Star Wars_ Rebel Force 04_ Firefight - Alex Wheeler [0]
Rebel Force #4
Firefight
by Alex Wheeler
CHAPTER ONE
Ten points of light shot through the midnight black, streaking toward the ground like falling stars.
Make a wish.
It was a woman's voice, soft and kind, fluttering up from a dark, buried place in his mind. Another man might have taken it as a long-forgotten voice from a long-forgotten past.
But X-7 had no past.
And these were no stars.
He shook off the imagined voice, the echo of an echo of a memory. Long ago, in the beginning, he'd heard voices like this, closed his eyes and seen strangely familiar faces smiling down on him, breathed in a hint of fresh spiceloaf or the rich scent of overripe blumfruits floating on a warm breeze and felt that other life, that human life, nearly close enough to touch. There had been a time when he'd held tight to these memories that weren't memories, this evidence that he'd once been someone else. That he'd once been someone.
But that had been before. He'd learned. His Commander had taught him. Memories were wrong; the past was dead. He wasn't someone; he was no one, and that was right.
That was good. The Commander had relieved him of the burdens of the past, the pangs of memory, the frailties of emotion and human need. X-7 had only one need: to obey his Commander, and that, too, was right.
That was good.
Except he had failed. Luke Skywalker lived, though the Commander wanted him dead.
And now X-7 had failed again.
"Return to base for retraining," his master had commanded. But X-7 had disobeyed.
X-7, who lived to serve, who had no life, no purpose, no will beyond the desires of his Commander, had defied the call, had fled to this lifeless moon on the fringes of the galaxy, had made a new plan.
It was not disobedience, he told himself. It was not a fear of the retraining, with its long needles and neuronic whips and dark cells and pain. It was Skywalker. X-7 couldn't return to his master in failure and shame, not while Skywalker still breathed. X-7 never killed for fun or in rage; he killed only for his Commander. But there was something about the young Rebel, something that made X-7 boil. X-7 couldn't— wouldn't—return to his master until the mission was complete and Skywalker was dead.
It was the right thing. It was the good thing.
But then why were the voices of the past returning to haunt him? Why was the dead hollow inside him slowly filling with anger, with the need to see Skywalker dead?
The Commander was right; X-7 knew that. Something inside him was wrong. There were impurities that needed to be scrubbed away. Erased. X-7 had tried to ignore that, and now he was being punished. I will go back. I will obey, he promised himself. As soon as Skywalker is dead.
"Targets incoming," the perimeter alert system informed him. X-7 shook off his doubts. The time had come. Ten lights blipped across the target scope. Through the moon base's transparisteel roof, he watched the ships approach. Ten of the galaxy's most skilled, most determined, most ruthless pilots, all eager to carry out his wishes. He had taken his time composing the team, but the frustrating wait was nearly over. They had come to Iope, the third moon of Rinn, with the promise of a mysterious job and rewards beyond their wildest dreams if they accomplished the mission. Pilots like these didn't ask questions; they just chased the payoff.
Some of them, the worthy ones, might even receive it.
"I'll meet your ships at the landing site," he said to them, transmitting a set of coordinates. "Good luck." He shut down the comm before they could ask why they would need luck. They wouldn't. Only skill. The ones who had enough of it would have their answer soon. As for the ones who lacked it…they'd have their answer even sooner.
He activated the laser-cannon targeting computer and zeroed in on the ten points of light. "Welcome to Iope," he said.
Then he fired.
"Blast it!" Slis Tieeer Dualli swung his CloakShape fighter hard to starboard. His insectoid compound eyes took in every inch of the battlefield at once while the eye on the back of his