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“What?”

“You didn’t know you were a clone? No, of course not. Isard wouldn’t trust the dispersal of her prized captives to just anyone: She gave the job to herself. With you she could actually be in two places at one time.”

“That’s insane.”

“So was she.” Wedge triggered an ion bolt that laced aquamarine fire through the shuttle’s aft shield. “Corran’s escape and her evacuation of Coruscant broke her, but you were imprinted before then, so your brainwelds weren’t loosened. You did your job and she had you shot. She expected you to die, but you didn’t and here you are.”

The shuttle sideslipped starboard as gracefully as a hawkbat riding air currents in Coruscant’s citified canyons. “No, not possible.”

“It’s true.” Wedge laughed aloud. “In fact, I can prove it.”

“It’s a lie.”

“Oh, then explain why, in a similar situation on Thyferra, Isard was using her shuttle to run and you, on the other hand, are still trying to deny us the Lusankya prisoners, as per her orders to you?”

He cut off her anguished scream by switching over to One Flight’s tactical channel. “Myn, move into the shuttle’s aft port. Gavin, set up for shots after a sideslip starboard.” Wedge punched an inquiry into his tactical computer. “Take it down, now.”

The other two trips moved in for the kill like teopari on the hunt. Myn’s Defender curled in past Wedge’s fighter and snapped off a pair of ion bolts that took the shuttle in the aft. Electricity played through the aft shield, shrinking it to a tiny sphere that imploded in a brilliant flash.

The shuttle, as predicted, sideslipped to the right. Gavin’s two bolts shot down at it and caught the shuttle on the high dorsal stabilizer, gushing down as if a fluid. Sparks shot from shield projectors as they shorted out and smoke began to trail from the concussion missile launchers. The light in the engines died out as the ship’s electrical system failed and a ship that had once been elegant in flight became a heavy construct of metal and ceramics suddenly unable to defy gravity.

The left wing tip hit the ground first, gouging a furrow in a bridge roadway. Scattered speeders whirled, spun, and flipped away as huge chunks of ferrocrete decking dropped twenty meters to the shallow river below. Portions of the wing whipped through the air as it hit the durasteel supports at the bridge’s edge.

The shuttle’s flattening spin would have slammed it into the ground, crushing the pilot’s compartment completely, but the river valley meant there was no ground for it to hit. The ship continued to spin and the right wing tip came down to splash through the water and strike riverbed. The wing lodged as firmly as if the riverbed were solid stone.

Metal screamed and ferroceramic armor tiles snapped along the wing’s joint with the ship’s hull. Because the wings were meant to fold up for ease of storage in the belly of a ship, the joint was not nearly as strong as it would have been were the wings part of the basic hull. Hydraulic fluid sprayed out as the hinges parted and the wing tore completely off.

The hull whirled through the air, the nose almost kissing the water after the first revolution. It came up again, sparing the pilot’s life, then the shuttle hit on the right rear quarter. The section of the boxy hull crumpled, splashing out great torrents of the river water it displaced. The ship bounced up, then landed hard on the aft. The impact jolted the drive units, tearing them free of their mountings and slamming them forward into the passenger compartment.

The shuttle wavered there for a second, then the last bit of its momentum pitched it over onto its port side. Water splashed up on both sides, then the craft settled back, resting on its blackened dorsal stabilizer. Water washed up around the ship’s hull and steam rose from the drive units.

After ten seconds, though, aside from the splashing of debris falling from the bridge, the lazy Daplona River had absorbed the violence of the shuttle’s crash and wended on its way.

Wedge glanced at his secondary screen and the answer to his computer inquiry.