Wedge's Gamble (42 page)

Needa glanced back at the fleet. “But those are the Rebels.”

“You think they can find us worst duty than this?” Pedetsen smiled. “They’ll probably hail you as a hero.”

“What?”

“Hey, it was your cousin who was martyred by Darth Vader after he let Han Solo escape Hoth. After all, your cousin had Rebel sympathies that he only confided in you, which is why he let Solo escape. Your having been punished with this duty proves the Empire suspected him, but could prove nothing.”

That
is
one way to interpret the facts of the case, I suppose
. Needa frowned. “Do you think the Rebels would believe that?”

“I don’t know, but I think if we’re dead, you won’t be able to convince them that you and your loyal crew have been waiting for them for ages.” Pedetsen raked a pile of chips toward himself and started to shuffle the sabacc deck. “Your choice, sir. Do what you think is right.”

Needa thought for a second, frowned, then nodded. “I think I choose not to choose. If we do something, we risk death. We can’t do anything anyway, so there is no reason to choose.”

A tremor shook OSETS 2711. Needa braced himself against the bulkhead as the mirror started to shift. “We’re moving.”

“I know, Lieutenant.” Pedetsen smiled. “Looks like someone just made your mind up for you.”

On
Home One’
s bridge chaos reigned. Hundreds of voices competed with one another, each filled with urgency. Admiral Ackbar sat at the center of it, listening intently to comm feeds from his group commanders. The two Imperial Star Destroyers entering the battle were the
Triumph
and the
Monarch
. Already
Emancipator
and
Liberator
had begun pounding the ships.
Triumph
’s shields had collapsed on one side, prompting the Captain to execute a roll that brought undamaged shields up between the destroyer and the Rebels.

Though the
Triumph
’s difficulties heartened Ackbar, the Golan Space Defense platform off the port stern sickened him. It had engaged many of the smaller ships in the fleet and was hammering them mercilessly. The Commander on the platform had targeted ships with multiple proton torpedoes while saving his turbolasers for snubfighter defense. TIE fighters coming up from Coruscant seemed content to fight beneath the umbrella of his fire. The fact that the station could not move made it marginally less lethal than the Star Destroyers, but in the time it took for them to be taken out of action, a lot of smaller Rebel ships would die.

He looked up at the Quarren who had just appeared beside his command chair. “What is it, Commander Sirlul? Something about the station?”

“Perhaps …” A tremolo distorted her words as she pointed out the port side viewport. “The mirror is moving.”

“Why would it …?”

Before Sirlul could offer a possible answer to Ackbar’s question, the mirror’s panels swung and locked into reflective position. The whole structure contracted slightly, sharpening the solar beam. Though the reflected light remained all but invisible in space—only showing up where it shone upon and incinerated debris—its
brilliant focal point could easily be seen. It appeared as a bright dot on the edge of the Golan III station.

Silvery lines, like cracks forming in ice or rootlets spreading through the earth, began to appear at the edges of the circle. Delicate and almost brittle, they snaked away from the station and drifted into space. The bright spotlight shifted right ever so slightly, leaving in its wake a black crescent. The argent rootlets clung to the crescent’s outer edge while opposite them some of the rootlets spun off into space.

The Quarren clasped her hands at the small of her back. “At its focal point the solar beam is approximately 12.5 meters in diameter. Roughly the length of an X-wing.”

The hole on the end of the station grew as the beam shifted slightly. Already half the turbolaser batteries had stopped firing. Ackbar could easily visualize the destruction as the beam pierced bulkhead after bulkhead, burning from one end of the station to another. A sheet of metal would glow red, then white, then evaporate. The solar beam would stab deeper, igniting whatever it touched, then begin on another bulkhead.

Ackbar looked up. “When the platform stops shooting send the
Devonian
and
Ryloth
over there. I want our people on that station to assess it and help those who have survived.”

“Sir, the
Ryloth
and
Devonian
have less than one hundred troopers on board. The station has over a thousand.”

“Not anymore, Commander.” Ackbar half closed his eyes as something near the center of the station exploded. “Those who are left aren’t going to be hostile. They’ll want to get off that thing and we will oblige them. Send them to the other Golan stations, let them tell the story of what happened to their station. It’ll give their Commanders a lot to think about and maybe, just maybe, save a lot of lives on both sides.”

45

Corran glanced at the fuel indicator on his command console. It showed he had another ten minutes of fuel. A return to Tycho’s base would only take two or three minutes and refueling would take a half hour or so. He wasn’t certain if with the fleet orbiting above the Palace district, Wedge and the others in the computer center would face danger from Imperial forces, but in many ways that question was moot given his fuel supply. He suspected the others were not in much better shape.

“Hunter Lead here, report with fuel status.”

Everyone else in the flight reported being in the same situation he was. “What we will do is this: Everyone take a long-range scan of the area. If we have no immediate things to worry about, we head in, refuel, and come back out.”

“I copy, Hunter Lead,” came the replies.

“Corran, I caught that, too.” Wedge’s voice paused for a moment. “Winter shows no activity in your vicinity and we look pretty secure here, too. Head in and hurry back.”

“Will do, Wedge. Horn out.” Corran brought his Headhunter around in a vast circle, letting the others fly
in on a more direct route toward their hangar.
First up, last in
. He smiled. He knew the others didn’t need him to provide a good example. The fact was that the five of them had accounted for over a dozen Imperial starfighters and Interceptors, proving the Rogues had not lost their edge and that Asyr Sei’lar was a good pilot in her own right.

He punched his sensors over to long range and immediately picked up a number of signals on his scanner. Corran keyed the comm unit. “Pash, I’m picking up nine or ten hits.”

“I copy, Corran. Looks like small civilian vessels. The exodus is beginning.”

Corran ruddered his ship to port and dove down to do a flyby on one of his sensor contacts. It did in fact appear to be a luxury yacht, with gentle flowing lines and a gaudily painted hull. Like the other ships it was heading northeast to slip beneath the edge of the Rebel umbrella. The ships would sail around to the daytime side of the planet and head out into hyperspace from there, using Coruscant’s mass as a shield to prevent the Rebels from attacking them.

Corran was certain the vast majority of the people heading out firmly believed the Rebels would steal their wealth, dispossess them of their treasures, defile their sons and daughters, torture, maim, and kill resisters, and commit any number of other crimes against them. He didn’t think plunder and raping were foremost in the minds of most Rebels, but here at the core of the Empire the belief in lies used by the Emperor to justify his dictatorship ran deep among some folks. And even those who knew better than to believe such lies did truly feel they had something to fear since the idea of bringing Imperials to justice had always been one of the Rebellion’s more appealing tenants.

He found himself of two minds about the fleeing people. Part of him wanted to bring them to justice. He could easily have sideslipped his Headhunter and blasted the hyperdrive engines from the hull of the yacht. That would
trap its occupants on Coruscant and force them to face retribution for their crimes against their fellow citizens.

The other part of him sympathized with them. The Empire had forced him to flee from Corellia, carrying with him little more than a change of clothes. He even had to surrender his identity, as would these refugees, for to remain who he was would have left him vulnerable to the Empire’s hunters. He had been forced to change who he had been and had been forced into an entirely different lifestyle just to preserve his life. Because of the constant fear of discovery, of being made to run again, that life seemed more punishing than any prison term or even execution.
Better no life at all than one lived in constant fear
.

He didn’t know if he’d heard those words before or composed the line himself, but it struck him that those words embodied the nugget of Rebel opposition to the Empire. Mon Mothma and the other leaders had enough foresight to look ahead and plan out the course of the campaign against the Empire, but for people in his position, the fight was one to defeat the forces who made them fear. The fact that after each battle, each victory, there was just that much less to be afraid of became almost tangible and served as a very sweet reward indeed.

Corran nudged his stick back and climbed up away from the fleeing yacht.
Run, but always know you cannot run far enough
.

He started to bring the Headhunter around on a course to the hangar, but he saw an anomalous blip on his sensor screen. He initiated an identification program, but the contact faded and returned, depriving the computer of enough solid data to make a match. It seemed to settle on an unknown fighter and a Super Star Destroyer. “Pash, what have you got for a contact at 352.4 degrees?”

“Nothing. Do you have something?”

“Yeah, but it’s weird. Probably a storm ghost. I’m going to check it out.”

“Want a wing? I can abort my approach.”

“Negative, I’m just doing a flyby. If I need help, I’ll need you all ready to go.” Corran glanced at his fuel gauge. “One pass, then I’m in.”

With the Golan Space Defense platform gone, Admiral Ackbar sent a signal to the fleet that started an evolution of the battle. Originally the Rebels had expected two or three times more by way of Star Destroyers than had appeared to defend Coruscant. That only the
Triumph
and
Monarch
remained to oppose them surprised him because neither ship had a particularly illustrious reputation or crew. At last reports
Emperor’s Will
and
Imperator
had also been part of the Coruscant defense force as well, and their participation in the battle would have made things much more difficult.

Liberator, Emancipator
, and
Home One
formed a line moving past
Triumph
and
Monarch
. The two lines exchanged fire and missiles, savaging each other. Shields held at first, then, inevitably, crumbled. Beneath them the ships’ heavy armor had to absorb the force of the missile blasts and laser bolts. Some shots, guided by the Force or the product of pure chance, hit turbolaser batteries or torpedo launch tubes, vaporizing them, crushing them, and destroying them. Others just nibbled away at a ship’s hull or superstructure. Molecule by molecule they weakened the barrier between the ship’s interior and the void.

As always with war the best strategy was to hit without being hit back. With ships the size of Star Destroyers and heavy cruisers, avoiding being hit was, at best, difficult. The closest that could be managed in that regard was to minimize the number of weapons bearing on the ship. With the two lines passing broadside to each other, the ships were exposed to the maximum possible damage inflicted by the other side.

At Ackbar’s signal another Mon Calamari heavy cruiser,
Mon Remonda
, turned from its position in line behind
Home One
, and pointed its bow toward Coruscant. It surged forward, cutting across the Imperial Star
Destroyers’ line of flight. In doing so it was able to bring all of its starboard firing-arc weapons to bear on
Triumph
while the Star Destroyer could hit it with its forward arc weapons.

Mon Remondao’
s gunners began to pour fire in on
Triumph
. The Imperial Star Destroyer had already lost its shields, so the turbolaser strikes played easily up over the spine of the ship. Even more devastating were the hits by the Mon Calamari cruiser’s ion cannons. Their blue lightning chased all over the destroyer’s hull. Explosions trailed in the lightning’s wake.

The same time that
Mon Remonda
moved to strike at
Triumph
, the umbrella force began to separate. Assault frigates—a fanciful name for refitted freighters—began to close a net around the two Imperial warships and their smaller support ships. While they could not sustain the sort of damage the heavier ships were taking and survive, the Star Destroyers’ ability to strike at them had been diminished by combat. The smaller ships closed in, firing away at the destroyers. There were so many of them that the gunners who could target them could not target
all
of them.

Other heavier ships—Corellian corvettes, gunships, and a variety of bulk cruisers and Mon Calamari cruisers—pushed up and out away from Coruscant. They used distance to let them see over Coruscant’s horizon and spot other Imperial forces that could have been hidden on the world’s far side. They remained out of range of the Golan Space Defense platforms, yet close enough to respond quickly to any situation that demanded overwhelming firepower.

Starfighters and troop carriers began their runs to the planet. The outcome of the battle in space was important, but without troops on the ground to take, hold, and secure facilities and impose order, Coruscant would remain unconquered. Ackbar suffered under no illusions about Coruscant and its defenselessness. That the shields were down he felt was nothing short of a miracle, but he couldn’t count on how long they would stay down. He
had, as nearly as he knew, a narrow window in which to insert his troops, so he pushed them forward as quickly as seemed prudent.