• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Or perhaps any minute now.

He hoped.

“There’s nothing good to tell, Lando!” Fenn had to shout to hear himself over the whine of blasterfire and the rolling crashes of thermal dets and heavy weapons. He stuck his rifle up over the rubble and sprayed fire blindly into the smoke. “This place is armored like a Hutt’s treasure vault—our breaching charges barely even leave scorch marks! Maybe your marines have something heavier?”

On the Remember Alderaan’s bridge, Lando rubbed his eyes; from what he’d seen, he didn’t figure any marines had survived except the ones already fighting within the ion-turbo emplacements. He took a deep breath. “All right, Plan B.”

He snapped out a series of orders that had his entire bridge crew staring at him blankly, mouths agape. “You heard me,” he said. “Do it!”

The bridge officers jerked back to their panels. Lando turned to C-3PO. “What are you waiting for?”

“Me?” The droid pressed a hand to his chest. “What am I supposed to do?”

“This ship has Mon Cal systems. The interdiction ships are Corellian,” Lando explained as patiently as he could manage. “They don’t talk the same language.”

“Well, of course they don’t.” C-3PO gave a burst of static that sounded suspiciously like a contemptuous sniff. “I’ve never met a Corellian system that had any manners at all, whereas Remember Alderaan—despite her somewhat coarse sense of humor—is a system of exceptional refinement. Even elegance—”

“Yes, fine, whatever,” Lando said. “Those Corellian ships also don’t have the calculating power to pull this off—we need to give them access to Alderaan’s processor array.”

“My goodness! That would require the services of—”

“The most capable and sophisticated protocol droid ever constructed,” Lando finished for him, with an encouraging smile. “Get to work.”

C-3PO gasped. “General! Me? What a lovely thing to say! Really, I am most gratified—”

“Be gratified while you work.” Lando turned away and again triggered his personal comlink. “Fenn, I need you to fall back.”

There was silence for a second or two, then a grim, “How far?”

“All the way. When that gravity gun opens up, we’ll hit back. Massively.”

“Have you seen the armor on this place? It’ll take you hours to pound through!”

“If we shoot the armor.”

Another pause, then: “I scan. Lando, don’t wait for us.”

“Fenn—”

“We’ll never make it. Do what you have to. Save the fleet.”

“You don’t understand what’s about to happen—”

“We’re Mandalorian. This is what we live for. This is how we die.”

“Stop it! I hate that garbage!” Lando chewed the inside of his lower lip for a second or two, then took a deep breath to keep a grip on his courage. “TacOps: Are Lancer, Paleo, and Unsung reaching position?”

“Scan reports affirmative.”

“When the Slash-Es hit their marks, execute at will.”

THE TRANSPONDER ALERT IN WEDGE ANTILLES’S COCKPIT blared a warning: he was in the kill zone of friendly fire. A quick check of his short-range scan showed three converted Corellian freighters on approach through Mindor’s shadow toward the flying volcano. Not far behind them, the four surviving Slash-Es were strung out in a curiously slanting sort of line. He couldn’t guess what they were up to, and he didn’t have time to figure it out; all three of the converted freighters were already swinging broadside and going into slow barrel rolls: an old navy trick to deliver maximum suppressing fire. Their main cannons had fire rates restricted by their ability to shed waste heat and recharge their capacitors; the barrel roll let them continuously bring fresh guns to bear while the recently fired guns were repowering.

Wedge triggered his general comm as he yanked his X-wing through a slewing arc that shot him away from the flying volcano. “Republic fighters: Break off and fall back! This is hot space. Repeat: We are in hot space!”

Starfighters scattered like roachrats surprised by sunlight. The Lancer, the Paleo, and the Unsung opened up with synchronized fire, blasting broadsides in precise sequence to maintain a near-constant