Star Wars_ X-Wing 05_ Wraith Squadron - Aaron Allston [35]
The rangefinder’s numbers rolled down to one and a half klicks. Kell fired, saw the torpedo flash toward the target, saw it miss by forty meters or more. As he pulled up and began the long loop around to orient him back toward Folor Base, he watched the torpedo continue on its ballistic path, eventually slamming into the side of one of the distant mountains, illuminating the mountain slope with a brief, brilliant flash.
“Not too good, Five,” Wedge said. “Seven, Eight, begin your run.”
“Seven, affirmative.”
“Eight, affirmative.”
Kell frowned. Suddenly he could hear Seven and Eight again. Doubtless, since he and Runt were through with the run, Wedge had reenabled their ability to do so. “R5, can you give me views through their telemetry? Seven’s and Eight’s?”
The R5 unit hooted in the affirmative. A moment later two views of the distant target appeared side by side on Kell’s main screen—views that were alike but not identical, so they appeared to be an unmerged stereoscopic image.
“Seven, recommend we set the torps to a broader proximity fuse. That target’s ugly.”
“Good point. Doing so. All right, Eight, strike foils to attack position, now.”
“Affirmative.”
A moment later one of the visual images went to gray. Kell grinned sourly. Seven and Eight were about to experience the same failure he had.
“Eight, my weapons are gone. Some sort of system failure.”
“Seven, my targeting’s shot.”
“Do you still have weapons?”
“Yes.”
“Hold on, I’m transmitting my targeting information to you … wait for the lock … Got it!”
“Firing, Seven. We have detonation … Looks like a kill. But I still don’t have targeting sensors.”
“Mine show a clean kill. Good shot, Eight.”
“You did all the work, I just pulled the trigger. Kind of the way I like it.”
Wedge’s voice crackled in: “Good work, you two. It’s back to base so Three Group can do this. Do not inform anyone who hasn’t gone through this exercise of its parameters. That’s an order.”
“Yes, sir.”
“One out.”
Kell gritted his teeth. Once again, because of one of Wedge Antilles’s oh-so-clever tricks, he had come out looking like an incompetent. He’d worked very hard to overcome that first score of zero in the simulators, worked hard enough to put him at the top of the pilots roster, and now it was starting all over again.
The punching dummy was shaped like a man—that is, if you fed a man until he was so fat that his features half disappeared in folds of flesh, then mounted him on a flexible rod in the Folor Base gymnasium. Kell shook his head; he certainly wouldn’t want to be treated that way. Nor would he want to suffer the damage he was inflicting on the dummy.
He started with a one-two combination that rocked the dummy’s head, deforming it temporarily; in seconds, the puttylike memory material inside began to restore the head to its proper shape, but until then it bore the marks of Kell’s fists. He switched to a knifelike blow with the edge of his hand to the thing’s neck, stepped in for a forearm shot to the nose, stayed in close to bring his knee up into the dummy’s rib cage twice. Both times, he heard cracking from within the dummy; it was constructed to feel like flesh, to give way like flesh and bone when the assaults were powerful enough, then return to its pristine state.
He danced back, bobbing, weaving, threw a left-hand feint, followed up with a right hook that whipped the dummy’s head partway around. Very satisfying … though not as gratifying as if it were the real Wedge, the real Janson.
Kell knew he wasn’t the best hand-to-hand fighter around. His instructor in the commandos was a woman half his weight, a head shorter than he. She could throw him around the mats at will and could hit harder than he ever could. But he was big, fast, and trained, so he figured he was in the top ten percent of unarmed combatants in the military. It was just something he was good