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And then the Star Destroyer formation came into view, Agonizer at the point, Retaliator and Master Stroke well behind, other, smaller vessels throughout the convoy. Wedge set his course straight for the flagship. “Pilots, arm your weapons. X-wings, S-foils to attack position. Squadron commanders, you are free for individual deployment.” He was not surprised to see the speed-happy A-wing pilots jump out ahead almost instantly. He switched to squadron frequency. “Red Flight, High Flight Squadron, call ’em as you see ’em.”

“Red One, High Flight Twelve. I detect incoming TIE fighters and Interceptors … and two wing pairs of TIE Defenders. They’ve left behind a pretty ferocious screen.”

Wedge grimaced. The TIE Defender was one of the best starfighters known. Equipped with three sets of solar wing arrays, equally spaced around the spherical fuselage, instead of two, and outfitted with shields equal to an X-wing’s and weapons and speed superior to the X-wing, it was an extraordinary—and extraordinarily costly—starfighter. “Red Leader to Solar Wind Squadron. Solar Wind Seven through Twelve, move up to join the screen. We’re going to need your help with the TIE Defenders.”

“Acknowledged, Red Leader.”

Space ahead lit up like interplanetary fireworks as Agonizer’s turbolasers and ion cannons went active. That meant the A-wings had come within range. Seconds later, he spotted the first of the incoming TIE fighters—mere blips on his sensor board that materialized into fast-moving blurs in his forward viewport.

He linked his lasers for quad fire, giving them a harder punch but a slower cycle rate. “Break by pairs and fire at will,” he said.

The X-wings around him spread out, maintaining their course straight toward the incoming enemies. Head-to-head combat approaches were among the most dangerous tactics for starfighters, but they favored the shielded X-wings slightly over the unshielded TIEs.

On the heads-up display projected onto his forward viewport, Wedge’s yellow targeting brackets tracked an incoming TIE Interceptor, the brackets trailing slightly behind the vehicle’s lateral evasive movements. He sent his X-wing into the juking and jinking maneuvers that made it a more difficult target and manually swept his targeting brackets across the path he suspected the TIE would take next. His suspicion was right; the TIE dove straight through the path his brackets were tracing and the brackets went green. Wedge fired. He was rewarded only with a graze as one of his lasers charred the Interceptor’s starboard solar wing black. The TIE veered off its intended course, away from Wedge and the X-wings.

Incoming green lasers matched outgoing red ones in number and intensity, and Wedge saw, in his peripheral vision, one of the High Flight X-wings explode, leaving only burning gas and rapidly cooking shrapnel behind.

Then the lines of TIEs and New Republic fighters met, merged, and separated again, the TIE squadrons flashing past. In a second the TIEs were behind him but coming around in their impossibly tight loops to come up behind the slower New Republic craft.

“Red Leader, got an eyeball,” Tycho said.

Wedge checked by sensors and visually. A TIE fighter, or eyeball in pilot’s parlance, had come up behind Tycho and was unloading a continuous stream of laser fire at him, though Tycho’s erratic side-to-side motions had kept him from sustaining any but the most grazing of laser impacts.

“Read you, Two. I’m your wing.” Wedge turned in Tycho’s wake.

Tycho dove—“downward” being the direction of Adumar’s orbital plane—in a shallow arc the most inexperienced of pilots could have followed. Less easy to follow would have been his extraordinary evasive maneuvering within the simple arc. The TIE fighter followed, keeping up his laser fire, and Wedge came up behind.

He fired once, his four lasers flashing through empty space where, a quarter second before, the TIE had been. The nimble eyeball flashed off to port, breaking away from its pursuit of Tycho.

“You’d think he wanted to stay alive or something, Lead.”

“Let