a proton torpedo launch, then touched the starboard rudder pedal a second before inverting the X-wing and making his pa.s.s on the TIE fighter.

Before Wedge applied rudder, the two s.h.i.+ps had been heading straight at each other. The rudder drifted the X-wing's nose about ten degrees to starboard, pulling him out of line with the TIE. The inversion flopped the starfighter, bringing the nose back into line with the TIE. Before Zsinj's pilot could react, Wedge's fighter streaked in at him and started shooting.

The first pair of red laser-bolts missed low, but the next two pairs swept up and across the ball c.o.c.kpit. One of the TIE's lasers died in a cloud of duraplast mist. Wedge's third shot lanced through the transparisteel viewport, igniting and melting all manner of components and equipment. The TIE starfighter rolled up on the starboard solar panel, then tight-ened down into a screw-spiral before exploding.

A second later a blue proton torpedo slammed into the port wing on the second TIE. The black solar panel closed around the torpedo like cloth around a thrown stone. The torpedo itself punched through the panel and penetrated the fighter's hull before detonating. The blast ripped the back half off the c.o.c.kpit pod, freeing the engines to soar further in-system while the shattered husk of a fighter tumbled on through the void.

"Nice shot, Deuce."

"Thanks for the setup, lead."

Wedge brought the X-wing up and around to the origi-nal heading and saw a proton torpedo from Erisi's s.h.i.+p finish off a TIE. Farther along he saw streams of green laser-bolts spraying out from the s.p.a.ce station. At the ex-tremes of range the fire did not seriously threaten the incom-ing fighters, but it did keep them away long enough for the station to scramble its TIEs. Zsinj's fliers boiled up and out from the station and rose on an intercept course with the Rebel fighters.

"Lead, I have a dozen Interceptors and eight starfight-ers."

"I copy, Twelve." That should be everything they have, unless they're holding something back. Keeping s.h.i.+ps in re-serve made little or no sense to Wedge, but he'd long since learned that warfare and tactics seldom make a lot of sense to the opposition. I just hope our run away from the station looks believable.

Aril Nunb led the Rogues and Y-wings up and away from the station. The squints and eyeb.a.l.l.s came on in pur-suit, hot to thin the ranks of the Ywings. The Interceptors opened a lead on the TIE starfighters and started to close fast with the Y-wings. Aril brought her X-wing over, and the rest of the Rogues followed her through a loop that took them back toward the Interceptors while the Y-wings continued heading away from their pursuers.

As the X-wing and Interceptor formations began to spread out into clouds, the B-wings burst into reals.p.a.ce and shot straight into the gap between the squints and the eye-b.a.l.l.s from the station. Wedge marveled at how each cruci-form s.h.i.+p flew with its wings and fuselage whirling around to keep the c.o.c.kpit stable despite a wild series of maneuvers and course corrections. Having flown a B-wing a few times, he could appreciate the s.h.i.+p's firepower, but the way it moved and flew made him feel less like a pilot than a driver.

The B-wings slashed in at the Interceptors. Half of them seemed content to attack using lasers or blasters, while the other half employed ion cannons to take the squints out of the fight without killing them. Blue ion-bolts caught In-terceptors in full flight, sending electricity skitter-jagging over the hulls. Laser and blaster fire ripped into other In-terceptors, burning holes through solar panels and c.o.c.kpits.

The B-wing ambush scattered the Interceptors, but the X-wings coming in at them did not break off ill pursuit. They left that to the B-wings. The Rogues pushed on through the crumbling Interceptor formation, shot past the B-wings and, as One Flight reunited with the squadron, sailed on in at the eyeball formation.

The first pa.s.s came head to head. Static hissed through the X-wing c.o.c.kpit as TIE lasers stung his forward s.h.i.+elds repeatedly. Wave after wave of green light washed over the s.h.i.+elds, but Wedge ignored it. He concentrated instead on his monitor and s.h.i.+fted the X-wing a bit to starboard, trapping a TIE fighter in the center of his targeting crosshairs. He tight-ened down on the trigger, pulsing kilojoules of scarlet energy into an eyebali's c.o.c.kpit.

A roiling explosion shredded that s.h.i.+p. Wedge kicked the X-wing up onto the starboard S-foil, then climbed up and away from the expanding ball of gas. Letting his roll con-tinue over the top, he dropped the X-wing into a dive, then rolled out to port and came around on an arc between the cloud of fighters and the station. He glanced off to starboard and saw Asyr still with him, which prompted him to toss her a salute. "Glad you stayed with me."

"That's my job."