“One, Two. You all right?”
“I’m unhurt, Two.” He glanced at the board that was supposed to display damage diagnostics. Text scrolled across it at a rate too fast for him to read, and he wished fervently that the Blades offered a diagrammatic display of damage the way New Republic fighters did. “Some damage to my Blade.” He cocked his head as he realized he was hearing a new, persistent noise.
His stomach sank as he recognized it. Whistling. Air was passing through his cockpit making a constant, unmusical sound as it did so. “I’ve experienced a hull breach,” he said, keeping his voice unemotional.
If he couldn’t patch the breach, he couldn’t reach space. Couldn’t make the
Allegiance
.
Now was not the time to worry about it. Ten enemies still remained, and his Blade shuddered as he suffered a hit from the rear lasers of the fighter he was pursuing. He put more of his personal attention to evasive maneuvering and continued stitching his target with linked laser blasts.
Fire and smoke erupted from its cockpit and it began a slow descent toward distant grain fields. Nine enemies to go. No, eight. The fighter in Hobbie’s sights exploded spectacularly, turning into a ball of black and red and gold that would have been beautiful if it had not been fueled by a human life.
Hobbie’s Blade was now trailing smoke, a thin stream of it emerging from beneath his cockpit. “Four—”
“I see it, boss. Still functional.”
Tycho pulled into wingman position behind and to the starboard of Wedge’s Blade. Through his viewport, Wedge could see that Tycho’s canopy was cracked and starred, with char marks indicating laser hits.
Wedge swore to himself. Tycho couldn’t make space either; a canopy damaged that way would blow out under the pressure of its internal atmosphere. And these pilot suits weren’t self-contained environment suits the way TIE fighter rigs were.
That left Janson the only one of them with a spaceworthy Blade, the only one who could reach
Allegiance
and tell the story of what had happened to them on Adumar.
Then Janson’s Blade was enveloped in an explosion cloud.
He emerged from the far side of the cloud intact, or so Wedge thought at first; then his Blade began rolling to port and Wedge could see that the starboard wing was completely gone. “Punch out, Three,” he said. “Janson, come in.”
An enemy Blade diving in from directly above tore his attention away from Janson. He looped to starboard, causing the incoming Blade to alter his dive angle to follow. Tycho decelerated, slowing to the Blade’s rated stall speed, and stitched the enemy with lasers from below. Wedge felt a tremendous bang to his rear quarters but watched, through his rear viewport and on the lightboard, as his attacker exploded. “Good shot, Tycho.”
He heeled over until he could see Janson again. Janson’s Blade was now sideways, its lone wing pointed toward the ground, and was beginning a looping descent to the ground.
But Janson was free of it. The pilot was in open air, a meter-square flat device above him; he hung by straps
from it. Wedge nodded; this had to be the Blade’s pilot-descent mechanism, a primitive repulsorlift device that lowered the pilot at a safe speed.
Safe, that is, unless someone was still shooting at the pilot. Wedge saw a Blade diving toward the defenseless pilot. He saw Janson pulling out his blaster pistol, as though a weapon that small could do any significant damage to a fighter, and open fire.
The incoming fighter exploded. Wedge resolved to find out just what sort of pistol Janson was carrying—and then saw Hobbie’s Blade whip through the new debris cloud, lasers still flashing.
That left six enemies against three damaged Red Flight Blades.
“Stay with Three, Four,” Wedge said. “When he reaches ground, land, join him, and tell him to take you to that club where he ate pastries the other night.”
“Acknowledged, Lead.”
“Two, you and I are going to finish this.”
“I’m your wing.”
“No, drift out in case they keep up the same tactics.”
The six enemy Blades had gathered into formation, two triangles, and were on an approach vector. Wedge saw the two formations drift apart, each triangle heading toward one of the Red Flight fliers. He nodded; they’d finally learned something about not just mindlessly prosecuting the most prestigious enemy. That was too bad; now was not the time for them to get smart.
In these slow-maneuvering Blades, missiles gave his opponents a serious edge. He had to take that edge away.
He slammed his control yoke forward, diving straight toward the Cartann streets beneath him. He thought he detected a moment of hesitation in his enemies before they dove to follow.
It was a gambit he was reluctant to take. Back at the air base, he’d taken steps not to endanger civilians. He
could afford to do so then; that choice did not have a direct bearing on his continued survival. But now it did, and he had to make use of available cover … or die.
Below, he could see only traces of lights indicating the outlines of streets.
But those streets were often blanketed by wires and cables at all altitudes, impediments that, even if they didn’t tear his fighter’s wings off, would throw him into a building side …
He nodded, remembering. They didn’t have all those cross wires at street intersections. He made for the square light pattern of an intersection.
Columns of light poured past him toward the ground, his pursuers’ lasers. He felt his stern rock from a graze impact. He returned fire with his rear lasers, was satisfied to see one shot punch through a canopy. It didn’t kill the pilot, at least not immediately; that Blade turned clumsily away, heading off toward the air base or the forests beyond.
Wedge put his repulsorlifts on at full power and pulled back on his yoke, a full-strength effort to pull out of his dive. He angled to slide in under the unseen canopy of wires and cables, hoping he’d correctly calculated their height aboveground, and a moment later found himself roaring down a mere three meters above street level. Ahead, a repulsorlift transport clumsily turned out of his path.
Behind him, his two pursuers imitated his maneuver. The first one came in too high; Wedge saw it shudder, then saw its port wing disintegrate from an impact with one or more of the cables. The Blade spun, its other wing crumpling under multiple successive impacts, then crashed down onto the street, skidding forward almost as fast as Wedge was flying. In his rear viewport Wedge saw pedestrians dive out of the way of the flaming thing, saw it brush aside an abandoned wheeled transport as though the thing were a millimeter-thin flatscreen.
The other Blade continued relentlessly onward.
As he reached the next intersection, Wedge yanked the controls hard to port, turning into the new lane … and reduced strength to his repulsorlifts. His Blade dropped nearly to the street’s surface and continued its spin until it was pointed back the way it had come. He brought strength up to the forward repulsorlifts, canting his bow upward, and slammed his thrusters forward as hard as he could.
His pursuer whipped around the corner, making better time than Wedge, coming so close to the building face on the outside of his turn that only his repulsors kept him from grazing the building. His nose was elevated far above Wedge’s position, the pilot obviously expecting to catch Wedge in his sights farther down the street.
Wedge fired, his lasers raking the Blade from bow to stern at close range. He saw the underside of the Blade open up like a seam bursting under pressure. The Blade wobbled, roared past over Wedge’s head, and slammed down into the street, skidding for a block in the direction it had been going, knocking wheeled transports aside like toys.
Wedge’s lightboard showed only buildings all around him. “Red Two, report status.”
“All clear,” Tycho said.
“Let’s see how clear we can get. Coming up to join you.” Wedge sent his Blade forward to the intersection, then rose on repulsorlifts until he was well clear of the ubiquitous cabling. He pointed his nose up and climbed.
In seconds, Tycho joined him from points east. If anything, he looked worse than before, with laser scoring all along the starboard side of his fuselage. His cockpit was now shattered; his Blade couldn’t hit very high speeds without wind hammering Tycho. “We’re not going to make space, boss,” he said.
“If I recall the maps right, Cartann’s border to Halbegardia isn’t outside our flight range,” Wedge said.
“We’ll use terrain-following flying to stay below their lightbounce sensors, and—”
His lightboard suddenly showed two fuzzy blips moving toward them, one from Giltella Air Base, one from Cartann Bladedrome. Within moments they resolved themselves into clouds of smaller blips, two entire flightknives. In the distance, Wedge could see the running lights of the incoming Blades; they were closer to one another than they were to Wedge and Tycho, but they would be on the New Republic pilots within seconds.
The tactical part of Wedge’s mind, the one that was often at odds with the Corellian part, calculated odds and strategy. The answer wasn’t good. Even if they could have ordinarily managed twelve-to-one odds, their equipment was too badly damaged to let them compete at full strength. Nor did they have time to land and get into hiding. Even if they punched out, experience had shown that the enemy pilots could spot them and were willing to shoot them out of the air as they descended.
Wedge suppressed a pang of regret. Not fair of him to offer a future to Iella and then rush off and get killed this way. He turned toward the incoming flightknives. He said, “Guess we’re just going to have to rack up some numbers, Tycho.” Despite his best effort, his voice was heavy.
“Understood, boss.” Tycho stayed tight to him.
Then, on his lightboard, one of the two clouds of Blades looped toward the other, and the comm board was suddenly active with traffic: “Strike the Moons Flightknife issues a challenge to Lords of Dismay Flightknife!” “Ke Mattino, you madman, now is not the time—” “There is always time to crush incompetence and cowardice. Fire!”
The sky between the two flightknives, not so distant now, was suddenly lit up by lasers and ball-shaped explosions. A moment later there was no way to distinguish
between the flightknives on the lightboard; they had merged into a single firefight.
“Red Two, we’re going to ground,” Wedge said. He switched to the standard Cartann military frequency. “Red Flight to Strike the Moons. Is that you, Captain ke Mattino?”
“It is I.”
“Thanks, Captain.”
“You have won your departure. I will not let some honor-grubber deprive you of it in this fashion. Confusion to your enemies.”
“And frothing disease to yours. Antilles out.” He pointed his nose toward the ground, toward the section of Cartann not so brightly lit by street illuminators.
It was hours later, the darkest and quietest hours of the night, when Wedge and Tycho arrived at the door of Iella’s quarters. Wedge could not remember ever having been so tired. But when the door opened to his knock and he saw her there before him, his exhaustion evaporated in an instant. He took her in his arms and she dragged him inside. He heard Tycho follow and close the door behind them.
“You almost killed me,” Iella said. Worry blunted the accusation in her tone. “Having to wait hour after hour to find out if you’d survived or not.”
“I’m sorry.” Wedge offered her a look of apology. “We needed to maintain comm silence as much as possible. To travel back streets and alleys and sometimes roofs and balconies to make sure we weren’t spotted, weren’t followed. Have you heard—”
The light in the apartment’s main room clicked on and Wedge discovered he had an audience.
Janson and Hobbie were lounging on the sofa, Janson with his feet up on a small table, a brightly colored datapad, of the sort usually optimized for children’s
games, on his lap. His slicked-back hair suggested he’d recently had a bath, and his fresh clothes made Wedge long to be rid of the sweat-drenched garments he was wearing. Hobbie was similarly scrubbed, though his tunic was off to show a half-dozen places where his torso and arms were bandaged.
Cheriss stood at the wall, near the light control, and Hallis sat on another chair.
Wedge blinked at them. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I seem to have interrupted a party.”
Iella smiled at him. “More like a conspiracy.” She led him and Tycho to additional chairs.
The room was crowded with more furniture than the last time Wedge had seen it; he supposed that she’d dragged it in off the balcony and out of other rooms. Wedge sat wearily and looked among the others. “You’ll excuse me, I hope, if I look a little confused. Cheriss, how do you come to be here? And how are you?”
Cheriss, in dark blastsword-fighter’s clothing, raised and lowered her left shoulder a couple of times, experimentally. “Better,” she said. Her voice was low, her tone somber. “I need some more time before I can fight again. But I was out of danger, and they brought me down to Cartann, where I learned of the air duel you’d had. I went to your quarters, where I found Hallis but not you or your X-wings. I knew if you were to go anywhere, you would come here, so I did.” When she finished, her expression suggested that she had more to say, but she bit back on it.
Wedge struggled with a way to suggest that bringing Hallis here was not a good idea, as it could compromise her identity, but Iella seemed to read his thoughts. She said, “After Cheriss came here and told me what she’d done and who she’d seen, I suggested she bring Hallis. It’s all right, Wedge.”
He nodded and sat back in his chair. “Hallis?”
She shrugged. “I robbed your quarters.”
“Ah.”
“Actually, when they said they’d taken your X-wings, I knew they’d ransack your quarters eventually. I went there intending to get Whitecap’s remaining parts. But I overheard the two men who were packing up your belongings; they were stealing things like they were in a contest, laughing about the four of you like it was good entertainment that you’d been shot down, so I got mad. When they were apart, I hit them both with a hydrospanner and took all the stuff they’d gathered up.”