by Kevin Hearne
“Only twenty-four? We’re one ship with a couple of blasters and a few missiles!”
“That’s all we need. And the TIE fighter pilots might be on lunch break or something, so we should be clear for a minute or two. We have speed and surprise on our side.” I probably sounded more confident than I actually felt, but that is the only way to engage the enemy—something I picked up from Han. He told me, “Never go into battle saying, ‘Well, I guess I’ll fight for my life now, if I really have to.’ Once committed, kid, you have to commit fully, or you won’t survive.” I pointed the nose down toward the Interdictor and accelerated for the first time to full attack speed, and it was breathtaking. The Desert Jewel was definitely faster than my X-wing.
“Luke, they’ve seen us by now! You can’t surprise them.”
“I’m talking about the surprise we picked up from the Chekkoo clan on Rodia. And the surprise that we would attack them at all, considering their advantages.”
The Interdictor’s batteries swung up and began spraying green bolts from quad laser cannons, but most of it was for show, since only a couple of them had the proper field of fire. The first squadron of TIE fighters, which must have been on alert or else eating lunch in their cockpits, began to swarm out from underneath.
“Let’s get out of here!” Nakari insisted. “This is insane!”
I didn’t think so; I wasn’t simply charging in with the hope that things would work out in my favor. I had a plan, and crazy people rarely had them. “I prefer to think of it as risky,” I said, and saying that reminded me of the conversation I had with Leia on the Patience. Surely this wasn’t as dangerous as going after the Death Star. “Artoo, which gravity projector should I target?”
ITS PORT SIDE, OUR STARBOARD.
“Both of them?”
YES.
“That complicates things.”
“They weren’t complicated before?” Nakari asked. “That cruiser has to be shielded.”
“It is, but this is one of the Immobilizer models, and we’ve been studying them since the Empire has been using them against us on our raids. They have twelve shield generators—some of them ray shields, some particle shields. We take out the particle shield generators for the port side first, then go after the gravity projectors with whatever we have left.”
“While dodging TIE fighters and quad laser fire. Do you hear yourself?”
Both were coming at me now, and I sent the Jewel into a spin away from an aggressive TIE pilot. Nakari missed seeing it, so focused was she on convincing me to flee. “I did say it was complicated.”
“Luke, let’s just run to the edge of the interdiction field! The Jewel is fast enough!”
I’d thought of that already, and perhaps it would have worked if I’d been in the cockpit instead of trying to make the caf machine produce something drinkable, but we’d lost too much time and space in those ten to fifteen seconds while I was unable to do anything. “No, they sucked us in too close. The TIEs are already on us.”
Nakari turned her head, saw the vast assortment of death heading our way, jerked in her seat, and exclaimed, “Gah!” She didn’t press her point after that, seeing that it was too late. Situations develop fast when fighters close on one another so quickly. We wove through the first six TIEs, avoiding their fire and head-on collisions; I managed to wing one of them with our laser cannons—we had three now, not just one—and it careened into another, taking both out. I didn’t bother firing at the cruiser, since there was no way our lone ship could weaken the shields enough to punch through, but I would gladly pull the trigger on the TIE fighters whenever opportunity afforded.
The Empire had stopped making these particular Interdictor cruisers because of their vulnerabilities, but while they weren’t making any new ones, there were still plenty of them out there. The Alliance kept running into them, so we had been training recently on how to eliminate them before our raiding parties got wiped out by their escorts of destroyers and cruisers. The Empire was putting gravity projectors into Star Destroyers now, much more difficult to take out for a group and impossible for a single ship to damage. To my knowledge no one had ever taken out an Immobilizer with a single ship before, but I’d theorized about the possibility with Wedge. I wouldn’t be trying it except that we were desperate—and we also had a bonus weapon that we’d picked up on Rodia. The Empire must have been frantic to find us if it had sent this one Interdictor to the edge of Hutt Space without any escorts.
Already in touch with the Force, I opened myself more to it and slipped into a nonthinking state of awareness, anticipation, and reaction, sliding the Desert Jewel into an attack vector that minimized my profile to the Interdictor’s gunners and led us straight to the portside shield generators.
We were slightly faster than the standard TIE fighters. After the first half of the squadron passed by and then banked around for another pass, the second half emerged from underneath the ship, coming up on either side of the cruiser and moving at me in a pincer formation, albeit behind me so as not to catch themselves in a crossfire. Their shots were sloppy and they didn’t care about hitting the ship, depending on the shields to ward off the stray bolts. The Jewel handled well—this was her first test at full speed under heavy fire—and we took a couple of hits that reduced our shields to 70 percent. I was glad they had fully recharged before we encountered this situation.
“Artoo, light up their particle shield generator for me on the targeting holo.” A small rectangle flashed and blinked for me on the bladed edge of the cruiser, and I assigned two of the Jewel’s six concussion missiles to it while also locating it with the Force. If I didn’t bring the shield down, nothing else would work; the missiles had to get there. The TIE fighters would do nothing about them, but the cruiser’s gunners would probably attempt to shoot them down. Spinning and juking my way down and feeling the ideal moment approach, I took two more hits from TIE fighters before launching the missiles. Cruiser fire aimed at me ceased and shifted to the missiles, which gave me more leeway to dodge the TIEs. I pulled the nose of the Jewel starboard so that we would dive past the shield generators shortly after the missiles hit. The sensors could pick up whether we scored a hit or not.
The cruiser itself represented a blind spot. The hangar that spat out the TIE fighters was underneath the ship and I couldn’t see what lurked underneath. I squeezed the blaster trigger and held it down as we approached the edge; two TIE fighters emerged from beneath the ship—the vanguard of the second squadron—caught bolts in their cockpits, and exploded. Four down, twenty to go—though the second squadron was still in the process of scrambling into action.
The concussion missiles struck one after the other, the first weakening the generator’s own shield and the second following up, penetrating and destroying it. Before we passed it, another hit took our shields down to 50 percent, and then we were briefly hidden from line-of-sight as I pulled the Jewel up to skate underneath the cruiser, just a meter above the shields to make it impossible for the TIEs above the cruiser to track me—to their scanners I was invisible now, lost in the shadow of the Interdictor. I planned to come up over the opposite side and take a shot at the newly vulnerable gravity projectors.
I didn’t hold my course, however; the TIE fighters above the cruiser’s plane would be waiting for me in a direct line from where I disappeared, filling the space with ambush fire. I drifted aft so that I would reappear on the back starboard corner, and from there I’d fly up and over the bridge before attacking the projectors. Three TIEs pursued me from behind but couldn’t get a lock. Their wings wouldn’t allow them to get as close to the underside of the cruiser as the Jewel, and they couldn’t line up a decent angle in the brief time they had before I cleared the other side. They took a few shots anyway to make it look like they were trying, and the bolts dissipated harmlessly against the cruiser’s shields. The Interdictor’s gunners either didn’t see me or were holding their fire to avoid tagging the TIEs; a couple more launched out of the hangar and soo
n they would all be after me.
As I cleared the starboard edge and climbed up, green bolts zipped past forward of my position where the topside TIEs had predicted I would emerge. The shooters followed too close behind that to correct course once they spotted me—they had to bank around for another pass. But some of the trailing fighters spotted me and banked to intercept. One of them banked right into a TIE that shot up from under the ship—two more down. I kept hugging the structure of the cruiser to make a firing solution difficult for their laser cannons, and as soon as I cleared the bridge I targeted the twin bulges of the port gravity projectors and sent two concussion missiles each at them. That wouldn’t necessarily set us free; with two of its projectors still working, we’d have to clear the Interdictor’s simulated mass by a good deal before our hyperdrive could engage, and the cruiser would have plenty of time to redirect those starboard projectors toward Kupoh if its crew was alert and operating efficiently. We needed a kill shot—and we had one on board, purchased at great expense from Utheel Outfitters’ secret catalog. The problem was that it might kill us in the bargain. There was no time to think it over; if it was going to work at all, I had to use it now, before the missiles hit, because the physics demanded it. I couldn’t expect to get another pass with only 50 percent of my shields remaining—the TIEs were forming up and responding to the surprise of my attack, the other squadron would be fully deployed any second, and when it was eighteen against one, they would surely deplete my shields before I could take my shot.
So I armed and released the Utheel Rockcrusher Compact Seismic Charge, letting it fall toward the rearmost gravity projector from the bracketed housing on the bottom of the Jewel. It didn’t have a guidance system or any propellant, so it followed the Jewel’s trajectory upon release and would detonate on a proximity trigger. It fell in an arc rather than continuing straight on our course because the gravity projector was still working.
Nakari sucked in a breath and whispered, “Uh-oh,” when she saw me press the button, but I couldn’t spare a glance in her direction.
As the gases inside the seismic charge mixed prior to detonation, I pulled up and leveled out, streaking past the batteries of lasers. Then I kept going in as straight a line as possible, thrusting past the Interdictor as the concussion missiles hit and running for all the Jewel was worth, and my path was like a needle pulling a string of TIE fighters behind me. They spread out in the back into a cone so they could all try to blast me.
I stole a quick look at Nakari now that I had the time to do so, and she was breathing heavily, her eyes wide and her hands clutching the armrests—or at least as well as she could. Her left hand wasn’t up to clutching anything yet, but it looked tense. The Jewel took a direct hit on the rear deflector as a result of my distraction, and our shields fell to 20 percent.
Right afterward, the seismic charge dropped into the open, unshielded wound of the gravity projector and detonated, its massive shock wave shredding the structure of the cruiser from the inside so that the huge ship bulged and came apart in a mess of bodies and metal, shearing the front half from the rear completely and rendering them into lifeless hunks of space debris heading in opposite directions. We picked up a tiny bit of speed as all the simulated gravity ceased to exist. We were clear to jump to hyperspace, and I reminded Artoo of the fact.
But the shock wave continued in our direction, too, plowing through the trailing TIE fighters behind us and shuddering them apart. We watched on the scanner as the red triangles representing the enemy disappeared one by one. They kept firing green bolts, as if they were determined to see us dead before they died themselves. Almost all of it sailed past our cockpit into the void, but the concentrated fire was too much to dodge forever and another bolt clipped us, essentially wiping out our shields except for a courtesy veil of energy as sheer as a negligee. The fire eased up as the TIEs were destroyed, but the closest one with the best angle landed one on the rear starboard and, a fraction of a second before it was obliterated, took out the sublight engine there, which spelled the end for us.
Having nothing else to distract me from approaching death, I felt a spike of fear shoot through me, cold and unforgiving. We’d never outrun the shock wave now, and though I’d overcome daunting odds to this point, I wouldn’t get any points for almost surviving. I was about to turn to Nakari and apologize for getting us killed when Artoo bleeped in triumph, flipped the hyperdrive, and we shot forward into a white blur, leaving behind a puzzle of wreckage for Imperial latecomers.
“We … we made it? We made it! Woooo!” Nakari pounded her armrests and stomped her feet on the floor until she ran out of breath. “Three kinds of dragon dump, Luke, I don’t ever want to do that again! I hate space battles, you hear? All I can do is sit here and clench and pucker and hope I don’t die.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
She rounded on me, her relief disappearing as she remembered that I had been the one to leap into that battle. “Charging that cruiser was stupid, Luke! We should be dead!”
I shrugged. She was right, but coming out of the battle fugue, I was beginning to feel something that was two parts relief, one part euphoria, and one part smug. “It worked.”
Realizing she couldn’t second-guess success, she said, “Yeah, but … yeah.” She broke into a grin. “Okay, that was some pretty good piloting. Maybe even legendary.”
“Don’t tell your dad.”
She laughed. “I won’t.”
“I’m going to go check on Drusil.”
“Okay, I’ll yell if we’re pulled into realspace again.”
Entering the quarters, I wrapped my arms around Artoo and told him he was the best droid in the galaxy, but he couldn’t tell Threepio I said that or I’d have to deal with passive-aggressive complaints for the next ten years. “Thanks for the save.”
R2-D2 burbled happily, and I turned to Drusil and inquired after her health.
Her spine looked even more rigid than normal as she sat, and her voice was thicker, more muffled. “I am recovering from glandular excitement, thank you for asking.”
“Well, I … I beg your pardon? Is this a bad time?”
“I am told it is a biological phenomenon not unlike the aftereffects of adrenaline in humans.”
“Oh, that kind of excitement! Good. No, I mean—I’m sorry I worried you. Er. We’re safe for the moment, anyway, en route to Kupoh.”
“We should have perished. Mathematically we had almost no chance of survival once we attacked. How did you accomplish this?”
I shrugged. “Artoo got us out of there.”
“The droid did his job adequately,” the Givin said, a dismissive summation to which Artoo belched an electronic burst of outrage, “but I speak of the piloting prior to that. Are you a Jedi in fact, Luke Skywalker?”
“No,” I snorted. “Not even close.”
“You refuse the title yet dress yourself in the trappings. You carry a lightsaber. And you used the Force to aid in the piloting of the ship, correct?”
“Yes,” I admitted, wondering where this would lead.
“Astounding. I have never thought of it before, having had no occasion to do so, but the Force must be a fulcrum variable. Yes, I must give this more thought.”
“Sorry—a fulcrum variable?”
“A variable around which improbabilities can be turned to probabilities, or vice versa. The impossible becomes possible—at which point one might as well not even do the math. But of course I can’t help myself in that regard.”
I was relieved that her line of questioning only looped her back into another math trip, but I couldn’t resist asking about the path ahead. I still had my doubts about Drusil’s value to the Alliance, and her questioning about my connections to the Jedi was disconcerting, but she might prove useful to us in the short term while her interests and ours coincided.
“Listen, since you appear to enjoy it, could you maybe think about the likelihood of us making it to the surface of Kupoh without running into any m
ore Interdictors—or other Imperial contact? If you think it’s improbable, we should abort now and see if we can reach somewhere else, because we can’t make another escape like that with an engine gone and nothing to shoot but laser cannons.”
Drusil’s mouth widened in what I supposed must be joy. She grabbed her datapad and woke it from its sleep. “A task! Excellent! You have my thanks. I will report soon.” Her face turned down and I realized that I had just been dismissed.
THE KUPOH SYSTEM WAS BEAUTIFUL in that it was free of any Imperial fleet ships. “This is good. We’re going to have to land and make repairs,” I said. “The Jewel couldn’t outrun a bantha right now.”
“Do you have someplace in particular in mind?” Nakari asked.
“I will in a minute. Remember that list of Kupohans that Sakhet gave us back on Denon? She probably didn’t expect us to wind up on her home planet, but maybe there’s a name there we can contact.”
“Oh, right! The file we’re supposed to decrypt using Rancor Sauce. Hang on.”
She left the cockpit to retrieve her datapad, and I set a course for a smaller city on the opposite side of the globe from the capital. I’d adjust as necessary—and thanks to the peculiarities of the planet, I was looking forward to the challenges of any adjustments.
Kupoh had achieved a somewhat legendary status among pilots. It was supposed to be constantly buffeted by howling winds—seriously loud, dangerous winds, not gentle breezes—that not only made piloting difficult but also interfered with hearing. So much white noise whipped around on the surface that most offworld beings had to communicate via helmet intercom—either that, or shout. Or use sign language. The Kupohans had evolved their frequency filter organs to screen out all the noise and detect voices, and of course it helped them hunt as well. There was an entire ecosystem of creatures that lived in the wind, animals that rarely if ever landed, spending their entire existence in the air. Pilots had to go in with their shields up or risk taking damage from the larger beasts. And then hope the winds didn’t toss them into the ground like poorly flown kites.
