Star Wars_ X-Wing 04_ The Bacta War - Michael A. Stackpole [57]
Wedge had been less than pleased with learning that Corran had been injured on Thyferra. He’d have been angry with Corran except that the smaller man gave him a full report on what happened, including an analysis of his mistakes. Corran had been quite frank concerning what he had done, reminding Wedge of Corran’s attack on stormtroopers on Talasea. When Corran finds trouble, he never seems to have difficulty just diving in, especially when the lives of others are at stake. Nice trait to have in a friend.
Information Jace had brought with him set the basis for the run the squadron had headed out on. Isard had initiated escort service for the bacta convoys, moving them to centralized locations where the client worlds would come to get their bacta. Wedge saw immediately that if he hit the covered convoys he’d be in serious trouble, but Jace’s people had initiated an operation to get them some of the bacta anyway. The Ashern had sliced new code into the navicomps on three of the freighters that would produce a course deviation in the final leg of the trip. The freighters would fly out from under their cover and be in a position for the squadron to make off with them. The navicomps would remain useless until the squadron sent them the key code or until the crew stripped the computer down and reloaded all of the software.
Wedge knew the operation was chancy, but to refuse to go after the ships would mean that the Ashern’s effort had gone for naught. The risk of the operation had to be weighed against the good that could be done with the supplies of bacta the ships carried. Halanit could still use more, as could several other small settlements that found the Thyferran price prohibitively high. More important, Coruscant needed more bacta to supplement the rylca treatments for the Krytos virus.
He couldn’t discount the possibility of a trap entirely, but for the Imps to ambush him meant they would be leaving another of their convoys open. The freighters that were coming to him were from a small convoy that was being watched over by the Victory II-class Star Destroyer Corrupter. Though the smallest of the ships Isard had in her fleet, it carried two TIE squadrons, equaling his force, and bristled with enough weaponry to be able to lay siege to whole planets.
Complicating matters, Wedge knew less about its Captain Ait Convarion than he wished he did. Convarion was supposed to have served both at Derra IV and Hoth before being given the Corrupter and being sent off on suppression missions—government-sanctioned campaigns of terror against populated worlds on the Outer Rim. Convarion was rumored to be calculating and cruel, with a penchant for quick action that had won battles despite the odds being against him. That was a combination that could cause a lot of trouble for the squadron.
If Convarion knows in advance of the defection, we could be in severe trouble. If he has to deal with having three missing ships from his convoy upon his arrival at the Rish system, he’ll be searching for an atom in a nebula. Depending on the reluctance of the freighter crews to follow us, we’ll need a maximum of an hour to move the convoy farther on. If we have been betrayed, we’ll have to jump back out of the system as fast as possible …
Wedge glanced at his primary monitor. “… and hope against hope that Isard hasn’t convinced any Interdictor cruisers to join her side.” He shook his head and sighed. He knew he was worrying about events that were very low on the scale of probability, but the chance of a problem still niggled at him. He knew he’d have felt better if he’d been in on planning the operation from the first, but he wasn’t in a position to refuse the help the Ashern offered.
“I’ll just make the best of this situation and hope Captain Convarion isn’t as sharp as rumors make him out to be.”
A pinpoint of