Star Wars_ X-Wing 09_ Starfighters of Adumar - Aaron Allston [96]
He looked around to make sure no one was close enough to hear. “Here’s some reassurance,” he told her. “Two reasons why I’m not going to let anything happen to me. One: I’m the best there is. Two: I finally have someone to come back to.”
She wrapped herself around him. “Don’t forget that.”
“I won’t.”
“I have to get to my station.”
He kissed her, then watched her run—or perhaps flee—toward the large aircraft that was her assignment for the mission. It was built like a spoke-and-wheel space station whose every joining of spoke and wheel was a spherical sensor array.
He climbed back up to his cockpit. His mechanic, a middle-aged woman whose face was striped, tattoolike, with Blade-32 greases, was astride the fuselage, just behind the cockpit, dogging down the rear of the canopy with a hydrospanner. “How’s it look, Grembae?” he asked.
“They gave you the best,” she said. “And it’s in as fine a shape as I can make it.”
His helmet lay in the pilot’s seat. He picked it up to put it on, then noticed the decorations upon it. Recently dried paint in gold on the dark red surface showed up as a succession of delta-shaped wedges, the decorative motif Wedge had added to most of the helmets he’d worn throughout his career. “Who did this?” he asked.
“My son,” she said. “A mechanic on my team. Your lady said you’d like it.”
“My lady.” He put the helmet on, cinched it under his chin. “My lady.” The words weren’t new to him, but they were in a new combination, a configuration that had never meant anything to him before. He decided he liked them.
He levered himself into the pilot’s chair. “She was right. Thanks, Grembae.”
12
They rose from the Yedagon City air base, hundreds strong, fighters and bombers and fortresses and aircraft of all colors and description, and they were only one group of several involved in this all-out assault on Cartann and her satellite nations. One of the Blade units moving ahead of the group as a skirmish line was Running Crimson Flightknife, now being led by Wedge and Tycho.
This was a much faster flight than Wedge’s departure from Cartann, and much more agreeable—it had just felt wrong to be in a vehicle he wasn’t piloting. He watched moonlit forest tops and cultivated fields flash by beneath him. It was oddly peaceful, despite the fact that he was at the spearpoint position of hundreds of engines of war, for there was no comm chatter.
A few klicks from the Cartann border, the lightboard offered up a throbbing noise, indicating that he’d been hit by a lightbounce from ahead. Wedge nodded. That would be a border sensor installation. As the noise continued, Wedge got a fix on it with his lightboard. He looped away from the Running Crimson formation with Tycho tucked in beside him and headed straight for the source of the lightbounce signals.
The enemy sensor operators tried to save their installation: The lightbounce signals cut off. But the installation’s coordinates were already locked into the Blade-32’s computers. Wedge brought it up on his sensor board and designated those coordinates as the sole target. He armed his lasers, and as soon as the sensor board solidified the lasers’ targeting brackets, he fired. He saw his lasers and Tycho’s flash down into the forest below, and some hard target erupted into flaming explosion.
On the way back, they took a closer look. They’d hit a squarish bunker, perhaps fifteen meters on a side, and it was burning fiercely. Elaborate sensor gear on top was now char and slag. Satisfied, Wedge headed back to rejoin Running Crimson Flightknife.
All down the line, other members of the advance screen of Blades would be doing the same thing. They couldn’t conceal their own approach to Cartann, but they could—if they hit enough sensor stations, and hit them early enough—conceal the size of the force approaching the enemy nation. The military forces of Cartann would have to go to an extra effort to get an idea of what was