Star Wars_ X-Wing 05_ Wraith Squadron - Aaron Allston [6]
The interceptor had crept up to within meters of Twelve’s aft end and was now skillfully matching all of the X-wing pilot’s frantic maneuvers. This was a demonstration of superior flying technique, a show of contempt by one pilot for his enemy, and there was no doubt that the interceptor could begin firing on the defenseless Twelve at any second.
Donos fired off a desperate snap-shot. At the same moment, the interceptor took its kill shot.
Donos saw his lasers strike and play across the interceptor’s main body, slashing across the engines and burning into the cockpit.
The interceptor’s lasers intersected at Twelve’s X-wing, hitting her aft shields in spite of her desperate maneuvers … and then they penetrated. Both of Twelve’s starboard engines flamed out. The starboard strike foils, softened by the lasers’ intense heat, began to deform under atmospheric friction.
The interceptor slowed. Sparks and flame, real ones now, issued from the engines. It rose, jumping out of the rocky rift, and was immediately lost to Donos’s sight.
Twelve’s X-wing began a portward roll. Donos’s next command was half a shout: “Twelve, bail out! Twelve, eject!”
“Ejecting now! Leader, get out of here!”
Donos watched helplessly as Twelve’s cockpit filled with the fire of an ejection thruster, but the canopy failed to open. The ejector seat smashed Twelve into it. Its transparisteel construction kept the canopy in one piece as the X-wing continued to rotate to port. Under continued pressure from the thrust of the ejection seat, the cockpit finally broke away from the X-wing, but Twelve sat limp in the seat as the ejection seat carried her mere meters from the doomed snubfighter, slamming her into the rift wall to port. In a split second she was gone, lost behind Donos, and her X-wing was nosing over to crash into the rift wall below.
Donos forced himself to look away, to return his mind to mission parameters.
A few minutes of terrain-following flying and he should be able to jump free of these rifts and head for space. But suddenly the prospect of survival didn’t appeal much to him.
Donos’s R2 shrieked at him. Startled back to attention, he looked around, saw that a pair of TIE fighters had gained on him during his reverie.
He could stay and be killed, or flee and describe his failure to his commanders in cruel, humbling detail.
He’d prefer to die. But the families of eleven good men and women deserved to know how their loved ones had met their fates. With an anguished cry, Donos hit the thrusters again and rounded the next turn.
2
The New Republic guard, his face as emotionless as a ferrocrete bunker, admitted Wedge to the office. Within, the walls were a soothing blue, the furniture smooth and rounded with colors of the sea, the air cool but uncomfortably moist. Still, Wedge was back in New Republic uniform, and that alone made him more comfortable than the office’s environment conditioner could have.
Behind the desk, Admiral Ackbar, commander in chief of the New Republic’s military operations, returned Wedge’s salute. Like other Mon Calamari, with their outsized heads and rubbery skins, he looked to most people like a bipedal and intellectual fish, but Wedge knew him to be far more humane and courageous than many who fought for the New Republic.
Ackbar gestured toward the visitors’ chairs. “Commander Antilles. Please, sit. Is it too humid for you? I can make adjustments.”
“Not at all.” Wedge took the seat indicated. “Thank you for making time in your schedule for me so soon.”
“It is not an imposition.” Ackbar leaned closer, focusing on Wedge, his two widely separated eyes sometimes moving independently. “I see no signs of hangover on you, Commander. Must I conclude that you did not celebrate adequately?”
Wedge smiled. “Very adequately.