Wraith Squadron Page 36

  Kell's voice: "R-ready, sir."

  "You all right, Lieutenant Tainer?"

  "Fine, sir. Something caught in my throat."

  The containers that had been ejected first began to glow from friction with the atmosphere.

  Wedge's comm officer turned toward him. "Transmission from Implacable. 'Launch all TIE fighters.' "

  "Acknowledge."

  "Yes, sir."

  Wedge hit the intercom. "Launch Gray Flight."

  Atril, Falynn, and Janson launched smoothly. Piggy was a little slower, more tentative. He brought up the rear, acting as Janson's wing, but seemed to handle his TIE fighter competently.

  Above, Implacable's belly hangar was disgorging flight after flight of TIE fighters, Interceptors, bombers. Atril led her group in a climb that carried them far to the side of the emerging streams of fighters, past the starboard leading edge of the Star Destroyer, and over the bow until they came to a halt fifty meters ahead of and above the point of Implacable's prow. "Gray Flight on station," she transmitted, and was very pleased to note that there was no quake in her voice.

  She sat in a laser-armed foil can and waited for her chance to destroy one of the most powerful vessels ever created.

  Wedge watched the sensors as seventy-two TIE fighters sped along the half-million klicks that separated Ession from her largest moon.

  Meanwhile, more explosions, blasts that looked to Wedge's eyes like carefully placed munitions rather than a self-destruct array, broke Red Feathers's hull into huge sheets that began to tumble, burning, into the atmosphere. The en-tire cargo of containment units and smaller pieces of wreckage also descended.

  All those pieces ignited as they fell, but only someone looking as closely as Wedge was, with equipment as sophisticated, would see that thirty-six of those pieces ignited only at one end—their sterns—and descended in a controlled fashion that matched the fall rate of the debris.

  The TIE fighters were nearly to the original site of Red Feathers's destruction. Wedge activated the comm system. "Face, mount up. Wraiths, prepare to execute the Loran Spit-ball." He stood and moved to the chief pilot's seat; the officer yielded it to him and moved to the secondary weapons con-sole. Wedge asked him, "Ready for tractor duty?"

  The young man cracked his knuckles and grinned. "It'll be the biggest thing I've ever tried to tractor in."

  Face galloped down the narrow metal stairs into the bow hold and down to floor level. The other pilots, already sealed in, stared at him from their X-wing cockpits.

  His fighter's canopy was already open, but mounted as it was in the holding brackets, it couldn't open all the way. He bounded up the ladder someone had left for him, squeezed into the cockpit like a snake seeking safety, and twisted until he was in position to close the canopy and start the engines. "Wraith Eight lighting up. We have four good starts." Outside, Cubber emerged from the shadow of Runt's wing, grabbed up the ladder, saluted, and ran to the hold exit.

  Wedge's voice came back immediately. "Preparing bow hold for departure." The lights went out; only a glow from the open doorway out of the hold lit the edges of the X-wings. As soon as it shut behind Cubber, the hold went dark.

  Face's canopy suddenly creaked as air pressure changed outside it.

  "Wraiths, this is Five. Remember, do not activate targeting computers until ordered. Use my targeting data for torp launch."

  Face silently ran through his checklist as fast as each item came up in the green.

  "Wraiths, this is Leader. Wishing you good luck. Be strong in the Force. Even you, Wraith Ten. Thirty seconds to Loran Spitball . . . Twenty-five . . . Twenty . . . Fifteen . . ."

  A thin vertical line of light appeared before the Wraiths and widened into a narrow view of the lunar vista. Face felt a slight sense of motion as that view swung upward. Within moments, he could see the world of Ession a half-million klicks away, then the stern of the Implacable above them. The view broadened as the bow hold continued to open. "Ten . . Five . . ."

  "Admiral, Night Caller is maneuvering. Bow elevating. It looks like she's preparing to head toward Ession."

  "Damned glory hound. Instruct them to stay on station. Transmit a routine query about their intentions."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Transmit Talon Strike,' " Wedge told the comm officer. He hit the intercom again precisely on cue. "Zero." Then he held his breath.

  Atril heard "Talon Strike" and responded.

  She inverted her TIE fighter, rolling over backward as though she were in a dogfighting loop, but moving not one meter. A moment later the Implacable was before her, above her, upside down.

  She brought up her targeting sensor, zoomed it in on the Implacable's bridge a klick and a half away, and fired.

  29

  Kell activated his targeting computer, bracketed Implacable's hull halfway between her solar ionization reactor and her stern. He shouted, "Fire fire fire!" and triggered his proton torpedoes.

  The sensors officer in the crew pit waved to get the admiral's attention. "Sir, we have multiple weapons locks below—"

  Another shouted, "Admiral, we have laser painting on our bridge—"

  Admiral Trigit shouted down to them, "All shields on full!"

  The weapons officer reached for his shielding controls.

  The main bow viewport made a noise as though a rancor's fist had hit it. It darkened to near-complete opacity as its phototropic shielding held the first laser blast at bay. A split second later a second blast hit it.

  The viewport blew in, raining shards of transparisteel among them, shards that reversed direction and immediately fled into space as the bridge atmosphere vented over Ession's moon.

  The air screamed from the bridge, flooding into the vacuum. An alarm klaxon sounded, muted by the roar of the wind.

  Admiral Trigit turned and tried to force himself against the wind toward the security foyer due aft of the bridge. He saw one of the foyer's stormtroopers, buffeted by the flow of air, stagger forward and fall headlong into the crew pit.

  Ahead, the blast doors separating bridge from security foyer began to close. Trigit gave up all pretense at dignity and dropped flat, elbow crawling with the speed of a much younger man. He scrambled into the foyer moments ahead of the door closing and was helped up by a stormtrooper.

  He looked around. The foyer's communications crew was mostly intact, though wild-eyed and windblown. The turbolift doors opened and Gara Petothel and a few other officers who had been stationed in the crew pit emerged, similarly rattled.

  Trigit pointed at the chief communications officer. "Get the auxiliary bridge to transfer bridge functions to the consoles here." The deck shuddered faintly under his feet. "Are our shields up?"

  "Checking." The officer brought up a diagnosticsreadout. He winced. "Sir, they took out the shield generator domes when they hit the bridge."

  Trigit hissed in vexation. "Take your positions. We're going to spend some time trading body blows."

  "Five away!"

  "Four's away!"

  "Six are on your tail!"

  Wedge listened to the Wraiths' launch announcements, silently begging them to get clear faster. He continued to raise the bow of Night Caller until the ship was pointed straight upward. He felt a shudder in the keel as the ship's repulsors were called upon to hold a position they were not designed to assume; only the moon's four-tenths of a standard gravity permitted the maneuver at all.

  "Wraith Nine away."

  "Ten is clear."

  He triggered a switch on the console's underside. Up swung a piloting yoke, a lightweight version of the sort of control found in fighters. Night Caller was not supposed to go through the sorts of precise, intricate maneuvers that would normally call for such a control, but Corellian engineers knew it happened sometimes. He powered up the yoke. "Ready on tractors?"

  "Ready."

  "On zero. Three, two, one, zero!" He hit Night Caller's thrusters.

  The corvette jerked and her engines moaned. She rose a few me
ters more above the moon's surface—then hovered, thrusters blasting away, tethered to the moon by her own tractor beam.

  The thrust emission kicked lunar dust and stones up in a I billowing cloud all around the corvette. In moments, Wedge [ lost sight of the Star Destroyer above them. But it was still on sensors, distorted but not completely screened by the distant dish emissions. "Bow guns, fire at will," he said.

  "Narra is launching." Cubber, in the shuttle, was under orders to hang well away from the conflict but offer help to pilots if they went extravehicular.

  "Wraith Seven gone, and I'm coughing up dust!" "Wraith Eight launching. Eight clear. Bridge, the hangar is empty."

  Gray One and Gray Two fired continuously as they raced back toward the command pylon by the Star Destroyer's stern. Atril saw the communications tower disintegrate under their sustained fire.

  She shifted her aim to the innocuous hull plating that protected the auxiliary power for the ship's computers. She doubted the TIE fighter's lasers could penetrate the armor, but perhaps, if she and Falynn were just accurate enough, perhaps . . .

  Face rose toward the huge hole in Implacable's underside. Blue energy emissions crackled across the ruined metal surfaces within and made Face's comm unit pop. "Looks like a good landing zone for some more torps, Seven."

  "Take it, Eight. I'm your wing."

  Face fired. His torpedoes and Phanan's flashed instantly into the gradually growing abscess in Implacable's belly. Their detonation forced its way back out as a glowing ball of energy and debris.

  Ever more debris, raining down on the lunar surface. Wraith Seven and Wraith Eight vectored away from the cloud of destructiveness, sideslipping to avoid return fire from the capital ship's guns.

  "Recall all TIE squadrons," Trigit said.

  His starfighter coordinator was dead, locked in with the vacuum in the bridge. Gara moved to an unoccupied console and issued the order.

  Trigit's officers were too well trained to protest that the command left the TIE fighter manufacturing facility on the planet's surface open to the Rebel assault. Some knew that the plant would have a few TIE fighters on hand to reduce the assault's effectiveness.

  But the plant only mattered to Trigit in the long term. For now, he had to keep Implacable in one piece. And that meant throwing as many resources at the treacherous Captain Darillian as he could.

  If it was Darillian. Trigit cursed silently. He'd allowed himself to be convinced by that man's persuasive knowledge of Ysanne Isard. He should have followed his original instincts.

  "Sir, maneuvers?" That was from the man who'd replaced the slain chief pilot.

  Trigit gave him a frosty little smile. "Do you see a need for it? When our shields are equally down on all facings and every other craft on the battlefield is faster and more maneuverable than we are?"

  "Uh, no, sir."

  The admiral turned to the main weapons board. "Weapons, is Night Caller destroyed?"

  "No, sir. We're suffering sensor malfunction."

  "Target her visually, you idiot! We're close enough."

  "There's a problem. We can't see her."

  "All right, Lieutenant, we're going to try some lateral drift." Wedge saw the lieutenant gulp and nod.

  He eased the yoke sideways, just a touch. Night Caller jerked as she strained in a new direction against the tractor, then jumped as the officer released it and immediately reestablished it farther to port. Wedge boosted the repulsors to compensate for the maneuver's clumsiness, but the corvette slid to port, kicking up an entirely new cloud of dust and debris as she did so.

  "Think we can do that a little more smoothly next time?"

  "Yes, sir. This time, I'll lay down a second beam, minimum power, and then transfer power at a smooth rate from one to the other."

  "Good." He turned to the weapons officer. "Transfer control of one of the bow guns to my station, Lieutenant. I'm not here just to drive."

  The weapons officer grinned. A moment later the thumb trigger on Wedge's yoke lit up.

  Kell and Runt cleared the Implacable's bow, spiraling and juking to throw off the aim of the vessel's gunners, and raced back toward the stern, a duplicate of the attack run of Gray One and Gray Two. In fact, those two TIE fighters were just vectoring off from a second strafing run; the damage they'd done to the ship's hull below the bridge was evident.

  "That's our target, Six. Stay evasive until we reach half a klick, then fire and vector away."

  "We're ready, Five."

  They stayed close to the Implacable's hull, making it all but impossible for any gunnery emplacement to have them in sight for more than a split second.

  It was tricky flying. Implacable's hull rose in steep angles like the sides of a ziggurat. The instant they cleared the final rise before the command pylon, Kell aimed and fired. His proton torpedoes hit just as Runt fired; the two X-wings vectored away before they could assess the damage they'd done.

  "Wraith Five, Six, this is Gray Two. We're going in for another run. Looks like you two penetrated."

  "Finish the job up for us, would you?"

  "Oh, sure. Afterward, can we do your laundry, too?"

  Wedge waited until Donos and Tyria finished their pass before firing.

  That first proton torpedo barrage from Night Caller's bow hold, the maneuver they'd nicknamed the Loran Spit-ball, had targeted the heavy durasteel hull protecting the Star Destroyer's huge array of power cells. Fourteen proton torpedoes had slammed into the unshielded hull, chewing it to pieces but not destroying it completely. Subsequent runs had widened individual holes.

  Wedge fired, pouring a linked turbolaser cannon's destructiveness against the Implacable's hull.

  He couldn't see what sort of damage he'd done; he was nearly as blind, visually and by sensor, as the Star Destroyer. But his sensors could pick out the larger craft's silhouette and give him accurate aiming against specific points on the underside.

  The dust cloud immediately to starboard of Night Caller lit up, became a brilliant column of whiteness as return fire from the Star Destroyer superheated and atomized Wedge's protective cloud. He resisted the urge to flinch. "Cease firing," he said. The larger ship's gunners were doubtless aiming at the source of the turbolaser barrages. "Lieutenant, we're going backward, relative ascent. We'll keep movement constant but unpredictable—and keep up our random firing. No constant fire. Understood?"

  He got confirmations from the bridge officers and set Night Caller in motion again. The corvette's nose tipped backward, threatening a fall, until he brought the repulsorlifts up to compensate; then they were drifting backward.

  Much smoother. The officer on the tractor beam was starting to get it.

  "Leader, Four. That last shot hit just ahead of the largest hole in the hull. If you can drop back a few meters astern and to starboard, you'll pop right into the hole."

  "Four, you can't just hover out there and do my spotting for me."

  "I'm not hovering, sir. I'm dancing. Besides, these guys can't hit the side of a bantha. Whoa! Close one."

  Wedge sighed. Grinder was trying to get himself killed. On the other hand, accurate damage to the Star Destroyer's fuel cells meant more than any damage Grinder's X-wing was likely to inflict now. "Sensors, plot my shots against a holo of the Implacable's silhouette. We need that to adjust for Grinder's directions." He positioned his thumb over the firing button. "Resuming fire."

  "We're getting reports from the manufacturing plant," Gara said.

  "Wait," Trigit said. "Estimated time of arrival on our TIE fighters?"

  "One minute."

  "All right. Go ahead."

  "The Pakkerd TIE fighters never made it off the ground."

  "What?"

  "The Rebels apparently had commando forces on the ground. The launch tubes were destroyed. They have two squads of TIE fighters sitting around uselessly in the hangars . . . and a squadron of Rebel Y-wing bombers blowing the whole facility to pieces. The other two squadrons are pursuing our TIEs back here
."

  Trigit hissed in vexation. "This is not good. Zsinj will be furious. Lieutenant, this time tomorrow, Implacable may be running as an independent instead of as part of the warlord's fleet."

  "That's actually a fine alternative, compared to some."

  "True."

  "Five, Six. We have incoming fighters."

  Kell glanced at his sensors . . . and froze.

  Red dots were approaching from the direction of Ession. Countless dots.

  "Right, Six. Let's, uh . . ."

  His back locked up in a painful knot. He tried to maneuver, to aim toward the incoming TIE fighters, but his flight stick resisted him, jerking uncontrollably.

  "Five, what?"

  "Let's get them . . ." Kell strained against the flight stick, but it would not cooperate, would not bring his X-wing's nose around toward the attackers.

  He glanced at his sensor screen again. There had to be a thousand of them coming.

  "Waiting for your turn, Five."

  "I'm experiencing a control malfunction, Six. Give me a visual check, would you?"

  "You've got some new debris scarring. We don't see anything wrong. What do your diagnostics say?"

  "I don't know."

  "Five?"

  "Let's get them, Six." Kell's X-wing continued on its course out of the line of fire.

  Atril felt the blow, saw the lunar landscape and the starfield above begin spinning, saw her diagnostics board light up in the red. "Gray Two, this is One. I'm hit." Sparks shot up from her control board, defying her to do anything but hold on to her control yoke and pray.

  "One, your starboard wing is gone, repeat, completely gone. Punch out!"

  "No ejection seat, Two." Atril felt a deep sense of regret—compounded by sudden nausea. Her inertial compensator must have failed, leaving her at the mercy of her ruined fighter's spinning motion. "Get clear."

  "Leader, Four. Traverse due astern five meters."

  Grinder snap-rolled and dove, anticipating the fire from a turbolaser battery that seemed to be tracking him, then rose and rolled up on his starboard wing to watch as a new column of deadly light shot up from the billowing dust cloud beneath Implacable. This beam fired straight into the hole in the capital ship's keel, filling it with light. Glowing debris, tons of it, began pouring from the hole. "Right there! Fix on that spot and keep hitting it."