Wraith Squadron (10 page)

Kell raised a hand.

“Mr. Tainer?”

“Speaking of acquisitions, do we have a squadron quartermaster? I’ll want to work with him on the matter of spare parts for the X-wings …”

“We don’t yet, but I’m looking among available personnel for someone who can do that. I’ll let you know.” Wedge looked down at his datapad to find the name of the next pilot. “Ton Phanan is our medical officer.”

Three or four pilots burst out in laughter; the fact that Phanan was at least one-fifth mechanical and not possessed of a healer’s manner was well known. Phanan himself grinned.

Face asked, “Corpsman?”

Phanan shook his head. “No. I used to be Dr. Phanan. Fully licensed to cut you open and weld you shut again.”

Tyria leaned across Kell and whispered, “Why did you give it up?”

He gave her his most diabolic smile and whispered back, “Because I didn’t care for patching up people I don’t care about and
do
enjoy killing people I hate.”

Tyria drew back with a shudder.

Wedge nodded to the female Mon Calamari sitting on the front row; her chin barbels twitched at the recognition. “Jesmin Ackbar is our communications expert. Voort saBinring, Piggy, is proficient in hand-to-hand combat, and capable of infiltrating Gamorrean units, which will be helpful on certain worlds. Hohass Ekwesh, Runt, has substantial physical strength—nearly three times greater than a human of equal size, and I understand he’s small for a member of the Thakwaash species. Eurrsk Thri’ag, whom most of you have met as Grinder, is our code-slicer.” The Bothan named Grinder sat upright, his gorgeous silvery fur rippling, and nodded at Wedge. Kell didn’t know much about him; he’d kept to himself much of the time, not bonding with any of his flying partners.

Wedge continued, “Tyria Sarkin is one of our intrusion experts; she is a member of the Antarian Rangers from Toprawa, and particularly proficient in silent movement in difficult terrain.”

Kell restrained a whistle. He’d never heard of the Antarian
Rangers, but he knew the name Toprawa: a human-occupied planet where members of Alliance Intelligence had staged the critical data that led to the destruction of the first Death Star. Not long afterward, Imperial forces had savagely destroyed the world’s armed forces, incinerated its cities, and sent the entire native population out of the cities to live in undeveloped wilderness. Kell had heard that the surviving inhabitants had to participate in regular rituals of self-degradation before the Imperial conquerors in order to receive food.

Wedge shut down his datapad. “All right, wingmates and designations. I’m Gray Leader or Gray One. I’m taking both designations to limit confusion. Mistress Ackbar, you’ll fly with me as Gray Two.”

The Mon Calamari nodded again. “An honor, sir.”

“Falynn, you’re Three. Grinder, you’re Four.” Both the woman from Tatooine and the Bothan looked unhappy with the pairing. Kell suspected that neither would be pleased with any wingman assignment.

“Kell, you’re Five. Can you guess who’s Six?”

“Runt, sir?”

“You’re developing into something of a genius, Kell.” The others laughed. Wedge continued, “Ton Phanan, Seven. Face, Eight. I want the majority of the squadron’s sarcasm concentrated in one wing pair so we can dispose of it more conveniently.

“Lieutenant Donos, Nine, you’re with Tyria, Ten. Lieutenant Janson is Eleven, paired with Piggy, Twelve. When we break down into four-fighter flights, I’m in charge of One Flight, Kell’s in charge of Two Flight, and Janson’s in charge of Three Flight. Any questions on organization?”

There were none.

“Good. You’re done for the day. Except you, Mr. Tainer: We’ve received the first delivery of new X-wings, four of them so far, and I want you and the mechanics to go over them this evening. Join us in the X-wing hangar in fifteen minutes. Tomorrow, live-fire exercises in the real thing.” Wedge smiled through the pilots’ whoops and cheers, then added, “Dismissed.”

·  ·  ·

Wedge waited until the last of them was gone. “What do you think?”

Janson stretched; tendons popped. “A pretty good roster … if we can keep them out of trouble. Some of them are experienced hard cases.”

“How are you getting along with Tainer?”

Janson slumped in his chair and grimaced. “Oh, outwardly, pretty well. But every time he sees me he shoots me this look of pure hate and knots up into a ball of quivering muscle. He spooks me sometimes. I don’t like being comforted by the presence of my blaster on base; I’d prefer to be able to relax among allies.”

Wedge nodded. “Can you bear up under it for a while longer?”

“I think so.”

“All right. I’d appreciate it if you’d dig us up a squadron quartermaster sometime today. I’ll be with the new snubfighters and then with our guest if you need me.”

Tyria seemed to be in a state of shock as they left the briefing room. Kell asked, “What’s wrong?”

“I was the last one he named,” she said. “I’m last again. The worst pilot in the squadron.”

“No. You’re tenth out of forty-three.”

She glared at him. “The washouts don’t count, Kell.”

“Well, let me put it to you this way. You’re the lowest-rated pilot in a squadron assembled by Wedge Antilles. You’re the worst of this group of elites. Elites, Tyria. And tomorrow, you could be ninth, and the day after, you could be eighth.”

Her expression softened. “Well … maybe. But let me ask you something, Kell. Have you ever been the worst at something?”

He thought about it. “No.”

“I didn’t think so.”

·  ·  ·

The X-wing hangar, so-called because there was only one X-wing squadron on Folor Base and the hangar was given over to its sole use, was cavernously empty. It could have held three full squadrons of fighters, but now was occupied only by nine vehicles.

The largest was the
Narra
, the
Lambda
-class shuttle assigned to Gray Squadron. It had been captured not from the Empire but from a rogue Imperial captain who had turned smuggler. This accounted for the way it had been retrofitted, with a hidden, electronically enhanced smuggler’s compartment worthy of Han Solo.

The other eight vehicles were all X-wings. Four had seen combat, the ones belonging to Wedge, Janson, Donos, and Face. Now alongside them were four spotless new fighters. Kell smiled, cheered by the gleaming surfaces, the un-scratched paint and canopies, the sentinel-like quality of the sleeping R2 and R5 units tucked in behind the cockpits, the overall appearance of invincibility.

The man beside him said, “How I hate these things.”

Kell looked at him. Cubber Daine, the squadron’s chief mechanic, was a bit under average height and over average weight, straining a little at the seams of the jumpsuit that might have begun life an orange color but was now so stained with lubricants that it was impossible to be sure. He had intelligent eyes deeply sunk in a face that looked as though it had been sculpted out of chopped meat and hastily decorated with hair.

“You hate X-wings?”

“No, no, no. I hate factory
new
X-wings. They look so sweet. But then you get in under the panels, and what do you have? Factory defects just waiting to blow up in your face. Assembly mistakes no one noticed. And worst of all, they’re always making improvements at Incom, slipping in these so-called technological upgrades without documenting them, without fully testing them—”

“And without getting your explicit permission.”

Cubber’s face broke out in a broad grin. “You
do
understand! All right, kid. Let’s pop these things open and see what they’ve done wrong.”

Within a few minutes, Kell decided that Cubber was correct. The rails on which the pilots’ chairs were mounted, so that they could be adjusted forward or back to account for the pilot’s height, seemed to be a glossy black ceramic instead of the stainless metal he was used to; he had no idea how the things would hold up under hard wear. He resolved to make sure there were some of the old-fashioned rails in the replacement parts inventory. The canopy seal on one of the snubfighters was faulty. The inertial compensators, the anti-gravity projectors that kept the pilot from suffering ill effects from acceleration, deceleration, and maneuvering, were smaller than he was used to and lacked the external kinetic rod array that was supposed to supply their internal computers with data about current inertial conditions. One of the four X-wings had a small, rectangular equipment module mounted on its exterior aft of the cargo compartment, but Kell couldn’t find any wiring or other connectors from it into the fighter’s interior.

So when Wedge arrived and asked, “How do they look?” Kell pulled himself out of one engine and said, “Terrible.” Cubber extracted himself from the next one and said, “The worst batch ever.” The rest of Cubber’s crew, crawling over the other two new snubfighters, shouted confirmation in explicit and unpleasant terms.

Wedge stared at Cubber and Kell with the ill-concealed incomprehension with which normal people routinely greet the pronouncements of the interplanetary society of mechanics. He heaved a sigh. “Can they be ready for training exercises tomorrow?”

Cubber looked dubious. “Well, two of them, sure.”

Kell said, “If we get a perfect run-through, first time, on the inertial compensator checks, maybe three.”

Cubber said, “And if a miracle occurs on the extruder valve tests, we could theoretically have all four ready. Maybe.”

Kell kept amusement from his face. There was no such thing as an extruder valve on the X-wing design.

Wedge looked unhappy. “Well, do what you can.”

Kell saluted. “Will do, sir.”

“And when you have a chance, though this isn’t necessary for tomorrow, paint out the red stripes on all the X-wings except mine and Janson’s. Replace them with gray.”

“Will do.”

When Wedge had withdrawn to his personal X-wing on the other side of the hangar, Kell asked, “What do you think? One hour, two?”

Cubber nodded. “One. Unless we do the stripes tonight. Which we won’t. You play sabacc, son?”

“A little. But I’m not very good at it.”

Cubber glared. “Do I look stupid? ‘I’m not very good at it,’ indeed. My six-year-old daughter is a better liar.”

“Well, I lie a little, but I’m not very good at it.”

Cubber snorted and pulled himself back into his engine.

Wedge Antilles wandered around the hangar for the next hour, long enough for the mechanics to grow nervous at his continued, needless presence. They got back at him by loudly telling one another stories of amazing mechanical failures they’d heard about, and the great loss of life that had usually resulted therefrom. Their work was done, but Cubber couldn’t dismiss them while Wedge Antilles was present; it would fly in the face of the story he’d told of the X-wings’ state of readiness.

Finally Kell heard a sound from the far end of the hangar’s exit tunnel: Its magnetic containment field hummed into life, and a moment later the heavy doors just beyond it rolled open. Outside, Kell could see dusty lunar surface, blast craters, the silhouettes of other surface buildings of the onetime mine, the distant lunar horizon, and stars.

Then, a light dot in the distance, gradually growing as it approached. When it was several hundred meters from the tunnel entrance, it resolved itself into a shape Kell recognized.

“Corellian YT-1300 Transport,” he said.

“Not just any YT-1300.” Cubber had moved up beside him. “That’s the
Millennium Falcon.
”

Kell gave the approaching ship a harder look. “Are you sure?”

“Oh, yes. I was a year on Hoth, passing by that slab of rust and bad wiring every day. I never got to service her—Solo and his Wookiee friend hated for anyone but them to work on her. You can always recognize her by the specific pattern of corrosion.”

Kell heard a distant pop as the ship breached the magcon field, which obligingly permitted the ship through but held the tunnel’s atmosphere within. The twin-pronged prow of the ship dipped a little as it finished navigating the tunnel and reached the hangar proper. The
Falcon
moved smoothly to the largest bare patch of hangar nearest the tunnel entrance, then rotated in place so the bow was facing back out the tunnel. Only then did it set down, its master displaying considerable skill with the repulsorlift landing engines.

Its boarding ramp descended as Wedge Antilles approached. Down the ramp came General Solo, but not as Kell had seen him on holorecordings. Instead of being an uncomfortable-looking man in a New Republic general’s uniform, Solo wore brown pants and vest and a light tunic much better suited to casual travel. He also wore a broad grin that did much for his craggy features.

He and Wedge embraced, then turned toward the hangar exit. Kell caught a few of their words: “… flight in … diplomatic functions … Zsinj.” Then they were gone.

Cubber clapped Kell on the back. “There’s your brush with greatness, kid. You can tell your children, ‘I saw Han Solo get off his ship once. He ignored me completely.’ C’mon, let’s get out of here.”

“Right.” But Kell lingered and watched for a moment as a gigantic humanoid mass of hair, doubtless Solo’s companion Chewbacca, descended the ramp. The famous Wookiee stood there a long moment, sniffing the air, then uttered a roar—not menacing, but low and resonant, perhaps just announcing his presence or claiming this part of the hangar as his territory. Then the Wookiee ascended the ramp and was gone.

As Kell returned his attention to the X-wing he’d been working on, he heard a scuttling noise. He jumped, then spun around, looking for its source. The sound was what he’d expect
if an insect the size of a small floor-scrubbing droid were running around in the hangar. But he caught no sight of such a thing, and the sound ended as soon as he moved.

Cubber was already dismissing the men and waving Kell to follow. “C’mon, kid. Remember sabacc?”

“Right, right.” Kell smoothed down the hair that had stood to attention on the back of his neck. He closed up the last of the X-wing’s engine panels and followed.

“How was your flight in?” asked Wedge.