Star Wars - X-Wing - Krytos Trap Read online

  find you can't be part of the squadron, you can walk away

  and I'll have been proud to have you as one of us."

  Asyr arched an eyebrow. "No threat of retribution if I

  betray you?"

  Wedge shook his head. "If you decide to betray us, I

  can't imagine we'll survive long enough to avenge ourselves

  on you. On the other hand, Rogues tend to take a lot of

  killing, so you can't be sure of how things will turn out."

  "I'll keep that in mind." Asyr smiled and Wedge took it

  for a good sign. "And, Commander, concerning Gavin, there

  is no hidden agenda. His wide-eyed way of looking at every-

  thing is refreshing and, perhaps, even energizing. I've lived a

  long time in the shadows, s o moving into the light feels very

  good. I'll do nothing to hurt him."

  "Good." Wedge waved her toward the door. "Go get

  your stuff and get to the briefing. I'm trusting you'll see the

  holes in this plan and help us plug them before Zsinj accom-

  plishes what the Empire could only dream about the de-

  struction of Rogue Squadron."

  6

  Corran Horn let his joy at again being in the cockpit of a

  starfighter consume him. It did not matter to him that he did

  not know how he'd gotten into the ship. He did not let the

  fact that he was flying a TIE Interceptor concern him. He

  thrust aside anxiety born of his ignorance of his location.

  None of those things were germane to his present situation.

  The only relevant facts in his life were these he was

  flying and, he knew, if he flew well enough he would be

  allowed to fly again. He had no idea how he knew his perfor-

  mance would be rewarded with more flight time--that fact

  seemed as fundamental to him as his need for air and food

  and sleep. His desire to continue flying blazed hot in his gut

  and burned from him the annoyance at the squint's ineffi-

  cient controls and sluggish reaction time. "Nemesis One, report."

  It took Corran a moment to realize the comm unit call

  had been directed at him. He glanced at his scanner win-

  dows. "One is clear."

  "One, we have two eyeballs vectoring in on a heading of

  239 degrees at a range of ten kilometers. They are hostiles.

  You are free to engage and terminate them."

  "I copy. Nemesis One outbound." Corran hit the left

  rudder pedal and swung the ship around onto the proper

  heading. The starfield whirled around him, then froze in

  place again. He could recognize none of the constellations,

  but that did not concern him. His mission was to destroy the

  enemy, and that he would gladly do no matter where he

  found himself.

  His breathing reverberated loudly in the full helmet he

  wore. The sound came rhythmically. It betrayed no nervous-

  ness. It was not the quickened breathing of prey, but the

  strong steady respiration of a predator on the hunt. He had

  already killed more TIE starfighters than he cared to remem-

  ber; these would just be two more.

  And yet, in the back of his mind, he knew he could not

  actually remember his previous kills, and this amnesia began

  to nibble away at his emotional well-being.

  With a thumb he flicked the Interceptor's quad lasers

  over to dual-fire mode, then pulled back on the steering yoke

  and brought the ship up in a slight climb. A quick starboard

  snaproll onto his head turned the climb into a dive, and

  suddenly he was upon the eyeballs. His index finger tight-

  ened on the trigger and a stream of verdant laser-bolts sliced

  through the lead eyeball.

  Because of his angle of attack, the bolts scored black

  furrows in one wing, then pierced the ball cockpit from the

  top. On the other side they freed the wing, but the ship's

  explosion shattered the hexagonal panel. It blasted debris

  into the flight path of the second TIE, causing it to roll to

  starboard and dive. The maneuver succeeded in saving the

  second ship from a collision with its dying wingman, but

  dropped it straight into Corran's sights.

  Corran cut the throttle back by a quarter, matching

  speed with his prey. The pilot he hunted juked right and left,

  but made none of the hard breaks and sharp turns needed to

  shuck Corran from his tail. Without remorse, but full of

  contempt, Corran flicked the squint's lasers over to qua

  fire, then impaled the TIE fighter on his crosshairs and hit the

  trigger with a delicate twitch of his finger.

  The four green laser-bolts converged and merged into

  one a nanosecond before they burned the top from the cock-

  pit, sheering it off just above the engine assembly. Corran

  imagined he could see the pilot's blackened body in silhou-

  ette for a second, then the eyeball exploded and seared that

  image into his brain. Exultation at having been victorious

  swept through Corran, though in its wake came the feeling

  that those two pilots had been so inexperienced that he had

  not really fought them, but had just slaughtered them.

  "Nemesis One, we have two uglies at five kilometers,

  heading 132 degrees. They are hostile. Engage and termi-

  nate."

  "As ordered." Corran brought the squint up and

  around, then punched the throttle to full power. He wanted

  to close quickly so he would be able to get a look at the ships

  he faced. Uglies were hideous, hybrid spacefighters cobbled

  together from various salvage parts. Smugglers and pirates

  used them fairly often. He couldn't pinpoint how he knew

  that, but he did know he'd fought uglies before. Given that

  he was alive, he assumed they had not proved too much of a

  problem for him.

  Something about that assumption niggled in the back of

  his mind. He knew it was not incorrect. He was a good pilot

  and he knew it, but his assuming superiority seemed wrong.

  He hadn't made the assumption on the basis of the fact that

  uglies seldom had the performance characteristics of the

  fighters from which they were created. He realized he'd as-

  sumed anyone flying uglies would be pirates or smugglers,

  and had instantly assumed they were his inferiors. While he

  could find no facts to dispute his assumption about his foes,

  he knew there was something wrong with his having made it.

  A warning klaxon blared in the cockpit, alerting him

  that one of the uglies had gotten a torpedo lock on him and

  had launched a proton torpedo. Corran banished thoughts

  about his enemies' combat-worthiness, rolled the ship up

  onto its port wing, then dove. His abrupt maneuver hurled

  his ship onto a course at right angles to the one he'd been

  traveling previously. The proton torpedo, which was travel-

  ing roughly twice as fast as he was, shot past his starboard

  wing and started on a long loop to head back at him.

  A proton torpedo has thirty seconds of flight time. I

  can't outrun it, but I can out-maneuver it. Corran smiled. Or

  deal with it more directly!

  He reversed the squint's thrust and hit the port rudder

  pedal. This threw the Int
erceptor into a flat spin that brought

  the nose around to face back along his flight path. Where the

  proton torpedo had been coming straight at his back before,

  now it was coming straight in at his cockpit. He killed the

  thrust and glanced at his scanner monitor--750 meters and

  closing fast.

  At 400 meters he flicked the lasers over to dual-fire and

  tightened his finger down on the trigger. Pairs of laser-bolts

  burned green through space seeking the torpedo. One bolt

  hit the torpedo at 250 meters out. It failed to destroy it, but

  did melt its way into the body and ignite a fuel cell. The

  subsequent explosion pitched the torpedo off course. When

  the onboard computer calculated the torpedo would not hit

  its target, it detonated the warhead, but the Interceptor re-

  mained a hundred meters outside the blast radius.

  Switching thrust forward again, Corran throttled up to

  full and punched up profiles of the uglies. One was an X-T1E.

  It had the body of an X-wing fighter with the hexagonal

  wings from a TIE starfighter. Corran found the ship hideous

  to look at and would have dismissed it immediately except it

  had launched the proton torpedo.

  The other ship looked fairly ridiculous. It mated a TIE's

  ball cockpit with the engine pods from a Y-wing. This partic-

  ular hybrid was rare because it combined the TIE's lack of

  shields with the Y-wing's lumbering, slothful handling. Cot-

  ran knew this type of ugly was often referred to as a TYE-

  wing, though DIE-wing was a common nickname for it as

  well.

  Corran cut his Interceptor on a course that shot him past

  the X-TIE, then broke on down into a series of maneuvers,

  twisting and turning, that left the TYE-wing far behind. The

  X-TIE hung with him long enough for Corran's scanners to

  pick out details. X-wing fighters had two torpedo launching

  tubes in the nose and four lasers, one mounted on each end

  of the stabilizers that supplied the ship with its name. Lack-

  ing those S-foils, the X-T1E had replaced one proton torpedo

  launch tube with what Corran guessed would be a laser can-

  non.

  Undergunned and overmatched. Cotran rolled his way

  down through a corkscrew dive that lengthened his lead on

  the X-TIE and the TYE-wing. The X-TIE's pilot began to

  pull the fighter's nose up, as if he intended to return to his

  wingman's side and the safety the TYE-wing would provide

  him. Corran watched him turn away, then inverted and

  pulled the Interceptor through a tight turn and shot back up

  and in at the X-TIE's exposed aft.

  Clearly unaware of Corran's maneuver, the X-TIE's pi-

  lot inverted and headed back toward the TYE-wing. Corran

  saw the pilot's head come up as he scanned space for signs of

  the Interceptor. Coming in from behind made spotting the

  squint difficult. The pilot never managed it, though Corran

  did see the R5 unit's head swivel around and spot him.

  Corran hit the trigger and walked laser fire from stern to

  nose on the ugly. Two bolts blew the R5's flowerpot head

  off, theft.two more punctured the cockpit, exploding it into a

  cloud of transparisteel and duraplast fragments. The last

  bolts hit forward and touched off a proton torpedo's fuel

  cells. The fuel's detonation filled the slender craft with fire

  and sent the nose spinning wildly off into space.

  Pulling back on the yoke, Corran brought his nose up

  and spitted the DIE-wing on the crosshairs. The ugly began a

  roll, so Corran matched him and tightened up on the trigger.

  Green laser-bolts slashed at one of the Y-wings, but the ugly

  flashed on past beneath him. Corran prepared to invert and

  loop, but a hail of angry red laser-bolts sliced across his flight

  path.

  "What? Who?" He kicked the squint up on its right

  wing, wrenched the wheel right, and tugged back on the

  yoke. The maneuver pulled him sharply out of line with his

  previous course, but he wasn't content with just doing that.

  He broke again, to port and up, then searched his scanner

  monitor for whomever had shot at him.

  The scanners reported two ships, both of them X-wings.

  "What's going on here?"

  "Nemesis One, we have two hostiles. X-wings. It was an

  ambush. Engage and terminate."

  Ambush me, will you? Corran translated his outrage

  into fluid maneuvering. Cutting and jumping, he bounced his

  Interceptor through a series of jukes that shook the X-wings

  from his tail and brought him around on the DIE-wing.

  Without really thinking about it, he pumped laser-fire into

  the ugly's ball cockpit, then pulled up and away as the misbe-

  gotten fighter exploded.

  Two on one--same odds I've had all day. Despite that

  hasty assessment, he knew the odds were actually quite dif-

  ferent in this battle. The squint's speed and maneuverability

  gave it an edge over the X-wings, but they had shields. They

  could take more damage than he could, and the ability to

  survive damage had a very direct relationship with the ability

  to survive in combat. More importantly, the two X-wing

  pilots seemed determined to operate together. They flew in

  tight formation and seemed familiar enough with each other

  that he wasn't so much fighting two foes as one meta-foe.

  The X-wings came around on a vector that brought

  them straight at him. Corran knew head-to-head passes were

  the most deadly in dogfighting, and given the enemy's superi-

  ority of numbers, he had no intention of engaging in such a

  duel. He cut his throttle back and dove at a slight angle so he

  would pass beneath their incoming vector. They made a

  slight adjustment in their courses, apparently content to get a

  passing deflection shot. Corran then goosed his throttle for-

  ward, forcing them to sharpen their dives, yet before they

  could get a good shot at him, he had passed beneath them

  and had started up again.

  One X-wing inverted and pulled up through a loop to

  drop on Corran's tail while the other broke the other way.

  The second X-wing's looped out and away from the Inter-

  ceptor, momentarily splitting the two fighters. Corran knew

  the second pilot had made a mistake and instantly acted to

  make the most of it. Cutting his throttle back, he turned hard

  to starboard and then back again to port.

  Corran's sine-wave maneuver brought him back on

  course, but the X-wing that had been following him now

  hung up and out in front of him. The X-wing's pilot had

  continued on his course, assuming the Interceptor had been

  trying to evade him. It wasn't until he shot past the Intercep-

  tor and it dropped into his aft arc that he realized his error.

  Corran throttled up and closed with the X-wing. You're

  mine now, all because your buddy made a mistake. He

  pushed the Interceptor in to point-blank range and started to

  fire---then he saw a blue crest on the X-wing's S-foils. It

  appeared to be the Rebel crest with a dozen X-wings flying
/>   out away from it. Though no words accompanied the crest,

  Corran knew they should have. Rogue Squadron!

  The second he recognized the crest, his finger fell away

  from the trigger. He didn't know why he didn't fire. Fear

  crystallized in his belly at the sight of it, but he knew he

  wasn't afraid of the Rogues. It was something else. Some-

  thing was wrong, hideously wrong, but he could not pierce

  the veil of mystery surrounding that sensation.

  Suddenly something exploded behind him, pitching him

  forward. He slammed hard into the steering yoke, crushing

  his life support equipment and driving the breath from his

  lungs. His chest burned as he tried in vain to catch his breath.

  He caught the fleeting scent of flowers, then a painful bril-

  liance filled the cockpit. He waited for the pain in his chest

  and the fire in his lungs to consume him, but those sensations

  dulled, and his ability to focus on them or anything else

  eroded.

  A woman's voice spoke to him. "You have failed, Neme-

  sis One. You are weak." Her words came tinged with anger,

  bitten off harshly and clearly meant to hurt him. "Had this

  been other than a simulation, your atoms would be floating

  through space and the rabble would be laughing at you. You

  are pathetic."

  Corran's right hand rose toward his throat and pressed

  itself against his chest. The shattered remains of his life sup-

  port gear prevented him from touching his breastbone, but

  he knew something was missing, something that should have

  been laying against his flesh. He did not know what it was,

  but he knew he would draw comfort from it.

  In its absence, despair flooded through him.

  "I had thought you worthy, Nemesis One. You told me

  you were, didn't you?"

  Though he recalled no such declaration, he confirmed it.

  "I did. I am."

  "You are nothing unless I say you are something. Now I

  say you are nothing, nothing but a failure!" In the light he

  saw the silhouette of a tall, slender woman. The sight of her

  made him shiver more than her words. He knew he feared

  her, but he also wanted to please her. Pleasing her was very

  important to him, the only thing that was important in the