Star Wars_ X-Wing 06_ Iron Fist - Aaron Allston [127]
The voice had been female. It had to be Shalla. Some of the chill in his stomach began to fade.
Good, that was good, and not just because it meant she’d survived her mission. Now they’d only have to try to stage the Parasite portion of their operation once. Twice, even if they could pull it off, would probably look suspicious.
Ahead, two of the TIE fighters looped around to come back at Wedge and Dia. A delaying tactic—the commander of that squadron knew his fighters couldn’t outfly interceptors, so he was sacrificing two pilots to allow the others to reach their objective, the Super Star Destroyer. The sacrificial TIEs looped out at a considerable distance before coming back in, so that if the Hawk-bats continued on their course, the fighters would be able to settle in neatly behind them.
Wedge said, “Four, stay with me, then break when we’re past them,” and vectored toward the incoming craft. Dia tucked in neatly to his aft and port.
The incoming TIEs sprayed fire as indiscriminately as if they were watering a garden. Wedge concentrated on evasive maneuvers, returning fire when his targeting brackets suggested they were about to manage a lock, but his beams still went wide. Then the two pairs of TIEs passed one another’s position and looped to come around again.
Wedge gritted his teeth and pulled the tightest, hardest loop he could manage. His gravitational compensator couldn’t quite compensate, and the maneuver slammed him back in his pilot’s couch, forcing blood into his head; he felt himself graying out and eased off. But his prey hadn’t tried a maneuver so ambitious, and Wedge found himself, half on instinct, tucked in behind the fighter. His prey wavered and veered off to shake him, but Wedge adhered to the fighter’s tail, sized up his shot, waited for the image of the target to jiggle in the targeting bracket, and fired. The fighter exploded in a rain of glowing gas and debris. Wedge twitched his yoke, a lateral drift, so he did not have to fly through the debris cloud.
He spotted Dia’s sensor signal on his screen and maneuvered around to get a look. She, too, was tucked in behind her foe, firing twin-linked lasers upon it, and her fire chewed away at the enemy’s twin ion engines and wing pylons. Wedge saw one pylon give way, reduced to molten slag, and one engine flame out.
That pilot shut the engine down and continued veering, trying to escape Dia.
She let him. She allowed the crippled TIE to vector off toward safety. She looped around and formed up with Wedge.
He brought them around toward their original objective and thought about that. The old Dia would have vaped that target without a second’s hesitation. The new one seemed satisfied with having the objective accomplished rather than scoring the kill. He hoped the change wouldn’t prove fatal to her. But all he said was, “Good flying, Four.”
“Yub, yub, One.”
Up ahead, toward the new Super Star Destroyer, Wedge caught flashes of light.
His sensor board showed that the six TIEs had become twelve—but the newcomers were blue dots, their transponders indicating they were friendlies from Iron Fist. The six red dots became five, then four, then two, then none. Wedge slowed his approach and Dia followed suit.
The newcomers continued in their direction.
Wedge opened his comlink. “Leader, what to do?”
“It’s still hairy here, One. Come back in.”
A new voice, clipped and martial accents: “Am I speaking to the Ewok pilot?” It was Fel’s voice, and Wedge’s gut chilled down to cryogenic levels again.
The sensor board showed the transmission coming from the oncoming TIE interceptors. Wedge said, “Yub, yub. Kettch here. Who talk?”
“My name Fel. Fel want to fly with Kettch.” The sophisticated voice and the simplified syntax just didn’t go together.
Wedge shook his head over that and brought his interceptor back toward the engagement zone. Dia followed suit, mercifully not intruding on this conversation. “Yes,” Wedge said. “Fly with. You see Kettch best pilot.”
“Well, best Ewok, certainly.”
“Kettch not really