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“This isn’t going to work,” Castin said. He was watching Iron Fist’s approach. “Our docking port is relative up. We’ll be taking off into their hangar bay.”

“I’ll take care of it.” Kell rose. “Runt, take the pilot’s seat, stand by to power up and launch without checklist.” He charged back down the boarding ramp.

Once he was on the tanker’s small flight deck, he brought up the controls for the ship’s artificial gravity and repulsorlifts. It was a simple matter to scrub the identification of a large mass—Iron Fist—as that of a ship and instead identify it as a planetoid. Then he configured the gravity system to orient the ship so that its bottom descended toward the surface of the planetoid. Now, unless Iron Fist spent an unusual amount of tractor beam power and used a lot of fine control to reorient Bastion, its upper surface would rotate to face the planet below and not the Super Star Destroyer above.

The rotation had already begun by the time he reached Narra again. And Iron Fist was much closer. Kell took the copilot’s seat and strapped himself in. “You ready?” he asked Donos.

The sniper shrugged. “If Castin here is any good, yes. Otherwise, we’re doomed.”

“It’ll work,” Castin said. “My code and patches always work.”

The others turned to give him an arch expression.

Castin gave them the look of someone caught in a lie. “Well, usually.”

Wedge felt ice slash through his gut as the most likely scenario went through his mind. The Hawk-bats would circle around the fallen pilot, trying to determine whether Phanan was dead or alive, and would protect him from the strafing runs of the enemy TIEs until they, too, fell one by one.

He keyed his comlink. “Hawk-bats, this is One. Recommend abort mission. Stormies.” On some worlds, stormies was the panicked cry of bar patrons who’d detected a raid by stormtroopers, and it replaced Omega Signal as the evacuation command when the Wraiths were in their Hawk-bat identities.

He steeled himself against a protest from Face. And Face’s voice came across immediately, but not with the words he expected: “Hawk-bats, Leader. Confirm stormies.”

But Face’s interceptor dropped below the tree line, pursued by two fast-moving TIE fighters.

The half squadron of TIE fighters preceded Bastion into the Super Star Destroyer’s main landing bay. Kell waited until Bastion was brought into line directly below the bay. In a moment, the tanker would begin its ascent into the hands of Zsinj. He brought his comlink up. “Remember,” he said into it, “we’ll have a handful of seconds from the time we launch to the time they get another tractor on us. Nine, that’s all the time you have.”

Donos was now back in the emergency airlock, his pilot’s suit on and sealed against space to give him a bare few moments of protection from the hard vacuum he would be experiencing. A last-minute change put him there instead of in the main compartment, as he’d realized that the phototropic shielding of the shuttle’s viewport, designed to give the vehicle some protection from incoming laser fire, would be even more effective against the lighter beam of Donos’s rifle.

Donos simply said, “Ready.”

“Do it.”

Runt hit the control to release the Narra from its dock with Bastion. He cut in the shuttle’s thrusters at full power, blasting away from the tanker, the shuttle’s thrusters burning and scarring Bastion’s hull in a manner that would invite retaliation from any ship’s master.

Runt immediately put Narra into a climb, toward the surface of Halmad, then continued the loop so that the charred, antiquated black surface of Bastion, and the surrounding gleam of the Super Star Destroyer Iron Fist, came within sight.

There was a little flicker of light between Narra and Bastion.

Nothing happened.

Kell felt his stomach sink. It was too difficult a shot. Donos, as good as he was, was trying to fire a laser beam modified to carry data instead of a lethal intensity of power, and trying to hit Bastion’s communications array from a moving shuttle.

Donos fired