Tomer’s temporary replacement would not be the detriment Tomer had been. Appointed by General Cracken, Iella Wessiri was now managing the New Republic’s Intelligence matters on Adumar with her usual efficiency.
“Are you sure you don’t want to direct your forces from
Allegiance
’s bridge?” Iella asked.
Wedge looked up, startled. Iella had appeared beside
him, in deceptive clothing, a naval lieutenant’s uniform, and had joined Wedge in studying the skies beneath them.
Wedge looked around, saw that no one was near them, and affected surprise. “I’d swear you were talking to me. What an odd question to put to a pilot.”
Iella managed a little smile. “Sorry. Lost my head for a moment. You can’t blame me for trying.”
“No, I can’t.”
She put an arm around his waist, rested her head on his shoulder. “I’m proud of you,” she said.
“We haven’t won, yet.”
“Not for winning. For being willing to lose. For standing by your guns when the whole galaxy seemed to be arrayed against your decision.”
“That wasn’t fun. But when I was sure I was about to lose everything, and I discovered that I hadn’t lost you after all … that made it all livable.”
“But that leaves me with one big worry about the future.”
“That I’m still flying?”
He felt her shake her head. She said, “No, that you’re almost as stubborn as I am. I—”
Whatever her next words might have been, they were cut short by the single blare of an alarm, followed by words that echoed throughout the bay and, Wedge knew, throughout the ship: “Reconnaissance unit High Flight Three Beta reports arrival of Imperial vessels in Adumari space. Three repeat three
Imperial
-class Star Destroyers and numerous secondary vessels inbound. All personnel to battle stations. All pilots to muster stations.”
Wedge sighed. “That’s it.” He pulled her to him for a quick kiss.
“I can’t ask you to be safe,” she said.
He shook his head.
“So shoot straight. And faster than they do.”
“Count on it. I love you.”
“I love
you
.” She broke from him and hurried off to
her station, casting one last look over her shoulder at him before she joined the personnel streaming out the exit and was gone.
They formed up a kilometer off
Allegiance
’s bow, an impressive fighter group: Wedge’s Red Flight, two shield-equipped TIE fighter squadrons, one slightly understrength A-wing squadron, a unit of B-wings, a Y-wing squadron, the High Flight X-wing unit off
Allegiance
, and three space-equipped Blade-32 flightknives from the planet’s surface—two from Yedagon and one from Cartann. They were 106 fighters in strength.
“Allegiance
’s sensors show the enemy TIE squadrons issuing from the Star Destroyers,” Wedge said. “Fighters escorting bombers—a lot of bombers. They expect us to try to intercept with our fighters. Here’s how we’re going to play it instead.
“Our advance screen is Red Flight, High Flight Squadron, Lightflash Squad, and Contender and Skylight Squadrons.” That put the X-wings, A-wings, and TIE fighters at the fore of Wedge’s group. “The rest of you hang back in formation until we’re fully engaged and you can calculate where the action is thickest—and where the enemy is less likely to be able to break away to engage you. Approach by those vectors and unload everything you have on
Agonizer
.” That put the B-wings of Solar Wind Squadron, Y-wings of Remember Derra Squadron, and Blades of the Ice Edge, Frozen Death, and Sunwhip Flightknives behind on missiling duty. “You Blades remember to fire on the command of your flightknife commanders, in unison; your missiles lack the punch of proton torpedoes, so you’re going to have to land precisely timed mass fire if you’re going to do any harm to a Star Destroyer. Understood?”
He was answered by confirmations from each of the squadron commanders.
“All right. Let’s go.” He transmitted the intercept course to the group and vectored to lead the way to the enemy.
As his group formed up on him, he switched the comm board over to the main Adumari broadcast frequency. The two-dimensional image that was the continuous flatscreen broadcast filled his main screen. It showed an older man, a patch over one eye not quite concealing the scar that both rose and descended from his eye socket, addressing the flatcam.
“… continues to hold out against Adumari Union forces,” the man said. “Despite reports that Pekaelic’s forces decline in number every day, assaults by units of his informal force continue to occupy Union attention and slow the Union efforts to bring peace to Adumar. At sunrise, Yedagon time, this morning, units of the Cartannese Lords of Dismay Flightknife, now allied with the former
perator
, escorted a bombing raid that destroyed six residential blocks in Yedagon’s prestigious Accolux Township …”
Wedge switched it off. This was the third day of broadcasts that were, in essence, all lies. Scripted by Hallis Saper with the input of the Adumari Union’s military advisors, the broadcasts told the tale of the former
perator
, Pekaelic ke Teldan, still mounting a mighty struggle against the conquering Adumari Union, keeping war raging across all the civilized nations of Adumar. The public followed the news accounts keenly. The guerrilla warfare always took place in communities that could be, and were, shut off from the outer world by military occupation … meaning that Imperial Intelligence agents on the ground would have a hard time disproving them.
Meanwhile, the true Pekaelic rested in the Cartannese township his son had chosen for his exile, barely aware of the events that were being attributed to him. All he knew was that he had a broadcast to make and a script to follow when instructed to do so.
If all went as it was supposed to, the Empire’s Intelligence team or Adumar would have been recording all these transmissions for the last three days, analyzing them and interpreting them, but not discovering that they were all lies. Even now, they’d be transmitting their findings to the Imperial task force headed toward the planet. With luck, the task force would believe the accounts of a world still at war, its military might scattered.
Well before Wedge’s group spotted the enemy Star Destroyers,
Allegiance
reported that elements of the 181st Imperial Fighter Group, escorting numerous squadrons of TIE bombers, was descending into Cartann airspace. Blips representing other Imperial fighter units were also detected in descent.
And then the Star Destroyer formation came into view,
Agonizer
at the point,
Retaliator
and
Master Stroke
well behind, other, smaller vessels throughout the convoy. Wedge set his course straight for the flagship. “Pilots, arm your weapons. X-wings, S-foils to attack position. Squadron commanders, you are free for individual deployment.” He was not surprised to see the speed-happy A-wing pilots jump out ahead almost instantly. He switched to squadron frequency. “Red Flight, High Flight Squadron, call ’em as you see ’em.”
“Red One, High Flight Twelve. I detect incoming TIE fighters and Interceptors … and two wing pairs of TIE Defenders. They’ve left behind a pretty ferocious screen.”
Wedge grimaced. The TIE Defender was one of the best starfighters known. Equipped with three sets of solar wing arrays, equally spaced around the spherical fuselage, instead of two, and outfitted with shields equal to an X-wing’s and weapons and speed superior to the X-wing, it was an extraordinary—and extraordinarily costly—starfighter. “Red Leader to Solar Wind Squadron. Solar Wind Seven through Twelve, move up to join
the screen. We’re going to need your help with the TIE Defenders.”
“Acknowledged, Red Leader.”
Space ahead lit up like interplanetary fireworks as
Agonizer
’s turbolasers and ion cannons went active. That meant the A-wings had come within range. Seconds later, he spotted the first of the incoming TIE fighters—mere blips on his sensor board that materialized into fast-moving blurs in his forward viewport.
He linked his lasers for quad fire, giving them a harder punch but a slower cycle rate. “Break by pairs and fire at will,” he said.
The X-wings around him spread out, maintaining their course straight toward the incoming enemies. Head-to-head combat approaches were among the most dangerous tactics for starfighters, but they favored the shielded X-wings slightly over the unshielded TIEs.
On the heads-up display projected onto his forward viewport, Wedge’s yellow targeting brackets tracked an incoming TIE Interceptor, the brackets trailing slightly behind the vehicle’s lateral evasive movements. He sent his X-wing into the juking and jinking maneuvers that made it a more difficult target and manually swept his targeting brackets across the path he suspected the TIE would take next. His suspicion was right; the TIE dove straight through the path his brackets were tracing and the brackets went green. Wedge fired. He was rewarded only with a graze as one of his lasers charred the Interceptor’s starboard solar wing black. The TIE veered off its intended course, away from Wedge and the X-wings.
Incoming green lasers matched outgoing red ones in number and intensity, and Wedge saw, in his peripheral vision, one of the High Flight X-wings explode, leaving only burning gas and rapidly cooking shrapnel behind.
Then the lines of TIEs and New Republic fighters met, merged, and separated again, the TIE squadrons flashing past. In a second the TIEs were behind him but
coming around in their impossibly tight loops to come up behind the slower New Republic craft.
“Red Leader, got an eyeball,” Tycho said.
Wedge checked by sensors and visually. A TIE fighter, or eyeball in pilot’s parlance, had come up behind Tycho and was unloading a continuous stream of laser fire at him, though Tycho’s erratic side-to-side motions had kept him from sustaining any but the most grazing of laser impacts.
“Read you, Two. I’m your wing.” Wedge turned in Tycho’s wake.
Tycho dove—“downward” being the direction of Adumar’s orbital plane—in a shallow arc the most inexperienced of pilots could have followed. Less easy to follow would have been his extraordinary evasive maneuvering within the simple arc. The TIE fighter followed, keeping up his laser fire, and Wedge came up behind.
He fired once, his four lasers flashing through empty space where, a quarter second before, the TIE had been. The nimble eyeball flashed off to port, breaking away from its pursuit of Tycho.
“You’d think he wanted to stay alive or something, Lead.”
“Let’s disabuse him of the notion. Back to the furball.” Wedge turned toward the most active portion of the engagement zone.
He could see on his sensor board the second wave of fighters, the missile-bearing craft, heading in two columns around the engagement zone toward
Agonizer
. And what he could see, the enemy could see. It would be best not to give the TIE Defenders a crack at those columns; Defenders would tear the slow-moving Y-wings and Blades to pieces. He identified the nearest Defender on his sensor board and headed straight for it.
It was engaged with two
Allegiance
TIE fighters and a B-wing operating in concert. As Wedge approached,
the Defender’s lasers chewed through one of the TIE fighters; the eyeball vented the gases in its cockpit and went dark. A linked ion-cannon blast from the B-wing missed the Defender by thirty meters or more, and the Defender’s return ion blast eliminated the other TIE fighter, filling its cockpit with sparks before the vehicle went dark.
“Red Two, go wide. Let’s give him nothing but guns to run toward.” Wedge looped to starboard, away from his wingman, and Tycho looped to port; they arced toward the B-wing and Defender from opposite directions.
The Defender, itself looping around for a run at the B-wing, instead swung wide to keep clear of its original target and accelerated toward Tycho.
Wedge’s targeting brackets flickered green across the Defender. He fired, but his lasers were meters off the mark.
Tycho and the Defender, skittering around like drops of ale on a cooking surface, came toward one another, Tycho unloading lasers, the Defender firing ion cannons. They passed one another seemingly undamaged … until Wedge noticed that Tycho was no longer maneuvering. Red Two’s X-wing was dark, headed out to space like a missile with no guidance control.
Wedge bit back a curse. He didn’t bother trying to raise Tycho on the comlink. Ion cannons tended to wipe out all a vehicle’s electronics. Tycho was out of the game unless he could manage a cold start on his engines, an unlikely eventuality.
Instead, Wedge turned in the Defender’s wake. He’d have only a shot or two before the other vehicle’s superior speed and maneuverability would take it out of Wedge’s range.
As his targeting brackets edged toward the Defender, its pilot detected the attempted targeting lock and went evasive, executing the kind of side-to-side maneuvers that only a TIE-style vehicle could manage. He also put on a burst of acceleration, drawing away from the
X-wing at a prodigious rate, and began a tight loop upward that would inevitably put him at Wedge’s stern.
Wedge shook his head and held his fire. Instead, he maneuvered his brackets around and across his target, seeing which way the Defender jumped whenever threatened with an imminent hit. The Defender’s response was always a spiraling loop down and to starboard, a fatal predictability … Wedge ran his brackets toward the Defender one last time, then, not waiting for the Defender’s response, sent his X-wing into a loop down and to starboard.
The Defender rolled right into his targeting brackets. The pilot saw his mistake, began a reverse, but Wedge fired, quad-linked lasers punching through the vehicle’s engines and into the cockpit. Fire flared through the hole he’d made, then the vehicle detonated.
Wedge found the B-wing on his sensors. “Red Leader to Solar Wind Eight. Tag Red Two, calculate his course and velocity, and transmit that data to
Allegiance
with a request for rescue.”
“Will do, Red Leader.”
Wedge turned back toward the heart of the engagement.