The Bacta War (21 page)

The fact that her father had been involved hurt her deeply. What made it even worse was that Iella Wessiri had been identified from the hologram. The Imps took that as a sign that Antilles had entered into a full alliance with the Ashern, but Erisi read more into Iella’s participation.
Iella caused my father to be embarrassed so as to get at me, to avenge herself for my betrayal of Corran and the rest of the Rogues. This was a message directed at me by her—a private declaration of war
.

Erisi glanced at her monitor and snarled into the comm unit. “Four, close the formation up.” Behind her four Interceptors came a quartet of the double-hulled TIE bombers. Her Interceptors were nominally flying cover for the bombers, though once they dropped their thermal detonators and proton bombs to open up the main colony, the Interceptors’ mission changed to engaging ground targets and suppressing fire at the stormtrooper-laden shuttles that would follow.

The TIE bombers swooped down through the air and spiraled in on their target. Erisi and her flight came around to follow them in. She couldn’t help but remember countless training exercises where she’d used an X-wing to stoop like a hawk-bat on such lumbering craft.
Two would be dead in my initial pass and the others would die as they attempted to flee
.

Below her, the bombers began their runs. The thermal detonators fell lazily from the bombers as if harmless. Their explosions flashed golden light through the glacier and bled up into the great gouts of steam they produced. The light breeze below quickly cleared the steam off, revealing a hole
roughly a kilometer around and nearly half that deep. Steaming water pooled in the bottom of it, and Erisi knew the thermal detonators had cleared the glacier down to the transparisteel canopy that protected the Halanit colony from the harsh climate of their world.

The bombers’ second pass eliminated the canopy. The high-yield proton bombs shattered the transparisteel shield, fragmenting the sheets at ground zero. A shock wave rippled through the double-walled barrier, ripping whole transparisteel plates free from both layers as it went. The warm air from beneath the shield rushed upward, blowing debris up and out, then condensed in the frigid air. At the same time, around the hole’s jagged edges, cold air poured down into the colony.

Rolling her Interceptor up on the port stabilizer assembly, Erisi spiraled the fighter down in through the hole the bombs had created. The chasm into which she flew stretched out above and below her fighter like the grandest of Coruscant’s boulevards. Long suspension bridges linked both sides of the chasm at various levels and quickly icing-over waterfalls splashed their way down into the depths in front of her. Lights from hundreds of viewports dotted the chasm’s depths with yellow circles and squares.

Erisi hit the triggers on her lasers. A stream of green laser darts scored a ragged line along one face of the chasm, piercing the viewports and reducing them to darkness. As she shot, she glanced at her primary monitor, waiting for the missile warning alarm to be activated.
It’s going to be missiles or turbolasers, and if they’re going to use them, it’ll have to be now
.

She continued her flight deeper and deeper, strafing targets as she went. One line of fire scattered a crowd on a balcony. Another swept across a foot bridge, chasing a man who foolishly thought himself faster than a laser bolt. Nearing the bottom of the chasm, she chopped her throttle back and pulled up in a loop, but not before filling the ice-crusted pools below with enough laser energy to start them boiling.

She knew, with the canopy being breached and the ichthyoculture pools having been transformed into giant
stewpots that the Halanit colony was dead. Those who didn’t freeze to death would starve—each a terrible way to die. She realized that her old comrades in Rogue Squadron would be horrified at the carnage, as she would have been if the Empire had carried this attack out on Thyferra, but she felt no remorse for the people doomed by her action.

They were already dead
. Their need for bacta had been desperate, because without it their marginal colony could not survive. They could not afford bacta because their colony was so poor, hence anyone with enough neurons to form a synapse would have seen that the only sensible thing to do was to abandon Halanit or choose a method of exploiting the world to generate enough money so it could sustain itself.

I
have no obligation to save the stupid from themselves. Even if we had given them bacta, another crisis would have wiped them out. The fact that they refused to face reality does not make it incumbent upon me to shield them from the disaster they so fervently court
. Erisi’s eyes narrowed as she started a strafing run back toward the surface.
And they compounded their stupidity by consorting with thieves and using bacta for which they could not pay
.

Despite the lack of fire defending the colony, she knew they were anything but a defenseless, inoffensive community. Their accepting the bacta from Wedge and the others was the equivalent of stabbing a knife into the Thyferran economy. If Thyferra allowed them to do what they did, other worlds would similarly duck their obligations. Other individuals would emulate Wedge, and pirates would swarm over the bacta convoys. The rightful reward for providing a vital fluid to the galaxy would be denied to Thyferra in an attack as destructive as the one she was mounting.

Rocketing up through the hole in the shield, Erisi rolled out and began a long elliptical orbit over the breached shield. “Interceptor One reporting. No hostile antiship fire in evidence.”

“We copy, One. The Captain congratulates you on your run and requests you join him for the march through the colony.”

“I copy, Control. As ordered.” Erisi smiled.
We’ve shown Convarion that THDC pilots are not the incompetent nerf-brains he thought we were. Now he will show me how powerful stormtroopers are so I won’t forget who is superior to whom. Not that I ever could, but I shall say nothing. Convarion would never believe himself to be my subordinate anyway
.

Gavin didn’t realize it was an explosion that had awakened him until a second and third blast sounded. He threw off thick layers of blankets—his Tatooine upbringing guaranteed that he felt cold even in Halanit’s hot baths—and snarled as he thrust his feet into cold boots. He fastened them, then stood and strapped on his blaster belt as Farl Cort appeared in the doorway of his room. “What’s happening?”

Before Cort could answer, Gavin’s ears popped with the change in the colony’s air pressure. Air began to rush out of the room, tugging at the hem of Cort’s cloak. The little man’s face went ashen. “They’ve breached the shield.”

Gavin grabbed him before he could fall. “Who’s they?”

“Imperials, I guess. There’s a Star Destroyer in orbit.”

“Sithspawn! You should have gotten me up when it arrived.” Gavin wanted to pound his head against the wall. He had been certain that he’d been careful enough to hide his trail so the
Corrupter
couldn’t follow him. When it showed up at the convoy hijacking, he’d immediately broken his flight and dove away from it. The
Xucphra Alazhi
’s bulk shielded him from the destroyer’s turbolasers. He knew he was dead unless he exercised the only option available to him, a jump to lightspeed, which he did blindly.

He held the jump for fifteen seconds, which were the longest fifteen seconds in his life. Jumping blind into hyperspace was about as stupid as making fat jokes around a Hutt, and nearly always as fatal. Coming out of hyperspace, he made a quick read of the area and had his R2 unit plot another short jump. He put his ship through a series of seven such small jumps, doubling back and forth, then took a long jump out toward the Rim. He landed on a small planet, got
into and out of some trouble there, and then began his run back to Yag’Dhul.

Because astronavigation had never been his strength, he was limited in his choices of destinations. To make the trip back as quickly as possible, making a long run to Halanit was his best route because, from there, the trip to Yag’Dhul could be accomplished with several short hops. He also thought there might be an off-chance that Corran and Ooryl wouldn’t have left Halanit by the time he got there. Traveling to Halanit would run him pretty much out of fuel. He hoped the Halanits would give him some in return for the bacta they’d been given, and with Corran being there he was certain they would fuel him up.

Despite Corran’s absence, the Halanits had been more than happy to give Gavin fuel, but the problem was that they needed to synthesize it first. The process of refueling his fighter was to take two days, during which they tried to make him feel as much at home as possible. On a world sheathed in ice, with abundant amounts of water and a cuisine based on fish, making a Tatooine native feel at home was not easy.

And now
Corrupter
has tracked me here, so I repay their hospitality with death
. Gavin growled incoherently, then stopped and forced himself to think clearly. He thumbed on the comlink clipped to the lapel of his flightsuit. “Jawaswag, give me a system start, now!”

His R2 tootled something back at him.

“I don’t care, just do it. Turn on the fuel pumps and suck their synthesizer dry if you have to. Gavin out.” He lifted Cort away from his slump against the wall and set him on his feet. “Get me to the utility hangar, now!”

Cort’s brown eyes unglazed. “Utility hangar, yes. Come, it’s on the other side of the chasm.”

Cort led Gavin from the apartment he’d been given and out into one of the subterranean corridors running toward the chasm. Screaming people had begun to fill the corridor, but the small man deftly cut through them. Gavin shouldered his way through the thickening crowd and caught up with Cort as they reached the walkway across the chasm.

Gavin grabbed the back of Cort’s cloak and yanked him
back out of the way of a green laser bolt. More of them played out in a line across the walkway, chasing down and burning the legs from a running man. The man’s screams were swallowed by the whine of a TIE Interceptor as it streaked past and he rolled from the walkway to fall to oblivion.

“Now, go!” Gavin’s shout carried above the screeching of the other Interceptors strafing the chasm. Gavin started running, letting his long legs devour the distance. He let every ounce of panic he felt fuel his run, and he knew he was running faster than he ever had before. His lungs burned and his breath steamed, but the echoed whines of Interceptor engines wouldn’t let him stop until he reached the far side and the safety of the tunneled corridor.

Cort arrived two steps after he did, adrenaline having lent him speed enough to almost match the taller man’s pace. Cort moved into the lead, cutting and weaving through corridors and down ramps until they came out into a huge subterranean cavern with a huge steaming lake, two bacta-storage cylinders, a variety of old Zenomach and other tunneling devices, and Gavin’s X-wing.

His fighter had been painted gold, with light red-orange crescents creating a scalelike pattern. Near the front of the fighter, a mouth had been painted with large, white, daggerlike teeth; the proton torpedo launching ports had become the pupils of eyes. When asked how he wanted his X-wing decorated, he’d chosen to make it over in the image of a krayt dragon, the most fearsome predator on all of Tatooine.

He turned back to Cort. “Look, this is my fault. They’re here after me. I’ll take off and lead them in a chase away from here. Get your people into defensible positions and hold out. These tunnels will make it tough on stormtroopers, so they’ll withdraw when I’m gone.”

Cort shook his head. “We have no weapons.”

The plaintive tone in his voice punched Gavin straight in the heart. “I never should have come here.” He drew his blaster and pressed it into Cort’s hands. “Take this, do what you can. I’ll do something.”

Gavin ran to his X-wing and clambered up on a mole-miner
to boost himself into the cockpit. Cort disconnected the refueling lines, then backed away and tossed Gavin a salute. Gavin returned it, then pulled on his helmet and fastened his restraining straps. He left his life-support gear on the floor of the cockpit, disdainful of the time it would take to pull it on.
If I go down out there, I’m dead anyway, so it doesn’t much matter
.

He cut in the repulsor-lift generators, retracted the landing gear, and feathered the throttle forward. The X-wing headed toward the retracting metal doorway built into the mouth of the cavern. Beyond it, Gavin saw a translucent glowing wall of white that he realized was snow that had drifted in against the door. He thumbed his fire-control to lasers and linked them for dual fire, then hit the trigger. The snow barrier evaporated, so Gavin kicked his throttle forward and shot out into the Halanit sky.

Keeping the X-wing low enough to skim the drifts, he headed out in a long loop through a valley that curved around to the north. Three kilometers out from the cavern he rolled up on the starboard S-foil and began to climb. As his sensors began to pick up Imp fighters, he reached up and flipped the switch that brought his S-foils into attack position and locked them.

A glance at his fuel indicator told him he had ten minutes for fighting before he made his run out of the system. Halanit itself created a fairly insignificant gravity shadow in hyperspace—he needed to get away from the gas giant around which it orbited.
No problem—ten minutes is more than enough time to make the Imps angry enough to chase me
.

Jawaswag beeped at him and Gavin smiled. “You’re right, the Imps are flying in formation. They want to make this easy. Acquire One, Two, and Three.” With the sensor signature of each locked into his fire-control computer, Gavin kept his fighter on the deck and closed to proton torpedo range. That course had him flying directly at the rising column of smoke and steam coming from the holed canopy.

“Jawaswag get me a sensor record of all this, visual and everything.”

The droid hooted his assent.

Gavin waited until he hit the outer fringes of range, then popped his weapons control over to proton torpedoes. He set them for single fire, then acquired the first Interceptor. His head-up display went from yellow to red and the R2’s keening wail filled the cockpit. He hit the trigger, shifted to the second target, got a tone, and fired a second torpedo.