The training astromech’s warning shriek saved her life for the third time in thirty seconds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mara inverted her X-wing and jerked back on the stick, a crude, brutal maneuver that Wedge and Hobbie would’ve scolded her for in flight training. Green laserfire flashed through the space she’d just vacated, close enough she swore she could feel the heat of the blast even through vacuum, shields, and transparisteel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She glimpsed her scopes, a frantic look, and then she juked the X-wing hard to port, reversed to starboard, fully defensive and with only a single objective in mind: stay alive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Kilometers away, red laserfire met green, an exchange punctuated by an explosion. Skywalker and Wedge, trying to get to me.<\/em>She spared a half-second to look at her scope, saw their signals vectoring, turning away, trying to find a seam to slip through the swarms of TIEs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the tactical situation was ugly, and Mara knew it. The TIEs were largely still focused on attacking the Independence<\/em> and her support ships, waves of TIEs steadily eroding the Rebel starfighter screen, inflicting kills and forcing the air wing elements out of position. The Independence<\/em> was preparing to escape, and the Empire’s fighter wings were responding with focused, concentrated attacks in overwhelming numbers. A-wings and X-wings that slipped too far out of position were swamped and destroyed; even if the Independence<\/em> escaped, the air wing would feel the casualties of today’s desperate fight for months to come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “…ay alive, Jade,” she heard Wedge’s voice in her ear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was no small miracle that Mara was still alive. And then she had no more time for thought, another element of TIEs diving on her, lasers flashing. She sent the X-wing into a looping spiral, throwing off their aim, but bleeding velocity as she did, the vicious maneuvering eating away at her speed. And when I’m too slow, I won’t be able to evade anymore.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Another warning shriek, and this time Mara responded by hauling the stick back. This time the lasers glanced her rear deflectors and the overstressed generator whined and died. No aft shields.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The temptation hung in her mind, the option she never<\/em> chose. She spared one more glance at her scopes; two X-wings fighting brutally through a vermin’s nest of TIEs, the sort of impossible dogfight that should kill Skywalker and Wedge, too, but somehow wouldn’t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “…almost there…” Skywalker’s voice, straining from the pressure of combat or g-forces or both.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Don’t reach out. Don’t flare. Don’t listen. Visibility is death, Mara<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another blast kissed her X-wing’s tail, and the fighter shuddered with the hit. A pair of red lights flashed on her console, but she could spare no concentration to see what systems had failed. Fear bubbled up from her chest, but it couldn’t find purchase; she was too focused on trying to stay alive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yes, visibility is death. But visibility is death later. This is death <\/em>now. I’ll deal with visibility later.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n And for the first time in nearly four years, Mara cracked the dam in her mind and listened<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Force whispered. Mara reacted. Her laser cannons fired as if of their own accord, and a TIE she hadn’t seen ran into the blasts and shattered. She hauled the X-wing’s stick back and to the right, a spiraling, climbing bank to starboard. Six TIEs off her nose, all firing, a glancing blow on her forward shields, but she didn’t hesitate. A TIE broke formation where it should have held, and she slipped through the gap. Another shot at her tail, but it didn’t catch the fuselage; it caught her upper port s-foil, and then her X-wing was tumbling, almost out of control as microthrusters misfired. The R5 trainer was screaming, but she couldn’t afford to break her focus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She listened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The X-wing stabilized, and she fired again; only three lasers now, the laser cannon on the tip of the damaged s-foil no longer responding. Another TIE she hadn’t seen, grazed, spiraling out of control, not dead but out of position.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mara could feel<\/em> the TIEs at her back, turning impossibly quickly, trying to line her up again. And there were TIEs in front of her as well. She stomped the etheric rudder pedal, swinging the X-wing’s nose hard to starboard, the fighter slewing viciously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She felt the gap in the swarm of TIEs between her and Skywalker and Wedge, a crack she could slip the X-wing through. It didn’t exist, but in four seconds it was going<\/em> to exist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Laser cannons flashed as she wrenched the fighter’s nose back around to where it needed to be. The red fire hit nothing, plasma spent in vain into the void of space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But in the swarm of TIEs, a pilot flinched, and the crack opened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mara hurled her X-wing into the crack; the TIEs at her back fired, green bolts clawing at her tail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Deflectors double forward,” Luke managed through gritted teeth. The Arfive whistled a protest, no doubt because of the tactical situation; Luke didn’t care. “Just do it<\/em>. Full throttle. Wedge?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Right with you, boss,” was Wedge’s grim reply.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “We’re punching through. Don’t stop.” And then Luke was firing, sometimes when the targeting computer chimed – though it was cycling through lock indications so fast it was almost impossible to keep up as TIEs flashed in and out of his sights – and sometimes by instinct.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Luke, trust your feelings. <\/em>Obi-Wan Kenobi’s voice, the way he’d heard his mentor during the Death Star battle. Luke didn’t know at this moment if it was memory or if Ben was trying to guide him right now, trying to keep his wayward student alive in a very ugly fighter engagement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It didn’t matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A pair of TIEs exploded, one under Luke’s guns, the other to Wedge’s precise fire. The hole was big enough for them to slip through, and Luke led the charge, ignoring a pair of shots that ricocheted off his front deflectors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Independence<\/em> to all fighters,” Colonel S’man’s voice called, strong and clear and drowning out the constant combat chatter, “forty-five seconds until jump. Nav data incoming in thirty seconds.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Luke was in the flow of it, and he could feel<\/em> the Force. He could feel Wedge on his wing, grim and focused and determined. He could feel the rest of the Rogues, still clustered around the Independence<\/em> and growing more distant, alive and terrified and determined and focused and jubilant, all at once. And ahead of him, he could feel Mara, desperate and clinging to life and shining in his senses like a star.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wedge whooped, a jubilant shout over the comm. “She’s through!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n He could see her X-wing, battered, smoking, half a dozen TIEs pursuing her. She was slipping through a gap in the formation facing her, and then the TIEs behind her and the TIEs around her dissolved into an undisciplined mess as the Imperial pilots were forced to evade, scattering to prevent collisions. Two TIEs smashed into each other, head-to-head, exploding in a spectacular fireball, and then Mara was racing toward them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Reverse,” Luke ordered. Wedge was on his starboard wing, and Luke banked to starboard. Wedge banked to port. They crossed vectors, splitting and reforming now pointed back at the Independence<\/em>, settling in on either side of Mara’s X-wing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Jade, are you okay?” Wedge asked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Two heartbeats passed. “Still alive.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Is your hyperdrive still functional?” Luke asked, glancing over at the smoke pouring out of the X-wing’s tail, noted the charring on her s-foil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Yes. Need nav data.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n As if on cue, Luke’s R5 whistled the receipt of nav data from the Independence<\/em>. “There it is.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n The TIEs between the three Rogues and the Independence<\/em> milled, their forward momentum blunted by Luke and Wedge’s attack a moment before. Now, some of them were turning back to face the trio of X-wings, but it wasn’t a unified attack. “Punch back through,” Luke said, “and as soon as we’re clear, we jump.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n I will never agree to a training mission without torpedoes again<\/em>, he thought ruefully. Then he opened fire, twitching the X-wing’s stick left and right, spraying laserfire inaccurately into the cloud of TIEs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Engines burned brightly all around the Independence<\/em>. All three CR90 corvettes jumped together. The medical frigate jumped next, then the Quasar Fire carrier, then the combat frigate. One of the Sphyrna corvettes jumped immediately after; the other was burning wreckage, falling behind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Too small to see at this distance, Rebel fighters began blinking out on the scope as they made their own jumps. “Boss?” Hobbie’s voice called.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Don’t wait for us, just jump,” Luke ordered. “We’ll see you at the rendezvous.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then the three of them were punching through the cloud of TIEs one more time. By instinct he threw power to his aft shields and dropped throttle a fraction; Mara and Wedge both accelerated out in front of him, and a blast that would’ve hulled Mara’s tail instead hammered his rear deflectors. Another TIE exploded, though Luke couldn’t tell which of them had scored the kill. It didn’t matter. Survival mattered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And then they were through. The Independence<\/em>‘s powerful engines flared brightly, the massive Mon Calamari ship flickered with pseudomotion, and then vanished into hyperspace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Jump, jump, jump,” Luke ordered rhythmically, hesitating for an extra two seconds until Wedge and Mara both made the jump before engaging his own hyperdrive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Stars stretched into lines, and then he was safe in the ethereal swirl of hyperspace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first hyperspace jump was only three minutes in duration; just far enough to carry the Independence<\/em> and her task force out of immediate danger. Wedge knew the task force would only stay at the rendezvous point for a few minutes at most, just long enough to recover starfighters, before they’d execute a second jump of short duration, and then a third, longer jump to ensure no Imperial pursuit remained.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nonetheless, the relief he felt was as warm as a blanket when his X-wing emerged back into realspace and he could see the task force for himself. He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. If something had gone wrong, we’d be stranded. I know why Luke agreed to these training astromechs, but that was a very bad decision in hindsight. At least he and I should have been flying with our regular droids.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n “Rogue Squadron, report in,” Luke ordered calmly, shaking Wedge out of his internal monologue. “And keep flying while you do it. I want us all tucked in Aux Two before the Independence<\/em> jumps again.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Senesca and Naeco here,” Zev reported in. “Minor damage, but we’re fine.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Janson and Eirriss,” Wes was next, “and may I say, we’re the best-looking element in the squadron.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Klivian here with Neth,” Hobbie reported, and Wedge couldn’t decide if his tone was annoyed or amused. “That was more exciting than training usually is.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Tell me about it,” Luke said dryly. “Wedge?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “All green,” Wedge said, only bending the truth a bit. Several warning indicators were flickering yellow on his system status board, but they weren’t red.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Mara?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n A heartbeat passed before she answered. “I can land it. The mechanics are going to hate me.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “We’ll take it.” Luke’s voice was sober now. “Mara and Wedge in first, then Hobbie’s element, then Zev’s element, then Wes.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “On my wing, Jade,” Wedge said briskly, slowly throttling up and wondering just how badly damaged Mara’s X-wing actually was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Whatever the damage was, she still handled the T-65B with the quiet precision he normally expected of her. The rest of the squadron strung out in pairs behind them, Luke falling to the very back of the formation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Independence<\/em> flight control offered no protest or complaint at the Rogues’ approach, clearing them immediately for landing in Aux Two. Wedge led the way, Mara as steady on his wing as if she’d been welded there. Two by two, the Rogues breached the magcon field and set down in their assigned slots, some rougher than others. Everyone’s dealing with the adrenaline crash<\/em>, Wedge thought as he powered down the X-wing’s engines and ran through an abbreviated post-flight checklist. Went for a training mission and survived one hell of a firefight.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Ground crews swarmed over the X-wings. Wedge noted, with something between amusement and alarm, several men and a droid were equipped with firefighting equipment, all clustered around Mara’s still-smoking X-wing. He waited until one of the support staff rolled a ladder to his fighter, offered a thanks, and climbed down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Luke met him at the base of the ladder, hair matted and soaked with sweat, tired, but blue eyes still shining. “We all made it, Wedge.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wedge allowed himself a small smile. “We made a lot of mistakes,” he pointed out, but it didn’t kill his smile. “But yes, we all made it. All the Rogues, anyway. The air wing took losses.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Luke’s smile faded. “They did. That was an ugly fight.” He looked away for a moment, then met Wedge’s gaze again. “The Empire knew exactly where we were. The Independence<\/em>, I mean.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Noticed that, too, did you?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Yes. That Star Destroyer came in exactly on the Independence<\/em>‘s heading. They forced us to redirect and calculate a new jump. If they’d come in almost any other way, the task force would’ve had a clean escape. But by blocking the vector, we had to calculate new jumps, execute new maneuvers, and actually fight a battle.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Exactly,” Wedge said with something approaching grim satisfaction. Luke is learning to look at the bigger picture, too.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n “Okay, immediate needs. Tell me if I’m missing anything.” Luke started ticking off items by fingertip. “First, we run all the Rogues through medical and make sure no one’s picked up an injury they’re not aware of. Second, we make sure all the maintenance is covered on the X-wings. Third, we write up our after-action report to Rieekan.” He paused for a moment. “And somewhere in there, I suppose we need to make sure everyone eats and sleeps, too. That ambush took a lot out of us.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “The after-action report can wait,” Wedge contradicted. “It needs to get written, yes, but it’s not urgent. Before we write our official reports, I want to pull all the telemetry from our X-wings. Gun camera holos, astromech recordings, maybe anything I can pull from the Independence<\/em>‘s recording of the battle, too.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Luke looked at him dubiously. “I suppose you can do that while I shepherd the Rogues through medical and mess hall. But why the telemetry?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Because you and I are going to look through every second of it,” Wedge said dryly. “Our training run today was meant to test and train our new two-ship element doctrine, right? We just fought our way out of an ambush using that with training loadouts. We should pull the data now and review it while it’s still fresh in our heads so we can figure out what works, what didn’t, what we need to change, and where the gaps are.” He grimaced. “There are going to be a lot of gaps. We were still thinking in three-ship elements.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Luke’s face was stone. “You mean the part where I almost got Mara killed.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Not just you,” Wedge cautioned. “I heard you give the order and didn’t think the implications through. That’s on both of us.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Alright. Pilots first, then X-wings, then telemetry.” Luke rubbed his face wearily. “Is there a part in there where you and I sleep?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Not today.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Luke was on his way back from medical when he saw a familiar silhouette in the corridor, heading away from him, toward a bank of turbolifts. He picked up his pace, bumping into several ship officers before he could reach her. “Leia!” he called.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Princess of Alderaan paused at the sound of her name and turned. “Luke!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n He finally reached her. “I didn’t know you were on the Independence<\/em>,” he said, a bit out of breath. “How long have you been here?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “I arrived late last night on a courier ship,” she said with a smile. “I came from Mako-Ta.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Are you staying here long?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Leia shook her head. “I came here to meet with Captain Verrack and General Rieekan, along with the courier packet.” Her lips twisted into a frown. “We’re going to be relying on couriers for longer than I’d hoped.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now it was Luke’s turn to frown. “Couriers?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “We lost our long-range communications network during the evacuation of Yavin,” she explained. “It’s made coordination impossible. All data exchanges right now are being done by fast courier ships. The information we brought last night included new protocols for establishing secure long-range comms for our task forces by using the Empire’s own Holonet relays.” Leia shook her head. “Just over twelve hours after we brought the long-range comms online, a Star Destroyer task force appears knowing exactly where we were.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “So the comms aren’t just down, they’re compromised,” Luke said grimly, the implications settling in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Leia nodded. “We broke the link when the ambush hit. We had a channel open with the Defiance<\/em> at the time. So now we’re scattering couriers to warn everyone off from using the new protocols.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “This is why I’m a fighter pilot,” Luke said wryly. “Blowing things up is much simpler.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “A fighter pilot and a walking complaint,” Leia added dryly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Luke winced. “Colonel S’man’s reports?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Oh, yes,” the Princess said with a serious nod, though there was a sparkle in her eye. “Naming your unit Rogue Squadron<\/em> really didn’t help his opinion of you.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Luke tried unsuccessfully to keep the grin off his face. “Speaking of the Rogues, you should come meet them. They’re a great group of pilots.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “I’ll try to make time, but I’m already late for a meeting with Rieekan and Dodonna.” She offered a smile. “I’m not promising, but I’ll try.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “That’s all I can ask,” Luke said with an accepting nod. It’s not all I can ask, but it’s all I can expect<\/em>, he corrected himself silently. “It’s good to see you.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “You, too, Luke. Stay safe, alright?” Then she was in motion again, heading to the turbolift.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Luke watched her go, regret gnawing at him. There’s never enough time. She’s an Alderaanian princess and a figurehead of the Rebellion. You’re a farmboy-turned-fighter-pilot. She already gives you more time than she can afford.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n She really would like the Rogues, though.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The training astromech’s warning shriek saved her life for the third time in thirty seconds. Mara inverted her X-wing and jerked back on the stick, a crude, brutal maneuver that Wedge and Hobbie would’ve scolded her for in flight training. … Continue reading
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