The Bacta War (51 page)

Myn Donos, the X-wing squadron commander, toggled his comm system. “Talon Leader to Talon Eight, any change?”

His communications specialist answered, “No, sir. He’s not broadcasting. As far as I can tell, he’s not homing in on any sort of a signal. And I’m still not picking up any engine emissions, other than his or ours, on the scanners.”

“Very well.”

The interceptor’s speed suddenly dropped and the vehicle began bobbing as if hit by heavy turbulence. It lost altitude, veering to starboard toward a cleft between two enormous volcanoes. Talon Leader saw glittering orange threads of lava crawling down the near slope of one of the black, fire-capped mountains.

“Leader to squad, it looks like he’s losing thrust and going low to lose us with terrain-following flying. Don’t give him the opportunity. Get close and force him down.” He led his squadron in a lazy arc toward the same gap. He watched the numbers changing on his distance-to-target register: three kilometers, two point five; the interceptor was now emerging from the gap on the far side as the X-wings were entering it.

Talon Eight’s voice broke, high-pitched and nervous, over the comm system: “Engines powering up, sir! Directly ahead! I count four, seven, thirteen—”

“S-foils to attack position!” Donos shouted. “Scatter and—”

Shiner, his R2 unit, issued a sharp squeal of alarm. Donos’s console echoed it with beeps and indicators showing that someone ahead had a sensor lock on him—two locks—
three
locks—

Donos veered sharply to port—directly toward a volcanic flue and the impenetrable stream of gray-black smoke belching from it. As he hit the cloud he pulled back on the stick, rising straight up the concealing smoke. The sensor locks on him disappeared.

He heard explosions, some near, some far, and the excited comm chatter of his pilots. He added to it: “Talon Two, go skyward in the smoke screen; we’ll hit them from above.”

No answer.

There was other comm traffic: “Five, Five, he’s on your tail!” “Can’t get clear, vape him for me, Six—” “Can’t, I’ve got—I’ve got—” “Nine banked into the volcano wall, she’s gone—” Another explosion.

Moments later, at two thousand meters Donos angled to starboard, getting clear of the smoke and emerging directly over the gap between volcanoes.

No one was on his tail. He checked the sensor board—didn’t believe what it showed him, checked it again.

He and Talon Twelve were the only New Republic forces remaining on the board. He counted twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty
-five
Imperial blips. A dozen were veering toward Twelve, the remainder toward Donos.

In a matter of seconds, Talon Squadron had been all but destroyed. Glittering pieces of X-wings were still streaming down toward the planet’s broken surface. In another few seconds, he and Twelve would be vaped, and the destruction would be complete.

Through the shock of it, he said, “Talon Twelve, dive for the surface. Trench Run Defense. Omega Signal. Acknowledge.”

“Omega Signal understood. Diving.” The sensor register on Talon Twelve showed decreasing altitude. Donos followed suit, standing his X-wing on its nose and blasting toward the ground.

He hadn’t even gotten a shot off at the enemy. Ten pilots dead and he had a full rack of proton torpedoes left, laser batteries charged to full. Time to change that.

The sensors showed an ominous cloud of TIE fighters—eyeballs, in Alliance fighter-jock parlance—pursuing Twelve toward the ground. If she reached the planet’s broken surface, which was pocked with craters and crisscrossed with rifts, she might be able to elude them; there, her piloting skill rather than the relative speeds of the fighters could allow her to lose pursuit, and any pilot who tried to follow her from above would quickly lose sight of her—this was the classic Trench Run Defense used against the first Death Star. But for now, Twelve would remain within the enemy’s weapons range for long, deadly seconds.

Within moments his sensors indicated that he was coming within range of the weapons of the rising cloud of TIE fighters. He switched his lasers over to dual fire, giving him greater recycling speed, and put the rest of his discretionary power on forward shields, then began firing as quickly as his targeting computer gave him the bracket color changes and pure audible tones of good target locks. He put his X-wing into a corkscrew descent, making it harder for him to hit his enemies, but making it much harder for them to hit him.

Most of his shots hit the ground. One missed his intended target but vaped its wingman. Two more shots hit their intended targets, one shearing off a wing and sending the fighter spinning into the nearest volcanic mountainside, the other having no immediate effect Donos could see—but the TIE fighter ceased all evasive maneuvering, its flight path becoming an easy-to-calculate ballistic curve. Donos almost smiled: It had been a surgical strike, the pilot killed by a beautiful shot straight into the cockpit, leaving the rest of the fighter craft unharmed.

His assault had its desired effect. The oncoming cloud of TIEs spread out and he shot through the gap in the center of their formation. They wheeled, an angry insect cloud, to follow, but now the TIEs pursuing Twelve into the rugged terrain below were in sight. Donos continued firing, vaping one starfighter before the others knew he was upon them; that fighter’s wingman, startled by the sudden explosion, reflexively banked rightward, directly into the side of the rift in which they were flying. His fighter also detonated, filling the rift with flame and shrapnel.

Donos dropped into the rift, pulling out of his dive just before he could scrape his keel on the ground. He had stone formations to either side of him—black rock so blurry from his speed that he could make out no details. “Leader to Twelve, report condition,” he said.

“Minor damage to lower port strike foil,” she answered. “It’s giving me a little vibration, which should go away if we can get out of atmosphere. Some starring on the canopy. Pursuit is hanging back—Wait, here comes one! He’s trying to get a lock on me!”

Donos put on more speed, increasing the risk that he would not be able to make some difficult turn ahead. He whipped around a bend in the rift and almost slammed into the ion engines of a slow-moving TIE fighter immediately ahead. He snapped off a laser shot out of reflex, saw it lance straight into the starfighter’s starboard engine.

The TIE fighter instantly became a glowing fireball of yellow and orange flame and debris. Donos’s X-wing rocked as he roared through the fireball; his helmet and hull were barely sufficient to keep the sound of the explosion from deafening him. Then he was through.

One more turn, a tight starboard bank that almost flung him into the rock wall to port, and he had Twelve in sight. Twelve, and the vehicle pursuing her—the interceptor that had led them into this trap. This was the first time Donos had seen it visually, and he fleetingly noted the nonstandard red stripes painted horizontally on the starfighter’s wing arrays before something else occurred to him: there were no sparks or smoke plumes emerging from its engines now. With the deception done, all the false signs of the interceptor’s weakness had been shut off.

The interceptor had crept up to within meters of Twelve’s aft end and was now skillfully matching all of the X-wing pilot’s frantic maneuvers. This was a demonstration of superior flying technique, a show of contempt by one pilot for his enemy, and there was no doubt that the interceptor could begin firing on the defenseless Twelve at any second.

Donos fired off a desperate snap-shot. At the same moment, the interceptor took its kill shot.

Donos saw his lasers strike and play across the interceptor’s main body, slashing across the engines and burning into the cockpit.

The interceptor’s lasers intersected at Twelve’s X-wing, hitting her aft shields in spite of her desperate maneuvers … and then they penetrated. Both of Twelve’s starboard engines flamed out. The starboard strike foils, softened by the lasers’ intense heat, began to deform under atmospheric friction.

The interceptor slowed. Sparks and flame, real ones now, issued from the engines. It rose, jumping out of the rocky rift, and was immediately lost to Donos’s sight.

Twelve’s X-wing began a portward roll. Donos’s next command was half a shout: “Twelve, bail out! Twelve, eject!”

“Ejecting now! Leader, get out of here!”

Donos watched helplessly as Twelve’s cockpit filled with the fire of an ejection thruster, but the canopy failed to open. The ejector seat smashed Twelve into it. Its transparisteel construction kept the canopy in one piece as the X-wing continued to rotate to port. Under continued pressure from the thrust of the ejection seat, the cockpit finally broke away from the X-wing, but Twelve sat limp in the seat as the ejection seat carried her mere meters from the doomed snubfighter, slamming her into the rift wall to port. In a split second she was gone, lost behind Donos, and her X-wing was nosing over to crash into the rift wall below.

Donos forced himself to look away, to return his mind to mission parameters.

A few minutes of terrain-following flying and he should be able to jump free of these rifts and head for space. But suddenly the prospect of survival didn’t appeal much to him.

Donos’s R2 shrieked at him. Startled back to attention, he looked around, saw that a pair of TIE fighters had gained on him during his reverie.

He could stay and be killed, or flee and describe his failure to his commanders in cruel, humbling detail.

He’d prefer to die. But the families of eleven good men and women deserved to know how their loved ones had met their fates. With an anguished cry, Donos hit the thrusters again and rounded the next turn.

THE OLD REPUBLIC
 (5,000–33 YEARS BEFORE
STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE
)

Long—
long
—ago in a galaxy far, far away … some twenty-five thousand years before Luke Skywalker destroyed the first Death Star at the Battle of Yavin in
Star Wars: A New Hope
 … a large number of star systems and species in the center of the galaxy came together to form the Galactic Republic, governed by a Chancellor and a Senate from the capital city-world of Coruscant. As the Republic expanded via the hyperspace lanes, it absorbed new member worlds from newly discovered star systems; it also expanded its military to deal with the hostile civilizations, slavers, pirates, and gangster-species such as the slug-like Hutts that were encountered in the outward exploration. But the most vital defenders of the Republic were the Jedi Knights. Originally a reclusive order dedicated to studying the mysteries of the life energy known as the Force, the Jedi became the Republic’s guardians, charged by the Senate with keeping the peace—with wise words if possible; with lightsabers if not.

But the Jedi weren’t the only Force-users in the galaxy. An ancient civil war had pitted those Jedi who used the Force selflessly against those who allowed themselves to be ruled by their ambitions—which the Jedi warned led to the dark side of the Force. Defeated in that long-ago war, the dark siders fled beyond the galactic frontier, where they built a civilization of their own: the Sith Empire.

The first great conflict between the Republic and the Sith Empire occurred when two hyperspace explorers stumbled on the Sith worlds, giving the Sith Lord Naga Sadow and his dark side warriors a direct invasion route into the Republic’s central worlds. This war resulted in the first destruction of the Sith Empire—but it was hardly the last. For the next four thousand years, skirmishes between the Republic and Sith grew into wars, with the scales always tilting toward one or the other, and peace never lasting. The galaxy was a place of almost constant strife: Sith armies against Republic armies; Force-using Sith Lords against Jedi Masters and Jedi Knights; and the dreaded nomadic mercenaries called Mandalorians bringing muscle and firepower wherever they stood to gain.

Then, a thousand years before
A New Hope
and the Battle of Yavin, the Jedi defeated the Sith at the Battle of Ruusan, decimating the so-called Brotherhood of Darkness that was the heart of the Sith Empire—and most of its power.

One Sith Lord survived—Darth Bane—and his vision for the Sith differed from that of his predecessors. He instituted a new doctrine: No longer would the followers of the dark side build empires or amass great armies of Force-users. There would be only two Sith at a time: a Master and an apprentice. From that time on, the Sith remained in hiding, biding their time and plotting their revenge, while the rest of the galaxy enjoyed an unprecedented era of peace, so long and strong that the Republic eventually dismantled its standing armies.

But while the Republic seemed strong, its institutions had begun to rot. Greedy corporations sought profits above all else and a corrupt Senate did nothing to stop them, until the corporations reduced many planets to raw materials for factories and entire species became subjects for exploitation. Individual Jedi continued to defend the Republic’s citizens and obey the will of the Force, but the Jedi Order to which they answered grew increasingly out of touch. And a new Sith mastermind, Darth Sidious, at last saw a way to restore Sith domination over the galaxy and its inhabitants, and quietly worked to set in motion the revenge of the Sith …

If you’re a reader new to the Old Republic era, here are three great starting points:

•
The Old Republic: Deceived
, by Paul S. Kemp: Kemp tells the tale of the Republic’s betrayal by the Sith Empire, and features Darth Malgus, an intriguing, complicated villain.

•
Knight Errant
, by John Jackson Miller: Alone in Sith territory, the headstrong Jedi Kerra Holt seeks to thwart the designs of an eccentric clan of fearsome, powerful, and bizarre Sith Lords.

•
Darth Bane: Path of Destruction
, by Drew Karpyshyn: A portrait of one of the most famous Sith Lords, from his horrifying childhood to an adulthood spent in the implacable pursuit of vengeance.