Star Wars: X-Wing VI: Iron Fist

by Aaron Allston

  Face nodded. “He’s a pretty belligerent drunk.”

  “Nice guy the rest of the time, though.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Ever play sabacc with him?”

  “Sure, he took me for a week’s pay once.”

  “You’re joking. He’s the worst player I ever saw.”

  There was the slightest of delays in Face’s response as he adjusted his story in light of new information. “No, I think I’m the worst.”

  “Really? You up for a game tonight?”

  “No, I’ve learned my lesson.”

  The stormtrooper settled back, his posture one of disappointment.

  Moments later, the skimmer slowed. Wedge heard a verbal exchange between the pilot and what must have been the gate guards, but he couldn’t make out the words. Then they were in motion again.

  It was a long minute before they slowed once more. Then the skimmer’s repulsorlift depowered and the vehicle settled to a hard surface.

  The door beside Wedge opened. They appeared to be in a vehicle hangar, and a few steps away was a table where a uniformed officer and another pair of stormtroopers waited. The officer, a man with graying hair and hard lines to his face, looked bored and irritable. “Move them out. It’s time for instant justice.”

  Wedge waved the real stormtroopers and their prisoners to proceed while his people got their unconscious prisoners up. Then the Wraiths moved out. Wedge was the last one out of the vehicle.

  “Papers,” said the officer in charge. Wedge tensed. But the stormtrooper he addressed handed him standard identity cards bearing the likenesses of the prisoners in his charge. Wedge glanced at Face, who discreetly held up the handful of identity cards taken from their own prisoners. Wedge turned away again.

  The officer looked over the identity cards. “Facts?”

  The stormtrooper in charge said, “Drunk and disorderly at Ola’s.”

  The officer grimaced. “You two idiots ought to find a better class of drinking establishment. Charges?”

  The stormtrooper in charge shook his head, the motion exaggerated by his helmet. “None.”

  “Well, that’s not too bad.” The officer glanced up at the two prisoners. “You two are confined to base for six days.”

  The prisoners looked relieved.

  “That’s three days starting now,” the officer continued, “and three days starting next payday.” He ignored their expressions of dismay and gestured for them to be on their way. “Next.”

  Wedge stepped up. He reached over without looking. Face put the identity cards in his hand and he presented them to the officer. “Drunk and disorderly at Rojio’s. Brawling with civilians.”

  The officer gave him an I-don’t-want-to-believe-you look. “They’re all unconscious. They lost to civilians?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How many?”

  “Two.”

  The officer looked pained. “Five of them against two civilians, and they’re too drunk to make a good accounting of themselves. They’ll pay for letting the unit down.” He frowned. “Five. Say, these are Captain Wanatte’s drinking buddies. Where’s the captain?”

  Face spoke up: “Before he passed out the last time, Lieutenant Cothron said the captain had found some companionship for the evening.”

  “Ah. Well, then. Let’s see the damages.”

  Wedge said, “One of the civilians paid for the damages before we dropped them off with the city authorities.”

  “Commendable. All right. I think these five will be improved by doing a few days of cleanup and breakdown work for the next morale event. Get ’em to their quarters.”

  Wedge saluted smartly and headed off in the direction the other stormtroopers had taken to leave the hangar. He heard the Wraiths fall in step behind him and the dragging noise of their prisoners’ boots scraping against the duracrete. Then he heard the skimmer’s engines start up again.

  He breathed a sigh of relief. The pilot of the skimmer hadn’t noticed that eleven footsore stormtroopers had boarded the skimmer, but only ten had emerged. Janson had taken Shalla’s place and was working with Castin to carry a pilot. Now, if this base followed standard Imperial procedure, that pilot would take this skimmer back to the military police motor pool.

  Then it would be up to Shalla. She was still in the skimmer’s enclosure, and her job was to prevent the pilot and his guard from talking to anybody.

  Her first job. She had other things to do as well. Wedge was reluctant to assign so much responsibility in a commando mission to a newcomer to the squadron, but Kell had spoken in such glowing terms of the Nelprin family’s formidable skills that he’d decided to go ahead with this approach.

  Outside the hangar, he took a moment to get his bearings, and silently cursed the restricted field of vision afforded by stormtrooper helmets; lacking peripheral vision, he had to turn in a slow, complete circle to acquire a mental picture of his surroundings. He had a fair idea of the base layout from the reconnaissance they’d done on the hilltop, but not an idea of where in the base they now were. When he had his bearings, he headed straight toward the group of dome-topped buildings he’d earlier decided were officers’ quarters.

  They’d never make it there, of course. They’d dump the unconscious pilots in the first dark alley or trench they found and go about their mission.

  • • •

  Lara Notsil, originally Gara Petothel, flinched as pair after pair of TIE fighters broke formation and dove, their engines screaming, toward her and her wingmates. A good mannerism, flinching, she decided. If they’re observing me, they’ll log it.

  Her wing leader’s voice came over the comm unit: “Gold One to Gold Squadron. Break by pairs and engage.”

  Lara keyed her own comm unit. “Gold Seven?”

  “I’m your wing, Eight.”

  She rolled to starboard, getting clear of the main formation of X-wings, and saw other paired fighters also breaking off.

  Then the first blasts of green Imperial laser fire fell among them. Lara’s X-wing was rocked by a stern hit; her aft shields were knocked partway down and she reinforced them with energy from her forward shields. The pair of TIE fighters raining laser fire down on both her and Gold Seven slid neatly into killing position behind them.

  “Dive for cover, Seven,” Lara said, and nosed the stick forward. The terrain below, a sprawling city in ruins, grew larger. She and Gold Seven dropped into a debris-littered street, flying lower than the tops of the surrounding buildings, but their pursuers never lost sight of them and stayed tucked behind. Lara’s snubfighter was hit by another pair of laser blasts and its aft section slewed slightly to port; she corrected with a deft application of etheric rudder.

  Up ahead, the road forked left and right. She knew from seeing the area from above that the two forks turned toward one another farther on, rejoining after only a couple of kilometers. That should have been her tactic: send Gold Seven to starboard while she went to port, then fire upon Seven’s pursuer while Seven fired upon hers once the roads rejoined.

  But that would probably have worked. And that wasn’t what she was here for.

  “Seven, at the big blue building, hard to port.”

  “I read you.” Seven’s voice sounded a bit worried.

  Lara suited action to words. As the X-wings came alongside what had once been a warehouse of tremendous size, painted an eye-hurting cyan, but was now a hollowed, burned wreck of a building with scorch marks surrounding blast holes in the walls, she executed a smart portward turn down a street that ran at right angles to the one over which they’d been flying. She rotated ninety degrees leftward, so the street was to her left and one row of buildings was beneath her keel.

  The sharpness of the angle was more than the X-wing’s inertial compensator could bear; she felt weight again, settling into her seat, as the snubfighter turned through the tightest portion of her maneuver.

  There was a sharp metal shriek as her keel scraped along one of the building facades; h
er X-wing lurched. The snub-fighter’s shields were no protection against such a graze. She glanced at her diagnostics board, looking for the telltale red glows of system failures.

  Behind her, the sky lit up. The sound and shock wave of an explosion rocked her X-wing. And the blue dot representing Gold Seven disappeared from her sensor board.

  Lara grimaced. Gold Seven didn’t have the skill to manage a turn like that. Lara had known this, had counted on it, but it wouldn’t do for her observers to see a smile of satisfaction cross her face. Knowing she would get no answer, she keyed her comm unit. “Seven? Gold Seven, come in.”

  Behind her, the two TIE fighters, having no trouble with the sharp turn into this side street, came screaming through the smoke cloud that was what was left of Gold Seven. As soon as they cleared the smoke, they opened fire again.

  Lara felt her aft section shudder. It slewed again. Lara deliberately overcorrected and let an expression of shock cross her face as she veered into the side of a building. She had just enough time to read the words WELCOME TO MOFFICE’S GROCERS before impact—

  Or lack of impact. There was no sharp blow, no deceleration, just the abrupt dimming of all cockpit lights to nothingness. Then the canopy opened above her.

  Captain Sormic—short, bald, human, usually apoplectic, with a face like pink clay molded into a fair approximation of human features—stood outside the simulator, glaring at her. “Candidate Notsil. Would you explain, for the benefit of the class, just what you were trying to accomplish with that last maneuver?”

  Lara let a note of uncertainty creep into her voice. “I was trying to regain control—”

  “Not that. The suicide turn down the side street.”

  “Oh. Uh, I was trying to shake the TIE-fighter pursuit—”

  “Right. You presumed that a pair of novice pilots could outmaneuver more experienced pilots in more agile spacecraft in clear air. Correct?”

  “Well, uh—”

  “Say, ‘Correct, Captain.’ ”

  “Correct, Captain.” Lara kept an expression of distress on her face.

  “And you got yourself and your wingmate killed.”

  “Correct, Captain.”

  “Candidate Lussatte, is that the tactic you would have chosen?”

  Lara glanced at her wingmate, who was still in the next simulator over. The Sullustian female gave Lara a look of apology. “No, Captain.”

  “What would you have done?”

  “I would have fired a proton torpedo—”

  “The Imperial fliers were already behind you, Lussatte.”

  Lara saw Lussatte take a deep breath. “Yes, Captain. Let me explain. I figure I can’t outfly the Imps. I figure that if I make a rapid deceleration, they’ll make an even more rapid one, because they’re better fliers in more maneuverable craft. But if I drop a torp about a city block up, that gives me a smoke cloud to fly through and a few moments where they can’t see me. If I have the impact site visualized well enough, I can risk a turn down a side street, throw them off, maybe get turned around so I can get them under my guns before they’re on me again.”

  Captain Sormic paused, then gave her a brief nod. “Pay attention to what she just said, class. It would give her a one-in-four, maybe one-in-two chance of surviving the next ten seconds and perhaps bagging one of the TIE fighters. Which is a much better chance than she had following Deadstick Notsil here. Dismissed.”

  Pilot candidates rose from the classroom seats; others climbed from the simulators. Lara didn’t rise; Captain Sormic still stood outside her simulator, blocking her exit.

  He turned back to face her, and his expression was suddenly sympathetic. He dropped his voice nearly to a whisper. “Candidate Notsil, you earn great scores in astronautics and communications. Just say the word and I’ll transfer you over to officer training in one of those divisions. You have a tremendous career ahead of you as a technical specialist on a capital ship’s bridge.”

  “No, sir. I’m going to be a pilot.”

  “It’s not as though you’ll be washing out. It’s just a transfer. And you’ll be a real asset to the Alliance there.”

  “No, sir. I’m going to be a pilot.”

  His face hardened. “Then I have one piece of advice for you.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “You think about Candidate Lussatte and anyone else you might have made friends with. You think about how you’re going to feel if you get them killed for real. Trust me, the kind of pilot you’re shaping into, it’s going to happen. And that’s not the worst thing that could happen to you. The worst thing would be for you to survive a bad decision that kills everybody you care about.” He turned away and followed the last departing pilot candidates from the room.

  Lara sagged into the simulator seat. Only part of her dejection was simulated. It felt bad to be considered such a screwup when she was capable of doing so much better.

  She shouldn’t even care what these Rebels thought; they were her enemies. But her fellow candidates had such naive enthusiasm, such a light of life within them, that it was growing increasingly hard not to like them.

  She felt a little tickle at the back of her neck. She turned to look through the simulator’s rear viewport.

  At the back of the classroom, a man in an Alliance uniform was turning away, heading toward the room’s rear exit. From his height and build, she recognized him as Colonel Repness.

  When had he come into the classroom? Had he been watching her in the moments after her exchange with Captain Sormic? She watched until he was gone, until she was alone in the room.

  She checked her chrono. There were no classes scheduled in this room for an hour. She pulled up the instrument panel before her and did a little bit of deft rewiring, a bit of electronic trickery at which she was becoming quite adept. Then she clicked the panel back into place and manually pulled the canopy back down.

  When she hit the button that, on a real X-wing, would initiate an emergency restart, the simulator came back online. But now it would not transmit its results and recordings to the training facility’s central computers. Whatever she accomplished here would remain her secret.

  The world with the ruined city came into view again, and once more she was surrounded by a squadron of X-wings.

  5

  Shalla tried to interpret every sway, every course change taken by the skimmer in whose enclosed bed she rode. Eventually the vehicle had to return to a motor pool or other vehicle hangar. Eventually she’d be able to begin her portion of the mission … a portion she had to accomplish alone.

  The vehicle went through a protracted right turn, then slowed and settled to the ground with an unmusical metallic clang. Shalla raised her blaster rifle to cover the door. Some stormtroopers were thorough and efficient enough to police their vehicles; others weren’t.

  Hers apparently fell in the latter category. The door remained resolutely closed. Then the lights went out.

  She heard, from outside the skimmer, a man’s laughter. She tensed. But the laughter was the type that came in response to a joke, not malicious laughter directed at a trapped enemy. When she heard the heavy footsteps of stormtrooper composite armor falling on duracrete, she relaxed.

  She gave it another minute. She wanted the stormtroopers to be well away from the skimmer, but couldn’t afford them too much time to realize that something was wrong. Then she rose, used her glow rod to find the door switch, and pressed the switch.

  Nothing, not even a beep. It had been deactivated with the rest of the power to the skimmer’s enclosure. She swore to herself, but it was only a minor inconvenience.

  She switched off her helmet comlink. She took off her stormtrooper helmet and spent a couple of minutes carefully extracting the comm gear inside it, then detached the miniature power pack from the gear. It took another couple of minutes to remove the door-switch cover and wire the power pack into it. Then she put the now comm-free helmet on again and took up her rifle.

  This time, the door opened s
martly. Outside was the slab-like side of an identical skimmer just barely far enough away to let this skimmer’s door descend as a ramp. When Shalla peered out, to the right she saw another row of skimmers of various types, some small and sporty, and the motor-pool wall beyond; to her left was open duracrete and then closed hangar-style doors of the motor-pool building. Voices reached her; she couldn’t make out the words, but they were male, two or three at least, raised in laughter and amused comment. They came from the rear of the motor-pool building. She thought she also heard a man’s voice, in conspicuous speech, from the front.

  So far, so good. She stepped out, alert to trouble, and hit the button to close the door again. But the ramp raised only halfway up, then made a whining noise and stopped. It slowly began to sag back toward the duracrete floor.

  She got under it and lifted. The power pack from her helmet was obviously not up to powering door machinery. By sheer strength she got the door lifted back into place. Though it did not lock, it fit snugly and would look normal to casual inspection.

  Now, three problems to solve: two groups of Imperial workers or stormtroopers, plus whatever security was installed within the motor-pool building. She looked around for the places, often at corners and on the metal beams supporting the curved ceiling, where sensors tended to be set up.

  Nothing. She breathed a sigh of relief. Skimmers weren’t valuable enough to this base to require constant surveillance. One problem down. She walked forward, toward the source of the droning speech, and wished she had Tyria’s aptitude for near-silent movement.

  • • •

  The Wraiths kept themselves flat against the exterior wall of the hangar, deep in the darkest shadow cast by the building.

  Wedge, one man back from the building’s front corner, suppressed a snort. The glossy white stormtrooper armor they were wearing practically glowed in the dark. Even in deep shadow they would be impossible to miss if a passerby glanced in their direction. Still, old habits of stealth died hard, and Wedge didn’t want them to die at all.

  Janson, ahead of him, helmet off, turned back and held up two fingers, then shook his head. Two guards on the front of the building, and they weren’t going to be easy pickings. Wedge traded places with him and took off his own helmet, luxuriated for a moment in the sensation of air moving once again on his face, and hazarded a peek.