Solo Command (42 page)

Their pursuers came around at full speed, hugging the asteroid’s surface more closely than they had, and overshot the two X-wings. Wedge fired, saw his twin-linked lasers hammer the side of his target. The TIE, not penetrated, struggled to return to its original course, but the blast had sent it tumbling too close to the asteroid surface. It veered straight into a hill-sized projection and detonated.

Wedge glanced at Tycho, then at his sensor board. His wingman was intact; the other TIE was a ball of orange-and-yellow gases half a kilometer back. The other starfighters of his group were holding up well in spite of the sudden arrival of several TIE fighter squads—and not all the new arrivals were enemies. Some were friendlies off
Skyhook
.

Wedge looped back around toward
Iron Fist
for another strafing run—or another head-to-head with TIEs.

A new cloud of TIEs, two squads of interceptors, rose from the destroyer’s belly and veered off into the asteroid field. All wore red horizontal stripes on their solar wing arrays.

Wedge checked their course. It took the interceptors away from
Iron Fist
, away from Solo’s engagement, toward Selaggis Six’s once-occupied moon.

“Leader, Two. I don’t like the sight of that.”

“Me either, Two.” He switched his comm unit to the group frequency. “Group, this is Leader. Polearm One, take command of the group. Rogues, Wraiths, form up on me. We have something to check out.”

Lara pushed open the access hatch just a few centimeters and peered out into the corridor beyond. It was empty, echoing with a radiation alarm, flashing with the red lights appropriate
to such a dangerous condition. Opposite the hatch was the door into the hangar bay she wanted.

She stepped out and helped haul Tonin over the hatch lip. “Give us a minute to get the door open,” she told the nonhumans crowded into the access shaft. “Then look both ways to make sure no one is coming, and join us.”

They nodded, a little excited but confident, like a roomful of businessfolk just before an important meeting. She was left with the unsettling impression that she was leading a horde of humans dressed up for no particular reason in humanoid suits.

The hangar door opened to their approach. She breathed a sigh of relief; she and Tonin wouldn’t have to run a lengthy bypass on the door controls. She toggled the control so the door would remain open for the humanoids following; despite their human-level, or genius-level, intelligence, they might still be startled by the suddenness with which ship’s doors tended to shoot up into their housings.

Within the hangar, only three vehicles remained: Lara’s X-wing, a
Lambda
-class shuttle, and a larger shuttle of similar design, an Imperial landing craft. “We’ll give them the landing craft,” she told Tonin. “I’ll get it prepped for launch. You still have the file on my X-wing?”

Tonin tweetled an affirmative.

“Open it up, disable all transponder systems, and disengage whatever else the file says they’ve done to it. I don’t want them to be able to detonate it remotely.”

“They won’t need to.” The voice, cultured and self-assured, came from behind her, from the hangar corner nearest the door.

She whirled. General Melvar stood there, a blaster pistol in his hand, and Ensign Gatterweld, looking surly and betrayed, held a blaster rifle at the ready beside him. Both men moved toward her.

“You had to come back here for your souvenir X-wing,” Melvar said. “Perhaps your only mistake in a skillful escape attempt. I knew your arrival was pending when you or your droid falsified the radiation leak for this deck.”

Lara saw shadows congregating behind the two men, at the door into the bay. She raised her hands. “That’s why the hangar doors were not secured. You were waiting for me.”

“Correct.”

“Will you be killing me now?”

“No. That’s the warlord’s prerogative.” Melvar looked sad, and Lara had the unsettling feeling that the emotion was genuine. “I do wish you’d been faithful. You could have helped the warlord lock down this quadrant of the galaxy. He’s generous with those he respects. You could have owned a world.”

“I wish I had something witty to say to you,” she told him. “But the thought of helping Zsinj is turning my stomach.”

The humanoids moved forward, a nonhuman mob, the sounds of their passage masked by the alarm sounding in the corridor.

“I think—” Melvar stopped, his eyes darting right, where one of the Gamorreans had just moved up within his peripheral vision.

He turned, brought the blaster around. The other Gamorrean, the female, grabbed his forearm and slammed him to the hangar’s metal floor. Gatterweld spun, panic on his face—

And then the nonhumans were all over the two men, pounding them, raking claws across their faces, biting at limbs and heads and torsos.

“Stop it!” Lara yelled.

The humanoids looked up at her.

“Just bind them. Leave them. They’ll die when
Iron Fist
is destroyed.”

They looked at each other, then rose from the downed men.

In minutes, she and Tonin had the two vehicles ready for departure. She fitted a ladder to the side of her X-wing. “You’re sure you can fly this thing.”

The Ewok, standing at the base of the shuttle’s boarding ramp, nodded. He carried the objects he’d brought with him from the hidden medical facility—four prosthetic extensions, two with articulated hands at the ends, two with long-toed feet.

Tonin rolled up to her and whistled a question.

She didn’t have to know the musical speech of droids to understand. “No, Tonin. You’re going with them. You have to
broadcast all that data I recorded about Zsinj’s projects. The medical data.”

He whistled again, more urgently, shrilly, a complicated message.

She drew her goggles from her pack, put them on, plugged the trailing wire into Tonin’s side.

WHERE ARE YOU GOING?

“I’m going to rejoin my unit.”

YOU SAID THEY HATED YOU. THEY WILL BE YOUR ENEMIES. THE WARLORD’S FORCES ARE YOUR ENEMIES. YOU’LL DIE IF YOU DO THIS
.

“Maybe,” she said. “Probably.”

DON’T
.

She stared down into his holocam eye, and suddenly found it, and Tonin’s stance, to be as expressive as any human mannerism. “Oh, Tonin. I have to. I have to do this to be who I decided I want to be. Do you understand?”

NO. YOU’VE ALREADY REPROGRAMMED YOURSELF. THAT’S ENOUGH
.

“I wish it were. But an intention isn’t anything unless you carry it out.” She knelt, wrapped her arms around the droid, gave him a squeeze she knew he could not feel.

YOU WILL TELL US IF YOU NEED HELP. WE WILL HELP
.

“I have my comlink,” she said. “I’ll tell you.” Tears blurred her vision for the first time in days. She rose, pulled her goggles free of Tonin’s jack, and hurriedly climbed up into her cockpit, unable to face the droid again.

Tonin wheetled one last, sad sound and rolled toward the landing craft.

17

On Wedge’s sensor board, the interceptors of the 181st had a commanding lead; they were already entering the atmosphere of the moon, once home to Selaggis’s colony.

Four friendly starfighters trailed the 181st, not losing ground to them—Kell, Elassar, Shalla, and Janson, flying four of Wraith Squadron’s own TIE interceptors. The X-wings of Rogue and Wraith Squadrons trailed by a distance that increased with every minute.

“Wraith Five to Leader. They’re descending toward the west coast of the primary continent. I think that’s where the colony used to be. Atmospheric conditions not helpful. Heavy rain, heavy winds.”

“Acknowledged, Five. Do not engage. Continue to update us on their progress. Transmit us your sensor data.” Wedge suppressed a curse. He preferred the X-wing to every other starfighter ever made, for its nearly ideal balance of ruggedness, speed, and firepower, but sometimes—such as now—he devoutly wished for more speed.

“They’re banking toward a set of ruins—the colony, I guess. No sign of life in the ruins—they’re strafing! There has to be a living target down there, Leader. Permission to engage.”

Wedge closed his eyes. He’d already confirmed that there
was no native comm traffic from Selcaron.
Mon Remonda’
s records had reported no survivors from Zsinj’s barrage of five months ago. And yet Zsinj was dedicating his best pilot, his best-trained starfighter unit, to pound those ruins flatter.

It had to be a trap. Had to be. But if it wasn’t …

The New Republic wasn’t here to protect itself, but to protect innocents. There might be colony survivors down there. It was that simple.

He opened his eyes again. One second had clicked by on his console chrono. “Permission granted.”

Kell banked and dove toward one of two rearmost pairs of interceptors. It was difficult to see them; the sky was overcast, and fierce winds blew sheeting rain almost horizontally across his path. His heart hammered—in his throat, it felt like—and he knew that he might at any moment introduce his lunch to the inside of his helmet.

The old fear. It had paralyzed him at the
Implacable
fight. In the months since, it had never entirely left him. It might never leave him.

It made him feel like hell. He decided to take it out on the enemy.

The rearmost interceptor of the wingpair he’d targeted chittered for a split second in his targeting brackets, then broke to starboard. Its wingmate made a sudden deceleration, seeming to blast backwards past Kell’s port side, preparatory to setting up for an attack on him—

It exploded, vanishing from his sensor screen. “Good shot, Nine.” He banked tighter, trying to stay inside his target’s turn radius, but the enemy interceptor’s maneuver was sharper than any Kell had ever made. A moment later the interceptor came up behind him, a quarter klick back. Kell heard his sensor system howl with the confirmation of his enemy’s targeting lock on him.

He dove toward the ground—a two-tone surface, gray seas to his port, brown soil to starboard, the wreckage of prefabricated dome buildings where the two colors met. Lasers flashed above him, visible through his top viewport. He angled
over toward the sea, dropping almost straight toward the shoreline.

As the range meter dropped, he felt wind kicking him to port. He struggled with the piloting yoke, heard the howl of his sensors again, and juked to throw off his pursuer’s aim. He was kicked to port again, and from the sensor’s unmusical complaints, this time it had to have been from a laser graze rather than atmospheric conditions.

At a mere couple of hundred meters from the ocean’s surface he fired his lasers and hauled back on the yoke. The lasers hit the water’s surface, boiling it, sending up a column of steam. He flashed through it, actually felt the drag of the mist as his interceptor hit the column, and banked to port, a maneuver so fast and tight his vision began to gray out.

His pursuer emerged from the column of steam, not banking instantly—its pilot had to be taking a moment to find Kell.

That was the moment he needed. He held his turn, struggled against the centrifugal forces trying to slam him into the starboard side of his cockpit, and came around behind his enemy. The TIE vibrated in his targeting brackets and he fired.

The TIE exploded spectacularly, transformed into the biggest fireball Kell had ever seen yielded by an interceptor’s detonation, a hundred-meter-diameter ball of destruction. Kell climbed to stay above the rising cloud of smoke and flame, then shook his head to try to clear his vision. “Two down,” he said. “Twenty-two to go.”

“Twenty.” That was Janson’s voice. “But they’re changing tactics.”

Kell looped around, back toward the ruined town, and Elassar fell in beside him.

Ahead, the interceptors of the 181st continued with their low-level strafing runs against the ruins. They seemed to have no particular target; their aim seemed to be the transformation of the entire set of ruins into smaller rubble and dust.

Kell saw Janson and Elassar come in from the east, aiming for a pair of interceptors near the ruins’s border. Their targets shied away toward the colony center; two more turned in the direction of Janson and Elassar for a head-to-head. Janson and
Elassar banked toward the newcomers, but those targets, too, looped away as a third pair maneuvered to engage the Wraiths.

It was a deadly game of keep-away, fliers of the 181st turning to engage the Wraiths just long enough to get their attention, then breaking away to return to their strafing. As Kell and Elassar neared shore, two interceptors turned toward them.

“If they come at us,” Kell said, “standard head-to-head. If they bank away, don’t follow.”

“Acknowledged,” Elassar said.

Their enemies banked away well before they were in targeting range. A new pair angled in from the north, timing their approach so they’d hit Kell and Elassar from the side if the Wraiths continued their straight-line approach.

“Up,” Kell said, and drew back on his yoke. His interceptor rose at a dizzying pace. “I don’t get it. They’re playing defensively.”

“They’re waiting,” Janson said. “For the rest of the Rogues and Wraiths.”

Zsinj watched in mounting disbelief as his fleet’s damage displays grew ever redder. “Melvar,” he said.

Captain Vellar looked over from his position on the command walkway. “He’s not back from his errand. Did his errand involve a shuttle launch? We have a landing craft taking off from the personal-vehicles bay. It seems to be in pursuit of an X-wing.”

Zsinj shook his head, unconcerned. “Never mind that. Vellar, are they that good? Oh, Sithspit, we just lost
Venom
.” Red flashes crossed and crisscrossed the display of the
Victory
-class Star Destroyer like a flash fire.

“They seem to be, sir,” the captain said. There was tension in his voice, but his expression was unwavering. “
Mon Remonda
is almost in position to engage us.”

“Your opinion?”

The captain gave the sensor holoprojections a long look. “Our group isn’t going to defeat their secondary group. They’re being pounded to pieces. Solo’s main group, which is almost
unhurt, is going to hit us in just a minute. We’re damaged, and we don’t know the extent to which we may have been further sabotaged. Eventually Solo’s secondary group will reinforce the main group.” He turned a regretful face to Zsinj. “Sir, we’re not going to win this fight.”