• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Iella laid a hand on her arm. “Wait, I have another idea. One that may work even better.”

“He has to die.”

“With what I have in mind, he will, but a thousand times over.” Iella drew her own pistol and clicked the selector lever over to stun. “We’ve already killed two guards, so they know we’re serious. Trust me, this will work.”

“If I don’t like it, he dies anyway.”

Iella smiled. “You’ll like it. We’ll get more play out of it.”

Iella explained, and Elscol balked until Sixtus cracked a smile. That swung Elscol over, so Iella fired one shot into the sleeping General, then set to work. The party exited the estate the same way they’d come in, and though burdened as Iella was carrying away General Aerin Dlarit’s dress uniform, the journey seemed not nearly as hard as before.

19

Commander Erisi Dlarit’s TIE Interceptor dropped from the belly of the Corrupter and let gravity seduce it down into Halanit’s atmosphere. The cant-winged craft bucked a little as it entered the frigid planet’s atmosphere, reminding Erisi that the Interceptor would surrender some of its maneuverability to friction and drag. Maneuvers she could pull in the vacuum of space would get her killed below.

The Rebels refer to these fighters as squints, but in atmosphere I prefer to think of them as winces. From the moment Ysanne Isard had appointed her to lead the Thyferran Home Defense Corps aerospace wing, Erisi had lobbied hard to equip her two squadrons with X-wings. While slower and slightly less agile than the Interceptor, the X-wing’s shields and ability to use proton torpedoes in addition to its lasers made it a superior fighter.

It mattered not at all how eloquently I argued, what facts I used, Iceheart would never have agreed to my request. Erisi realized her own sense of superiority had collided full on with Isard’s need to see anything and everything Imperial as better than anything the Alliance had to oppose it. Isard sees herself as the pinnacle of Imperial excellence and demands that everything else rises to her level. What I or others know counts as nothing to her because we are not up to her standards.

Erisi really couldn’t blame Isard for treating the Thyferrans and the THDC as the Empire’s stupid, inbred cousins. Though the Corrupter had already been en route to Halanit when the Ashern raid took place, word of it had been communicated to the ship. Her cheeks burned as the image of her father slumped naked in his chair exploded in her mind. Mortifying in the extreme, the incident meant that the Corrupter’s Imperial crew felt no reason to hide their contempt for the THDC personnel on board.

The fact that her father had been involved hurt her deeply. What made it even worse was that Iella Wessiri had been identified from the hologram. The Imps took that as a sign that Antilles had entered into a full alliance with the Ashern, but Erisi read more into Iella’s participation. Iella caused my father to be embarrassed so as to get at me, to avenge herself for my betrayal of Corran and the rest of the Rogues. This was a message directed at me by her—a private declaration of war.

Erisi glanced at her monitor and snarled into the comm unit. “Four, close the formation up.” Behind her four Interceptors came a quartet of the double-hulled TIE bombers. Her Interceptors were nominally flying cover for the bombers, though once they dropped their thermal detonators and proton bombs to open up the main colony, the Interceptors’ mission changed to engaging ground targets and suppressing fire at the stormtrooper-laden shuttles that would follow.

The TIE bombers swooped down through the air and spiraled in on their target. Erisi and her flight came around to follow them in. She couldn’t help but remember countless training exercises where she’d used an X-wing to stoop like a hawk-bat on such lumbering craft. Two would be dead in my initial pass and the others would die as they attempted to flee.

Below her, the bombers began their runs. The thermal detonators fell lazily from the bombers as