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Beside the makeup case was an injector unit already filled with an illicit substance. She picked it up, hesitated. It was a necessary part of the deception. She just had to make sure she was clearheaded enough, in spite of the drugs, to finish what she was doing here. She jabbed herself with the unit, felt the flow of alien fluids into her vein.

Before the drugs took hold, she spoke aloud, a variation on the code that had given her access to this chamber.

A portion of one wall slid aside. Beyond was the access to Trigit’s personal escape pod. The one neither she nor anyone else but Trigit was supposed to know about.

She ignored the feeling that swept through her, the sensation of drifting, long enough to grab up her identicards and makeup case and stagger into the pod.

Had Wedge’s vision not been obscured by the dust cloud he was maintaining, he would have seen the tiny flight of three Interceptors leave Implacable’s launch bay and angle away from the crippled Star Destroyer.

The Wraiths, Blues, and Rogues battling for their lives against a numerically superior force also paid the flight no attention. Those Interceptors weren’t entering the fight. They’d be dealt with later.

Gara Petothel’s voice came across Implacable’s intercom. “Attention, crew. Implacable is losing power and will crash in five minutes or less. Abandon ship.”

All over the Star Destroyer, officers and crewmen looked at one another.

Only the ship’s commander was authorized to issue such an order. But the chain of command could be breaking down just as the ship’s systems were.

Crew members began racing toward the escape pod accesses. Only the most loyal, the most foolhardy, remained behind at gunnery positions.

Kell completed his third pass through the TIEs, alone this time—Blue Nine was off again with her wingman, Blue Ten. There were fewer of the TIEs this time around. Much of that was Rogue Squadron’s fault; he’d never seen such coordinated skill, such squadron-wide competence in dogfighting, as the Rogues had demonstrated while eating away at the TIE fighters’ numbers. But the odds were still bad and he knew his luck could not continue to hold.

It didn’t. He heard Runt’s voice, “Five, roll out—”

He snapped up on his starboard wing, but the crossfire from an oncoming TIE Interceptor, a gray craft sporting rakish red stripes on the outer surfaces of its wings, struck him with casual accuracy. The first laser blast battered at his stern shields; the second penetrated, burning its way into his fuselage behind his R2 unit.

His flight stick locked up and his control board went dead. All electronics gone … he swore to himself as he began a slow, graceful plunge toward the moon below. The interceptor pilot waggled his wings, then rose toward a distant cluster of A-wings.

Kell opened the panel to his left and hit the button for a cold start. Nothing happened.

By his best guess, he had about thirty seconds until impact. Thirty seconds to get an inoperable X-wing started … assuming it could be.

And he couldn’t participate in the start-up. Only Thirteen, his R2 unit, could reach the damage.

He switched on his helmet comlink, heard the hiss indicating that the interference from the relay dish was still in effect, heard fuzzy voices of the pilots involved in the fight. With his left heel, he yanked at a small, innocuous tab extending from the cockpit hull by his foot. “Thirteen, can you hear me?”

The astromech responded with a whistle.

“Can you get at the damage? Can you bring us on-line?”

Thirteen’s next whistle was a low, mournful one.

Kell’s tub popped out a short metallic bar. With his foot, he began pumping it, manually generating the current necessary for an emergency deployment of his landing gear. “Are you sure? Not even one engine?”

Thirteen’s answer was the same, a sad trill.

Kell heard the landing gear pop open and into place. But there was no power-up of the repulsorlift landing engine, not even its emergency backup power. “Repulsorlifts?”