Star Wars - X-Wing - The Bacta War

They also provided the means for entering the estate. Most travel to and from

  the estate took place by airspeeder. Forty-five kilometers of a twisting,

  single-lane track con-.nected the estate to the main throughway to the south,

  but several gates interdicted it, and a number of narrow passes between natural

  rock outcroppings made for perfect ambush points if an invasion were attempted

  along it. Likewise, a ring of well-hidden Comar Tritracker Air Defense batteries

  meant approaching the estate in an airspeeder without authorization could be

  suicidal. Various sensor arrays positioned around

  the estate also monitored likely avenues of approach through the rain forest.

  Slicing into the planetary computers and making use of Zaltin surveillance

  satellites, the Ashern team had pulled down realtime holograms of the estate and

  the thermal images of the guards on their rounds. They also found the

  placement of the sensor devices in the rain forest and noted the human patrols

  tended to concentrate on the side of the estate facing the mountains and the

  waterfalls. After studying the specifications for the sensors in use around the

  estate, they realized that the sensors on the mountain side of the estate had

  been muted so the movement of water and the sound from the falls wouldn't

  constantly be triggering alarms.

  Entering the estate, they made their appro ach from the far side of the mountain

  and ascended to the summit by dusk. Once darkness fell, they descended, keeping

  as close to the waterfalls as they could. They sped their descent by rappel-ling

  down beneath one of the longer falls, letting the curtain of water hide them

  from the estate's sensors. Once at the base of the mountains, they moved in

  along the fringes of the sensors' range, cutting a labyrinthine path through

  the jungle.

  The SpecNav troops led the way. Though they were as big as stormtroopers,

  Sixtus's men were deceptively swift and deathly quiet. Iella was more than happy

  they were on her side. As scary as facing stormtroopers might have been,

  fight-ing against these men would have been worse. At one point

  they had been selected to join the Imperial Navy's most elite fighting unit, and

  the product of their skills proved that choice had been a wise one.

  Iella heard a single click over her comlink, so she hurried forward, remaining

  low. She reached Elscol's side and looked off in the direction where the smaller

  woman pointed. Silhou-etted against the lights from the house she saw two

  Thyferran

  Home Defense Corps guards wandering along. Elscol tapped her finger twice

  against her comlink and huge shadows rose up to eclipse the guards. Iella heard

  no screams or shots being

  fired. but another double-click played over the comlink, indicating the guards

  had been neutralized.

  The rest of the group moved up to the edge of the clear-

  ing around the estate. Barely twenty-five meters separated them from the mansion

  solarium. Iella dropped to one knee next to one of the guards and felt for a

  pulse in his neck, but her hand encountered a sticky wetness that told her all

  she needed to know. The sound of a stun shot being fired or the light from the

  blue burst could have been seen. These men had to die.

  Elscol tapped two of the SpecNav soldiers on the shoulders and they sprinted

  forward across the lawn to the shadows beside the solarium. Iella found herself

  holding her breath, waiting for a reaction from the house. A single click from

  the comlink told her the SpecNavs felt safe. Elscol sent them a double-click,

  and Iella prepared herself to run.

  The SpecNavs pulled an electronic device from an equipment satchel and slapped

  it over the solarium's door lock. Iella saw lights on the device flicker and

  shift color, then five of them all burned green at the same time. They went out

  after three seconds at which point one of the SpecNavs pushed the door open.

  Another double-click came through the comlink, and Iella was up and running.

  With each step she braced herself for a shot from the darkness, a burning red

  bolt that would hit her, lift her up and send her flying across the yard. She'd

  seen it happen to others before, more times than she could remember. The look of

  surprise on the victim's face as confident immortality dissolved into dismay

  and despair haunted her. In death, especially violent death, no one ever looks

  pretty.

  She made it to the door and passed through, then cut to the left and hugged the

  wall on the other side of the doorway into the main house, opposite the first

  SpecNav trooper. After her, came Elscol; then Sixtus. They both ran through the

  doorway, then double-clicked an all clear so Iella and the SpecNav moved up.

  Other members of the team fanned out through the mansion's lower floor and

  secured it without incident.

  Elscol and Sixtus moved up the stairway to the main floor. Iella followed them

  up and found the main floor dark save for a muted yellow light coming through

  one open doorway further along the main hallway. The darkness didn't sur-

  prise her terribly muchthe raid had been timed to reach the estate halfway

  between midnight and dawn to take advantage of the fact that most people would

  be asleep. That a light was still on seemed odd, but carelessness couldn't be

  ruled out.

  Nor can someone's working late. That's supposed to be Dlarit's office. Iella

  crept forward cautiously. Though only ten meters separated her from the lit

  doorway, she took two minutes to make it that distance. At the edge of the

  doorway she tilted her head and got a quick glimpse into the room. What she saw

  prompted a smile and made her double-click her comlink and invite the others

  forward.

  She strode into the office and shook her head. Wearing his finest Thyferran Home

  Defense Corps uniform, Aerin Dlarit sat sprawled in a high-backed chair behind

  his desk. The holoprojector plate built into the desk displayed a meter-tall

  replica of a monument featuring a larger-than-life statue of Dlarit atop a

  pedestal. The hologram slowly rotated in the air, complete with a throng of

  miniature well-wishers gasping and applauding at its base.

  Elscol drew her blaster pistol and dropped her voice to a whisper. "Get the

  holocam up here. He dies a monument to his own ego and misplaced trust in the

  Empire."

  Iella laid a hand on her arm. "Wait, I have another idea. One that may work even

  better."

  "He has to die."

  "With what I have in mind, he will, but a thousand times over." Iella drew her

  own pistol and clicked the selector lever over to stun. "We've already killed

  two guards, so they know we're serious. Trust me, this will work."

  "If I don't like it, he dies anyway."

  Iella smiled. "You'll like it. We'll get more play out of it."

  Iella explained, and Elscol balked until Sixtus cracked a

  smile. That swung Elscol over, so Iella fired one shot into the sleeping

  General, then set to work. The party exited the

  estate the same way they'd come in, and though burdened as Iella was carrying

  away General Aerin Dlarit's dress uniform, the journey seemed not nearly as hard

  as before.

  19 r />
  Commander Erisi Dlarit's TIE Interceptor dropped from the belly of the Corrupter

  and let gravity seduce it down into Halanit's atmosphere. The cant-winged craft

  bucked a little as it entered the frigid planet's atmosphere, reminding Erisi

  that the Interceptor would surrender some of its maneuverability to friction

  and drag. Maneuvers she could pull in the vacuum of space would get her killed

  below.

  The Rebels refer to these fighters as squints, but in atmosphere I prefer to

  think of them as winces. From the moment Ysanne Isard had appointed her to lead

  the Thyferran Home Defense Corps aerospace wing, Erisi had lobbied hard to equip

  her two squadrons with X-wings. While slower and slightly less agile than the

  Interceptor, the X-wing's shields and ability to use proton torpedoes in

  addition to its lasers made it a superior fighter.

  It mattered not at all how eloquently I argued, what facts I used, Iceheart

  would never have agreed to my request. Erisi realized her own sense of

  superiority had collided full on with Isard's need to see anything and

  everything Imperial as better than anything the Alliance had to oppose it. Isard

  sees herself as the pinnacle of Imperial excellence and demands that ev-

  erything else rises to her level. What I or others know counts as nothing to her

  because we are not up to her standards.

  Erisi really couldn't blame Isard for treating the Thyferrans and the THDC as

  the Empire's stupid, inbred cousins. Though the Corrupter had already been en

  route to Halanit when the Ashern raid took place, word of it had been

  communicated to the ship. Her cheeks burned as the image of her father slumped

  naked in his chair exploded in her mind. Mortifying in the extreme, the

  incident meant that the Corrupter's Imperial crew felt no reason to hide their

  contempt for the THDC personnel on board.

  The fact that her father had been involved hurt her deeply. What made it even

  worse was that Iella Wessiri had been identified from the hologram. The Imps

  took that as a sign that Antilles had entered into a full alliance with the

  Ashern, but Erisi read more into lella's participation. Iella caused my father

  to be embarrassed so as to get at me, to

  avenge herself for my betrayal of Corran and the rest of the Rouges. This was a

  message directed at me by hera private declaration of war.

  Erisi glanced at her monitor and snarled into the comm unit. "Four, close the

  formation up." Behind her four In-tersceptors came a quartet of the

  double-hulled TIE bombers. Her Interceptors were nominally flying cover for the

  bombers, though once they dropped their thermal detonators and proton bombs to

  open up the main colony, the Interceptors' mission changed to engaging ground

  targets and suppressing ire at the stormtrooper-laden shuttles that would

  follow.

  The TIE bombers swooped down through the air and spiraled in on their target.

  Erisi and her flight came around to

  follow them in. She couldn't help but remember countless

  training exercises where she'd used an X-wing to stoop like a hawk-bat on such

  lumbering craft. Two would be dead in my

  initial pass and the others would die as they attempted to flee. Below her, the

  bombers began their runs. The thermal

  detonators fell lazily from the bombers as if harmless. Their explosions flashed

  golden light through the glacier and bled

  up into the great gouts of steam they produced. The light breeze below quickly

  cleared the steam off, revealing a hole

  roughly a kilometer around and nearly half that deep. Steaming water pooled in

  the bottom of it, and Erisi knew the thermal detonators had cleared the glacier

  down to the transparisteel canopy that protected the Halanit colony from the

  harsh climate of their world.

  The bombers' second pass eliminated the canopy. The high-yield proton bombs

  shattered the transparisteel shield, fragmenting the sheets at ground zero. A

  shock wave rippled through the double-walled barrier, ripping whole

  transparisteel plates free from both layers as it went. The warm air from

  beneath the shield rushed upward, blowing debris up and out, then cond ensed in

  the frigid air. At the same time, around the hole's jagged edges, cold air

  poured down into the colony.

  Rolling her Interceptor up on the port stabilizer assembly, Erisi spiraled the

  fighter down in through the hole the bombs had created. The chasm into which she

  flew stretched out above and below her fighter like the grandest of Coruscant's

  boulevards. Long suspension bridges linked both sides of the chasm at various

  levels and quickly icing-over waterfalls splashed their way down into the

  depths in front of her. Lights from hundreds of viewports dotted the chasm's

  depths with yellow circles and squares.

  Erisi hit the triggers on her lasers. A stream of green laser darts scored a

  ragged line along one face of the chasm, piercing the viewports and reducing

  them to darkness. As she shot, she glanced at her primary monitor, waiting for

  the missile warning alarm to be activated. It's going to be missiles or

  turbolasers, and if they're going to use them, it'll have to be now.

  She continued her flight deeper and deeper, strafing targets as she went. One

  line of fire scattered a crowd on a balcony. Another swept across a foot bridge,

  chasing a man who foolishly thought himself faster than a laser bolt. Nearing

  the bottom of the chasm, she chopped her throttle back and pulled up in a loop,

  but not before filling the ice-crusted pools below with enough laser energy to

  start them boiling.

  She knew, with the canopy being breached and the ichthyoculture pools having

  been transformed into giant

  stewpots that the Halanit colony was dead. Those who didn't freeze to death

  would starveeach a terrible way to die. She realized that her old comrades in

  Rogue Squadron would be horrified at the carnage, as she would have been if the

  Empire had carried this attack out on Thyferra, but she felt no remorse for the

  people doomed by her action.

  They were already dead. Their need for bacta had been desperate, because without

  it their marginal colony could not survive. They could not afford bacta because

  their colony was so poor, hence anyone with enough neurons to form a synapse

  would have seen that the only sensible thing to do was to abandon Halanit or

  choose a method of exploiting the world to generate enough money so it could

  sustain itself.

  / have no obligation to save the stupid from themselves. Even if we had given

  them bacta, another crisis would have wiped them out. The fact that they refused

  to face reality does not make it incumbent upon me to shield them from the

  disaster they so fervently court. Erisi's eyes narrowed as she started a

  strafing run back toward the surface. And they compounded their stupidity by

  consorting with thieves and using bacta for which they could not pay.

  Despite the lack of fire defending the colony, she knew they were anything but a

  defenseless, inoffensive community. Their accepting the bacta from Wedge and the

  others was the equivalent of stabbing a knife into the Thyferran economy. If

  Thyferra al
lowed them to do what they did, other worlds would similarly duck

  their obligations. Other individuals would emulate Wedge, and pirates would

  swarm over the bacta convoys. The rightful reward for providing a vital fluid to

  the galaxy would be denied to Thyferra in an attack as destructive as the one

  she was mounting.

  Rocketing up through the hole in the shield, Erisi rolled out and began a long

  elliptical orbit over the breached shield. "Interceptor One reporting. No

  hostile antiship fire in evidence."

  "We copy, One. The Captain congratulates you on your run and requests you join

  him for the march through the colony."

  "I copy, Control. As ordered." Erisi smiled. We've shown

  Convarion that THDC pilots are not the incompetent nerf-brains he thought we

  were. Now he will show me how powerful stormtroopers are so I won't forget who

  is superior to whom. Not that I ever could, but I shall say nothing. Convarion

  would never believe himself to be my subordinate anyway.

  Gavin didn't realize it was an explosion that had awakened him until a second

  and third blast sounded. He threw off thick layers of blanketshis Tatooine

  upbringing guaranteed that he felt cold even in Halanit's hot bathsand snarled

  as he thrust his feet into cold boots. He fastened them, then stood and strapped

  on his blaster belt as Farl Cort appeared in the doorway of his room. "What's

  happening?"

  Before Cort could answer, Gavin's ears popped with the change in the colony's

  air pressure. Air began to rush out of the room, tugging at the hem of Cort's

  cloak. The little man's face went ashen. "They've breached the shield."

  Gavin grabbed him before he could fall. "Who's they?" "Imperials, I guess.

  There's a Star Destroyer in orbit." "Sithspawn! You should have gotten me up

  when it arrived." Gavin wanted to pound his head against the wall. He had been

  certain that he'd been careful enough to hide his trail so the Corrupter

  couldn't follow him. When it showed up at the convoy hijacking, he'd immediately

  broken his flight and dove away from it. The Xucphra Alazhi's bulk shielded him

  from the destroyer's turbolasers. He knew he was dead unless he exercised the

  only option available to him, a jump to lightspeed, which he did blindly.

  He held the jump for fifteen seconds, which were the longest fifteen seconds in

  his life. Jumping blind into hyperspace was about as stupid as making fat jokes