“Ten copies, Nine.”
I kicked my X-wing up on the port stabilizer foils and hauled back on the stick. Chopping power to the engine, I tightened the circle, then rolled out to the right as the pirates started a long serpentine turn. I switched over from missiles to dual lasers and immediately got a yellow box around the lead fighter. I goosed the throttle back to full to close range and keyed my comm. “I’m on the leader.”
Ooryl gave me a double-click on his comm to let me know he’d gotten the message. Nudging the stick just a bit right, the targeting box went green and I hit the firing button. Two red bolts hit the target. The first fried the shields. The clutch trailed sparks from the shield generator like a comet trailing ice. The second bolt pierced the cockpit and though it hit kind of high, it hit hard, too. Sparks shot from the hole and the clutch began a slow spiral down toward Alakatha.
Ooryl rolled to port as the other clutch broke. I brought my X-wing around in behind him as he lined his shot up. The Gand’s first two shots blasted past the shields and burned furrows in the ship’s hull. The next two drilled the engines, jetting the disintegrating ship forward on a golden gout of flame. The flame abruptly died, leaving the Tri-fighter to tumble through space out toward the asteroid belt.
Up through the cockpit canopy I could see the green and white streaky ball of Alakatha and the Glitterstar rising up from it. Off to starboard the Booty Full seemed to crouch in the void like a malignant insect. The turbo-lasers along its spine and in a belly turret fired out, trying to track one flight’s X-wings, but the shots were no real danger to the fighters. Colonel Celchu, Hobbie, Janson and Gavin Darklighter were old hands at pulling the teeth of raiders like these. As long as we kept the clutches busy, the Booty Full had no chance.
The X-wing’s first slashing attack came from Tycho and Hobbie. They rolled through and each drove a proton torpedo into the aft shields. Coming from the other direction, Gavin and Wes Janson strafed the ship with laser fire. Gavin’s second burst melted the belly turret clean away while Janson’s shots nibbled away at the ship’s aft vector jets. The Booty Full was done, though I had no doubts it would take a couple more passes before the crew realized that and surrendered.
I followed Ooryl up and around the back toward the fight. It had fairly well degenerated into a chase-and-kill run. The loss of seven ships before they even saw their enemies had clearly shocked the pirates and, more importantly, brought their numbers down close to ours. While clutches were more agile than X-wings—not by much, but by enough to make fighting them difficult—they couldn’t outrun us or outgun us. Lacking the discipline of a trained military unit like Rogue Squadron, when panic set in, they fell apart and made our job that much easier.
Ooryl settled in on one and hit it with a full quad burst from his lasers. The clutch exploded, but boiling in through the explosion came another clutch making a head-to-head pass at Ooryl. The clutch got off a shot with the ion cannon that sent a lightning storm skittering over Ooryl’s shields, but they died before the ion blast did. The motivator blew on his R5 unit and Whistler reported his engines were out.
“Ooryl, go for a restart.” I didn’t know if he still had comm or not, but I offered that bit of advice and fired a dual burst at the clutch. Hastily aimed, the shot missed low, but did cause the clutch to veer off. Rolling out to the right, I headed in after him. “This is Nine on one. Someone watch my back.”
Vurrulf, the Klatooinan in three flight, barked a harsh, “I copy, on it,” so I felt a bit safer in pursuing the clutch. One of the worst things a pilot can do is to get so locked in on a target that he misses what else is happening. When situational awareness focuses down on one target, the hunter becomes hunted and never knows what hits him. It’s a rookie mistake and while I’m no rookie, I’m not immune to it.
The clutch’s pilot was good and clearly had no desire to die, but Whistler wasn’t reporting that he’d powered down his weapons, so he was just as clearly willing to fight. I tried to settle in on him, but he modulated his throttle and used his ship’s agility to keep breaking before I could get a lock. I snapped a couple of shots off at him, but they missed wide or high. Try as I might, I was having trouble keeping up with his shifts and cuts.
I pulled back on the throttle and let him gain some distance. His juking antics continued, but with range the movements that had ripped him out of my sights in close barely broke the edges of my targeting box. I hit the firing button and sent two paired bursts at him. One pair lanced through the aft shield and mangled one of the landing tines. The other two energy darts clipped the thrust vector vents on the port side, limiting his maneuverability.
Whistler displayed a comm frequency being used by the clutch and I punched it up on my comm unit. “This is Captain Corran Horn of the New Republic Armed Forces. I will accept your surrender.”
A woman answered me. “Don’t you know, Invids never surrender?”
“Not true of the Booty Full.”
“Riizolo is a fool, but he doesn’t have a capital warrant out on his head. I do.” She laughed. “I have nothing to live for, except my honor. One pass, Horn, you and me.”
“You’ll die.” A single pass would negate the clutch’s agility advantage. She had to know that.
“But perhaps not alone.” Her ship stopped jinking and headed out on a long loop. “Allow me this honor.” The clutch turned and began its run at me.
I wanted to do as she asked, and would have, except for one thing: the Invids had proved over and over again that they had no honor.
I switched to proton torpedoes, got a quick tone-lock from Whistler and pulled the trigger. The missile shot from my X-wing and sprinted straight for her ship. As good as she was, the clutch pilot knew there was no dodging it. She fired with both lasers, but they missed. Then, at the last moment, she shot an ion blast that hit the missile. Blue lightning played over it, burning out every circuit that allowed the torpedo to track and close on her ship.
I’m fairly certain, just for a second, she thought she had won.
The problem with a projectile is that even if its sophisticated circuitry fails, it still has a lot of kinetic energy built up. Even if it never senses the proximity of its target and detonates, that much mass moving that fast treats a clutch cockpit much the way a needle treats a bubble. The torpedo drove the ion engines out the back of the clutch, where they exploded. The fighter’s hollow remains slowly spun off through space and would eventually burn through the atmosphere and give resort guests a thrill.
Whistler made my threat screen all green indicating no more active hostiles in the area. Three flight reported in and Ooryl was back up and running. His forward shield had collapsed and refused to come back up, but otherwise he was fine. Vurrulf and Ghufran reported no trouble with their X-wings. As it turned out only Reme Pollar in two flight had been hit hard enough to be forced extra-vehicular, but she reported she would be fine until the Skipray blast boat from the Glitterstar picked her up.
I switched the comm over to the command channel. “All green here, Rogue Leader.”
“I copy, Nine. Looks like this wasn’t the trap we feared it would be.”
“No, sir, it doesn’t.”
“Have your people prepare to rejoin the fleet.”
“As ordered, Colonel.”
I relayed the order to my people, but before we could reach my designated rendezvous point, the fleet made a microjump in from the edge of the system. A Mon Calamari Cruiser and two Victory-class Star Destroyers formed a triangle in the space above Alakatha. We’d come to the system aboard Home One and used microjumps to get in as close as we did. Because the information about the Booty Full had been unusual, we expected it might be an ambush, so the fleet had waited to see if the Invids would pounce on the Rogues.
If they had, we would have gotten a chance to finish them once and for all.
I keyed my comm. “Colonel, if we were expecting the pirates to jump us, and they did not, was this mission a success?”
 
; “Good question, Nine. This is one of those missions where only Intelligence will be able to tell us how we did.” Tycho hesitated for a moment. “Then again, we lost only machines, not people. It’s a victory anytime that happens.”
TWO
The K’vath system was far enough from Coruscant to be trendy and desirable for seclusion—though the price of a mug of lum there would have been enough to discourage most folks from enjoying their holiday. Mirax and I never would have gone there three years ago, but Wedge Antilles had recommended it, and someone in management had been convinced that our participation in the liberation of Coruscant made Mirax and me just the sort of glam couple to attract the notice of the New Republic’s fashionable elite. As a result we didn’t pay for anything while we were there, and stopping the Booty Full over Alakatha helped me feel a bit better about having enjoyed the world’s hospitality.
The Glimmerstar requested an escort all the way to Coruscant, which Home One agreed to supply. This meant our return trip would be at the leisurely pace dictated by the liner instead of the faster speed of which the Mon Calamari Cruiser was capable. The Rogues could have taken our X-wings home, but the trip would have locked us in the cockpit for a full twenty-four hours, which I looked forward to with the same enthusiasm I had for discussing old times with Mirax’s father. It would have been nice if the Glimmerstar had allowed us to spend the extra day of travel time on the liner, but their gratitude extended only as far as letting us study the ship’s beautiful lines from afar.
We had duties enough to keep us busy anyway, and despite the oppressive humidity, the Mon Cal Cruiser’s accommodations were not that bad. After landing my X-wing and getting Whistler set up for recharging, I caught a quick meal in the galley, then joined the rest of the squadron in a briefing room for our debriefing. We all rode Reme for going EV, but we were glad to have her back and enjoyed her descriptions of the Glimmerstar’s blast boat. After that I grabbed some rack time, slept for eight hours, worked out a bit and headed for the galley for some breakfast.
Ooryl raised a three-fingered hand and waved me over to the table he occupied all by himself. I smiled and nodded to him, then grabbed some breakfast cakes and an artificial nerfmilk protein beverage. I almost balked at it, because consuming anything that doesn’t sit well on the stomach can be a mistake when eating with a Gand, but I was very thirsty.
I dropped into the chair opposite Ooryl and did my best not to glance down into the bowl from which he was feeding. “Anything interesting happen while I’ve been down?”
Ooryl’s mouth parts moved apart in his approximation of a smile and his compound eyes glittered brightly. His grey-green flesh was of a hue slightly darker than the sauce on the tentacles he was fishing out of the bowl, and contrasted sharply with the bright orange of his flight suit. Knobby bits of his exoskeleton poked at odd angles from within the fabric, as if his flesh were having an allergic reaction to the color.
“Nothing Ooryl considers out of the ordinary.”
I frowned. The Gands had a tradition of speaking of themselves in the third person and not using the pronoun “I” because they thought it was the height of arrogance to do so. Only those Gands who had committed acts so great that all Gands would know of them were allowed to speak of themselves as “I.” The whole of Rogue Squadron had even gone to Gand and been part of Ooryl’s janwuine-jika, the ceremony that conferred that right upon him. For him to have reverted to third person meant something was bothering him.
“What is the matter?” I narrowed my green eyes and stared into his black faceted orbs. “You can’t be embarrassed about getting shot by that Invid.”
Ooryl slowly and deliberately shook his head. “Ooryl is ashamed that he has not been able to help you with your problem.”
“My problem?”
“You have been distracted, Corran.” Ooryl perched his hands on the tabletop like two armored spiders. “You and Mirax desire offspring. If Ooryl was on Gand, Ooryl could help solve this problem.”
I stuffed a crumb from one of the cakes into my mouth, chewed quickly and swallowed. “Back up here. How do you know about the child thing?”
The Gand remained rock-still for a moment, then lowered his head. “Qrygg was told by Mirax that you and she would have children, therefore Qrygg had to do Qrygg’s best to make certain you were not killed in combat.”
I gave him a hard stare. “Mirax talked to you about our discussion on children?”
“Mirax wished to know if you had spoken with Qrygg about the discussion. When Qrygg said you had not, she asked Qrygg to encourage the discussion if you did.” Ooryl’s head came back up. “You should not have been ashamed to speak to Ooryl of it. Ooryl would have been worthy of your trust.”
I gave Ooryl the biggest smile I could muster. I over-exaggerated it because he wasn’t so good at reading subtlety. “Ooryl, if I was talking to anybody about our wanting kids, it would have been you. I trust you with my life every day and have never had any cause to regret it.” I saw his mouth parts open, aping my smile and I realized right then and there I’d been fairly stupid in keeping the whole discussion to myself. “And I really should have spoken with you about it. Your advice has always been welcomed and wise. I just didn’t think, which is a bad habit I had hoped to abandon.”
“If Ooryl was truly wise, Ooryl would have advised you to abandon it.”
“You have, in very many ways.” I sighed slowly. “And, as Mirax told you, we have been talking about having kids. She went to you to learn what I was thinking. I’m sure any help you offered her was appreciated.”
“Ooryl would like to think so. You will recall that during Ooryl’s janwuine-jika, Ooryl was also initiated into the ways of being a Findsman. On Gand, the Findsman performs many useful tasks. He locates lost slaves, reads the mists for omens and hunts criminals. There is one more duty he performs for people like you and Mirax. He can wander into the mists and find the child they desire. These mistborn children are a gift and raised by the people as their own. I would be honored to do this for you, my friend.”
I smiled. “Thanks, but I think I can handle the child production part on my own.”
Ooryl’s mandibles sprang open. “Then you are capable.…”
“Yes, very much so.” I raised my chin. “Very much so. No problems here.”
A membrane nictitated up over Ooryl’s eyes for a moment. “Then why would you not have a child already?”
“Huh?”
“This is the purpose of life, is it not? To create life is the greatest act a living creature can commit.”
The solemnity and truth in his words hit me hard. “That’s true, but …”
“Is this a time Ooryl should remind you that you are trying to abandon being thoughtless?”
I snapped my jaw shut and narrowed my eyes. “If having kids is so important, why don’t you have any?”
Ooryl shrugged. It wasn’t a motion natural to him and his exoskeleton clicked in protest. “I am janwuine. It is not for me to choose a wife, but for Gand to choose one for me. At that time I shall proudly commit genetic fusion.”
“The idea loses something in translation there.” I drank a bit of the milk and used another piece of cake to get rid of the thick chalky taste. “The fact is I mean to settle this thing with Mirax once we get back to Coruscant.”
“Good. With the stories you have told of your father, any child you will have will be well cared for.”
I arched an eyebrow at him. “And how do you know I’ll agree to have children?”
“I have spoken with Mirax. That is enough.”
I sat back and laughed lightly. “I never really had a chance, did I?”
“No, Corran, but that really means you will have every chance.” Ooryl slurped in a tentacle, then wiped verdant gravy from his cheek. “We have all helped create and strengthen the New Republic. Creating the generation to which it will be passed is one more duty we owe posterity.”
Ooryl’s words stuck with me through the r
est of the trip and worked on me like a virus. By the time I loaded myself into my X-wing and began to descend to our hangar facility, I was looking forward to heading home with Mirax and start working on a child then and there. And while that sort of an enthusiastic greeting when either one of us returned from journeys was not at all uncommon, this time it would be more than a wordless way of saying “I missed you.”
It would mean parts of us would never be separated again.
That thought struck me as so right and good, even flying over the debris fields littering Coruscant could only slightly tarnish my mood. Vast swathes of destruction had been carved across the urban landscape. Ships never meant for entry into atmosphere had crashed down, glowing white from the heat, trailing thick clouds of black smoke, to slam into the cityscape. They gouged great furrows through neighborhoods and blasted huge craters out of the buildings. Hundreds of millions, perhaps even billions of people had died in the factional fighting that followed Thrawn’s assault on the New Republic; and we were nowhere near recovered from it.
Looking at the shattered buildings and twisted wreckage, I found it difficult to conjure up my memories of Coruscant from before, back when it was still Imperial Center. I could remember vast rivers of light making the nightside glow with life, but here only dull grey predominated. Bright lights had once given Coruscant an artificial life and without them the urban planet seemed dead.
I knew it wasn’t really that bad. Despite the vast surface destruction and tremendous loss of life, people did continue living. The catastrophic damage did bring out the worst in some people, but it brought out the best in even more. Mirax and I had planned to live in her Pulsar Skate when our home had been destroyed by one of the crashing ships, but friends wouldn’t let us. Iella Wessiri, my old partner from the Corellian Security Force, managed to convince her boss at New Republic Intelligence that we should be given the run of a safehouse they maintained, so we ended up with a place even closer to Rogue Squadron Headquarters than before.