Star Wars_ Legacy of the Force 07_ Fury - Aaron Allston [27]
Seha nodded, clearly intimidated by the responsibility placed on her.
chapter nine
COMMENOR
At times like this, Lieutenant Caregg Oldathan wondered who creaked more—himself, or the aging K-wing assault starfighter he flew. Both of them had been recalled from honorable retirement to active duty when the civil war had begun, and both were in dire need of maintenance and rest.
Not that they were likely to get any today. Rising through high planetary orbit to the engagement zone, where Alliance ships were once again arriving to assault planetary defense forces, he shook his head and offered up a near-silent curse. The Alliance units being brought to bear against them were not enough to crack Commenor’s defenses, but were sufficient to keep them from being deployed to other theaters of war. They were enough to wear those forces down over time, and Oldathan was certain they were doing their job.
“One minute to contact,” he said. “Weapons check.”
“Lasers in the green.” That was the voice of Lieutenant Danen, his bombardier-gunner for this mission. He occupied the starboard cockpit of the vehicle’s dual-cockpit arrangement. “Bangers report operable.”
Bangers were, in Commenori military parlance, concussion missiles, and this K-wing’s hardpoint attachments were laden with them. Oldathan would have preferred boomers, or proton torpedoes—his starfighter’s primary mission was to prey on capital ships—but at this point in the conflict they were in short supply.
The next voice over the comm board was not Danen’s but that of their flight controller, operating from a sensor station on the ground. “Grayfeather Squadron, report.”
Oldathan frowned. “Grayfeather One here.”
“Divert to heading one-eight-oh immediately. We’re picking up an intermittent blip that suggests a vessel approaching on the night side, but we can’t get a fix on it. Coordinates should be on your sensor board now.”
Oldathan glanced at his sensor board and saw a broad green dot over equatorial Commenor a few thousand kilometers to the west, which marked the start of their new search zone. “Got it. Grayfeathers on the move. Out.” He took a moment to retransmit the coordinates to the other four K-wings in what was left of his squadron, then led them westward.
In atmosphere, the trip would have taken hours, but a high ballistic trajectory like this, outside of atmosphere, would be done in a fraction of the time. Still, Oldathan was twitchy with impatience. The battle zone, where his comrades were fighting and dying, was behind him. This was like running away.
Unless, of course, the phantom blip was indeed some sort of Alliance attack, not just another malfunction of Commenor’s overtaxed planetary defense sensor system.
When they reached the target zone, they found it empty of airborne traffic except for one ground-based courier shuttle sprinting off into space, its crew hoping to get clear of the planet’s gravity well and enter hyperspace before Alliance forces detected and intercepted it. Nothing else showed up on sensors.
Oldathan shook his head, annoyed. “Another monkey-lizard chase. All right. Two and Three, head spinward a hundred clicks. Four and Five, anti-spinward. Begin spiral patterns outward. I’ll stay here and do the same. Report all contacts instantly.”
He received four confirmations and saw the two wing pairs peel off to head toward their respective start zones. He felt no undue worry. The shovel-headed, thick-winged starfighters were not particularly fast or elegant, but he knew they could take care of themselves—they were more heavily armed than just about any comparable vehicles the enemy was likely to field.
As he began his own spiral pattern, he tuned in to the general fleet frequency