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“Nine, the freighter is turning to run. Do you want help with the eyeballs?”

“Negative, Five.”

Whistler scolded him with a harsh blatty sound.

“It’s not that I think I’m that good, Whistler, it’s that I know they aren’t.” Refusing assistance to deal with enemies that outnumber you was usually ascribed to unending egotism or terminal stupidity, but Corran had a third reason in mind. The Y-wing pilots, while enthusiastic and decently trained, were insufficiently experienced in dogfighting to be much help to him. If they entered the fight, he’d have to worry about hitting them. Without their intervention, his only possible targets were Imperial ships, and that fact gave him some freedom.

“Nine, we’ll take Vengeance.”

“Negative, Five, definitely negative.” If they go in on the freighter it will pick them apart. “Hang off there and try for torp locks on the TIEs.”

Glancing at his sensor displays, he marked the positions of the Y-wings, then rolled his ship and dove. Angry green laser bolts slashed through the blackness in front of him, but neither of the TIEs’ shots hit. The sensors reported the last two eyeballs had just pulled through a crisscross maneuver and were looping up and around to make another pass on him. That told him the last two pilots were good enough to have survived more than one fight in their ships.

They rolled through their double-helix maneuver and Corran shot through the center of their spiral. Rolling out to the right he cut in front of one, inviting a hastily snapped shot. The TIE pilot took it, splashing lasers against the X-wing’s aft shield. Ignoring Whistler’s shrill shriek, Corran reinforced the rear shield, then rolled and began a dive.

The eyeball rolled and started after him. Corran chopped his throttle back, then rolled and dove sharply. He remained in the dive for a couple of seconds, then rolled again and climbed. Rolling back out onto his original course, he popped in behind the TIE that had previously been on his tail and took a shot of his own.

The eyeball juked at the last second, so the four laser bolts only clipped the top of one of the solar panels. The TIE starfighter began to whirl away, but it never exploded. Damaged as the ship was, it would be an easy target to follow and finish, but the last TIE sprayed laser fire against the X-wing’s shields, giving Corran a more immediate threat to deal with.

Because it was coming in from the left, Corran rolled right, then cruised down through a diving turn that aimed him back along its inbound course. The TIE looped up, then rolled and came down through an inverse loop to cut across Corran’s tail. Corran let the X-wing sideslip right, but not before the eyeball had taken a shot at him. Whistler screamed, then a bank of lights started flashing on the fighter’s command console.

Sithspawn! My shields are down. Corran stomped on the right rudder pedal, swinging the X-wing’s nose in that direction, then rolled up on the port stabilizer and pulled back on the stick. As the ship started to climb, another snap-roll to the left broke it off at right angles to the climb and away from pursuit. “Whistler, get the shields back up, fast.”

A counter appeared on his main screen and began counting down from one and a half minutes.

“Not good, not good at all.”

The major advantage an X-wing had over a TIE starfighter was shields. The two fighters matched each other in speed and the TIE actually had the edge in maneuverability. Shields allowed the X-wings to survive more hits during a fight, and in dogfighting, the goal was surviving to the end and beyond. Corran felt he could outfly the TIE pilot, but engaging in combat while naked was not something that made him feel at all confident.

He punched the throttle to full and pushed the fighter through a series of twists and loops that carried it away from the TIE, but no closer to the Y-wings. Time seemed to be passing very slowly to Corran, with each second on the counter seeming to take a minute to click off. The TIE pilot