Star Wars_ X-Wing 06_ Iron Fist - Aaron Allston [27]
He breathed a sigh of relief. The pilot of the skimmer hadn’t noticed that eleven footsore stormtroopers had boarded the skimmer, but only ten had emerged. Janson had taken Shalla’s place and was working with Castin to carry a pilot. Now, if this base followed standard Imperial procedure, that pilot would take this skimmer back to the military police motor pool.
Then it would be up to Shalla. She was still in the skimmer’s enclosure, and her job was to prevent the pilot and his guard from talking to anybody.
Her first job. She had other things to do as well. Wedge was reluctant to assign so much responsibility in a commando mission to a newcomer to the squadron, but Kell had spoken in such glowing terms of the Nelprin family’s formidable skills that he’d decided to go ahead with this approach.
Outside the hangar, he took a moment to get his bearings, and silently cursed the restricted field of vision afforded by stormtrooper helmets; lacking peripheral vision, he had to turn in a slow, complete circle to acquire a mental picture of his surroundings. He had a fair idea of the base layout from the reconnaissance they’d done on the hilltop, but not an idea of where in the base they now were. When he had his bearings, he headed straight toward the group of dome-topped buildings he’d earlier decided were officers’ quarters.
They’d never make it there, of course. They’d dump the unconscious pilots in the first dark alley or trench they found and go about their mission.
• • •
Lara Notsil, originally Gara Petothel, flinched as pair after pair of TIE fighters broke formation and dove, their engines screaming, toward her and her wingmates. A good mannerism, flinching, she decided. If they’re observing me, they’ll log it.
Her wing leader’s voice came over the comm unit: “Gold One to Gold Squadron. Break by pairs and engage.”
Lara keyed her own comm unit. “Gold Seven?”
“I’m your wing, Eight.”
She rolled to starboard, getting clear of the main formation of X-wings, and saw other paired fighters also breaking off.
Then the first blasts of green Imperial laser fire fell among them. Lara’s X-wing was rocked by a stern hit; her aft shields were knocked partway down and she reinforced them with energy from her forward shields. The pair of TIE fighters raining laser fire down on both her and Gold Seven slid neatly into killing position behind them.
“Dive for cover, Seven,” Lara said, and nosed the stick forward. The terrain below, a sprawling city in ruins, grew larger. She and Gold Seven dropped into a debris-littered street, flying lower than the tops of the surrounding buildings, but their pursuers never lost sight of them and stayed tucked behind. Lara’s snubfighter was hit by another pair of laser blasts and its aft section slewed slightly to port; she corrected with a deft application of etheric rudder.
Up ahead, the road forked left and right. She knew from seeing the area from above that the two forks turned toward one another farther on, rejoining after only a couple of kilometers. That should have been her tactic: send Gold Seven to starboard while she went to port, then fire upon Seven’s pursuer while Seven fired upon hers once the roads rejoined.
But that would probably have worked. And that wasn’t what she was here for.
“Seven, at the big blue building, hard to port.”
“I read you.” Seven’s voice sounded a bit worried.
Lara suited action to words. As the X-wings came alongside what had once been a warehouse of tremendous size, painted an eye-hurting cyan, but was now a hollowed, burned wreck of a building with scorch marks surrounding blast holes in the walls, she executed a smart portward turn down a street that ran at right angles to the one over which they’d been flying. She rotated ninety degrees leftward, so the street was to her left and one row of buildings was beneath her keel.
The sharpness of the angle was more than the X-wing’s inertial compensator could bear; she