As terrifying as that was, it was nothing compared to the sight of the X-wing swooping through the chasm. Painted like a brutal, fearsome creature, it appeared more like a predator seeking prey than a war machine piloted by the enemy. Without being able to identify the pilot as he flashed past, Erisi knew it was one of her old squadron-mates.
And she knew the only way she would survive was to get back to her Interceptor and shoot him down.
Gavin flew past the collapsing walkway and saw a hail of laser bolts streaking past him from all angles. Small arms fire. No real threat. He smiled grimly, pulled back on his throttle to reverse his thrust and cut in his repulsor-lift coils. He flipped the X-wing’s lasers over to single fire, then applied enough rudder to bring the fighter’s nose around toward his tormentors. He leveled the fighter out, killed his thrust, then let the repulsor-lift coils propel him up through the chasm.
Using his rudder pedals, he turned the ship left and right. He dropped his crosshairs on the stormtroopers shooting at him and returned their fire. Whereas their laser bolts skipped harmlessly off the X-wing’s shields, his shots proved to be anything but harmless. It wasn’t that they were sufficiently powerful to pierce a stormtrooper’s armored chestplate as much as they evaporated it, and most of the person beneath it.
Part of Gavin rebelled at the slaughter. The stormtroopers had no chance of survival facing him, but they did not break and run. They stood their ground, giving their lives for the dead creation of a dead Emperor. They gain nothing from this. Why? Given enough time, I will kill them all.
Gavin slowly nodded. Right, they’re buying time. The Corrupter is scrambling more TIEs. If I stick around, I’m not leaving.
He kicked his throttle in and sped up his ascent. He still sprayed knots of stormtroopers and concentrated a lot of fire on the uppermost region, trying to get the one black Imperial uniform lurking amid a squad of stormtroopers. Most of them went down, but he couldn’t tell if he got the officer or not. Analysis of the sensor data may answer that question. I hope so.
Realizing he had done all he could for the people of Halanit, Gavin accelerated the X-wing and launched it through the hole in the transparisteel shield. “They’ll pay, Cort, they’ll pay dearly for this.” Rolling out to port, he pointed his fighter west and began his run home.
Erisi pulled the Interceptor’s hatch shut and dropped into the pilot’s seat as the X-wing jetted up and out through the shield hole. She pulled on her helmet and strapped in, then went for an engine start.
Both refused.
Diagnostics scrolled over her primary monitor. Reactor chambers are too cold for a start. She punched up a directory of systems software, then worked her way down through a hierarchy of choices until she got to a list of emergency overrides. She glanced at her weapons display, then picked a program that drained the energy from her lasers into the reactor cores to warm them enough for a restart. She waited until the temperature had climbed sufficiently, then restarted the engines.
The twin ion engines roared to life and sent a gentle thrum through the cockpit. Erisi shunted energy back into recharging the lasers, then cut the repulsor-lift generators in, retracted the landing gear, and throttled up to head after the X-wing. Coming up and around, she dropped her Interceptor on his tail, but saw he already had ten kilometers worth of lead over her. Even with the Interceptor’s greater speed, I won’t catch him before he escapes the atmosphere and goes to lightspeed.
Erisi reached over and punched up a broad band frequency selection for her comm unit. “Fleeing X-wing, this is Commander Erisi Dlarit of the Thyferran Home Defense Corps. Land at once or be destroyed.”
“Erisi?”
She recognized the voice immediately. “Gavin? Listen to me. You have to stop. If you don’t, they’ll get you.”
“Don’t you mean you’ll get me?”
Erisi smiled. “No, the Imps will get you. Surrender to me and I can protect you from them.”
“How should I do that? Give you my override codes so I end up like Corran?” Gavin’s laughter stung her ears. “You want me, come get me.”
“I would if you weren’t so intent on running.” By shunting more energy to her engines, she could increase her speed, but her lasers would have no power to shoot Gavin when she caught him. If I had proton torpedoes, on the other hand Iceheart is a fool. “I never would have thought you a coward, Gavin.”
Gavin laughed again. “A year ago, maybe even three months ago, you could have gotten me to turn back with that taunt, but not now. I’m not nearly as stupid as you’d need, for me to engage you while Corrupter comes around and cuts me off.”
“Rationalize your cowardice any way you want, Gavin.” She knew she couldn’t get him to turn around, so she tried to hurt him as their ships left Halanit’s atmosphere. “Run away so you can come back later. Know you’ve doomed the people of Halanit. And know I’ll kill you when next we meet.”
“You’ll pay for what you’ve done here, Erisi.” Emotion filled Gavin’s words, pinching their tone. “For you, getting out of this alive will be impossible.”
“Impossible is what Rogues do best.”
“Yeah, but you were never really a Rogue, were you?”
Kilometers began to scroll up impossibly quickly on Erisi’s range finder as the X-wing ran up to lightspeed and entered hyperspace. Erisi watched it vanish, then pulled back on the Interceptor’s yoke and looped the fighter back toward Halanit. No, I was never a Rogue, Gavin. I never relinquished my grip on reality.
She smiled as the Corrupter came into view around the curve of the moon. “I know where the true power in the galaxy is, and I know that if you keep trying to defy the impossible, eventually you fail. This is your time to fail.”
Chapter Twenty
The feeling in Corran’s gut was as cold as Wedge’s narration of the holographic imaging from Gavin’s X-wing. At various points in the presentation Winter hit keys on the datapad connected to the holoprojector. The image froze, then the computer enlarged and enhanced an image from the background. They’re all of dead bodies—dead civilian bodies.
Corran shivered and felt Mirax gently rub her hand along his spine. I was there not a week before this happened. I probably talked to some of those people, ate with them, joked with them. Corran realized that, as he had with his comrades in CorSec, he had mentally prepared himself for losing friends who were in the squadron. All of them accepted the risks of warfare and all of them had the same things at stake. Riv Shiel’s death had surprised him, but he was able to tell himself that Shiel had died well, in combat, just as he would have wanted to go.
The people of Halanit however He shook his head. “They were never meant to find themselves in that situation.”
Mirax leaned heavily against him. “I know, but Isard put them there, you didn’t.”
The glow panels in the small briefing room came up, in no way easing the severe expression on Wedge’s face. “First I want to state publicly that, in my opinion, Gavin could have done nothing more than he did at Halanit. While he has felt he somehow led the Corrupter to Halanit, we know that isn’t true. Halanit stopped asking anyone but us for bacta after our first run, and the tanker pilots knew where they had dropped off a supply. It was easy for Iceheart to tag them as a target—I’m fairly certain she would have found out who we had supplied no matter how we got the bacta to the worlds, but we could have made it tougher for her. The fact is that Iceheart has publicized what happened at Halanit to frighten others into paying Thyferra for the gift of bacta we made to them.”
Wedge’s brown eyes narrowed. “Since Gavin’s departure, there has been no direct communication from Halanit. According to the messages Iceheart has sent out, the Corrupter initiated a planetary barrage that expanded upon the damage the bombers and stormtroopers had inflicted. It is my assumption that no one was left living in the colony. I’m fairly certain that after all was said and done, the place was sown with mines and other boobytraps to kill survivors or rescuers.”
>
Nawara Ven’s braintails twitched. “So you’re saying we’re not going to try to save any of the people there.”
Wedge shook his head, his reluctance to forgo such a mission thick in his voice. “We do not have the ships we need to help them. If even one-tenth of the individuals there survived, that would dwarf our transport capabilities. I do know the New Republic is sending some ships to Halanit, but they don’t expect to find survivors either.”
He opened his hands. “I know that’s not easy for any of you to hear. Innocent individuals have suffered because of something we did, but what we did meant they lived just that much longer. Had we not acted, that colony would have been dead weeks ago. We kept it going that much longer. We were able to lift a blanket of oppression and misery from them, and this disaster cannot devalue what we did. Iceheart made choices that raised our conflict to another level.”
“She has to pay.” Gavin hammered a fist down onto the arm of his chair. “Iceheart and Erisi and all of them have to pay.”
“And pay they will.” The edge sliding into Wedge’s voice brought Corran’s head up. “Ysanne Isard has forgotten the lesson she taught the Rebellion by giving us a sick Coruscant. She’s forgotten that our strength is our freedom and her weakness is her link to the sources of production for bacta. We can go anywhere and be anywhere, but she’s limited. She is limited in how much she can cover, so we can hit her where she’s open and run when she has our targets protected.”
Inyri Forge raised a hand. “But we ran this time, and she hit an innocent world. How do we prevent that from happening again?”
“Two ways. First, with Booster’s help, we’ll deal the bacta we capture to traders and let them sell it. The price is high enough for them to accept the risks. We can have them undercut Isard’s prices or we cut them off from future shipments. In return we can get the arms, munitions, and spare parts we need to continue doing what we’re doing. We’ll insulate places by allowing them to deny knowing where the bacta came from and we’ll make traders very happy with us. The traders become a cutout for us and Isard can’t complain too loudly about them because if she does, she loses access to the supplies she needs to maintain her forces.
“Second and more important, we have a score to settle with her. Thyferra has dozens of small bacta-producing colonies out there. We’re going to pick one and destroy it. The mission will be dirty and dangerous. What bacta we can’t haul away we’ll destroy. And we’ll let her know that we’ll continue to hit her colonies every time she takes her war to an innocent party.”
He brought his hands together. “There are analogies that can be drawn between Halanit and Alderaan, and I wish neither incident had happened. What’s important to remember is that both worlds died because evil has been allowed to run unchecked. In our pleasure at defeating the Empire, it’s all too easy to ignore the nasty bits and pieces of its evil that survived. The New Republic is out hunting down Warlord Zsinj. I’m sure, out there, somewhere, there are still people who will yet come forward to overthrow what we’ve done and try to reestablish the Empire. This war is really far from over, but if we don’t realize that and act accordingly, there will be more Alderaans, more Halanits.
“All of us have tried to keep this idea uppermost in our minds, but we saw a diminished Isard as a diminished threat. I know I was doing that, not consciously, but I still was doing it. No more.” Wedge’s hands folded down into fists and crashed against each other. “Isard is killing innocents, extorting money, enslaving the Vratix, and holding prisoners we want freed. Each and every single thing we do from this point forward is going to be part of the plan to bring her down.”
“However.” Wedge’s voice took on a huskiness. “This war isn’t going to be over fast. After this strike at a bacta colony, we’ll be moving into a protracted conflict where we’ll be more pirate than we are army. It will be exhausting but, as long as she doesn’t get her hands on an Interdictor Cruiser, we’ll be able to stay ahead of her and wear her down. We’ll frustrate her and make her impatient. Then we’ll have her.”
Corran found himself smiling. Wedge was correct in that without an Interdictor Cruiser to prevent the X-wings from running and hiding in hyperspace, Iceheart’s navy would be ineffective against them. We’re okay unless someone jumps in on top of a ship the way the Corrupter did. Barring that, we can fly in, shoot off a bunch of proton torpedoes, take out some freighters, and flee before Iceheart can stop us. As long as we don’t run out of torpedoes, we should be fine.
Wedge’s head came up. “Tycho and I are working with Bror Jace on compiling a list of viable targets for our punitive strike. When we have a selection made we’ll convene another meeting and begin planning of the operation. Until then, your time is your own, but stay here on the station. We’ll go when we have a plan in place, and I’m hoping that will be sooner than later. Thanks. You’re all dismissed.”
Corran sat back for a moment, then let Mirax tug him to his feet. “Lots to think about.”
She nodded in agreement and slipped her left arm over his shoulders. “I don’t know about you, but I want a drink and something to eat. Do you want to hit a tapcaf?”
“Sure. How about the Hype?”
“Food’s better at Flarestar.”
“Actually the service is better at Flarestar, but I prefer the decor at Hyperspace.” Flarestar tended to be rather dark and quiet, while Hyperspace was as brilliantly lit as its namesake. “The mood I’m drifting into isn’t one I want to aid and abet with dim light.”
Mirax gave his shoulder a squeeze. “Lead the way.”
They walked to the station’s core and took the turbolift up to the first of the docking ring’s decks. Hyperspace’s well-lit opening beckoned to them from opposite the lift. The decor consisted mostly of pinks, yellows, and white jumbled together in an odd, asymmetrical manner that Corran found somehow comforting. He’d decided it was that the color selection was repulsive, but the strange angles and mixing prevented any of it from being overwhelming. The Trandoshan who ran the place seemed to have a quasi-mystical respect for shape and form, often seating people in the tapcaf in a way that accentuated the establishment’s visual chaos.
They followed the large sauroid to a corner booth big enough for the entire squadron. Corran considered it wishful thinking on her part. The booth was far enough away from the other patrons that he felt he could talk with Mirax without surrendering privacy, so the Trandoshan’s choice suited him perfectly. A motley silver-and-gold 3PO droid came over to take their order, then bounced off to fill it.
Corran picked at a chipped area of the duraplast table’s edge with his thumbnail. “Wedge made some good points in there. I think he’s right that all of us had really stopped thinking about the seriousness of what we were doing. Face it, since Blackmoon, aside from me, the squadron had really lost no one. I showed back up and that helped reinforce our feeling that we were invincible. Tycho joined us, then Bror reappears, and we’re suddenly reinforced by some of the best pilots the Rebellion ever had.”
“The unit has felt more relaxed.” Mirax shrugged. “I think that’s only partly because of the successes you’ve had. You are good, but I think you’ve all underestimated your opposition. Sure, Isard had to run, and she’s trapped herself on Thyferra; but she’s still tough. Captain Convarion is very aggressive. Avarice’s Captain Sair Yonka is very smart and calculating—the antithesis of us Corellians because he does care what the odds are and does everything he can to maximize his chances of survival. He’s spent much of his career on ships in the Outer Rim chasing down pirates and protecting convoys, so he understands very well what Isard has him doing.
“The Virulence’s Joak Drysso is a stalwart Imperial. I think he’s working with Isard as much to strike back at the Rebellion as he is for any other reason. I was talking with my father, and it’s his guess that Drysso will move over to take command of the Lusanka—assuming, of course, Isard was in command of it to this point. Drysso’s Executive Officer is Captai
n Lakwii Varrscha, so she’ll be moved up in his place. I had to outrun her when she was commanding a Customs corvette. Tactics weren’t innovative—standard Imp, utterly by the book—but tactics for an Imperial Star Destroyer have never really been subtle anyway.”
Corran nodded as the serving droid put tumblers of Corellian whisky in front of them, then accompanied it with a steaming, tentacled mass of noodles and thin-sliced vegetables drenched in a green sauce. “Thanks, I think.” He glanced at Mirax as the droid retreated. “Is this what we ordered?”
“I think so.” She stabbed a fork into it, twirled it and lifted a dripping noodle coil to her mouth. She chewed for a moment, then swallowed. “Unrecognizable, but not inedible.”
“Your enthusiasm is underwhelming.” Corran poked around the food with his fork, speared something crunchy and popped it into his mouth. The sauce seemed a bit hot, but it was flavorful and cleared his sinuses, so he decided against complaining. “Not bad. I also think you’re right on in pointing out that we have been underestimating Isard and her people. Part of it is because Erisi joined them—I think we have a vested interest in seeing her in a negative light. That could easily be a fatal mistake. We need our edge back, and I think Wedge is going to beat that idea into our brains from this point forward.”
Corran looked up as Ooryl entered the tapcaf and waved him over. The Gand hesitated for a moment, looked back out into the concourse, then nodded. As he made his way through the jumble of tables, Corran saw three other Gands trailing in his wake, like mynock splitlings drafting off their parent. Only one of them equaled Ooryl’s size—the other two probably massed as much as Ooryl but wore most of it around their middles. I wonder how that works with an exoskeleton?
Ooryl stopped at the edge of the table. “Greetings Corran and Mirax. It is Qrygg’s honor to present to you three Gands from Qrygg’s homeworld of Gand. They are Ussar Vlee, Syron Aalun, and Vviir Wiamdi.”