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Donos put on more speed, increasing the risk that he would not be able to make some difficult turn ahead. He whipped around a bend in the rift and almost slammed into the ion engines of a slow-moving TIE fighter immediately ahead. He snapped off a laser shot out of reflex, saw it lance straight into the starfighter’s starboard engine.

The TIE fighter instantly became a glowing fireball of yellow and orange flame and debris. Donos’s X-wing rocked as he roared through the fireball; his helmet and hull were barely sufficient to keep the sound of the explosion from deafening him. Then he was through.

One more turn, a tight starboard bank that almost flung him into the rock wall to port, and he had Twelve in sight. Twelve, and the vehicle pursuing her—the interceptor that had led them into this trap. This was the first time Donos had seen it visually, and he fleetingly noted the nonstandard red stripes painted horizontally on the starfighter’s wing arrays before something else occurred to him: there were no sparks or smoke plumes emerging from its engines now. With the deception done, all the false signs of the interceptor’s weakness had been shut off.

The interceptor had crept up to within meters of Twelve’s aft end and was now skillfully matching all of the X-wing pilot’s frantic maneuvers. This was a demonstration of superior flying technique, a show of contempt by one pilot for his enemy, and there was no doubt that the interceptor could begin firing on the defenseless Twelve at any second.

Donos fired off a desperate snap-shot. At the same moment, the interceptor took its kill shot.

Donos saw his lasers strike and play across the interceptor’s main body, slashing across the engines and burning into the cockpit.

The interceptor’s lasers intersected at Twelve’s X-wing, hitting her aft shields in spite of her desperate maneuvers … and then they penetrated. Both of Twelve’s starboard engines flamed out. The starboard strike foils, softened by the lasers’ intense heat, began to deform under atmospheric friction.

The interceptor slowed. Sparks and flame, real ones now, issued from the engines. It rose, jumping out of the rocky rift, and was immediately lost to Donos’s sight.

Twelve’s X-wing began a portward roll. Donos’s next command was half a shout: “Twelve, bail out! Twelve, eject!”

“Ejecting now! Leader, get out of here!”

Donos watched helplessly as Twelve’s cockpit filled with the fire of an ejection thruster, but the canopy failed to open. The ejector seat smashed Twelve into it. Its transparisteel construction kept the canopy in one piece as the X-wing continued to rotate to port. Under continued pressure from the thrust of the ejection seat, the cockpit finally broke away from the X-wing, but Twelve sat limp in the seat as the ejection seat carried her mere meters from the doomed snubfighter, slamming her into the rift wall to port. In a split second she was gone, lost behind Donos, and her X-wing was nosing over to crash into the rift wall below.

Donos forced himself to look away, to return his mind to mission parameters.

A few minutes of terrain-following flying and he should be able to jump free of these rifts and head for space. But suddenly the prospect of survival didn’t appeal much to him.

Donos’s R2 shrieked at him. Startled back to attention, he looked around, saw that a pair of TIE fighters had gained on him during his reverie.

He could stay and be killed, or flee and describe his failure to his commanders in cruel, humbling detail.

He’d prefer to die. But the families of eleven good men and women deserved to know how their loved ones had met their fates. With an anguished cry, Donos hit the thrusters again and rounded the next turn.

THE OLD REPUBLIC

(5,000–33 YEARS BEFORE STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE)

Long—long—ago in a galaxy far, far away … some twenty-five thousand years before Luke Skywalker destroyed the first Death Star at the Battle of Yavin in Star Wars: A New Hope … a large number of star systems and species in