Crosscurrent (45 page)

The
yow
was a product of multiple cannon hits that disintegrated his right dorsal cannon and most of the extended wing it had been attached to. This kicked his fighter into a tumble that he fought with both hands on the yoke and both feet kicking attitude jets and almost had under control until the pair of the Defenders closest on his tail blossomed into expanding spheres of flame and debris fragments. The twin shock fronts overtook him at exactly the wrong instant and sent him flipping end-over-end straight at another Defender formation streaking toward him head-on. Then tail-on, then head-on again, and so forth.

His ship’s comlink crackled as Wedge Antilles’s fighter flashed past him close enough that he could see the grin
on the commander’s face. “
That’s ‘stupid plan
, sir
,’ Lieutenant.
”

“I suppose you think that’s funny.”

“
Well, if he doesn’t,
” put in Hobbie’s wingman, “
I sure do.
”

“When I want
your
opinion, Janson, I’ll dust your ship and scan for it in the wreckage.” The skewed whirl of stars around his cockpit gave his stomach a yank that threatened to make the slab of smoked terrafin loin he’d had for breakfast violently reemerge. Struggling grimly with the controls, he managed to angle his ship’s whirl just a hair, which let him twitch his ship’s nose toward the four pursuing marauders as he spun. Red fire lashed from his three surviving cannons, and the Defenders’ formation split open like an overripe snekfruit.

Hobbie only dusted one with the cannons, but the pair of proximity-fused flechette torpedoes he had thoughtfully triggered at the same time flared in diverging arcs to intercept the enemy fighters; these torpedo arcs terminated in spectacular explosions that cracked the three remaining Defenders like rotten snuffle eggs.

“Now,
that
was satisfying,” he said, still fighting his controls to stabilize the crippled X-wing. “Eyeball soufflé!”

“
Better watch it, Hobbie—keep that up, and somebody might start to think you can fly that thing.
”

“Are you
in
this fight, Janson? Or are you just gonna hang back and smirk while I do all the heavy lifting?”

“
Haven’t decided yet.
” Wes Janson’s X-wing came out of nowhere, streaking in a tight bank across Hobbie’s subjective vertical. “
Maybe I can lend a hand. Or, say, a couple torps.
”

Two brilliant blue stars leapt from Janson’s torpedo tubes and streaked for the oncoming TIEs.

“Uh, Wes?” Hobbie said, flinching. “Those weren’t the flechette torps, were they?”

“
Sure. What else?
”

“Have you noticed that I’m currently having just a little trouble
maneuvering?
”

“
What do you mean?
” Janson asked as though honestly puzzled. Then, after a second spent watching Hobbie’s ship tumbling helplessly directly toward his torpedoes’ targets, he said, “
Oh. Uh … sorry?
”

The flechette torpedoes carried by Rogue Squadron had been designed and built specifically for this operation, and they had one primary purpose: to take out TIE Defenders.

The TIE Defender was the Empire’s premier space-superiority fighter. It was faster and more maneuverable than the Incom T-65 (better known as the X-wing); faster even than the heavily modified and updated 65Bs of Rogue Squadron. The Defender was also more heavily armed, packing twin ion cannons to supplement its lasers, as well as dual-use launch tubes that could fire either proton torpedoes or concussion missiles. The shields generated by its twin Novaldex deflector generators were nearly as powerful as those found on capital ships. However, the Defenders were not equipped with particle shields, depending instead on their titanium-reinforced hull to absorb the impact of material objects.

Each proton torpedo shell had been loaded with thousands of tiny jagged bits of durasteel, packed around a core of conventional explosive. On detonation, these tiny bits of durasteel became an expanding sphere of shrapnel; though traveling with respectable velocity of their own, they were most effective when set off in the path of oncoming Defenders, because impact energy, after all, is determined by
relative
velocity. At starfighter combat speeds, flying into a cloud of durasteel pellets could transform one’s ship from a starfighter into a very, very expensive cheese grater.

The four medial fighters of the oncoming Defender
formation hit the flechette cloud and just … shredded. The lateral wingers managed to bank off an instant before they would have been overtaken by two sequential detonations, as the explosion of one Defender’s power core triggered the other three’s cores an eyeblink later, so that the unfortunate Lieutenant Klivian was now tumbling directly toward a miniature plasma nebula that blazed with enough hard radiation to cook him like a bantha steak on an obsidian fry-rock at double noon on Tatooine.

“
You’re not gonna make it, Hobbie,
” Janson called. “
Punch out.
”

“Oh, you’d
like
that, wouldn’t you?” Hobbie snarled under his breath, still struggling grimly with the X-wing’s controls. The fighter’s tumble began to slow. “I’ve got it, Wes!”

“
No, you don’t! Punch out, Hobbie—PUNCH OUT!
”

“I’ve got it—I’m gonna make it! I’m gonna—” He was interrupted by the final flip of his X-wing, which brought his nose into line with the sight of the leading edge of the spherical debris field expanding toward him at a respectable fraction of lightspeed, and Hobbie Klivian, acknowledged master of both profanity and obscenity, human and otherwise, not to mention casual vulgarities from a dozen species and hundreds of star systems, found that he had nothing to say except, “Aw, nuts.”

He stood the X-wing on its tail, sublights blasting for a tangent, but he had learned long ago that of all the Rogues, he was the one who should know better than to trust his luck. He reached for the eject trigger.

Just as his hand found the trigger, the ship jounced and clanged as if he had his head trapped inside a Wookiee dinner gong at nightmeal. The metaphorical Wookiee cook must have been hungry, too, because the
clanging went on and on and kept getting louder, and the eject still, mysteriously, didn’t seem to be working at all. This mystery was solved, however, by the brief shriek of atmosphere through a ragged fist-sized hole in the X-wing’s canopy. This hole was ragged because, Hobbie discovered, the fragment that had made this opening had been slowed by punching through the X-wing’s titanium-alloy ventral armor. Not to mention the X-wing’s control panel, where it had not only ripped away the entire eject trigger assembly, but had vaporized Hobbie’s left hand.

He glared at his vacant wrist with more annoyance than shock or panic; instead of blood or cauterized flesh, his wrist jetted only sparks and smoke from overheated servomotors. He hadn’t had a real left arm since sometime before Yavin.

Of more concern was the continuing shriek of escaping atmosphere, because he discovered that it was coming from his environment suit’s nitroxy generator.

He thought,
Oh, this sucks
. After everything he had survived in the Galactic Civil War, he was about to be killed by a minor equipment malfunction. He amended his previous thought:
This
really
sucks
.

He didn’t bother to say it out loud, because there wasn’t enough air in his cockpit to carry the sound.

There being no other useful thing he could do with his severed left wrist, he jammed it into the hole in his canopy. His suit’s autoseal plastered itself to the jagged edges, but the nitroxy generator didn’t seem mollified; in fact, it was starting to feel like he had an unshielded fusion core strapped to his spine.

Oh, yeah
, he thought.
The other hole
.

He palmed the cockpit harness’s snap release, twisted, and stretched out his left leg, feeling downward with the toe of his boot. He found a hole—and the rising pressure sucked the entire boot right out the bottom of his
fighter before the autoseal engaged to close that hole, too. He felt another impact or two down there, but he couldn’t really tell if something might have ripped his foot off.

It had been a few years since he’d had his original left leg.

With the cockpit sealed, his nitroxy unit gradually calmed down, filling the space with a breathable atmosphere that smelled only faintly of scorched hair, and he began to think he might live through this after all. His only problem now was that he was deharnessed and stretched sideways in an extraordinarily uncomfortable twist that left him unable to even turn his head enough to see where he was going. “Arfour,” he said quietly, “can you please get us back to the PRP?”

His current position did let him see, however, his astromech’s response to the task of navigating toward the primary rendezvous point, which was a spit of gap sparks and a halo of sporadic electrical discharge from what was left of its turret dome. Which was slightly less than half.

He sighed. “Okay, ejection failure. And astromech damage. Crippled here,” he said into his comm. “Awaiting manual pickup.”

“
Little busy right now, Hobbie. We’ll get to you after we dust these TIEs.
”

“Take your time. I’m not going anywhere. Except, y’know, thataway. Slowly. Real slowly.”

He spent the rest of the battle hoping for a bit of help from the Force when Wedge sent out the pickup detail.
Please
, he prayed silently,
please let it be Tycho. Or Nin, or Standro. Anyone but Janson
.

He continued this plea as a sort of meditation, kind of the way Luke would talk about this stuff: he closed his eyes and visualized Wedge himself showing up to tow his X-wing back to the jump point. After a while, he
found this image unconvincing—somehow he was never that lucky—and so he cycled through the other Rogues, and when those began to bore him, he decided it’d be Luke himself. Or Leia. Or, say, Wynssa Starflare, who always managed to look absolutely stellar as the strong, independent damsel-sometimes-in-distress in those prewar Imperial holodramas, because, y’know, as long as he was imagining something that was never gonna happen, he might as well make it entertaining.

It turned out to be entertaining enough that he managed to pass the balance of the battle drifting off to sleep with a smile on his face.

This smile lasted right up to the point where a particularly brilliant flash stabbed through his eyelids and he awoke, glumly certain that whatever had exploded right next to his ship was finally about to snuff him. But then there came another flash, and another, and with a painful twist of his body he was able to see Wes Janson’s fighter cruising alongside, only meters away. He was also able to see the handheld imager Janson had pressed against his cockpit’s canopy, with which Janson continued to snap picture after picture.

Hobbie closed his eyes again. He would have preferred the explosion.

“
Just had to get a few shots.
” Janson’s grin was positively wicked. “
You look like some kind of weird cross between a starfighter pilot and a Batravian gumplucker.
”

Hobbie shook his head exhaustedly; dealing with Janson’s pathetic excuse for a sense of humor always made him tired. “Wes, I don’t even know what that is.”

“
Sure you do, Hobbie. A starfighter pilot is a guy who flies an X-wing without getting blown up. Check the Basic Dictionary. Though I can understand how you’d get confused.
”

“No, I mean the—” Hobbie bit his lip hard enough that he tasted blood. “Um, Wes?”

“
Yeah, buddy?
”

“Have I told you today how much I really, really hate you?”

“
Oh, sure—your lips say ‘I hate you,’ but your eyes say—
”

“That someday I’ll murder you in your sleep?”

Janson chuckled. “
More or less.
”

“It’s all over, huh?”

“
This part is. Most of ’em got away.
”

“How many’d we lose?”

“
Just Eight and Eleven. But Avan and Feylis ejected clean. Nothing a couple weeks in a bacta tank won’t cure. And then there’s my Batravian gumplucker wingman …
”

“
You’re
the wingman, knucklehead. Maybe I should say, wing
nut.
” Hobbie sighed again. “I guess Wedge is happy, anyway. Everything’s proceeding according to plan …”

“
I HATE when you say that.
”

“Yeah? How come?”

“
Don’t know. It just … gives me the whingeing jimmies. Let me get this tow cable attached, and you might as well sleep; it’s a long cruise to the PRP.
”

“Suits me just fine,” Hobbie said, closing his eyes again. “I have this dream I really want to get back to …”

“Good job, Wedge.” General Lando Calrissian, commander of Special Operations for the New Republic, nodded grave approval toward the flickering bluish holoform of Wedge Antilles that hovered a centimeter above his console. “No casualties?”

“
Nothing serious, General. Hobbie—Lieutenant Klivian—needs another left hand …
”

Lando smiled. “How many does that make, all told?”

“
I’ve lost count. How’s it going on your end?
”

“Good and less than good.” Lando punched up his readout of the tracking report. “Looks like our marauders are based in the Taspan system.”

Wedge’s brilliant plan had become brilliant entirely by necessity; the usual method of locating a hidden marauder base—subjecting a captured pilot or two to a neural probe—had turned out to be much more difficult than anyone could have anticipated. Shadowspawn seemed very determined to maintain his privacy; through dozens of raids over nearly two months, many deep inside Republic territory and costing thousands of civilian lives, not one of Shadowspawn’s marauders had ever been taken alive.

This was more than a simple refusal to surrender, though the marauders had shown a distressing tendency, when they found themselves in imminent danger, to shout out words to the effect of
For Shadowspawn and the Empire! Forward the Restoration!
and blow themselves up. Forensic engineers examining wreckage of destroyed TIE Defenders hypothesized that the starfighters were equipped with some unexplained type of deadman interlock, which would destroy the ship—and obliterate the pilot—even if the pilot merely lost consciousness.