Wraith Squadron Read online

  Janson leaned away from the painful brightness. "What the—" Then he caught sight of the vehicle that had scored the kill. "Good shooting, Night Caller."

  Lieutenant Tabanne's voice came back, "Can't let you toy drivers score all the kills, Twelve. Hold tight." The oncoming Night Caller fired again, her laser cannons converging on a wingless TIE ball that had been firing concussion missiles indiscriminately. The spherical craft emerged from the beam intact, or so Janson thought at first; then it rotated and he saw that one half had been burned entirely away.

  Half a pilot drifted out of the cockpit and joined it in its plummet to the lunar surface.

  Kell heard two more Ugly pilots surrender. His snubfighter roared over the moon's surface, mere scores of meters above the irregular ground, occasionally dropping closer as he and Tyria headed over deep impact craters.

  They skipped over the ridge that was a common border between two such craters and saw them—treaded vehicles peering just over the far rim. Even as large as this crater was, they were already in weapons range, only a couple of seconds away.

  "Switching to torps," he said. "Firing."

  "Firing," Tyria repeated.

  Their proton torpedoes flashed almost instantly across the distance separating firer from target.

  Almost instantly. The treaded vehicles also fired, lasers and concussion missiles, aiming at distant targets. Then the torpedoes caught up to them. Kell's hit the big one on the left, the too-tall construction body atop a military crawler's treads, while Tyria's hit the smaller laser-cannon-armed crawler in the middle. All three vehicles were caught up in the dual blast. They dropped out of the bottom of the resulting ball of smoke and fire, tumbling down the crater's slope, throwing off treads, doors, shreds of weapon components, chunks of armor, all charred and warped almost beyond recognition.

  The comm crackled with Jesmin's pained voice. "I'm hit."

  Kell and Tyria cleared the crater a moment later and vectored in behind Jesmin and Donos.

  The Mon Calamari pilot and her temporary wingman were still together, but both were hit, trailing smoke, and drifting apart.

  Jesmin seemed to be the one damaged worst. Kell guessed that the blast had been one of a pulse barrage; nothing else was likely to have been able to knock down her shields and penetrate before the shields came back up. A laser blast had hit her on the port side of her cockpit; from the angle and the deepening black score along the cockpit's flank, Kell gauged that the blast had done the majority of its damage just behind and below the pilot's chair. Jesmin also could have caught some of the wash of damage.

  Her X-wing was also standing on its starboard strike foils and was in an arc heading toward one of the nearest hills. "Jesmin, straighten up. Two, can you hear me?"

  "Hear . . . you . . . Five . . ." If anything, her voice sounded worse than before.

  "Level off, Two. Right now."

  "Can't . . . reach . . . stick . . ."

  She was too badly hurt to reach the pilot's yoke? That was bad, but—then he realized the truth. Her words, and the way she was struggling to say them, added up to one thing: her inertial compensator was shot. The device that made pilots immune to the centrifugal effect of fighter maneuvers was no longer working, and she was being crushed back into her seat by the high-speed arc she was performing.

  She was seconds from hitting the hillside. He said, "Thirteen, instruct her R2 to cut her fighter's thrust by half."

  Thirteen's answer came up immediately: HE CAN'T. HIS LINKS TO COCKPIT CONTROLS ARE GONE. HE SAYS GOOD-BYE.

  "No! Jesmin, punch out!"

  There was no answer.

  There was other comm traffic going on. Kell ignored it. He was aware only of Jesmin's dying X-wing meters in front of his own. Of the rapidly growing hillside beyond that.

  He closed his strike foils into cruise position and goosed his thrusters until he was just to the side of and beneath Jesmin's X-wing.

  Janson's voice: "What are you doing, Five?"

  Wedge's: "Let him go, Eleven. I see what he's up to."

  With his port wing a meter beneath Jesmin's starboard wing, Kell rolled gently to starboard. His wing contacted hers with a scrape, putting a shudder through his snubfighter, checking and reversing her roll. He drifted to starboard and continued his roll until he nearly completed a three-sixty.

  Now he stared at the bottom of Jesmin's fighter, at the damage to her side and at cables trailing out of it. Because the impact of wing against wing had rolled her, her fighter had gone through nearly ninety degrees of a rotation to port. For the moment, her X-wing was angling away from the hillside, but the roll was continuing. As delicately as he could, Kell rose toward the underside of her fighter.

  The hillside flashed below him and was gone. Jesmin's roll brought her port wing down on top of Kell's. The stick under his hands shuddered. Behind him, Thirteen shrieked and Kell felt the bump of the R2 unit's impact with the underside of Jesmin's fighter.

  As Jesmin's rotation forced his port strike foils downward, Kell's flight stick jerked and his fighter tried to roll to port. He fought it, trying to keep his fighter in line through sheer strength. If he could just bring Jesmin's nose up, he might angle her out of the atmosphere, enable the Narra to catch up to her— He heard a crackle, felt his body tingle. Thirteen made another noise of dismay.

  His text display lit up with diagnostics reports: ETHERIC RUDDER NONFUNCTIONAL.

  PORT FUSIAL THRUST ENGINES NONFUNCTIONAL.

  STRIKE FOIL CONFIGURATION HYDRAULICS NONFUNCTIONAL.

  REPAIRS COMMENCING.

  Kell's port-side engines whined and shut down. Jesmin's X-wing, now headed in a long arc toward the ground, leaped out ahead of him.

  "No! Five to Two, come in."

  Nothing.

  "Thirteen, can you query her pilot chair's electronics?"

  THEY REPORT LEVELS CONSISTENT WITH UNCONSCIOUSNESS IN MON CALAMARI.

  "Night Caller, can you snag her with your tractor?" "She's out of our line of sight, Five. I'm sorry."

  Jesmin had only ten or fifteen seconds to live unless he managed something. "Ten, where are you?"

  "Five, this is Leader. Ten is with Nine. She can't help you."

  "But I've got—I've got—"

  "I'm sorry, Five."

  Jesmin's fighter hit the lunar surface. It didn't detonate; it shredded instantly into tons of shrapnel, rolling across the rocks and pockmarks of the moon below, coming to a rest in a swath of litter half a kilometer in length.

  Kell wiped tears away from his cheeks. Then the real pain of his failure hit him.

  "Nine, answer me." Tyria tried to keep her voice calm and level. Flying above and behind Donos, she could see that damage to his X-wing was minimal—unless she counted the charred crater that was what was left of his R2's docking station. If there were any fragments of Donos's astromech, Shiner, remaining, they would have to be dug out of a deep layer of slag and carbon scoring.

  The dialogue between Kell, Jesmin, and Wedge was becoming more desperate. She tried to ignore it, to keep it in the background of her mind. "Myn! Answer me!"

  There was a little burst of static that may have been a word.

  Tyria pressed her helmet closer to the side of her head, hoping it would help her hear. "What did you say? 'Gone'?"

  It came again, Donos's voice, still faint but understandable: "Gone."

  She glanced at her sensors. Jesmin wasn't gone yet, but it didn't look as though there was much hope for her. Tyria started to correct Donos—then the import of what he was saying hit her.

  She dialed her comm system down to minimum transmission power and hoped that her signal wouldn't carry back to the other Wraiths. "Myn, do you mean Shiner?"

  "He's gone."

  "Myn, damn you, he's only a droid! Jesmin Ackbar may die and all you're worried about is a hunk of metal!"

  There was no answer.

  She accelerated and dropped down in front of Donos. "Wraith Nine, this is Wraith Ten. You're my wing. D
o exactly as I do."

  Again, no answer. She sideslipped a little to starboard but Donos didn't follow. Exasperated, she moved back in front of him.

  Then she saw it, just as, minutes ago, she'd imagined the two flying Uglies leading Kell off to his death. "Talon Leader, this is Talon Two. Do you read?"

  There was a delay, then Donos's voice came back strong and calm. "Two, this is Leader."

  "Leader, you're damaged. Injured. I'm going to lead you back to base. You're my wing. Do you copy?"

  "I copy, Two, and thanks."

  She slowly rolled up onto her starboard wing and came around in a gradual arc back toward Night Caller. Behind her, Donos skillfully duplicated her maneuver.

  She wanted to feel relieved, but trying to imagine what must be going on in Donos's mind made her shudder.

  Then the dot designating Wraith Two winked out on the sensor board.

  Wedge and Janson finished the tour of the bandit base in silence.

  The base was an elderly, damaged Kuat Super Transport VI container ship. With its engines in the shape they were, Wedge doubted the vessel would ever lift, even from the half-standard gravity of this moon. The engines were just barely functional enough to provide power for artificial gravity, life support, and communications. A smaller hauler, an aging Corellian bulk freighter, apparently served to haul half squads of Uglies through hyperspace to whichever areas they chose to patrol. They had enough firepower to intimidate decent-sized cargo vessels, and their supplies of stores suggested the pirates had been doing quite well.

  In the base's filthy mess hall, the surviving pilots, eleven of them, plus about twenty support crewmen waited under guard. Falynn and Grinder, grim-faced, kept them under the cover of blaster rifles; the two Wraiths stood behind upended tables that would give them some quick cover if one of the pirates produced a holdout weapon the searchers had missed.

  Wedge stood before the pirate captain, a beefy, black-bearded man who had admitted to the name of Arratan. "Stand," Wedge said.

  Uneasy, the man stood. "We have a right to be here. We have a right to attack intruders."

  "What right?"

  "We're colonists. This is an unclaimed system. There's no law here."

  Wedge sighed, suddenly made even more weary by the lie. "Very well. You're free to go."

  The pirate chief blinked. "What?"

  "You're free to go."

  The bearded man looked among his men and nodded, They slowly stood.

  "Of course," Wedge said, "there's no law here. So my pilots are free to shoot you if they want to."

  The pirates sat again, all but Arratan.

  "Furthermore, since there's no law here, my crew and I are going to help ourselves to whatever supplies we need. Then we're going to take off and blow a hole in your beloved Blood Nest, venting the atmosphere. Then we'll inform the New Republic military that there's a nice hard-vacuum warehouse here full of other stolen goods and a lot of depressurized bodies."

  Arratan's face twitched. "You can't do that."

  "Of course we can. There's no law here. This is unclaimed territory. Would you or any of your men like passage to some other system before we blow this base to pieces?"

  "Maybe."

  "Then maybe you should spend some time thinking about what you have to offer us for passage. Not goods; we'll take what we want anyway. Information." Wedge leaned close to the pirate. "Be advised. You filth killed one of my pilots to protect your right to have no laws. So I'm going to be very hard to please."

  Rattled, the pirate chief leaned back from Wedge. The backs of his legs encountered the table bench behind him and he sat clumsily.

  Wedge spun on his heel and left the mess, Janson following.

  19

  On the way back to the wobbly, unreliable-looking extruder tube where Night Caller was docked, Wedge said, "New orders."

  Janson pulled out his datapad.

  "Test all the fuel they have in reserve. Whatever's up to the standards of our snubfighters, transfer to the corvette. But I want Kell to look at everything first in case it's wired to blow."

  "Kell's in sick bay."

  "Was he hurt?" Wedge was aware that trailing power cables from Jesmin's X-wing had shorted out some of the systems of Kell's snubfighter. Perhaps he'd taken too much electricity himself.

  "Violent nausea."

  Wedge gave him a surprised look. "What does our doctor say about that?"

  "He says Kell is a real mess and shouldn't be given a job frying tubers for the Alliance, much less flying X-wings."

  "That sounds like Phanan. Was that on the record?"

  "No. He's hoping Kell will surprise him. By coming out of it."

  "Me, too. I'll talk to Kell. Any other injuries?"

  "Myn Donos. A concussion from the explosion that did all the damage to Jesmin's snubfighter. Or so Phanan says. I wasn't able to talk to Myn; Phanan had already sent him to his quarters for rest."

  "Fine. Oh, and transfer Phanan's R2 unit—Gadget?"

  "Gadget."

  "—to Myn."

  They entered the airlock providing access to the extruder tube. Wedge closed the inner airlock door and opened the outer, then stared dubiously at the shifting length of stained man-height tubing. Somewhere beyond its curve was one of Night Caller's airlocks. "I'd almost rather suit up against the atmosphere."

  "Oh, come on, Wedge. If it's good enough for those upstanding citizens, it's good enough for us."

  Wedge managed a faint smile. "Then you go first."

  "Ton, a few minutes privacy?"

  Wedge stood just inside the door to sick bay. Phanan gave him a stiff nod and left without a word.

  On one of the bay's beds lay Kell Tainer, somber, pale. He gulped, obviously aware he was in for a dressing-down.

  "I don't know how you do it," Wedge said. "You do such good work. Then you screw everything up."

  Kell nodded. "It's my fault Jesmin is dead. I know that."

  "Not that, you idiot. It's that tank driver's fault she's dead. It's the fault of a failed inertial compensator. It's her body's fault for failing her, letting her fall unconscious, when she could have used those extra seconds you gave her to reach her ejection control. The maneuver you pulled, trying to rescue her, was crazy and brilliant. Most pilots in Starfighter Command would've cracked up performing it."

  Kell drew back from the anger in Wedge's voice. He looked confused. "Then what—the screwup—"

  "It's this." Wedge waved at him, at the sick bay. "You think you've failed. You go to pieces. Every one of us lost a friend today, and who's in sick bay? You. Myn Donos has a concussion and he's just sleeping it off. You need a doctor's care."

  Kell started to say something, then clamped down on it.

  "Now, get up, get back into uniform. I want you to search the pirate base for explosives. I don't want any of us losing hands—or our lives—when we're exploring. We need you."

  Kell started to rise, then pain crossed his face. To Wedge, it looked like a massive cramp.

  "That's part of it, too, isn't it?" Wedge kept most of the scorn out of his voice—leaving in just enough for Kell to detect. "Someone needs you and you go to pieces. Well, we do need you. We're relying on you. Our lives depend on you. Right now. What's it going to be?"

  Kell stood up. His face was a curious mixture of fury and pain. That pain doubled him over, but he straightened up almost instantly. "Permission to speak freely, sir?"

  "Go ahead."

  "Every time you make one of these motivational speeches I want to beat you to death."

  "And how do you suppose I feel about you whenever some responsibility sends you into vaporlock?" Wedge turned and left.

  In the corridor, he realized what his next task had to be. He resisted the urge to turn back. He'd rather argue with Kell for hours than perform his next duty. He'd almost rather let Kell beat him to death than perform it.

  He could put it off for a while. He had to dictate the report of the assault on this pirate bas
e. He had to put in a recommendation that the New Republic seize this site, just in case it became useful in the war against the warlords and the Empire. He even had to put in a recommendation for a citation for Kell Tainer—even if the man folded up in a pinch, his efforts today were above and beyond the call of duty.

  But then, ultimately, he had to write Admiral Ackbar to tell him that his niece was dead.

  Wedge sat under a single light in the captain's quarters that had once been lavish but were now echoingly empty.

  He began writing on his datapad's touch pad. A terminal keyboard would have been faster, but he knew it was not the interface that would slow him tonight. Slower still would be finding the right words.

  He wrote, Sir, I'm afraid this letter comes to you as a bearer of bad news.

  He looked at his words. A bearer of bad news. A trite phrase, and it wasn't correct. The letter wasn't the bearer. Whoever brought Ackbar the letter would be the bearer. Perhaps it would just be a wall terminal.

  He hit the clear button and the words winked out.

  Sir, I wish I could find some way to soften the news— No. With a preface like that, Ackbar, if his emotional patterns were like those of humans, would merely feel a mounting fear of dread . . . just before realizing his dread was justified.

  He hit the clear button.

  Sir, I regret to inform you that your niece, Jesmin Ackbar, is dead.

  Ackbar knew that Jesmin was his niece.

  He hit the clear button.

  Sir, I regret . . .

  Even that was formal, impersonal. He and Ackbar were not friends; they were fellow officers. But he had great respect for the Mon Calamari naval officer and felt that Ackbar had similar respect for him.

  He felt for Ackbar and his loss. He'd known that loss himself, the day a pirate's escape had destroyed the refueling station where his family worked and lived. He'd lost his home, his family, his past. All that was left to him was his future, one that had then seemed threatening instead of inviting.

  But that was just the opposite of what Ackbar would experience, wasn't it? Jesmin was not his past. If anything, she was a piece of his future. Was that not even worse? Suffering the pain of the loss of a loved one . . . and of the future she represented?