Wraith Squadron

by Aaron Allston

  "Daydreaming."

  "Traitor." Wedge hit the comm key to send a click, signaling the end of the conversation, and switched back to squadron frequency. "Wraiths, thirty seconds to jump."

  During the first of three long jumps leading them to Doldrums, Kell forced himself to calm down, to settle his nerves.

  He couldn't quite extinguish his jubilation, though. In his first combat mission as a pilot, he hadn't so much as fired a shot at an enemy, but he'd executed tactics that might have saved the Borleias from destruction or saved some of his fellow Wraiths from death under the guns of the Implacable.

  Even Wedge Antilles had been impressed—at least, more impressed than annoyed.

  The jump was long enough, though, that he couldn't just reflect on his recent victory. There was Tyria to consider.

  How would he persuade her that she was wrong about his feelings for her? First, obviously, he'd have to think about her more during the day, to answer her objection on that score . . . What else did he need to do?

  He considered that, approaching the problem from a dozen logical angles, but an answer he had not expected and did not like began to lurk at the periphery of his thinking. Finally it moved in, squeezing aside his other trains of thought, and demanded that he pay attention to it.

  Tyria hadn't been wrong. She was right. You don't actually love her.

  Kell frowned at the traitorous voice. What are you, one of Runt's leftover minds?

  You don't love her. You feel about her the way you did about Tuatara Lone when you were fifteen.

  Tuatara Lone was a holo actress on Sluis Van. Short, shapely, so cute she was toxic, she was particularly adept at portraying madcap girls with odd lifestyles or nosy investigators capable of bluffing their way out of any problem. For three years, Kell had been mesmerized by her, seeing every one of her comedies and dramas, agonizing at night over her beauty, projecting himself into fantasy situations where he'd rescue her from harm or solve a crisis threatening her happiness.

  Then he'd learned that the actress was in fact extremely happily married, with two children and another on the way. Kell, finding himself out of the running in a race he had actually never entered, was crushed. He moped around his home and was nearly fired from his job as a mechanic. Only when he entered the New Republic armed forces and was too busy to do anything but work and sleep had he forgotten his pain.

  Now she was back, Tuatara Lone in all her beauty, hovering before him alongside Tyria. And that drove it home, his two obsessions side by side, as no previous argument had: He really was in love with holograms, images that only dimly reflected the real women they represented.

  Tyria was right. You don't love her.

  I know. Shut up. Just go away. He sighed, dejected.

  Thirteen beeped at him. Startled out of his painful rev- erie, he saw the timer on his main monitor counting down one standard minute—time until arrival in the Xobome system, the uninhabited first stop on their route to Doldrums. He did a visual check around his X-wing, seeing only the usual effect of a hyperspace jump, the corridor of light formations in endless, beautiful motion. Everything normal, and he had enough fuel, just barely, for the two farther stages on to Doldrums.

  At twenty-seven seconds until the end of the jump, the stars appeared as elongated columns like millions of laser beams extending into infinity, and then snapped into a motionless starfield. Immediately a bright glow swallowed the stars, erased them.

  Kell's instrument panels and forward viewports went dark. A bright flash of light rocked his snubfighter. A shower of sparks erupted from his main monitor, landing on his flight suit, threatening to set his legs on fire. There was more smoke in the cockpit than those sparks could have produced.

  He cursed and batted at his legs to put out the sparks. His vision and the viewports cleared, the starfield outside returning to normal. In the distance, he could see one star that was noticeably brighter than all others; if this was indeed the system they were aiming for, that was Xobome, but they'd arrived well outside the region they'd targeted. He could see another X-wing half a klick or so to his starboard, drifting slowly away; he couldn't make out the pilot, but if it was the closest snubfighter to him, it should be Runt.

  His instruments remained dead, and there was no hiss of air to indicate his life-support systems were functioning. Glancing back, he could see lights flickering on Thirteen; the droid seemed to be in the middle of startup procedures.

  Kell pulled off his flight suit gloves, then reached under the instrument panel, unhooked latches there, and swung the whole panel up. Here was the source of some of the smoke, several wires burned and semiconductors fried—all delicate diagnostics circuitry, it appeared.

  The wiring and circuitry associated with his restart system seemed intact, so he swung the instrument panel back into place and dogged it down. Then he reached past his left shoulder, pried open a small, innocuous panel there, and depressed the red button beneath it. He held down the button there until he heard the comforting, familiar whine of a snubfighter trying to bring itself back on-line.

  Immediately words appeared on his data screen: R2-D609 is ACTIVE. HOW MAY I SERVE YOU?

  Kell frowned. "R2-D609, what's your name?"

  The R2 unit beeped irritably at this simple test. I AM R2- D609.

  "Can you give me a random number?"

  13.

  "Dammit." Thirteen's temporary memory was gone; it had returned to its default memory and settings, the ones burned permanently into its circuits.

  They'd been hit by some sort of ionization bomb, he was sure of it; in his experience, only an ion cannon could scramble all a snubfighter's electronics this way. But what had hit them was more powerful, and ion cannons couldn't cause a ship in hyperspace to pop back into real space prematurely.

  His communications board lit up and immediately he had voices: "—is just drifting. I have one engine coming up; I'll try to maneuver over to him." "Do that, Three. Is anyone else active?"

  "Five here," said Kell. "I'm in the middle of a cold start."

  "Four."

  "Eleven."

  There was a noise over the comm, something like an animal grunt.

  "Twelve, this is Eleven. Was that you?"

  Another grunt.

  "Piggy, is your translator burned out? Once for yes, twice for no."

  One grunt, a short, irritable one.

  "Are you injured? Has it done any damage to your throat?"

  Two short grunts.

  "Good. Stand by."

  "Sir?"

  "This is Leader. Who's speaking?"

  "Sir, Shiner isn't responding." Shiner was Donos's R2.

  "Nine, is that you?"

  "Sir, Shiner isn't responding."

  "I read you, Nine. Are you injured?"

  "No, sir. But Shiner—"

  "Isn't responding. I understand. Let him be for the time being."

  "Yes, sir."

  Kell frowned. Donos didn't sound like himself. He did sound like someone suffering a concussion or other injury.

  Within the next couple of minutes, the remaining Wraiths had reported in, all but Runt, Phanan, and Grinder. Most also reported electronics system damage, some of it trivial, though several engine units and a couple of astromechs were not coming on-line.

  Everyone reported total electronic memory loss—from the X-wings' configuration choices to the astromechs' full memory banks to the contents of the pilots' datapads and chronos. That meant their nav course to Doldrums was erased. Even a return to Commenor system was impossible.

  Wedge doggedly worked his way through their options. They didn't have enough fuel to go looking for a safe landing zone in another system; the X-wings were running close to dry.

  The Narra had nearly a full load of fuel. The Wraiths could improvise a fuel transfer between the shuttle and the X-wings, but under these conditions this would take hours. If, as Wedge suspected, this attack would result in pursuit by their enemies, such a tactic would doom them. />
  Or the shuttle could dump all its cargo, the pilots could assemble on board, and they could jump around until they reached a system where they could reacquire navigational data. That would bring them to safety . . . but would cost them twelve X-wings, eight of them new. That would probably be the death knell of Wraith Squadron.

  On the other hand, if he had the Narra use its personnel retrieval tractor to drag the inoperable snubfighters to avail- able cover, where they could be repaired, the energy-expensive effort would burn off enough of the shuttle's fuel to make the squadron's escape impossible. But they would be operable and perhaps able to take out the pursuit vessels.

  Finally Wedge said, "All right, Wraiths. Two reports a planet and satellites not too far away. I'm pretty sure that it's Xobome 6, the outermost planet of the system, and it has an atmosphere warm enough for us to effect some repairs, and an asteroid ring—just the thing if we're being pursued, and I'll bet my Endor patch that we are. We'll transit there, with the Narra towing the three nonfunctional fighters with its pilot retrieval tractor."

  "That'll be slow going and a significant power drain, Lead."

  "I know, Eleven. But we don't have another choice that will keep the unit in one piece. Once we're in position, we'll try to effect repairs, first on the fighters that are out of commission. That means—Five, how's your suit integrity? Can you stand a few seconds of hard vacuum to make a cold transit to the shuttle's emergency airlock?"

  "My suit diagnostics are down, too, sir, but I think the suit's otherwise intact."

  "Good. You and Cubber will put on vacuum maintenance suits Cubber stowed on the shuttle and effect repairs as best you can. I'm assuming that we're going to have pursuers on our tails soon, so work fast and be as messy as you have to. Everyone but Four, Six, and Seven head on over to Xobome 6. Land and effect what repairs you can, all but Five—you remain in orbit. I'll stay on station with the inert fighters while Narra tows them in one by one. Execute."

  Kell, who had four engines showing ready, brought his fighter up to speed and in line beside and aft of Wraith Twelve—even at proper trailing distances he could recognize Piggy by his profile in the cockpit.

  "Demolitions."

  Kell jerked upright. In commando operations plotting, he knew he might be referred to as Demolitions instead of Wraith Five. A check of his comm board told him this was a private communication from Wraith Leader.

  "Yes, Control."

  "What do you think hit us?"

  "Nothing I've ever heard of. But I think I could build something to do this—though I could bank the money and live off it for the rest of my life instead."

  "Describe it."

  "You'd need four basic components. No, five. First, a pretty standard ion projector, probably rigged for a single detonation instead of multiple shots. Second, an electromagnetic pulse generator, with the same area of emission. Third, a sensor rig that can detect hyperspace anomalies—that is to say, ships jumping into the system. Fourth, a gravitational pulse generator like the ones off the Imperial Interdictors. And fifth, a communications device—probably a one-shot hypercomm unit, something to throw off a single alarm at the time of detonation."

  "So you're talking about a bomb that detects hyperspace arrivals, puts out a gravitational pulse to bring them out of hyperspace prematurely, and then hits them with both ion pulse and electromagnetic pulse."

  "That's about the size of it."

  "I don't buy it. Energy dropoff is such that it couldn't be made practical. What if you arrive in a system and this bomb is on the far side? It would detonate and do no harm to the arrivals."

  "I thought about that, sir. And if I think as a bomber, not a demolitions professional, it occurs to me that you plant bombs where people are most likely to be."

  "Explain that."

  Up ahead, a tiny white dot, Xobome 6, appeared among the stars and began to grow. "Sir, most nav courses are plotted from the point of departure to the center of the system where you plan to arrive—that is, the sun. It's simple and it's safe; you taught us that. You can set distance so you drop back into real space short of the system, with no chance of hitting any natural gravity well, or you can fire straight into the system, and if you hit a gravity well before you reach your destination, it pops you back into real space before you're close enough to the center of gravity to endanger you. Correct?"

  "Correct."

  "So everyone knows that most courses are aimed at the sun of the arrival system. And if you already know that there's going to be a jump from Commenor to Xobome's sun—"

  "Oh." The word emerged almost as a bark. "You set up your bomb on that straight-line path, just short of any normal arrival point at the system, and you're almost sure to bag your target. Meaning that someone knew, or suspected, there would be traffic from Commenor to Xobome."

  "And since there's no trade between the two systems, it had to have been planted by the forces that attacked us. They knew we'd flee, and knew or suspected that some of us would flee by way of Xobome."

  "Right. That makes sense. Thanks, Demolitions. Control out."

  Kell had had a little training in zero-gee, hard-vacuum work. He'd done some exterior repairs on a cruiser over Sluis Van and had gone through the standard demolitions training in planting charges on a vessel in orbit.

  That didn't make him proficient. That didn't mean he liked it.

  In the cumbersome vacuum maintenance suit, which had built-in maneuvering jets, he could move around and stay warm. But he and Cubber didn't have tools rated to the cold of space, just toolboxes cobbled together from the X-wing hangar back on Folor, and this left them cursing over frozen and vapor-locked hydrospanners while Grinder, safe inside his cockpit, watched them impatiently.

  Still . . . Kell could look up for an unimpeded view of an infinity of stars, the sort of vista he could never see on any world with atmosphere and never had time to appreciate while in the cockpit of a snubfighter. He could look down past his feet to see the world of Xobome 6, rotating with a slow majesty. Somewhere down there, on a high plain blasted by freezing winds, most of the Wraiths were trying to make repairs to their own less-damaged X-wings. They were probably looking up now and envying Kell his comparatively warm environment suit.

  Kell floated beside the open hatch to Grinder's port dorsal engine. Its internal diagnostics said it was on-line and ready to supply power, but it was receiving no data from ship's controls. Kell brought himself back to his task. "Could all four data relays have been shorted?"

  On the other side of the X-wing floated Cubber; even through their respective polarized faceplates Kell could see the mechanic shake his head. "All of them identically? No, it's got to be an interruption farther up the line."

  "Think you could get into his cargo hatch and splice into the data feeds under the cockpit? I'll monitor here."

  Cubber shrugged, an exaggerated motion. "I'll give it a try." Tiny jets vented at intervals across his back, turning him toward the X-wing's bow, moving him forward.

  "Kell?" The voice was faint, eerie . . . and emerging from within Kell's own suit.

  Kell's mouth went dry. He used his tongue to hit the microphone-off switch, then said, "Who's there?"

  "Kell, it's Myn."

  "How did—" Kell sighed and relaxed. Donos had apparently patched in to Kell's own private comlink, the one he carried in his breast pocket. Kell tugged his helmet forward so he could angle his chin down past the bottom of his helmet, making it easier for him to make himself heard. "Myn, call me on the main squadron channel."

  "No, no. I need privacy for this. I need your help."

  "Go ahead."

  "Shiner's still down, Kell. I need for him to be up."

  "We have more important problems right now. Shiner can wait."

  "Please, Kell."

  Kell frowned, troubled. The pain and worry in Donos's voice were clear enough to carry even over standard comlink distortion. "What's he doing?"

  "Nothing! He won't respond to verbal co
mmands for a warm start, and the reset switches for a cold start don't do anything. I think he's . . . dead."

  "Probably just in need of repairs. Stop worrying." The droid's power converter could be down, or it could be powered up but with its programming locked, unable to begin a restart sequence until power was actually shut off throughout the unit and the system was restarted. "Hey, try this. Do you have a restraining bolt? You or any of the others?"

  A long pause. Then, "Yes, you have one."

  "All right. Insert it. In him, I mean."

  Donos didn't laugh at the joke. "It's in. But nothing's happening."

  "Right. Now switch it over to power-down."

  "Done. No change."

  "Now switch it back to power-up."

  "No— Hey! It's working!"

  Kell smiled. Among the many features of the standard restraining bolt, an attachment designed to maintain control over a fractious or independent-minded droid, was an external means to shut off a droid's main power converter. Kell's guess had been right, and this external shutdown had flushed the droid's locked-up programming and allowed it to begin a cold start.

  "Call me again if you absolutely have to—but don't call me just because his memory's gone. All their memories are gone."

  "Right, right. Thanks, Kell. Myn out."

  Cubber summed it up. "Commander, we got Grinder and Runt mobile in record time, but Phanan's X-wing is a loss until we can get it into a full shop setup." Within his cockpit, Phanan looked pale. He said he'd gotten bandages over his injuries, but there was no doubt that he couldn't give himself full medical attention within the cramped confines of the cockpit, without the medical kit now occupying his cargo bay. He also wasn't moving too well; it was evident some of his cybernetics were still malfunctioning.

  Wedge's voice sounded resigned. "All right. Pop the hatch and get him into the shuttle. Don't forget his medical gear.

  "In the meantime, we can assume that the bomb that stuck us here also sent out a signal to whoever planted it. Meaning they'll be coming soon. If it was a hyperspace communication and they were signaling the Implacable, the Star Destroyer could be here in another couple of hours. We could make a blind jump to deep space or the nearest star to get away from them, but that'll probably end up killing us; we don't have enough fuel to do any significant exploration. Anybody have any ideas?"