Starfighters of Adumar

by Aaron Allston

  Kneeling behind the control board to get as much cover as possible from the low lip at the edges of the vehicle, Wedge powered up its steering mechanism. “Call ’em as they come aboard,” he said.

  Tycho lay on his stomach at the transport’s starboard side, his pistol braced against the lip. He fired once, twice, three times, and Wedge heard a shriek from the crowd of shooters. There was another thump, and Tycho said, “Four’s aboard.”

  “Where’s Three?”

  “Thirty meters back.”

  “We’ll pick him up.” Wedge put the ungainly vehicle in reverse. It glided backward with frustrating slowness. Wedge reduced the repulsorlift power on the port side, increased it on starboard, so it tilted to port; this made it harder to control, but the vehicle’s underside offered him and his pilots a little additional cover.

  The vehicle shook again, harder than before, and Tycho announced, “Three’s aboard.”

  Wedge glanced at his men. “Anyone hit?”

  They shook their heads, not looking at him, concentrating on pouring blaster fire off the starboard side.

  Wedge increased all repulsorlifts to full power. The transport soared upward—

  To an altitude of four meters. Half the height of the walls of the perator’s complex. There was no way he could fly over the walls.

  “We’re going out by the gate,” he announced. “Brace yourselves, pilots.” He put the transport into forward motion, steering straight toward the crowd of shooters and the gate beyond.

  The air was thick with the smell of blaster bolts, and thick with the bolts themselves. Only the shooters at the farthest edges of the crowd could get a good look at any of the men on the transport, and therefore get a decent shot at them; the others could see only the transport’s underside.

  Tycho uttered a yelp and stood as the metal under his stomach superheated. All over the transport, the flooring began to glow. In two spots, it gave way entirely and blaster bolts shot through, toward the sky. Wedge shifted his body as the flooring beneath him began to glow.

  But meter by meter they approached the gates and began outrunning the shooters in the courtyard. A thin screen of attackers with blasters was lined up at the gate, and they poured fire up at the bottom of the transport as Wedge crossed overhead; he saw one blaster shot, reduced in strength, emerge to slice across Hobbie’s hip. He hissed, leaned over the rail, took three quick shots in the direction of the screen of attackers.

  Then they were past, floating at a good clip above a street heavy with pedestrian and transport traffic, pursuers trailing out behind them and losing ground—

  The repulsorlift transport’s engine coughed and the vehicle immediately lost speed. The pursuers began to gain ground on them, even while rushing across lanes of heavy traffic.

  Hobbie, stanching his hip wound with a pocket torn from his jacket, offered up a bitter smile. “It just doesn’t get better, does it?”

  Tycho popped the metal plate over the transport’s engine. “Shot,” he announced. “Both ways. Blaster fire has ruined it.”

  “Right,” Wedge said. “Janson, what do they expect us to do?”

  “Set down and run on foot, or hop another transport. A wheeled one, since there are no floaters in sight.” Janson, keeping low, leaned over the rear of the transport and fired off several shots at their pursuers. Wedge saw two men fall. One of them was immediately run over by a wheeled transport, its driver unable to swerve far enough aside in time.

  “So we do something else,” Wedge said. He aimed the dying transport toward the building opposite the palace gates—a tall residential building, its balconies deep, many furnished with elaborate tables or reclining furniture.

  As they neared the building, Wedge could see the flatscreens on its exterior at ground level. All showed an identical image—the rear of Wedge’s transport, from a distance of forty or fifty meters, on its approach toward the building. He offered up a growl. A flatcam was broadcasting their escape and it was probably up on walls and personal flatscreens all over Cartann. People at the base of the building he approached recognized the scene, turned, pointed up at their transport—and some unsheathed blaster pistols and began firing.

  “Hobbie, suppression fire to starboard. Tycho, to port. Janson, keep it up off the stern.” Then Wedge saw that their transport, even at maximum altitude, would not be high enough to climb over the rail of even the lowest balcony before them. It would probably slide in just beneath the balcony. “On my mark, prepare to abandon your posts, come forward, and jump.”

  “Got it, boss,” Tycho said. He traversed to the port side of the transport and began unloading fire on the new enemies there.

  In moments the balcony was mere meters ahead. On it were numerous ornate recliners—and several startled-looking Adumari nobles, brewglasses in hand. Wedge saw no flatscreens in their vicinity and supposed they were unaware of what was going on.

  “Come forward!” Wedge shouted. And as his pilots abandoned their positions and moved to join him, he locked the controls down and moved up to the transport’s forward rail. As it came within two meters of the balcony, he stepped up on it and launched himself upward, grabbing the balcony rail, swinging himself over onto the balcony floor. His pilots landed beside him, one, two, three.

  He had his blaster pistol out before the balcony residents quite reached their feet. He waited a moment as the slow-moving transport crashed into the side of the building below, and said, “Don’t move, we’re just passing through.”

  He led his pilots through the sliding transparent door and into the nobles’ main room. More people were here, adults, children, liveried servants. Wedge gestured with his pistol and they raised their hands.

  “Jackets and belts off,” he said. “Too distinctive. You people get to keep them as souvenirs. You.” He gestured at one of the servants. “Where’s your cloakroom?”

  The man, his expression wavering somewhere between delight and alarm, pointed.

  Janson kept the occupants under guard while Wedge slid the cloakroom door opened. He grabbed four dark cloaks, handed them out as Hobbie and Tycho took up positions on either side of the double doors out into what should have been the building’s main hall.

  Behind him, he could hear snatches of conversation from the nobles: “That one’s the diligent one.” “Why, they’re no taller than our pilots. I thought they would be giants.” “Is this a custom from their world? I rather like it. I think we’ll visit the ke Oleans this way.”

  Wedge draped a cloak around Janson’s shoulders and the last around his own, then the two of them also set up beside the doors. “Ready,” he said, “go.”

  Janson pulled the door open, peered both ways. “Clear. Where to?”

  “Straight across,” Wedge said. “Now.”

  “Thank you for honoring our home,” called one of the nobles.

  “Happy to oblige,” Wedge said, and followed his pilots across the hall.

  He could hear shouting from the nearest stairwell, could even make out the words: “We must be allowed entry with our weapons. You have intruders on the first floor up—”

  Wedge grinned. For once he was benefiting from, rather than being inconvenienced by, the local security measures.

  Opposite was a big set of double doors, the main entrance into some other noble family’s quarters. “The lock,” Wedge said. “Fire.”

  “Wait,” Hobbie said. He reached for the door handle, twisted it, gave it a pull. The door swung open toward him. He shrugged, gave Wedge an apologetic look. “Worth trying,” he said.

  They charged into that set of quarters, surprising a trio of servants setting places at a long dinner table, and raced past them to the doors onto the balcony. It was unoccupied, though brewglasses were arrayed on the long bar to one side.

  Wedge peered over the rail. Below was ordinary street traffic, mostly pedestrian, with two wheeled transports in view. In the distance to his left he saw a rarity for a downtown Cartann avenue—a pair of Adumari riding l
izards and riders marching in stately fashion toward them. There were no maniacs waving blaster pistols to be seen.

  Moments later, all four pilots dropped to the street and merged into the pedestrian traffic. At the intersection, they ducked faces and pulled up cloak hoods as survivors of the shooters’ crowd turned the corner and raced toward the part of the building from which they had dropped, their attention high, blasters at the ready.

  Wedge and his pilots passed through that crowd of amateur assassins and continued onward, forcing themselves to walk at a measured pace. “So far, so good,” Wedge said, his voice low. “Keep your eyes on the flatscreens on the buildings. If we see ourselves on them in real-time, we know we’re in trouble.”

  “What’s the plan?” Tycho asked.

  “They know where we’re going. And we do have to go there if we’re going to get off-planet. I suppose we could try to find enough privately owned Blades on balconies… but then we’d be stuck there, trying to get through security measures we’re not used to, while they have time to recognize us and come after us again.” Wedge shook his head. “No, we’ve got to get to the air base.

  “They’ll have people on the most obvious routes to the base, and probably a whole congregation at the base’s main gates. So we go by side streets and back routes until we’re near the base…” Wedge stopped, considering.

  “Getting into the base is the hard part,” Janson said. “It has transparisteel walls eight meters high, higher than those blasted reduced-power repulsorlift transports can go. Easily guarded gates are our only entry points. Wish we had Page’s commandos or the Wraiths and a couple of days to prepare.”

  “We improvise,” Wedge said. “We need a wheeled transport, one of the flatcam units our pursuers are carrying, and four sets of women’s clothing.”

  Hobbie looked crestfallen. “Boss, please tell me you’re not putting us in women’s clothing.”

  “Very well,” Wedge said. “I’m not putting us in women’s clothing.”

  Chapter Ten

  Half an hour later, the four of them sat, wearing Adumari women’s clothing taken from a middle-class family’s apartment, in a wheeled transport two blocks from the gates into Giltella Air Base. Hobbie stared with a hurt expression at Wedge, who ignored him.

  On this ill-lit section of street, running between warehouses serving the air base, the pilots were well concealed by darkness. This was not to be the case when they neared the air base’s front gates, which were brilliantly illuminated by glow lamps atop tall poles. Even at this distance, the pilots could clearly see the crowd that awaited them at the gates.

  “You lied to me,” Hobbie said.

  “I did,” Wedge said. “With my brilliant achievements in the diplomatic profession has come the realization that lies can be powerful motivators.”

  “My faith is shattered.”

  “You knew, when I said we needed four sets of women’s clothing, that we were going to end up in them. You knew. So any hopes you had to the contrary were just self-delusion.”

  “I understand that. But I’d rather blame you than me.”

  Wedge grinned. “Tycho, what are we facing?”

  “A hundred fifty, more like two hundred, easy,” Tycho said. “So, fifty to one odds.”

  “Not too bad,” Janson said, and cracked his knuckles. “So. Who’s best-looking in women’s dress? I vote for myself.”

  “Quiet,” Wedge said. “Tycho, do you have the broadcast figured out?”

  Tycho nodded. “I think so. But we’re going to have to rely some on luck.”

  “We are doomed,” Hobbie said.

  Tycho gestured at the flatcam unit they’d taken from a man who now slept, with a bump the size of a comlink on his forehead, behind a stairwell in a residential building a few blocks from here. “I can’t override the local flatcams,” he said. “There’s no equipment for that, no procedure. Just a specific broadcast protocol. My guess is that when we broadcast the recording, some manager at the local information distributor will decide whether or not to put it up on the flatscreens citywide.”

  “Which they will,” Wedge said. “Considering the subject matter. All right, start broadcasting.” He set the wheeled transport into motion, heading straight toward the two hundred eager killers awaiting them at the airfield’s gates. Tycho hit a set of buttons on the flatcam’s side and then carefully placed the device out on the street. Within moments it was lost to sight behind them.

  The flatscreens on the buildings they passed—screens not so numerous as on the buildings in the richer quadrants of the city—showed edited scenes from their escape from the perator’s palace, and occasional glimpses of them in their stolen cloaks during their flight toward Giltella Air Base. They’d managed to avoid direct confrontations with the extraordinary numbers of shooters and flatcam wielders between there and here, even when breaking into a home to steal the women’s clothing, though they’d had to lay down some long-distance suppression fire when eluding pursuit a time or two.

  And now they were headed straight toward an enemy that was numerically superior and anxiously awaiting their arrival.

  Each time they passed a flatscreen, Hobbie said, “Still the old stuff.” Then they were a block closer, just coming into visual range of the crowd at the gate, and men and women there began to notice their approach, to point.

  Wedge felt his stomach tighten. “Come on, come on…”

  “Maybe we did something wrong,” Hobbie said. “We might not have encoded the right security protocols or something. We probably failed to—oh, there it is.”

  On the flatscreen of the next building before them appeared new images. Four human silhouettes were suddenly illuminated against the side of a building. Two threw back cloak hoods, revealing their faces—Wedge Antilles and Wes Janson, their expressions at first startled, then vengeful.

  On the flatscreen view, Wes Janson threw back his cloak and then drew his blastsword. The view wavered as if the flatcam holder was trembling, and then the distance to the pilots increased as though the holder was backing quickly away.

  But Janson ran forward, lunging with his blastsword, its tip leaving a light blue trace in the air. There was a blue flash offscreen to the left, then the world spun as the flatcam holder flailed around and crashed to the ground.

  In a moment, the view settled on the front of the building—with its distinctive red riding-farumme above the main entryway—and became still. The pilots, still barely visible at the left edge of the flatscreen, rushed out of view.

  Wedge nodded. It was a crude attempt, but if the people of Cartann didn’t take too much time to analyze it, it would withstand inspection—long enough to serve Wedge’s purposes.

  The pilots had made the recording minutes go, standing before a very distinctive building a short distance from the air base. Hobbie had held the flatcam in one hand, a piece of brick-colored street cover in his other. The fourth silhouette in the flatcam view was actually Hobbie’s cloak, held up on the point of Tycho’s blastsword. When Janson had lunged, his blastsword had hit the street cover, resulting in the flash of light suggesting the flatcam holder had taken the blow instead.

  Ahead, the crowd must be seeing the recording. A roar of anger and expectation rose from the men and women there. Within moments, most were in motion, heading straight toward the pilots’ transport—and beyond, Wedge hoped, to the building that had been their backdrop. “Get ready,” he said, and drew the shawllike garment closer about his face.

  In seconds, the leading edges of the crowd reached them. Most ran past. One man, chest heaving from his exertions, pointed with his blastsword toward the building of the red farumme. “Did you see them?”

  Wedge nodded and pointed the same direction.

  Behind him arose a terrified, high-pitched wail. Wedge jerked around to look, but it was Hobbie, uttering a noise of panic and suffering toward the sky, tearing at the clothes over his chest as though he were in mortal dread. Wedge blinked at the display and turned
around again to steer.

  “Never fear,” panted the man who’d addressed them. “We will capture them, and rend them, and make them suffer for every—” Then the still-rolling transport was too far beyond him for his words to carry.

  Moments later, the pilots were beyond the main body of vengeful Adumari. “Good screaming, Hobbie,” Wedge said.

  “I practice a lot,” Hobbie said, his voice hoarse. “Anytime Wes makes plans for the squadron, for example. Anytime a Corellian cooks for us.”

  Janson and Wedge both turned to glare at him.

  Ahead, perhaps thirty men and women remained before the gates. Many appeared to be watching the flatcams posted on the transparisteel walls to either side of the gates themselves, but quite a few still had their attention on the approaching transport. Beyond the gates, themselves transparisteel, were two guards in the black-and-gold livery of the air base.

  “On the command ‘One,’” Wedge said, “fire on the gate locks. When I see them give, I’ll issue the command ‘Two.’ That means spray suppression fire toward the crowd. Over their heads unless return fire starts coming in. Understood?”

  He heard three affirmatives.

  As they neared, the closest members of the crowd began shouting: “Did you see them?” “Did they kill the camwielder?”

  As if in answer, Wedge shouted, “One.” Then he drew and poured blaster fire into the locks on the gates.

  Fire from the other three pilots joined his. One succession of blasts, probably Janson’s, chewed away with extraordinary accuracy at the mechanisms. The guards behind the gates threw themselves away and down.

  In his peripheral vision, Wedge saw members of the crowd flinch away, then realize they weren’t being fired on. They began bringing blasters already in their hands to bear—

  The locks weren’t yet clearly destroyed, but Wedge shouted, “Two!” He leaned to port and fired repeatedly, blowing holes in street cover, firing once, with reluctance, at a young man too daring or stupid to demonstrate any self-preservative instincts; that man drew a careful bead on the transport and Wedge’s shot took him clean in the gut, folding him over, depositing him with a fatal wound on the street cover.