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Jawaswag beeped at him and Gavin smiled. “You’re right, the Imps are flying in formation. They want to make this easy. Acquire One, Two, and Three.” With the sensor signature of each locked into his fire-control computer, Gavin kept his fighter on the deck and closed to proton torpedo range. That course had him flying directly at the rising column of smoke and steam coming from the holed canopy.

“Jawaswag get me a sensor record of all this, visual and everything.”

The droid hooted his assent.

Gavin waited until he hit the outer fringes of range, then popped his weapons control over to proton torpedoes. He set them for single fire, then acquired the first Interceptor. His head-up display went from yellow to red and the R2’s keening wail filled the cockpit. He hit the trigger, shifted to the second target, got a tone, and fired a second torpedo.

The first torpedo lanced up from the snowy landscape and smashed full into the Interceptor’s cockpit. The subsequent explosion shredded the Quadanium solar panels, sowing chaff and debris in the path of the other two TIEs. The second torpedo blasted into the left wing of its target, snapping it off, then exploded right behind the cockpit. The Interceptor just disintegrated, its scattered pieces clipping the last Interceptor.

That squint immediately heeled over in a roll and dove for the planet. Gavin tried to get a lock on it, but it fell too quickly. Slight adjustments to its course told him it was still under power, but he doubted the pilot could recover from that sharp a dive. He’s going in.

Gavin braced for the explosion and fireball as he came up over a little crest, but the Interceptor didn’t crash. Instead it plunged in through the base of the steam plume and into the chasm that was the heart of the Halanit colony.

No one gets away that easy. Gavin switched back to lasers and brought the X-wing up in a lazy loop that he took over the top. The black hole in the planet’s white blanket loomed before him like the mouth of a krayt dragon. He ignored the spark of fear in his guts and evened out the power to his shields. The people of Halanit might be defenseless, but I’m not. Now you pay for the fun you’ve had.

Erisi spotted the two Lambda-class shuttles flying down. Their wings began to retract as they prepared to land near the colony’s surface entrance. She brought her Interceptor around and vectored in toward the landing site. With the flick of a switch she cut in her repulsor-lift coils and extended the Interceptor’s landing gear, even though she expected them to sink into the snow. Nice to have a ship with the hatch on top.

She keyed her comm unit. “Bascome, you have command of the flight. Continue to orbit but do not make another chasm run unless it is specifically requested of you.”

“As ordered, Commander.”

The first shuttle landed and disgorged two squads of stormtroopers in their cold weather gear. The stormtroopers dashed into the opening of an ice cavern the colony used as a shelter for visitors’ personal spacecraft. Red lights flashed from within, bathing the snow with the color of blood, then some black smoke slowly drifted up through the narrow opening.

Looks like they’re in. Erisi waited for the second shuttle to land before she popped the hatch on her fighter. The cold immediately cut through her flightsuit; yet despite it, she removed her heavy helmet. The sweat in her hair froze immediately, but she ignored it. Climbing up out of the hatch, she slid down the curve of the cockpit and found the snow crust sufficiently solid to bear her weight. Leaving her blaster in the shoulder holster she wore, she strode across Halanit’s frozen face and fell in beside the black-clad Captain Ait Convarion.

The Imperial officer acknowledged her presence with a nod she felt was calculated to be mildly dismissive of her even though she towered over him. Sandwiched between stormtrooper phalanxes, they wordlessly made their way into the ice cavern and to the heat-lock beyond it. The doors had been blasted open,