Wraith Squadron (17 page)

“Thank you, sir!”

“Pipe down, Five. Also to mention that I’m thinking of putting you two on report for that stunt with the clear-air broadcast to the
Implacable
. What were you thinking?”

“Uhhh … I guess we weren’t, sir. I was just shot through with adrenaline because I’d survived.”

“Well, I expect it all balances out, and by way of reward and punishment I’ll just hammer medals straight into your skulls.”

“Thank you, sir. Uh—who’s piloting
Narra
?”

Another familiar voice cut in. “It’s Cubber, Five. I have Squeaky with me.”

Wedge said, “That reminds me. Wraiths, be advised that instead of taking the first transport off this rock, Squeaky raided your quarters and lockers, bagging anything he thought would be of importance to you, especially personal items; they’re all aboard the
Narra.
”

There was a chorus of thanks, whistles, and short cheers over the comm. Then Squeaky’s voice: “It was enlightened self-interest, I assure you. Had I not done this, I would have been barraged with requests for replacements for your lost goods. I’m far too busy to attend to such irrelevant requests.”

“Leader, Five. What’s our destination?” Folor had shrunk to a small coin-sized disk of silver-gray behind them; their current course was taking them around Commenor in a wide arc.

“As before, Doldrums. We’re going to take the same navigational exercise as before. We’ll be joining the rest of the Folor Base evacuees at Doldrums.”

“They’re going there, too? That’s an odd coincidence.”

“No coincidence, Five. When I reported the
Implacable
coming in, I also told General Crespin of our training mission and mentioned that Doldrums would be a good site to stage a regrouping. The rest of the evacuees are going there in one jump; we’re going to do our exercise just because we can use the practice. Which reminds me—I need fuel reports from each of you.”

·  ·  ·

Malicious cheer clearly visible on his face even through the wavering hyperspace connection, Warlord Zsinj’s hologram smiled at Trigit. “Well?”

Trigit didn’t bother to conceal his glum mood. “I have both good news and bad to report. The good news: the base on Folor is gone, and I think I gave it enough of a pounding to make it impractical for the Rebellion to reestablish it.”

“Good! And?”

“Due to some unanticipated reconnaissance and some superior tactics on their part, the Rebel garrison got away without significant loss. We, on the other hand, had substantial losses. Twenty-six TIEs of various types destroyed, another eleven damaged so badly that they withdrew from the engagement. I’ve already transmitted a requisitions request to your bridge.”

“Apwar, Apwar! They outmaneuvered you with such ease, and you expect me to replace your losses?”

“Yes, of course. I don’t ask for unnecessary excesses of supplies when I perform brilliantly for you, and I do ask for ordinary replacements on those few occasions I come up short. So far, I believe you have little to complain about.” Trigit finally let a smile spread across his face. “Besides, I had already set some activities in motion to capture possible evacuees. With luck, I’ll have some better news to report to you in the near future.”

Zsinj sighed, rippling the holographic image. “Very well. I’ll signal you when I have replacements available for you. In the meantime, keep—”

“—you informed. As ever, sir.”

Zsinj gave him a frosty smile and wavered out of existence.

Before they made the jump to hyperspace, Wedge switched his comm over to give him a private channel with Janson. “Wes.”

“I’m here.”

“What was Piggy doing?”

“I’m not sure how to describe it. I think he was running
like a tactical planning computer. In addition to doing all his own flying—he vaped one interceptor—he seemed to be keeping track of all the Wraiths and their current opponents. He offered a few suggestions at critical times and gave us a handful of kills we wouldn’t have had otherwise.”

“I’ve never heard of anyone able to do that.”

“Well, he’s not human. He’s not even exactly Gamorrean.”

“What’s your assessment of the overall squadron?”

“They’re not as good as Rogue Squadron was when you reorganized the squadron. But they’re still pretty good. Why?”

“They’re just … different. Hand them an ordinary set of instructions and they’ll carry them out in an ordinary fashion. Hand them an objective without instructions and they accomplish it some strange way. Like that whole fake
Millennium Falcon
ploy, and what Piggy was doing, and the data they got off Commenor’s planetary computer net. I’m having a hard time anticipating them.”

“Hey, you picked them.”

“I—
I
picked them? What were you doing during those pilot interviews?”

“Daydreaming.”

“Traitor.” Wedge hit the comm key to send a click, signaling the end of the conversation, and switched back to squadron frequency. “Wraiths, thirty seconds to jump.”

During the first of three long jumps leading them to Doldrums, Kell forced himself to calm down, to settle his nerves.

He couldn’t quite extinguish his jubilation, though. In his first combat mission as a pilot, he hadn’t so much as fired a shot at an enemy, but he’d executed tactics that might have saved the
Borleias
from destruction or saved some of his fellow Wraiths from death under the guns of the
Implacable
.

Even Wedge Antilles had been impressed—at least, more impressed than annoyed.

The jump was long enough, though, that he couldn’t just reflect on his recent victory. There was Tyria to consider.

How would he persuade her that she was wrong about his feelings for her? First, obviously, he’d have to think about her more during the day, to answer her objection on that score … What else did he need to do?

He considered that, approaching the problem from a dozen logical angles, but an answer he had not expected and did not like began to lurk at the periphery of his thinking. Finally it moved in, squeezing aside his other trains of thought, and demanded that he pay attention to it.

Tyria hadn’t been wrong. She was right. You don’t actually love her
.

Kell frowned at the traitorous voice.
What are you, one of Runt’s leftover minds?

You don’t love her. You feel about her the way you did about Tuatara Lone when you were fifteen
.

Tuatara Lone was a holo actress on Sluis Van. Short, shapely, so cute she was toxic, she was particularly adept at portraying madcap girls with odd lifestyles or nosy investigators capable of bluffing their way out of any problem. For three years, Kell had been mesmerized by her, seeing every one of her comedies and dramas, agonizing at night over her beauty, projecting himself into fantasy situations where he’d rescue her from harm or solve a crisis threatening her happiness.

Then he’d learned that the actress was in fact extremely happily married, with two children and another on the way. Kell, finding himself out of the running in a race he had actually never entered, was crushed. He moped around his home and was nearly fired from his job as a mechanic. Only when he entered the New Republic armed forces and was too busy to do anything but work and sleep had he forgotten his pain.

Now she was back, Tuatara Lone in all her beauty, hovering before him alongside Tyria. And that drove it home, his two obsessions side by side, as no previous argument had: He really was in love with holograms, images that only dimly reflected the real women they represented.

Tyria was right. You don’t love her
.

I know. Shut up. Just go away
. He sighed, dejected.

Thirteen beeped at him. Startled out of his painful reverie,
he saw the timer on his main monitor counting down one standard minute—time until arrival in the Xobome system, the uninhabited first stop on their route to Doldrums. He did a visual check around his X-wing, seeing only the usual effect of a hyperspace jump, the corridor of light formations in endless, beautiful motion. Everything normal, and he had enough fuel, just barely, for the two farther stages on to Doldrums.

At twenty-seven seconds until the end of the jump, the stars appeared as elongated columns like millions of laser beams extending into infinity, and then snapped into a motionless starfield. Immediately a bright glow swallowed the stars, erased them.

Kell’s instrument panels and forward viewports went dark. A bright flash of light rocked his snubfighter. A shower of sparks erupted from his main monitor, landing on his flight suit, threatening to set his legs on fire. There was more smoke in the cockpit than those sparks could have produced.

He cursed and batted at his legs to put out the sparks. His vision and the viewports cleared, the starfield outside returning to normal. In the distance, he could see one star that was noticeably brighter than all others; if this was indeed the system they were aiming for, that was Xobome, but they’d arrived well outside the region they’d targeted. He could see another X-wing half a klick or so to his starboard, drifting slowly away; he couldn’t make out the pilot, but if it was the closest snubfighter to him, it should be Runt.

His instruments remained dead, and there was no hiss of air to indicate his life-support systems were functioning. Glancing back, he could see lights flickering on Thirteen; the droid seemed to be in the middle of startup procedures.

Kell pulled off his flight suit gloves, then reached under the instrument panel, unhooked latches there, and swung the whole panel up. Here was the source of some of the smoke, several wires burned and semiconductors fried—all delicate diagnostics circuitry, it appeared.

The wiring and circuitry associated with his restart system seemed intact, so he swung the instrument panel back into place and dogged it down. Then he reached past his left
shoulder, pried open a small, innocuous panel there, and depressed the red button beneath it. He held down the button there until he heard the comforting, familiar whine of a snubfighter trying to bring itself back on-line.

Immediately words appeared on his data screen:
R2-D609 IS ACTIVE. HOW MAY I SERVE YOU?

Kell frowned. “R2-D609, what’s your name?”

The R2 unit beeped irritably at this simple test,
I AM R2-D609.

“Can you give me a random number?”

13.

“Dammit.” Thirteen’s temporary memory was gone; it had returned to its default memory and settings, the ones burned permanently into its circuits.

They’d been hit by some sort of ionization bomb, he was sure of it; in his experience, only an ion cannon could scramble all a snubfighter’s electronics this way. But what had hit them was more powerful, and ion cannons couldn’t cause a ship in hyperspace to pop back into real space prematurely.

His communications board lit up and immediately he had voices: “—is just drifting. I have one engine coming up; I’ll try to maneuver over to him.” “Do that, Three. Is anyone else active?”

“Five here,” said Kell. “I’m in the middle of a cold start.”

“Four.”

“Eleven.”

There was a noise over the comm, something like an animal grunt.

“Twelve, this is Eleven. Was that you?”

Another grunt.

“Piggy, is your translator burned out? Once for yes, twice for no.”

One grunt, a short, irritable one.

“Are you injured? Has it done any damage to your throat?”

Two short grunts.

“Good. Stand by.”

“Sir?”

“This is Leader. Who’s speaking?”

“Sir, Shiner isn’t responding.” Shiner was Donos’s R2.

“Nine, is that you?”

“Sir, Shiner isn’t responding.”

“I read you, Nine. Are you injured?”

“No, sir. But Shiner—”

“Isn’t responding. I understand. Let him be for the time being.”

“Yes, sir.”

Kell frowned. Donos didn’t sound like himself. He did sound like someone suffering a concussion or other injury.

Within the next couple of minutes, the remaining Wraiths had reported in, all but Runt, Phanan, and Grinder. Most also reported electronics system damage, some of it trivial, though several engine units and a couple of astromechs were not coming on-line.

Everyone reported total electronic memory loss—from the X-wings’ configuration choices to the astromechs’ full memory banks to the contents of the pilots’ datapads and chronos. That meant their nav course to Doldrums was erased. Even a return to Commenor system was impossible.

Wedge doggedly worked his way through their options. They didn’t have enough fuel to go looking for a safe landing zone in another system; the X-wings were running close to dry.

The
Narra
had nearly a full load of fuel. The Wraiths could improvise a fuel transfer between the shuttle and the X-wings, but under these conditions this would take hours. If, as Wedge suspected, this attack would result in pursuit by their enemies, such a tactic would doom them.

Or the shuttle could dump all its cargo, the pilots could assemble on board, and they could jump around until they reached a system where they could reacquire navigational data. That would bring them to safety … but would cost them twelve X-wings, eight of them new. That would probably be the death knell of Wraith Squadron.

On the other hand, if he had the
Narra
use its personnel retrieval tractor to drag the inoperable snubfighters to available
cover, where they could be repaired, the energy-expensive effort would burn off enough of the shuttle’s fuel to make the squadron’s escape impossible. But they would be operable and perhaps able to take out the pursuit vessels.

Finally Wedge said, “All right, Wraiths. Two reports a planet and satellites not too far away. I’m pretty sure that it’s Xobome 6, the outermost planet of the system, and it has an atmosphere warm enough for us to effect some repairs, and an asteroid ring—just the thing if we’re being pursued, and I’ll bet my Endor patch that we are. We’ll transit there, with the
Narra
towing the three nonfunctional fighters with its pilot retrieval tractor.”