Star Wars: X-Wing VII: Solo Command Read online

  Shrike Leader knew better than to give them such an opportunity. “Reduce speed to two-thirds,” he said. That would throw off the enemy’s timing. The unseen X-wings would cross before them, having nothing to shoot at, and provide his TIEs with abundant shooting practice. Either that, or they’d break formation now, popping up out of the trenches of Lurark’s streets, and the Shrikes could engage them immediately in dogfights.

  But no X-wings came bouncing up out of the streets, and the two known targets came implacably on. Shrike Leader frowned at that. “Fire at will,” he said.

  A second later, one of the X-wings jittered within the brackets of his targeting computer—and dove, even as Shrike Leader fired. His linked laser shot superheated the air just above the enemy starfighter and hit what looked like a residential building.

  His target was suddenly gone, down into the maze of streets below, as was the other oncoming X-wing—and just as suddenly, six more X-wings popped up from other streets, also on oncoming headings, and opened fire.

  Shrike Leader banked hard, so sharply that his inertial compensator couldn’t quite make up for the maneuver—he was thrown sideways into the netting of his pilot’s couch.

  Then he felt something like a hammerblow as his left wing was hit, penetrated—

  Abruptly the world outside his viewport was spinning, starry sky, nighttime city lights, over and over, and he could see the laser-heated stump of his left wing falling mere meters away.

  He felt a sickness rise in his stomach, but knew that his discomfort would last only for another fifteen hundred meters.

  One thousand.

  Five hundred.

  Wedge checked his sensor board and smiled thinly at what he saw. The maneuver had been more successful than he’d hoped. Scotian of One Wing and Qyrgg of Three Wing had skimmed along at rooftop level, feeding their sensor data to the other Rogues, who had lined up their opening shots based solely on the transmitted data. As soon as Scotian and Qyrgg had detected targeting locks on them, they’d dived to cover among the streets, and the other six Rogues had jumped up and taken their shots. Suddenly the enemy squadron of TIEs had been reduced by five—three destroyed, two badly damaged and winging away—and the odds were now in the Rogues’ favor.

  The numerical odds, he told himself. The odds were already in our favor. “Break by pairs,” he said. “Engage and eliminate. Keep your eyes open for additional incoming units.” He arced to port, Tycho tucked in tight behind him.

  Lara accepted a hand from Donos and swung from the crawler to his rooftop. Elassar stood on guard, his back to them. “Thanks,” she said.

  “Welcome. Any word from the others?”

  She shook her head.

  A shrill whine rose behind them—and, like a landspeeder, an X-wing nosed around the building corner to their north, turning their way, riding on repulsorlifts. It climbed as it came until it was at rooftop level. The cowling rose and Rogue pilot Tal’dira nodded at them, his face serious as ever.

  “That’ll be the lunch I ordered,” Lara said, under her breath. She heard Donos snort, saw him struggle to keep his face straight.

  “Prepare to pick up your squadmates,” Tal’dira shouted. “South face of the building complex. Don’t get too near before we blow it.”

  “Understood,” Donos said. “Thanks.”

  The Twi’lek grimaced, his expression speaking eloquently of how he’d prefer to be halfway across the city where starfighters were engaged in combat, rather than here chatting to ground-pounding commandos. He lowered his X-wing’s cowling and goosed the snubfighter forward.

  Dia leaned in close to Face, so that only he could hear, and asked, “Who is Tetran Cowall?”

  “What?”

  “That Gast creature said she liked Tetran Cowall more than you.”

  “Oh.” He laughed. “She can have him. He’s an actor from Coruscant. We’re the same age. We competed for everything. Both wanted to be pilots. Tested for the same roles. Chased the same girls. He had no perceivable acting skills.”

  She managed a slight smile. “He was the one Ton Phanan was going to leave his money to. If you didn’t get the operation to clear the scar from your face.”

  Face nodded, rueful.

  “I haven’t heard of him. Is he still making holodramas?”

  “No.” Face smiled. “That was one competition I definitely won. He was a good-looking kid, but as he grew up he got sort of homely and couldn’t find work. He hasn’t made a holo in years.”

  The tunnel rocked and a section of it, seventy meters and more away, collapsed, sending dust and large chunks of duracrete rolling down the tunnel toward the Wraiths.

  “I think,” Face said, “that our ride has arrived.”

  The Wraiths rode out of Lurark in the back of Donos’s new stolen flatbed speeder, lurking beneath blankets that smelled of feathers and avian manure. They lay as comfortably as they could—not comfortably at all for most of them, given the placement and severity of their burns. The city around them was alive with noises—distant explosions, occasional siren wails.

  Lara, handling the comm unit while Elassar bandaged Runt, relayed information back. “Rogue Six and Rogue Five are riding guard over us, staying below sensor level. The commander and the rest of the Rogues are strafing the military base now. They’re going to lead off pursuit from the next base out. That means we’ll probably be able to climb out of the atmosphere at a fairly easy pace.”

  “Good,” Face said. “Is everybody fit to fly?” He shined a glow rod from face to face to get responses.

  Dia nodded. Her broken arm was now in a cast made of fast-hardening paste from Elassar’s backpack.

  Piggy said, “Ready to go home.”

  Shalla and Kell gave him tired nods.

  “Fit to fly,” Tyria affirmed. She wasn’t kidding; when Face had gotten a good look at her, he found that the only damage she’d suffered was burns that hadn’t quite penetrated her boot soles and some charring to the butt of her blaster rifle. When he asked how she’d gotten away unmarked, she’d merely shrugged.

  Janson said, “Just try to stop me.” He hadn’t cracked a smile since the incinerator, and Face could finally see, in his grim expression and the anger deep in his eyes, the man Janson had to be when flying against an enemy.

  Runt was slow to answer. Then he said, “We can fly. But we are groggy from what Eleven has given us.”

  “Just tuck in behind me,” Kell said. “I’ll get you there.”

  “We are your wing.”

  “All right, then,” Face said. He didn’t really believe they could all fly, but their experience and determination made it possible, and he didn’t have much in the way of options. “We have one other problem. Cargo.” He shined his light into the face of their prisoner, Dr. Edda Gast. She lay on her side, her arms bound behind her, expression perfectly serene.

  “Put her in with me,” Shalla said. “Beside me in my TIE. She’s not big, I’m not big. We’ll dump everything out of my cargo area to lighten up.”

  “And if she gets feisty?” Face waved his glow rod at Shalla’s right side, which was decorated with bandages.

  Shalla’s face set. “Then I’ll kill her.”

  “You have nothing to fear from me,” Gast said. “The worst I plan to do to any of you is negotiate with you.”

  “Negotiate?” Face said.

  “For what I know.”

  “I think I’ll let Nine kill you now.”

  Gast shook her head, not apparently offended by his suggestion. “No, you won’t. The Rebels—excuse me, the New Republic—doesn’t do things that way. That’s what I’ve always liked about you. And you do want to know where Voort saBinring came from. Why he exists at all. Don’t you, Voort?” She twisted to look at the Gamorrean.

  Piggy merely stared back at her, his expression unreadable.

  “So start talking,” Face said.

  “No. You, personally, can’t give me what I want. Elimination of any charges the New Republic m
ight see fit to press against me. Enough money to start my life over again. Protection from Zsinj. I don’t think I’m asking too much—”

  “Gag her,” Face said. He lay back against the side of the speeder’s bed and tried to quell his stomach, which threatened to rise against him.

  7

  They returned to Mon Remonda’s X-wing bays, twenty-three starfighters. Some of them now showed new battle damage. Others were flown as though their pilots were drunk or worse. Medical crews were on station in the bays to help ease pilots out of cockpits and carry them on repulsorlift stretchers to the medical ward.

  Two hours later, against his doctor’s orders, with his back heavily swathed in bacta bandages underneath a white hospital shirt, Face returned to his quarters.

  Solo quarters. A captain, even a brevet captain, warranted decent-sized accommodations all to himself. Face felt a tinge of the old guilt, the old feeling that he didn’t deserve any such special consideration, given the good he’d done the Empire back when he was making holodramas … but he suppressed that feeling, burying it under a surge of anger. Ton Phanan had shown him that he needed to leave such thoughts behind. If only knowing what he needed to do were the same as doing it.

  A scritch-scritch-scritch noise reminded him of duties he needed to perform. He took a pasteboard box from a drawer and moved to the table where the cages rested.

  Two cages, each about knee height, each contained a translucent arthropod that stood and walked on two legs. The creatures were about finger height, with well-defined mandibles and compound eyes. Storini Glass Prowlers, they were called, from the Imperial world of Storinal. Ton Phanan and Grinder Thri’ag had each secretly come away from the Wraiths’s Storinal mission with one of the creatures. Face had found Grinder’s when it had been placed in his cockpit as a prank, and had given it to Phanan. Then Phanan, too, had died, and Face had inherited them. But both creatures were male, more likely to kill one another than coexist peaceably, and Face kept them in side-by-side cages.

  He used a spoon to extract some of their food from the box. It was unappetizing-looking stuff, looking like little glass beads with green flecks at their centers. But when he poured a spoonful into each cage’s feeder box, the Glass Prowlers fell upon the food as though it were the most wonderful of treats; the Prowlers’s arms snapped out to scoop up each individual bead and their mandibles chewed away at the transparent coating and green flecks within. Face smiled at their voracity.

  There was a knock at his door. “Come,” he said.

  It slid open and Wedge stepped in. “Am I intruding?”

  “No. Just feeding my roommates. Have a seat.” Face flicked a tunic from one of the room’s chairs. He settled in the other, forgetting for a moment, flinching as his back came in contact with the chair.

  Wedge said, “I just came in to see how you were doing. Well, more precisely, to see how you felt about today’s mission.”

  “I figured you would. So I’ve been thinking about it.”

  “And?”

  “And I feel pretty good about it.”

  That got him a raised eyebrow from his commander. “Can you explain that?”

  “Well, I don’t feel good about the casualty total, obviously. Sithspit. Janson and Runt in bacta tanks, everyone else bandaged and drugged up to the eyebrows … I have only four pilots fit to fly.”

  “So what makes you feel good about the mission?”

  Face took a deep breath. “We had an objective. Get information. We succeeded, even if that information is going to be difficult to drag out of Doctor Gast. We got out of there with everyone more or less alive.

  “Even more, it’s obvious that they’d geared that whole facility to kill us, which is something we hadn’t anticipated. We were channeled to the place they intended to kill us, and they threw everything they had at us—and we took it and got out anyway. That’s a tremendous thing. When my pilots realize that, it’s going to be harder than ever to stop them. To intimidate them.

  “And then, again, there’s the fact that the enemy went to such lengths to wipe out the Wraiths. They spent a tremendous amount of money and effort. They may want us dead, but they’re showing us respect—which is something I need to point out to the other Wraiths.” He shrugged, then winced again at the incautious move. “We all feel as though we’ve had the stuffing kicked out of us, then been fried up for someone else’s meal—but we won this one, Commander.”

  Wedge nodded and rose. “I guess I don’t have too much to tell you.”

  Face stood as well. “You came here to talk me out of a depressive state.” He mimed drawing a blaster and placing it to his temple. “Good-bye, galaxy of cruelty. My pilots are all burned; I must kill myself out of shame.”

  “Something like that. But you’re obviously too smart for that.”

  Face shook his head. “Too experienced. A year ago, I’d have felt like bantha slobber after something like this. Maybe even a month ago. Now, I just feel pride for my pilots … and a realization that I’m going to be sleeping on my stomach for a while. By the way, I’m putting in a commendation for Kell for his initiative, and one for Lieutenant Janson for bravery.”

  “Like he needs another one,”

  “Maybe he can build a little fort out of them.”

  Wedge smiled and departed.

  There was another knock at his door.

  “Come.”

  Dia almost flew through the door. She wrapped her arms around his neck, high so as to avoid his bandages, and drew his face to hers for a kiss.

  A long one. He held her to him, the two of them able, at long last, to be clear of the military traditions that made it inappropriate for them to embrace before the other pilots, to be able simply to appreciate that they were both still alive.

  When she finally released him, it took him a moment to remember what he’d been up to recently. “I sure am glad you two arrived in the right order.”

  She looked confused. “What do you mean?”

  “I’d have hated to have offered you the chair and given the commander the kiss.”

  She gave him a smile, the one she’d never displayed before the two of them became a couple, the smile that was only for him. “Let’s see what we can do so you’ll always remember to keep the order straight.”

  Donos settled onto the stool next to Lara’s and looked across the bar. “Fruit fizz, double, no ice,” he said.

  Lara looked curiously at him. “You know there’s no one tending bar.”

  “Sure, but some of the old formalities have to be maintained.” Donos looked around. The two of them were the only people in the pilots’ lounge—not unusual, considering the lateness of the hour, and the way no one much felt like celebrating. “I was wondering if you’d thought about what I asked you to.”

  “You, you mean.”

  “Well, us, really.”

  “Sure, I had plenty of time, when I wasn’t planting comm markers, shooting at stormtroopers, and tending the injured.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  She gave him an exasperated look. “Lieutenant, will you give me an absolutely honest answer?”

  “Call me Myn. Sure.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  He took a deep breath, stalling as he composed his answer. “I want to get to know you better. What I do know, what I’ve seen, suggests that we’d be good together. I want you to stop saying it can’t ever be—stop throwing that up as a theory and let us accumulate some evidence. I want to make you smile with something other than a wisecrack. I want to know who you really are.”

  Her laugh, sudden and hard, startled him. “Oh, no, you don’t.”

  “Try me. Lara, does anyone know who you really are?” That put a stop to her hard-edged amusement. She had to take a moment to consider. “No.”

  “Even yourself?”

  “Least of all me.”

  “So how do you know no one can love you for what you are? Until you know, you can’t have friends, you can’
t even really have family—you have to be absolutely alone in the universe.” He took a moment to settle his thoughts. “Lara, I just want you to give me a chance. But even more, even if it’s not with me, I’d really like to see you give yourself a chance.”

  She looked away from him, studying the gleaming brown surface of the bar top. Real wood, protected by so many coats of clear sealant that it shone like glass. He could see thoughts maneuvering behind her eyes, could see her examining them as if measuring and weighing trade goods. But her expression wasn’t clinical; it was sad.

  Finally, her voice quiet, she said, “All right.”

  “All right, meaning exactly what?”

  “All right, I’ll stop avoiding you. All right, let’s get to know one another.”

  “All right, let’s find out if we have some chance of a future together?”

  She looked back up at him. “I’m pretty sure I’m going to break your heart.”

  “Well, that’s a step in the right direction. Can I break yours, too?”

  She didn’t smile. “Maybe you already have.”

  Normally, taking news to the warlord didn’t cause General Melvar’s stomach to host some sort of internal dogfight. But sometimes the news was bad. Such as when he’d had to tell Zsinj how much they’d lost in the Razor’s Kiss battle with General Solo’s fleet.

  Such as now.

  Approaching the door to the warlord’s office, he nodded at the two guards on duty, two handpicked fighting men of Coruscant, and activated one of the many comlinks he carried on his person. This one signaled a very special set of hydraulics he’d had installed in the doors to most of Zsinj’s private quarters and retreats. They opened the door at a fraction of the speed and with almost none of the noise of most door mechanisms. Silently, he stepped inside, waited for the door to slide shut behind him, then stood before his warlord.