Shadows of the Empire (9 page)

TIEs were faster but no more maneuverable, and the X-wings had the advantage in shielding—TIEs didn’t
have any, save for a few of the specially equipped interceptors, like the one Vader had.

“Here they come,” Rogue Six said. That was Wes Janson, an old hand.

A score of TIE fighters spewed from the Destroyer’s flight bay ports.

“I see them, Wes,” Luke said. “Everybody stay alert!”

Took them long enough
, Luke thought.
Must have thought it was a drill; they probably don’t get much action out here
. Maybe they’d gotten fat and lazy. Well. He could hope they had.

“Double up on the forward shields,” Luke ordered. “Attack speed, targets of opportunity.”

“Yeeehhaaawww!” one of the squad yelled into the comm.

Luke had to smile. He really should tell whoever it was—sounded like Rogue Five, that was Dix—to bottle the unofficial commspeak, but he knew just how the pilot felt.

There was nothing else in the universe that felt like flying into combat.

“Watch yourselves,” Luke said.

Then he was cutting across the Destroyer’s axis, laser cannons spitting high-energy beams, no time to talk now.

The battle was joined.

O
n the
Millennium Falcon
, Leia crouched down behind Chewie and Lando in the control cockpit. Threepio stood behind them, braced more or less in the doorway.

“Do be careful, Master Lando. We’re awfully close to the tops of those trees!”

“Oh, really?” Lando said. “I hadn’t noticed.”

“Well. There’s no need for sarcasm.”

Ahead of them a couple hundred meters, Dash flew
the
Outrider
, and the wind of his passage was enough to fan the tall evergreens below; you could see the air wake ripple through the foliage. The chrome-silver ship cleared the tops of the highest trees by no more than five meters.

“Any closer and we’ll get green stains on our belly,” Leia said.

“Tell me about it,” Lando said. “He said we’d have to fly low but I didn’t realize he meant this low. Chewie, what’s our altitude?”

Chewie looked at a control panel and said something in that half gargle, half moan of his.

“Oh, my!” Threepio said.

“Do I want to know?” Leia said.

“I don’t think so,” Lando said.

Over the comm on a shielded opchan, Dash spoke. “You nervous back there, Calrissian?”

Lando glanced at Chewie. “Who, us? Nah. I thought you said we were going to be flying
low
, Dash. We’re practically in the stratosphere way up here.” He cut the comm off.

Lando grinned at Chewie. “Guess I told him, didn’t I?”

Dash didn’t respond in words; instead, the
Outrider
dropped four meters lower. If a passenger on the smuggler’s ship could have reached through the floor, he would have been able to touch the tops of the trees with his fingertips.

He’s crazy
, Leia thought.

“He’s crazy,” she said.

“Yeah, but he can fly, you got to hand him that,” Lando said. “Give me a little more thrust, Chewie.”

“Master Lando! What are you
doing?
”

“I can’t let him think he’s scared us, can I?”

“Certainly you can!” Threepio said. “He has!”

“You’re crazier than he is,” Leia put in.

The
Millennium Falcon
lost four meters of altitude.

Chewie said something.

Threepio said, “Oh, dear!”

“What?” Leia asked.

Threepio waved his arms. “He says that another centimeter and we’ll snag the laser cannon!”

Leia shook her head. “What’s with this guy? What’s he trying to prove?”

Lando concentrated on his flying—that was good—so he didn’t look at her as he spoke. “You never heard the story of the Rendars?”

“Should I have?”

Chewie yelled something.

“I see it, I see it!” Lando said. The ship lifted a meter to avoid a particularly tall tree directly in its path.

After they’d cleared it, Lando continued. “Dash was at the Imperial Academy, a year or so behind Han. His family was wealthy and highly placed. Dash’s older brother was a freighter pilot working his way up through the family shipping company. There was an accident. A control system blew out, not the pilot’s fault, and the freighter crashed on liftoff from the Coruscant spaceport. Killed the crew, destroyed the ship.”

Leia nodded. “Terrible. So?”

Chewie started to speak, but Lando beat him to it. “I
see
it. Do you want to fly it?”

Chewie grunted. Leia didn’t need to speak Wookiee to understand that one.

“Then be quiet and let me do it.”

The
Falcon
did another little hop behind the
Outrider
, settled back into its dangerous dance with the treetops.

“So, the building the freighter hit was the Emperor’s private museum. Had a lot of his mementos in it. Most of them were lost in the ensuing fire.

“The Emperor was not happy. He had the Rendar family’s property seized, then had them banished from Coruscant. That included Dash. They kicked him out of the Academy on Carida and off that planet, too.”

Leia ground her teeth. That kind of thing was one of
the reasons the Alliance was fighting the Empire. No one should have that much power, that he could arbitrarily do such things unchecked. And Leia knew of worse, knew of much worse. The Death Star had destroyed her homeworld, killed millions, as a test of its power. Just to see if it worked. It had meant nothing to the Empire, less grief than swatting a fly.

“I can see that he wouldn’t have any love for the Empire,” Leia said. “Why isn’t he working for the Alliance?”

Lando shrugged. “He doesn’t want to owe anybody, doesn’t want anybody to owe him. He works for whoever pays the most. He’s downright magic with anything that flies, and he can pick wing nuts off a tabletop with a blaster without scorching the finish. He’s a good man to have at your back when the going gets hot—as long as your money lasts.”

Leia nodded. The Empire had ruined a lot of good people. Looked as if Dash Rendar was one more casualty.

F
our TIE fighters roared in, spewing death.

Luke yelled at Wedge. “Rogue One, look out! On your port, bearing three-oh-five!”

Wedge’s X-wing immediately peeled left and down. “Thanks, Luke!”

Luke punched it, swung a shallow turn, and headed straight for the attacking quad.

Use the Force, Luke
.

Luke grinned. The first time he’d heard that, during the attack on the Death Star, he hadn’t understood. He knew what it meant now.

“Targeting sensors off, rear shields off, reroute more power to the guns.”

Artoo was not pleased and said so.

“Sorry, buddy, but this way is better.”

Luke reached out. The Force was here, as it was everywhere,
and it was no harder to touch deep in space than it was in the swamps on Dagobah. He let it fill him.

The TIE fighters suddenly seemed to be moving slower. Luke’s hands flew over the controls; he moved the stick with sharp and precise movements. Swung to his starboard and lit the lasers, double-tapped the fire button.

Lines of fire lanced out and shattered one, two of the four TIE fighters. The explosion spat a hard spray of wreckage at him as Luke looped away. Shards of the destroyed TIEs sleeted against the X-wing’s transparisteel canopy, a metal and plastic hail.

“Fine shootin’, Rogue Leader,” Rogue Five said.

“Thanks, Dix.”

“More coming in, six blips at one-seven-five,” Rogue Four said.

“Watch your back, Luke!” somebody said. “You got a tail!”

But Luke had already felt the approach of the TIE and had put his fighter into a hard downturn. He flew an outside loop and came up behind the TIE.

Luke stroked his fire button once, and the TIE shattered into expensive scrap.

“Rogue Two, you got a pair of ’em coming in at two-two-four, move it!”

“Ah, copy that, Wes. I owe you one.”

“Pay me back later.”

The X-wings and TIE fighters streaked back and forth through the blackness of space, tossing incandescent spears of hard light at each other.

“I’m hit,” Rogue Two said. “Got my Artoo unit and punched a hole in my canopy. I’ve got a patch here … Okay, the leak is plugged.”

“Break off and return to base, Rogue Two,” Luke said.

“Hey, I can still shoot and I got manual.”

“Negative, Will, there’s too many for that. Take a walk.”

Artoo whistled rapidly.

“Doesn’t apply to me,” Luke said. “I’ve got an edge.”

“Copy, Rogue Leader. Rogue Two returning to base. Good luck, guys! I’ll put the kettle on for tea.”

Two more TIEs came at Luke, and he moved instinctively, pulled the stick and soared away from the attackers at almost ninety degrees, then looped at the top and dropped back toward the attackers in a power dive, lasers blinking.

One of the TIEs exploded; the other’s engine flamed and went out, and the wounded TIE coasted out of the fight without main power.

“Here comes another wave,” Wedge said. “Twelve blips at three-zero-three and closing fast.”

The odds were getting worse, the dangers increasing by the second, and Rogue Squadron was down one member. Things didn’t look good.

Despite that, Luke was having a great time. He might not be much of a Jedi, but he could fly.

He hoped Lando and Leia and Chewie were doing okay.

Acceleration pulled at his body as he swung the X-wing into a hard power turn.

The battle continued.

L
ate afternoon shaded into evening as Xizor left the house of his mistress, an almost palatial dwelling he had bestowed upon her as a going-away gift, though she did not yet know the affair was over. Xizor never spent more than a few months with any female. Because of his hormonal makeup, his ability to produce overwhelmingly powerful pheromones, he never had any trouble attracting new companions. But because it was so easy, he quickly tired of them, no matter how beautiful, no matter how clever. He had never found a companion he could consider his equal, and if he ever did, well, how would he be able to trust someone that adept? An interesting conundrum.

Moreover, once a meal was eaten, no matter how delicious, he preferred to dine on a different delicacy the next time …

A warm rain drizzled down from a condensation cloud hanging low over this section of the city. Such microweather cells were quite common at this season; a
short distance away the skies might be crystal clear. As the darkness thickened and where clouds did not interfere, one could view the colorful discharge auroras and the red and blue running lights of the constant stream of ship traffic going to and coming from orbit, even here in the center of the cityglow.

The two bodyguards waiting at the exit accompanied Xizor to his armored luxury coach, where two more guards and the droid chauffeur waited. Xizor entered the vehicle and leaned back on the cloned-leather seat. His mistress would receive a call from Guri shortly, a generous severance payment and good wishes for her future. She would also be told never to attempt to contact Xizor again. Should she do so, the consequences would be … dire.

Thus far, only one of his ex-companions had tried to see him after their arrangement had been terminated. That unfortunate woman, he was told, had become part of a tall commercial plex on the Southern Enclave, courtesy of a giant factorylike construction droid that had somehow, alas, accidentally mixed her in with a vat of duracrete.

Life was full of dangers, even here.

“We’ll have dinner at the Menarai,” Xizor told the droid.

The coach lifted and swung smoothly up into the traffic pattern, bracketed front and back by bodyguards in their own airspeeders. The trio of vehicles reached cruising altitude and headed for Monument Park, where the planet’s single uncovered mountain peak jutted above the surface’s otherwise all-encompassing building complex. There was a restaurant that catered to the wealthy and powerful on a spire near the park, and from the shelter of the building one could view the mountain, even see through the restaurant’s transparisteel walls the religious fanatics who maintained vigil over the peak to prevent tourists from stealing the bare rock for souvenirs. One booked
reservations for the Menarai months in advance and then only if one’s name was on the approved list. It was the most exclusive restaurant on the planet.

Exclusive, but even so, no matter how crowded the Menarai, no matter how it might upset a rich man to see an empty space when he’d waited months for a chance to dine there, a place was always kept open for Prince Xizor. If he took it upon himself to drop in, he was ushered to his private booth without delay. To most of the diners, Xizor would be simply another wealthy shipping magnate, no more important than a thousand other rich beings in the Imperial Center. They would wonder why he deserved such treatment when they did not—given that many of the patrons had more credits in their accounts than Xizor, at least in his guise of shipper.

None of them had more money than Black Sun.

Besides, Xizor was one of the place’s owners, though that was not common knowledge, and word had filtered down from the top: If Prince Xizor has to wait to be seated, the manager who allows such stupidity to occur will be looking for another job before he can stammer an apology. If he is lucky.

Xizor smiled as the coach looped away from the central nexus toward the mountain. He did not often flaunt his power, but good food was one of his small pleasures, and there was no cuisine better than that of the Menarai.

The rain had stopped, and now the shadows of night condensed and intensified. Soon Coruscant would be ablaze with its own light, quite a view from a ship as it approached from space. Nowhere else in the galaxy had nearly the entire surface of a world been covered with the building blocks of civilization. To live here was truly an experience, to be at the center of everything. Coruscant was the Empire’s acme; the head of Black Sun could hardly live anywhere else.

Now. What should he have for dinner? The fleek-eel
was good. Kept alive until the moment of being dipped in boiling pepper oil, the eels would have been light-years away and swimming in the Hocekureem Sea that same morning. Also, the stuffed yam and plicto steak was excellent, as was the Giant Ithorian snail in flounut butter. Or perhaps the Kashyyyk land shrimp?