Star Wars: X-Wing VI: Iron Fist Page 9

  All the Wraiths stopped what they were doing and either donned their helmets again or held pocket comms up to listen.

  Face’s voice came across in a whisper. “Skimmer full of stormtroopers approaching. Not a hostile attitude, but they’re coming right here.”

  Wedge replied, “Stay loose. Keep us informed.” He looked among the Wraiths. “Tyria, Donos, get on the door. Be prepared to support Face and Phanan. The rest of you, what’s our status?”

  Kell answered, “Five interceptors prepped, Runt and I are on the last, no work yet on the two we were going to sabotage.”

  “Don’t worry about the sabotage. If we’re pressed for time, we’ll just blast them on our way—”

  Phanan’s voice came in over the comm: “It’s shift change. They’re supposed to drop off two and take us away. Face is talking to them. He’s been listening to those Quadrant recordings and knows the guy’s voice. But—it’s not going well—”

  The next sound was the scream of blasters from outside. Blasters, shouts, armored bodies hitting the duracrete.

  6

  Face had tried to be reasonable. “We’re ready to go, Lieutenant. But our packs are inside. Permission to go inside and retrieve our packs.”

  The stormtrooper seated next to the skimmer pilot sounded contemptuous. “What idiot let you bring unauthorized gear out on a normal sentry watch?”

  Tactic: When asked for information you don’t have, try to present the asker with a variable he can define himself. Face said, “The new one, sir. What’s-his-name.”

  “Balawan?”

  “That’s him, sir.”

  “Well, he’s an idiot. But sharing some kitchen duty with you two might smarten you all up. All right, you can get your unauthorized gear. First, let’s finish this.” The officer turned to look at the bed of his skimmer; he nodded. Two stormtroopers stepped out. They stood before Face and Phanan in the same stance of attention. Face said, “I relieve you of this post.”

  Face swore to himself. That was a nonstandard phrase. Tactic: When obliged to participate in a ritual you know nothing about, provide a reason and grab all the sympathy you can. Face said, “I—” And then he coughed, a deep, racking cough that shook him. The coughs continued and bent him nearly double. Still, he half straightened several times, saluting all the while, the very picture of a man fighting to do his duty in the face of overwhelming opposition.

  If anything, the officer’s contempt increased. “What is this man doing on duty? He should be in his deathbed.”

  Face heard Phanan say, “Dedicated.”

  “Oh, very well. Just give me the damned password.”

  Phanan said, “Amelkin versus Tovath.” That was the name of the classic Quadrant game that had given them access to the hangar.

  “What? The shift password, you idiot.”

  Tactic: When no other options present themselves, shoot everything in sight. Face straightened, grabbed the top edge of the chest armor of the stormtrooper before him to hold him in place, and shot the man in the stomach. Phanan shoved his own stormtrooper back and fired, catching the man in the helmet.

  Face dragged his dead or dying target to him, holding him up as a human shield, and, one-handed, swept fire across the occupants of the skimmer. He saw at least two men, including the lieutenant, hit, but there would still be only a split second before the stormtroopers brought their own weapons into line and fired—

  To Face’s and Phanan’s blasts were added lethal cross fire from the door into the hangar. Face hazarded a glance. Two Wraiths stood there in stormtrooper armor—he couldn’t tell who—and then advanced, firing as they came.

  A bad tactic, Face thought, abandoning the shelter of the doorway, but he understood when their place at the door was taken by more Wraiths.

  The pilot of the skimmer banked up and away from the firing Wraiths, a maneuver sharp enough to shake the surviving stormtroopers in back but skillful enough to place the skimmer’s bottom between them and the Wraiths for a few long moments. The skimmer’s maneuver carried it across the wide lane between buildings. It had to level out or smash into the face of one of the buildings, but when it did so it was far enough away, and moving fast enough, that the Wraiths’ concentrated fire was not so lethal. With all the blasts they poured into the moving target, Face saw only one more strike a stormtrooper, and assumed that the anonymous Wraith who fired it was Donos, their sniper. The skimmer made a corner and was gone.

  The stormtrooper at the door was Wedge; his shout was distinctive. “Two, get the hangar doors open and lock them that way; we can’t afford for the central computer to lock them closed. Do you have a distraction ready?”

  “My number two distraction is ready. My best one will take a couple of minutes more.”

  “Go with the number two. Then join Six, Eight, Nine, and Eleven, get out of here on foot—”

  Castin’s voice rose in something like a whine. “But I was going to fly one of the interceptors!”

  “Pipe down. We only have five. Move out in any direction but the one those stormtroopers took, running in Imperial formation, and get in contact with Ten for whatever transport she can provide. The rest of you, to your interceptors.”

  “They have the hangar door open,” reported the skimmer pilot, now standing at the corner of a building not far away. “I can hear ion engines inside firing off. I’ve got my men scattering to firing positions. I—”

  His next words were lost in the wail that rose all around him. It was the anguished cry of some long-forgotten god, a moan that rattled his bones despite his armor; he saw transparisteel viewports on the buildings around him vibrate under the fury of that sound.

  It was, in fact, the base’s air-raid siren system, an antiquated measure to inform every person on base and anyone within several klicks that enemies were coming by air. In the days when this base was first built, those enemies were the Empire; after the Empire took over, the base operators maintained the system. Just in case.

  And now the impossible had happened, someone was attacking the base from the sky. The stormtrooper saw columns of light crisscross the sky in search of targets, then heard and saw the base’s huge automated turbocannons begin firing at targets high up in the air. He couldn’t see the targets … but if the big guns were firing, they were up there.

  Distracted by the aerial show, the stormtrooper did not see the first of the interceptors emerge from the hangar.

  Face broke formation to draw abreast of Castin as they trotted. He had to shout to be heard over the siren wail. “Two, what did you do?”

  Two’s body language momentarily suggested an aw-shucks embarrassment. “I found some of their old wargame projections about Imperial raids. They weren’t under much security; they were just archives. But I was able to patch the data into their sensor net, as though it were data being received now, and it triggered an automated response. Any second now—”

  In the distance, two squadrons of TIE fighters lifted, racing toward the sky and the presumed enemies waiting there. Instead of continuing his thought, Castin just pointed.

  Face said, “Six, do we have anything from Ten?”

  “We have. She is coming. We have given her our vector.”

  “Coded, I hope.”

  “Coded.” The Wraiths’ code for this mission included a very simple method for transmitting locations, in case their scramblers were decoded: Locations were given in standard Imperial grid format, but with the values reversed, south for north, east for west. It might take only one visual check by stormtroopers to confirm that the locations were incorrect, but the time tolerances for this mission were so tight that this might be all the help the Wraiths needed.

  Kell and Phanan, the pilots least experienced with TIE fighters—and experienced not at all with TIE interceptors, even in simulators—were the first to emerge from the hangar. Running close to the ground on repulsorlifts, they crept out tentatively from the hangar’s interior. Even with their caution, Phanan failed to decelerate
correctly and slowly glided into the building across the lane, stopping with a bump.

  Wedge, Janson, and Dia, more sure of their control over the vehicles, emerged next. On Wedge’s cue, they turned, orienting back toward the open hangar door, and fired, destroying the three interceptors remaining within. Then they turned up the lane and cut in their twin ion engines, accelerating far faster than their X-wings. Phanan and Kell fell into position behind them.

  “Stay next to the ground,” Wedge ordered. “Keep repulsorlifts running at full until I give the word.” He glanced over his sensors. They showed his small squad of five interceptors running at just above ground level, plus another thirty-six TIE fighters, three squadrons’ worth, rapidly ascending toward presumed enemies.

  One switch gave him access to the sensor data being broadcast by the base. It showed a sky crowded with enemies. Initial telemetry identified them as somewhat antiquated TIE fighters and some other Imperial-style support vehicles. Though they were Imperial vehicles, their sudden appearance, their aggressive pattern of approach, and their lack of response to normal hails had caused the base computer to flag them as probable unfriendlies. The three squadrons of base TIE fighters looked decidedly overmatched in numbers, but as Wedge watched, another two squadrons rose to join them.

  As buildings flicked by right and left, Wedge locked down the broadcast sensor signal and transmitted its source to the others. “All right, Wraiths. We’re doing one pass, then we’re going home.” He pulled back on the stick, popped up over the rooftops, and angled toward the source of that signal. The others fell into formation behind him.

  They came within firing range almost instantly. Wedge linked his four lasers for quad fire. The interceptor’s weapons screen initially had a little difficulty identifying the base’s command center, a huge, rounded bunker, as the intended target, but once it locked the target in, it managed to define the building, its bristling gun emplacements, and its numerous sensor emplacements as discrete targets. Wedge tagged the nearest set of sensors as his first target and said, “Fire.”

  The interceptors roared toward the bunker, their twenty lasers acting as five channels of destruction, laying waste to the surface of the bunker, tearing through the sensor arrays and gun emplacements as though the metal were so much paper. Wraith Squadron screamed across the bunker, mere meters above its now nearly molten surface, and then banked off toward freedom.

  There was now traffic on all the base’s lanes—skimmers carrying stormtroopers to ready areas, civilian workers running on foot, some of them only partially dressed, to their duty stations. But no one seemed inclined to question a well-disciplined group of five stormtroopers running with purpose.

  Up ahead, two squads of stormtroopers, more than twenty, turned onto the Wraiths’ lane and headed toward them. “Stay alert,” Face said. “If they address us, respond on the run. If they challenge us, open fire and run harder.”

  But a skimmer with an enclosed bed turned onto the same lane behind the dual squadron and accelerated into them, flattening some of the stormtroopers, knocking others hard out of the way. The skimmer accelerated toward the Wraiths. Runt said, “We think our ride has arrived.”

  The skimmer pulled up and swerved as it settled, placing its port and rear sides between the Wraiths and the nest of angry stormtroopers. The door was already half down when the skimmer touched the ground.

  “Good work, Ten,” Face said. “I’ll take gunner position. Everyone else in back.” Face slid into the seat beside Shalla; the rest trotted into the bed.

  Face heard one of them, Donos from his voice, trip, fall, and swear. He glanced at Shalla. She shrugged. “I had to leave a couple of casualties back there,” she half explained. A moment later, the first of the blaster shots from the pursuing stormtroopers hit the vehicle’s rear and side armor, and Donos came over the comm: “Go go go!”

  They exited via the same gate by which they’d entered. This time, though, they didn’t stop to get authorization or for the guards to open the gates. As they approached at full speed, Face raked the guardhouse with blaster fire, forcing the officer on duty to duck, preventing him from activating the magnetic locks, magnetic containment fields, repulsor-activated land mines, or other traps the Imperials routinely had laid out for vehicles approaching or departing a base in an unfriendly fashion.

  They hit the spare metal gates, slamming them open and off their hinges, and roared up the road out of the base.

  But a mere half klick away, around the first of the bends in the road and sheltered from sight by the very hill Wedge had earlier used for reconnaissance, Shalla set the skimmer down again. The Wraiths scrambled out. Shalla keyed a code into the keypad on the control panel and the skimmer rose once more, winging off into the night toward the distant lights of the city.

  “What course is it taking?” Face asked.

  Shalla shook her head. “I wrecked most of its higher processes when I destroyed the comm system. All I was able to do was give it a ballistic course toward the city.”

  “That should be enough. Let’s get out of sight.”

  The Wraiths were in a ditch, helmets off, only the eyes and the tops of their heads showing, when the three pursuit skimmers flew by, following the skimmer’s course.

  A minute later, they were with Piggy at the site of the civilian skimmer that had brought them here. Captain Wanatte, still unconscious, was trussed up in back.

  The Wraiths peeled out of their stormtrooper armor, leaving them in sweat-drenched street clothing appropriate to the world of Halmad. They quickly loaded all the armor components into a plastic crate in the back of the skimmer. Then they boarded. “Back to the spaceport,” Face said. “Slowly. Sedately. As befits a bunch of tourists who’ve been off drinking and recreating all evening and are now too tired to twitch.”

  Shalla nodded. “Pretty close to an accurate description.”

  Hawk-bat Base was situated on a large spherical rock deep in the asteroid belt of the Halmad system.

  Years before, it had been the Tonheld Mining Corporation’s Site A3, tasked with bringing high-quality metals up from the depths of a large asteroid formed during the long-ago destruction of one of the Halmad system’s outer planets. The asteroid had a thick outer shell of stone and a center made up mostly of cooled nickel and iron. Tonheld Mining Corporation, all too efficient, had removed the majority of the useful metals, leaving only those that were trapped in veins and pockets within the stone shell. Then the company had dismantled its machinery and housing modules and departed, leaving the site deserted and cold for forty years.

  Now, when approached by spacecraft, it still seemed the same. Its thick stone sheath, still intact, was sufficient to block sensors from detecting the life-forms and vehicle emissions now within it.

  Halfway down the main shaft, a side tunnel, once a staging area for the mining corporation, turned off at a ninety-degree angle, running parallel to the asteroid’s surface. This was now sealed off by a duracrete plug perforated only by large motor-driven doors at either end.

  Beyond, inside, where the side shaft was broadest and tallest, was the hangar area where the Hawk-bats’ vehicles rested. There were two TIE fighters and five TIE interceptors, and the biggest vessel on site, a Xiytiar-class freighter named Sungrass.

  Among the least elegant of all cargo vessels serving in the galaxy, the Xiytiar-class freighter consisted of a long blocky bow that was mostly cargo space, an equally long connective spar in the middle, and a short blocky component that was mostly engines at the stern. Sungrass didn’t improve the vehicle line’s reputation for stylishness; scarcely a centimeter of its once-gleaming surface was unmarked by scrapes, sloppy paintwork, ion scoring from too-close passes alongside other vessels, or old blaster burns.

  But its hull was solid, its engines were recently rebuilt and in fine tune.

  Once it had belonged to an Imperial shipping corporation. It had been in dry dock in a repair hangar when the entire site was destroyed by elements of New Repub
lic Intelligence. Its bow cracked, its superstructure buried under the wreckage of the hangar, it had been reported as destroyed by reconnaissance units of the Empire. Now, after a couple of seasons of repair, it flew again, its name changed, its history fabricated, its mission to support Wraith Squadron.

  On its bridge, Wedge Antilles snorted. He supposed that was symbolic of the New Republic as a whole. Making use of the Empire’s castoffs, getting a few extra years of functionality out of them, almost always making do with scraps and crumbs in a way that confounded the remnants of the Empire. Yet it was a far cry from the pretty vision of an Empire-free future that the New Republic still doggedly pursued. He wondered if that image, where everything was new and gleaming and free of any memories of the Empire, would ever come to pass.

  He glanced over at the man in the captain’s chair. Captain Valton seemed ideally suited to command of this ship. He, too, looked weathered and battered but still fit for many years of useful service. His long, tanned face was unmemorable, though his eyes were sharp, possessed of intelligence. Wedge thought that if they put him in a janitor’s uniform he’d blend right in with the service personnel of any New Republic or Imperial station, and wondered if the Wraiths might someday make use of that fact.

  And, mercifully, he didn’t apparently have a need to hear himself talk. He saw Wedge’s side glance, looked over in case Wedge were trying to get his attention, and when he saw that was not the case, returned to the datapad on which he was calculating fuel-mass ratios, all without saying a word.

  Wedge turned his attention to his Wraiths, visible through Sungrass’s forward viewports, hard at work painting the stolen interceptors. The one Tyria and Kell worked on was now decorated with a red spiderweb pattern, a design that was at once rakishly dangerous-looking and a little unsettling. Phanan and Face left the basic paint job of their interceptor unchanged but had added a ludicrous number of kill silhouettes to the hull—including a number of X-wing silhouettes to rival the genuine kills of Baron Fel, the Empire’s greatest ace after Darth Vader. Shalla and Donos were painting theirs with fake blaster scorings and had even painted the engine to look as though it were slightly askew, as if knocked out of alignment by enemy fire. Wedge wondered about the advisability of that; it would probably convince some enemies the interceptor was damaged, perhaps persuading some opportunistic pilots to finish it off when otherwise they might treat it with more caution.