Star Wars: X-Wing I: Rogue Squadron (16 page)

The jump to hyperspace for his leg seemed somehow smoother and more effortless than the previous two. He knew that sensation was an illusion and he wondered about it for a moment or two. It occurred to him that the reason he was more at ease with his jump was because he had been in control of it. Mistakes made in calculating a hyperspace jump could be fatal and Corran had never been good about putting responsibility for his life in another person’s hands.

“But I don’t have to worry about a mistake on this leg, since I did the calculations.” A keening whistle from his astromech made him smile. “Fine.
You
did the calculations, with no help from me at all.”

Whistler’s hooting became more urgent. The astromech started scrolling sensor data over the cockpit screen, but none of it made sense to Corran. “There’s another stellar mass in the Chorax system. That’s impossible, unless …”

Before he could broadcast a warning to the
other members of Rogue Squadron, the automatic safety cutout on the hyperdrive kicked in. The snubfighter burst through an incandescent white wall and into the outer reaches of the Chorax system.

And right into the middle of a running lightfight.

Corran threw the stick hard to port and pushed it forward. “Rogue Eleven, break up-star.” He trusted Ooryl would follow him moving down and to the left, which cleared the way for the rest of the squadron to enter the system. “Lock S-foils into attack position.”

He reached up and flipped the switch with his right hand. “Whistler, have you IDed those ships yet?”

The little droid shrieked urgently back at him.

“Anything you can give me.” The big ship, Corran knew immediately, was an Imperial Interdictor cruiser. Its quartet of gravity well projectors allowed it to create a hyperspace shadow roughly equivalent to that of a fair-sized star. The Interdictors had proved effective in ambushing smugglers and pirates—and the presence of one of the six-hundred-meter-long triangular cruisers in the Chorax system was not wholly unexpected.

It hadn’t been there to trap them, however. Running from the cruiser, which Whistler identified as the
Black Asp
, was a modified
Baudo
-class star yacht. About three times as long as his X-wing, the yacht had a broad, triangular shape to it that was softened by the gentle down-curve of the wings. It looked almost organic in origin, as if it should have been swimming through space instead of rocketing along on its twin engine’s ion thrust.

Corran had seen plenty of modified yachts in his time with Corellian Security, and this one even
looked vaguely familiar. Most often the yachts were modified to haul contraband. While he had no love for smugglers, he had even less for the Empire.
Enemy of my enemy is my friend
.

Whistler bleated sharply. Corran glanced at his screen, then keyed his comm. “TIEs. Squints—I mean Interceptors. Looks like a dozen of them.” He looked up through his cockpit canopy and felt panic when he couldn’t see with the naked eye what his instruments showed so plainly on his monitor. “Rogue One, what are your orders?”

Wedge’s voice came back cool. “Engage them, but watch the cruiser’s guns.”

“I copy that. Rogue Ten, on me.”

Ooryl double-clicked his comm, indicating understanding of Corran’s order. That action seemed, like Commander Antilles’s order, to betray no nervousness at all. The bitter taste slicking Corran’s tongue surprised him because he’d flown against Imps in real life and endless simulator battles. He’d never been this bad before—nervous, yes, but not edging toward losing it.

Pull yourself together, Corran
. His hand snaked up and touched the coin he wore.
Your squadron mates and the folks in that yacht are counting on you
.

Because the break they’d executed had taken them down, the Interdictor and its TIEs were coming in above their line of sight. Pulling back on his stick, Corran thumbed a switch that put all power in the forward shield.

“All power to forward shield, switching to proton torpedoes.” A targeting box appeared on the heads-up display and Corran maneuvered the X-wing to drop the sight on the lead Interceptor. The range indicator dropped numbers and digits as the X-wing closed on the Imperial fighter.

Easy, easy. Let yourself go, just like in training
. He nudged the flight stick to the left and framed the incoming squint perfectly. The box went red and a strident beep filled the cockpit. Corran hit the trigger and the first torpedo sped in at its target.

Another torpedo streaked past him and raced toward an Interceptor. Both of the Imperial ships broke hard, but Ooryl’s torpedo reduced his target to fire and scrap metal. Corran’s missile missed his intended target, so he switched back to lasers and evened his shields out.

“Good shot, Ten. Scratch one squint!” Fingering the coin he wore beneath his flight suit, Corran swallowed hard, then keyed his comm unit. “Cover me, I’m going after mine.”

Ratcheting the throttle up to full, Corran swooped the X-wing up on its port stabilizers, then corkscrewed down through a roll that brought him out on the Interceptor’s tail. He linked his offside lasers so they fired two at a time and triggered a burst that burned armor from the Interceptor’s bent wings, but failed to destroy it.

The squint drifted to the left, then came up in a roll that brought it around and over Corran’s line of flight.
If he continues that roll, I’ll overshoot him and he’ll end up on my tail
. Corran pushed the stick to the left, making a wide turn to port that opened distance from the Interceptor, but still let the Imperial ship slip in behind him.

“Ooryl cannot get him, Nine.”

“I know, Ten, not to worry.”

Keeping one eye on the rangefinder, Corran kept his X-wing on the long loop.
Come on, you know you want me. If you had proton torps I’d be freespace ions, but you don’t!
“Yes, Whistler, I know what I’m doing.” Feeling some of his confidence returning, he shrugged. “At least I’m pretty sure I do.”

The Interceptor pilot came up fast and flew in a straight line to get quickly to the same point in space where Corran could get slowly with his great loop. Seeing his prey close in fast, Corran centered and hauled back on his stick, tightening his turn considerably and jamming his body down in his seat.

The X-wing shot across the TIE’s line of flight barely twenty meters behind the ball-and-wing craft. Yanking the stick to starboard, Corran rolled the fighter 180 degrees. He pulled the stick back to his breastbone, bringing the X-wing’s nose up in another turn that reversed his previous course. Leveling the fighter out, he sailed in right on the TIE’s tail—his long S-turn having allowed him to let it overshoot him by a fair distance.

A lethal distance
. Corran lined the Interceptor up in the sights and blew it apart with two laser blasts. As pieces of the disintegrating ship whirled past him, he keyed his comm unit. “Ten, report.”

“Cover Ten. Heading 90 degrees.”

“I have your wing, Ten.” Guiding the stick to the right he saw Ooryl’s X-wing shoot ahead of him and into the ion wake of an Interceptor. The Gand’s first shot struck sparks and armor from the fighter’s central ball.
One more, Ooryl, and you have him!

“Nine and Ten, break hard port! Get out of there!”

Ooryl’s compliance with Wedge’s order came immediately. His sharp turn took him across Corran’s line of flight, forcing Corran to yank back on his stick and roll to starboard. He leveled out and started a turn to port, but Whistler’s shrill whine filled the cockpit. The stick slammed back into Corran’s chest, pinning him in his ejection chair as the droid brought the X-wing’s nose up. Red crept into the corners of Corran’s vision and the
stick’s pressure against his breastbone made breathing hard.

The vast expanse of the
Black Asp’
s bulk filled his viewscreen.
By all the souls of Alderaan!
A blue bolt of ion-cannon energy sizzled in and battered down the X-wing’s shields. Whistler yowled and the stick went slack for a moment, allowing Corran to act.

He slapped the stick hard to port, bringing the X-wing up in a snap-roll that put the Interdictor beneath his feet. He started to pull back on the stick, to show the cruiser his stern and rocket full away from it, but he felt a tingle run through him as another ion blast partially caught the starboard stabilizer foils. The astromech’s screams died abruptly and Corran was slammed against the left side of the cockpit.

Even without seeing the stars swirling around him like dust motes in a Tatooine sand tornado, he knew what had happened. The ion blast had knocked out his starboard sublight engines, leaving the pair on the port side of the ship operating at full power and without competition. This put him into a flat spin, with his stern chasing his nose, completely out of control.

But at least I’m hard to hit
.

The ion blast, in addition to shutting Whistler off, had killed all his cockpit electronics and acceleration compensator. The only thing he could do, he knew, was to shut his engines down and go for a restart. Until he had some sort of power,
or until that cruiser slaps a tractor beam on me
, the X-wing would spin like a gyroscope.
Gotta power down
.

That was easier said than done. The emergency shutdown panel had been placed on the right side of the cockpit. Mashed against the opposite side by centrifugal force, it remained just beyond the reach
of his outstretched fingers. Gritting his teeth, Corran levered himself off the cockpit wall with his left elbow and tried to hit the panel.

The stick slammed him back into place pinning him. Corran caught it with his right hand and tried to pry it forward. Pain radiated out from where the stick had jammed his medallion into breastbone.
So much for that being terribly lucky
. The stick made it painful to breathe, adding one more unnecessary complication to his predicament.

A sense of urgency boiled up in him, overriding panic instead of boosting it. “Let. Me. Go!” He redoubled his effort to move the stick. It resisted at first, but Corran refused to be daunted. Concentrating with every fiber of his being, he pushed and the stick yielded. Centimeter by centimeter he forced it away from himself.
Yes, I’m free
.

Corran shoved the stick as far as it would go to the left, then used it to pull himself away from the port side of the cockpit. With his left hand on the top of the stick, he brought his elbow up, inch by inch, scraping it past various switches and knobs that had died with the rest of the ship. When his arm came up above the top of the stick, he lunged to the right, letting the stick slip beneath his armpit, and hit the shutdown panel with his right elbow.

The thrumming of the port engines died, leaving him alone with the sound of his own breathing in the cockpit. The ship still spun and showed no signs of slowing, but without friction or other resistance in the vacuum of space, it would continue to spin forever. Corran relaxed slightly in relief at cutting the engines off, and was rewarded by being bashed back against the port side of the cockpit. His helmet hit a hard stanchion, leaving him a touch dazed. Along with the spin-induced nausea, it made him hope someone
would
shoot him and end his misery.

That flash of despair lasted for a moment until another spark of pain spread out from his breastbone.
Kill us they might, but I’m not going to make it easy for them
. He slid his right hand across his chest, past the medallion and his left shoulder, and tipped three switches up. A bit farther along, he lifted a plasteel plate that covered a recessed red button, then punched that button and hoped for the best.

What he wanted to hear was the return of the engine thrum, but what he got was nothing.
Ignition circuits must be fried. There has to be something else I can do
. Without the engines, he had no power. The primary power cells and the reserve power cells for the lasers probably had enough energy in them to at least give him communications, attitude control jets, and limited sensors, but getting at it from inside the cockpit presented him a problem.
It’s not like I can just land this monster and do some manual cross-wiring
.

Corran laughed aloud. “No, but I
can
manually land this thing.”

He brought his left leg up and hooked a small tab on the cockpit wall with his heel. It flipped out a small bar that sat in a groove. Corran centered his foot on the bar and pumped it down. It came back up beneath his foot and he pushed it down again and again.

From the nose of the fighter he heard metallic pops and clicks. The bar was connected to a small generator that put out enough current to deploy the fighter’s landing gear. Extending them did nothing to affect the spin, but the payoff Corran hoped for wouldn’t come until the gear locked into place.

With a shudder he felt throughout the ship, the landing gear snapped into their fully deployed positions. The monitor in the cockpit lit up again and
the stick began to feel alive in his left hand. Laughing aloud, Corran took the stick in his right hand and tugged it over to the starboard side of the cockpit. The spin began to slow.

He fingered the medallion with his left hand. Because no-power landings would be seriously harmful to most lifeforms, extending the landing gear on the fighter opened a circuit that allowed the primary and reserve power cells to drive the S-foil impeller jets for simple maneuvering and to kick in the repulsorlift drives. The power cell tap tended to be used primarily by techs for moving the ships around in repair and maintenance facilities, because running the fusion engines up for full maneuvering power in enclosed places is generally considered harmful to most living creatures.

Corran tried his restart again, with the same results as before. Diagnostics told him he’d lost one of the starboard Incom phi-inverted lateral stabilizers and the engine just wouldn’t start with power levels fluctuating all over the place.
No engines, but maybe I have sensors and communication
.

He brought those systems on-line but got nothing from sensors and a lot of static covering voices on the comm. “This is Rogue Nine. I could use some help here.”