Someone clapped a couple of times, stopping when no one joined in.
“You’re every bit as brave as they were,” Dreis said. “I saw that just a few days ago. I know in the next hour I’ll see it again. We’ll rely on one another up there, like we always do. And as long as we do that, I’ll go up against anything in the galaxy and like our chances. All right, that’s it. Techs have already started preflight. Get to your birds in ten minutes and I’ll see you up there.”
Col remained motionless as the other pilots and techs began filing out of the room.
“Tough break, kid,” said Puck. “Stay sharp—if they can get more birds flying they’re going to need pilots.”
“But Red Squadron’s got its twelve,” Col said. “So even if that happens, I’ll be at the back of the line.”
Puck started to say something, but Col turned away. “Just leave me alone,” he said, leaning his forehead against the wall. The ancient stone felt soothingly smooth and cool.
The room quieted and when Col looked up he was alone. The only sound was the hum of the air scrubbers fighting their rearguard action against the jungle moon’s relentless humidity. The chairs were askew, and ration bar wrappers and half-empty cups of caf dotted the tabletops.
Someone needs to clean this up—if Colonel Cor sees the ready room like this the demerits will fly.
Except there wouldn’t be a next briefing. Soon everything around him would be part of a cooling debris field in the earliest stages of becoming a ring of Yavin. What was the point of cleaning up? What was the point of doing anything except waiting to die?
The fury came all at once. Chairs flew, tables overturned and still Col raged on, looking for new targets. He spotted his flight helmet, hanging by its chin strap from a rack on the wall. That would do nicely, he thought, taking a step toward the helmet and the one hanging next to it.
The matte-green one hanging next to it.
Oh.
The door opened and Antilles stared at the wreckage and Col standing in the center of it, breathing heavily.
“I guess you forgot your helmet,” Col said, his voice low and strange in his ears.
“Kelemah had to ask where it was,” Antilles said, stepping carefully over a tangle of fallen chairs. “Not the best way to start a hop.”
Antilles avoided Col’s eyes as he made his way to the rack, took his helmet down, and picked his way back to the door. But then he paused and turned.
“I’m sorry you’re not going up with us,” Antilles said. “I mean that, Col. And I had nothing to do with that idiot nickname.”
“You’ve got no reason to be sorry,” Col said with a smirk. “You get to fly against the Empire, while good pilots like me sit down here and do nothing. Just remember that you’re flying for all of us—and you better not let us down.”
Antilles nodded, but his eyes had turned hard and flinty.
“I’ll fly for you, Col. And for a lot of other people, too. The whole galaxy’s counting on us, you know. You’re not alone in this fight—and you never will be. Unless you insist on pushing everybody away.”
The sound of Antilles’s departing footsteps grew fainter and was lost amid distant voices, whining machinery, and muffled announcements—the activity of a rebel base ready for war.
Col listened for a moment longer, then began to right the tables and chairs.
—
When he entered the war room Col immediately spotted Princess Leia, a slim figure in white at the main command table with Dodonna and other rebel bigwigs. He scanned the room and found a knot of orange flight suits at an auxiliary display: Rue, Chan, Quersey, and Kelemah.
Col steeled himself for their reaction, but the others simply nodded, with Rue and Chan making room for him at the table.
“Battle station’s orbiting the gas giant,” Chan said. “Less than fifteen minutes to firing range.”
“So when do they call Kay-One-Zero?” Col asked.
“Don’t think they’re planning to evacuate,” Quersey said. “Most of the essential equipment left with the fleet. It’s all in the hands of the pilots upstairs.”
And there’s nothing I can do about it, Col thought. The pilots were the last line of defense against the Empire’s planet killer. They’d need every advantage they could get—and a lot of luck.
Kelemah tapped at a readout on the tactical display, muttering at what he saw.
“Problem with one of our birds, Kel?” Chan asked.
“Port stabilizer on Red Twelve’s misaligned. But Naeco knows to compensate for it. I’m more worried about Red Two. We had to do a patch job on the stern hydraulic lines after Scarif.”
“Wedge can handle it,” Chan assured him.
Col retraced schematics in his mind and didn’t like what he found.
“If those lines fail, his micro-maneuvering controls will go, too.”
“Antilles knows that and still wanted to go,” Kelemah said. “It was fly with the patches or don’t fly at all.”
“That’s a big risk,” Col said, which drew a bark of laughter from Quersey.
“Look around, Col. We’re all part of the biggest risk in the history of the galaxy.”
Over the speakers, Gold Leader announced the start of the Y-wings’ attack run, with Red Leader directing his X-wings to cut across the battle station’s axis and draw the Imperials’ fire.
Col stared at the tactical display, trying to match the bright blips indicating the fighters’ positions with the chatter on the squadron channel. The X-wings had broken into pairs and trios, raking the surface of the battle station with laserfire. They were a distraction, harrying the Imperial defenses while the Y-wings raced for the vulnerable exhaust port. Pilots he’d served alongside were risking their lives for a slight increase in the Alliance’s odds.
“They’re outflying those turbolasers,” Kelemah grunted. “Those guns are meant for capital ships, not starfighters.”
But then Porkins announced he had a problem, and the red dot that represented Red Six slowed. An agonized yell was drowned in static, and the dot vanished.
“So long, Piggy,” Rue said quietly. “You will be avenged.”
An alarm sent controllers scrambling. Kelemah waved a mottled hand at new lights blinking on the tactical readout.
“TIEs,” Rue said. “If the Empire’s jamming our sensors, those fighters will be right on top of our birds before they’re detected.”
A warning went out to the pilots, and the table became a shifting constellation of red and green. Col realized he was gripping the edge of the table so hard that his knuckles were white. He told himself to relax, then realized the other pilots were doing the same thing.
A green dot attached itself to John D., and a moment later the rebel veteran was dead. Then Skywalker took a glancing hit from a TIE just before flying into a heavy fire zone. Both the red and green blips vanished, and Chan leaned closer.
“Did we lose the kid?”
The two blips reappeared, and Skywalker called out for Biggs. But it was Red Two that vaporized the Imperial pursuer.
“That’s Antilles’s third kill,” Kelemah said. “Wish he wouldn’t ride those patches so hard.”
“Shh,” Chan said. “Gold Squadron’s starting its attack run.”
Col studied the telemetry from the Y-wings’ sensors and shook his head.
“They’ve got no room to maneuver in that trench. With all those guns down there, their forward shields will take a beating.”
The Y-wing pilots switched on their targeting computers, and numbers began counting down on one section of the readout.
“The guns—they’ve stopped,” Gold Two said in disbelief.
A moment later, TIE fighters swooped in from behind. Col tried to will the targeting numbers closer to zero.
Then Gold Two was dead, followed by Gold Leader. Gold Five, doomed, was warning Red Squadron that the fighters had come from behind. And the Death Star was less than five minutes from clearing the planet.
&
nbsp; Col realized he’d been holding his breath and let it out in a ragged stream. He stared at the tactical readout, trying to count the red dots.
“The other Y-wings are being chewed up,” Chan said, seeing his gaze. “And Red Eight and Red Seven were shot down skirmishing TIEs.”
Dinnes was dead, and Binli, too. Col remembered the pride on their faces after Scarif, how he’d ached for the chance to fly with them.
“The Old Man’s up next,” Rue said. “He’ll make that shot, you watch.”
Col nodded, trying to convince himself. Wasn’t Dreis a legend, with a flight log dating back to the Clone Wars? And didn’t he have Theron and Puck backing him up? He imagined Puck destroying the battle station and becoming a rebel hero—and choosing Col as his wing as the Alliance pursued more victories.
With the Death Star three minutes from firing, Dodonna told Dreis to keep half his group out of range for another potential attack run.
“We won’t get a third shot at this,” Col said, and Chan shushed him.
Dreis ordered Skywalker, Darklighter, and Antilles to hold their positions while Red Nine and Red Eleven kept skirmishing with TIEs.
As the three X-wings swung into the trench, Col found himself muttering under his breath, begging Puck to watch out and urging whatever cosmic forces had shaped the universe to guide Dreis’s torpedo.
Rue stood stock-still at the tactical table, sweat running down his forehead. Quersey kicked relentlessly at the stone floor. Chan gnawed his lower lip.
“That’s six kills for Antilles,” said Kelemah. “I fix something, it stays fixed.”
Col stared at the three dots approaching the blinking cross that marked the exhaust port, trying to speed them up.
“Keep your eyes open for those fighters,” Dreis said. A chime announced that his targeting computer had the target marked and locked in.
“Come on, boss! Come on!” Col said.
And then there was a cry and the blip representing Red Twelve blinked out. Puck was dead. Col looked down, blinking hard.
“You’d better let her loose!” Naytaan urged. “They’re right behind me!”
“Almost there,” Dreis said, his voice almost pleading.
“I can’t hold them!” Naytaan warned, and then wailed in anguish.
Another chime, Dreis yelled, “It’s away,” and a dozen conversations started at once.
“It’s a hit!” someone yelled on the squadron channel. Col stared at Quersey, seeing the same wild hope he knew was on his own face.
“Negative,” Dreis said as the green dots closed on his position. “It didn’t go in. Just impacted on the surface.”
He ordered Skywalker to get set up for his attack run. And then the Old Man’s starboard engine was scrap. Dreis howled until his X-wing smashed into the station’s surface.
A cool voice announced the Death Star’s time to firing range: a minute and closing.
“Biggs, Wedge, let’s close it up,” said Skywalker, sounding far older than the young man in dusty clothes who’d sat next to Col. “We’re going in. We’re going in full throttle.”
The three X-wings raced into the trench with Skywalker leading and Darklighter and Antilles farther behind, to impede the fighters everyone knew were coming. At those near-suicidal speeds, Col knew, any mistake would send a starfighter careening into the trench wall—or another T-65.
Red Nine vanished, leaving Red Eleven as a solitary red blip surrounded by green dots.
“Get Surrel out of there,” Col begged. “He can’t survive those odds.”
“No,” Chan said. “But he can buy them a little more time.”
“Fighters,” Antilles said. “Coming in point three.”
As Skywalker’s targeting computer picked up its lock, something blinked on Kelemah’s tactical readout and the tech’s maroon skin turned a pale salmon.
“Antilles is hit,” he said. “Shot severed the hydraulic lines. If he doesn’t get clear he’s as big a danger as those TIEs.”
Col could almost see Wedge fighting a slewing and bucking starfighter while trapped in the narrow trench.
“Tell him, Kel!” Col urged.
“I’ll never get through.”
“I can’t stay with you,” Antilles said bleakly, and the red blip zoomed away from the trench. Seconds later, the dot representing Surrel disappeared. Red Squadron had been reduced to Skywalker and Darklighter.
“The TIEs are accelerating,” Chan said. “Now it’s a race.”
“Hurry up, Luke!” Darklighter said, then hesitated.
“Wait!” he said plaintively, a split second before he died.
Thirty seconds to firing.
Col spotted the red blip that was Wedge—heading back toward the trench with a cloud of TIEs closing in.
“What’s he doing?”
Kelemah studied his instruments. “He’s charged the auxiliary hydraulics. But that’ll only give him a minute of fine control at most. If he goes back in that trench he’ll never come out.”
Col silently begged Wedge not to throw his life away—not after having survived such odds. But he suspected he’d have done the same thing, recklessly trying to rejoin the fight rather than let people think he’d run.
Nobody who’d flown a T-65 would say that. But did Wedge realize that right now? And if their positions had been reversed—as Col had so fervently hoped—would Col have realized it?
And then everything seemed to happen at once. The Death Star cleared the planet. Skywalker’s targeting computer shut down, and the Womp Rat Kid claimed nothing was wrong. The freighter that had returned Princess Leia to Yavin 4 came out of nowhere, scattering Skywalker’s pursuers with a suicidal charge. And Wedge, instead of dropping into the trench using the last drizzles of hydraulic fluid, turned his X-wing away from the Death Star.
Skywalker’s torpedoes fired—Col thought he heard the young pilot gasp as they ignited—and the noise in the war room rose in pitch and volume.
The Death Star vanished from the tactical boards, leaving just four red blips against a blank expanse.
Col and the other pilots stared down at the readouts. No one breathed. No one dared to speak.
“Target destroyed,” a controller said, and the war room descended into pandemonium. Col found himself pounding Rue on the back, hugging Quersey and Kelemah and slapping hands with Chan so hard that it hurt.
Then he was swept up in the throng of pilots, soldiers, and technicians rushing for the main hangar. They arrived in time to see the freighter set down outside the temple, with a Y-wing landing nearby—and two battered X-wings easing into the hangar.
Most of the crowd headed for the T-65 with the five chevrons on each wing, but Col’s destination was the X-wing attended by only a scattering of rebels. He was waiting at the bottom of the ladder when Wedge slowly descended, facing away from Col.
Wedge removed his helmet, his back still turned. His hair was matted with sweat and his shoulders rose and fell.
When Wedge turned he saw Col and took an instinctive step backward.
“There was nothing I could have done—”
And then Col wrapped him in a bear hug.
“You took out six TIEs, ran that trench at full throttle, kept your bird intact without its maneuvering systems—you did all that and then you tried to go back, you crazy fool,” he said. “You did everything anyone could have done and more.”
When he finally let Wedge go, the other pilot gaped at him.
“I just hope everyone sees it the way you do.”
Col threw an arm around his shoulders.
“If they don’t, tell them it was Fake Wedge up there,” he said. “Because I’d be honored to be mistaken for you—for any of you. Now come on. There’s a celebration waiting for us.”
The fear—which I know will last till I see the winged eyeball silhouette of TIE fighters tearing headlong toward me through black space—metastasizes in my gut as Dodonna’s briefing comes to an end. But there’s another feeling, the
same that I felt before the mutiny on the Rand Ecliptic.
Peace.
A feeling of serene completeness, as if the nomadic path that took me to the Imperial Academy, to my first post on the Rand Ecliptic, and to my subsequent defection to the Alliance, has brought me full circle. As if, parsecs from Tatooine, billions of kilometers from Tosche Station and the moisture farms of my family, I’ve found home again.
I heard his voice in the briefing.
I saw his farmboy face, the same that used to smirk at me before a run on Beggar’s Canyon or when he’d waste a womp rat at full pitch.
But still I didn’t believe my eyes.
The kid’s sandy tuft of hair disappears out the tunnel from Dodonna’s debrief like the rump of a fleeing bantha. I call after him, but he doesn’t hear. I caught wind from Wedge that the princess had been brought back by a farmboy and a smuggler, but there’s more agricultural systems under the Empire’s boot than the grains of sand on a Mon Calamari beach. Even a top-of-the-line protocol droid couldn’t calculate the odds of the farmboy being a son of Tatooine, much less the only bush pilot besides myself who’s ever threaded his way through Stone Needle in Beggar’s Canyon.
But it feels so purposeful. So fated.
Just as my path has led me here, to the point of crisis, where I can strike a blow for freedom, it’s brought my best friend as well. What luck. It’s as if all the stories we heard as children were true.
I push my way through rebel flight officers and pilots and get tangled with an astromech droid, banging a chunk of skin from my left shin. Shouting in pain, I hop sideways on one leg straight into Jek Porkins. I sink into the side of the man, and he throws an arm around my head to try to ruffle my mustache with his ham-sized fingers.
“Watch where you’re goin, laserbrain.” Porkins chuckles like a Hutt and I manage to wrench myself free of his squidgy embrace. Most of the Alliance veteran pilots—loose a term as that is—were accommodating to new recruits, especially given the nascency of their fighter squadrons. But Porkins, a cocky pilot from Bestine, seems to think it’s his duty to institute ritual hazing, even on the brink of battle.
“Hope you’re better off your feet than on them,” he says with a grin.