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The third meteor shower in as many days peppered the frozen arctic regions of Saffalore’s northern hemisphere. Few of the meteors survived long enough to hammer the planet’s surface; most burned up from the friction of their descent through the atmosphere, often leaving behind long trails to mark the fiery ends to their travels. A few had enough mass left to strike the ground as meteorites, often leaving deep craters in the hard, uncultivated ground.

And then there were the fabricated objects in their midst. Starfighters, almost two dozen, maneuvered away from the true meteorites and pulled up sharply from their descent, missing collisions with the ground sometimes by only a few dozen meters.

There were no rebukes for too-chancy flying over the comm waves. These pilots were keeping comm silence, staying in visual range of one another.

Three of the vehicles were TIE interceptors, the most lethal starfighters of the Empire. The remainder were X-wings, heavily laden with extra fuel pods under their S-foils.

The danger with an intrusion like this, Donos decided, is that it’s boring enough that you become distracted, and still dangerous enough to leave you dead. Terrain-following flying was a tricky skill. Most of what they would be crossing tonight was tundra, hard-frozen ground and an ice sheet over it, offering little to endanger them. But there were occasional hilly regions and one mountain range to cross before they reached their objective. Under a comm blackout, each pilot had to keep a close eye on the sensors; he couldn’t rely on the sharp sight of his fellows.

Donos kept his focus on the sensors. Focus was no problem for him. As a sniper for the Corellian armed forces, he’d learned to keep his attention unwavering on his target. Lives had depended on his ability to do so. He’d been good at it.

Of course, at a certain point, the suspicion that there was something wrong, something unfair, with what he was doing had begun to eat away at him. Yes, every target he had taken down as a sniper had been on the verge of killing an innocent … or many innocents. But the fact that he could never afford to give them a chance still nagged at him.

Enlistment in Starfighter Command had seemed the answer. He’d proven that he had the reflexes, the technical grounding necessary to become a pilot. There was never any moral quandary—everyone he brought down as a pilot had a chance to shoot back. He’d risen quickly and surely through the ranks, earning his lieutenancy within a year, being granted the temporary rank of brevet captain soon afterward.

His own command, Talon Squadron. Every member except Donos killed in the ambush on an uninhabited world no one wanted. Leaving him with a blot on his career he might never be able to erase. A blot on his mind he might not ever be able to heal.

He raised the visor on his helmet and pressed his hands to his eyes. His inclination was to steer away from these thoughts. He couldn’t afford to do that. The emotions that rose—threatening to overwhelm him—whenever he sent his mind down this course were enemies he had to defeat. He had to hammer away at them until they left him alone forever. And he had to keep control of himself while doing it, so others would not see his weakness.

He’d lost eleven subordinates, fellow pilots, some of them friends. He’d lost his command; Talon Squadron had been decommissioned. He’d even lost his mind, or at least misplaced it, turning into an emotional wreck sometime later, when the loss of his astromech plunged him back into vivid memories of the destruction of Talon Squadron.

His new squadmates had lured him back to reality. Had forced him to look once again at life. To begin thinking again about his present, about his future.

He returned his attention to his sensors. There would be no future if he plowed into a hillside.

All right, then. There were two paths open to him … assuming he didn’t get killed before he could begin to follow them.

First was the one that had