find you can't be part of the squadron, you can walk away
and I'll have been proud to have you as one of us."
Asyr arched an eyebrow. "No threat of retribution if I
betray you?"
Wedge shook his head. "If you decide to betray us, I
can't imagine we'll survive long enough to avenge ourselves
on you. On the other hand, Rogues tend to take a lot of
killing, so you can't be sure of how things will turn out."
"I'll keep that in mind." Asyr smiled and Wedge took it
for a good sign. "And, Commander, concerning Gavin, there
is no hidden agenda. His wide-eyed way of looking at every-
thing is refreshing and, perhaps, even energizing. I've lived a
long time in the shadows, s o moving into the light feels very
good. I'll do nothing to hurt him."
"Good." Wedge waved her toward the door. "Go get
your stuff and get to the briefing. I'm trusting you'll see the
holes in this plan and help us plug them before Zsinj accom-
plishes what the Empire could only dream about the de-
struction of Rogue Squadron."
6
Corran Horn let his joy at again being in the cockpit of a
starfighter consume him. It did not matter to him that he did
not know how he'd gotten into the ship. He did not let the
fact that he was flying a TIE Interceptor concern him. He
thrust aside anxiety born of his ignorance of his location.
None of those things were germane to his present situation.
The only relevant facts in his life were these he was
flying and, he knew, if he flew well enough he would be
allowed to fly again. He had no idea how he knew his perfor-
mance would be rewarded with more flight time--that fact
seemed as fundamental to him as his need for air and food
and sleep. His desire to continue flying blazed hot in his gut
and burned from him the annoyance at the squint's ineffi-
cient controls and sluggish reaction time. "Nemesis One, report."
It took Corran a moment to realize the comm unit call
had been directed at him. He glanced at his scanner win-
dows. "One is clear."
"One, we have two eyeballs vectoring in on a heading of
239 degrees at a range of ten kilometers. They are hostiles.
You are free to engage and terminate them."
"I copy. Nemesis One outbound." Corran hit the left
rudder pedal and swung the ship around onto the proper
heading. The starfield whirled around him, then froze in
place again. He could recognize none of the constellations,
but that did not concern him. His mission was to destroy the
enemy, and that he would gladly do no matter where he
found himself.
His breathing reverberated loudly in the full helmet he
wore. The sound came rhythmically. It betrayed no nervous-
ness. It was not the quickened breathing of prey, but the
strong steady respiration of a predator on the hunt. He had
already killed more TIE starfighters than he cared to remem-
ber; these would just be two more.
And yet, in the back of his mind, he knew he could not
actually remember his previous kills, and this amnesia began
to nibble away at his emotional well-being.
With a thumb he flicked the Interceptor's quad lasers
over to dual-fire mode, then pulled back on the steering yoke
and brought the ship up in a slight climb. A quick starboard
snaproll onto his head turned the climb into a dive, and
suddenly he was upon the eyeballs. His index finger tight-
ened on the trigger and a stream of verdant laser-bolts sliced
through the lead eyeball.
Because of his angle of attack, the bolts scored black
furrows in one wing, then pierced the ball cockpit from the
top. On the other side they freed the wing, but the ship's
explosion shattered the hexagonal panel. It blasted debris
into the flight path of the second TIE, causing it to roll to
starboard and dive. The maneuver succeeded in saving the
second ship from a collision with its dying wingman, but
dropped it straight into Corran's sights.
Corran cut the throttle back by a quarter, matching
speed with his prey. The pilot he hunted juked right and left,
but made none of the hard breaks and sharp turns needed to
shuck Corran from his tail. Without remorse, but full of
contempt, Corran flicked the squint's lasers over to qua
fire, then impaled the TIE fighter on his crosshairs and hit the
trigger with a delicate twitch of his finger.
The four green laser-bolts converged and merged into
one a nanosecond before they burned the top from the cock-
pit, sheering it off just above the engine assembly. Corran
imagined he could see the pilot's blackened body in silhou-
ette for a second, then the eyeball exploded and seared that
image into his brain. Exultation at having been victorious
swept through Corran, though in its wake came the feeling
that those two pilots had been so inexperienced that he had
not really fought them, but had just slaughtered them.
"Nemesis One, we have two uglies at five kilometers,
heading 132 degrees. They are hostile. Engage and termi-
nate."
"As ordered." Corran brought the squint up and
around, then punched the throttle to full power. He wanted
to close quickly so he would be able to get a look at the ships
he faced. Uglies were hideous, hybrid spacefighters cobbled
together from various salvage parts. Smugglers and pirates
used them fairly often. He couldn't pinpoint how he knew
that, but he did know he'd fought uglies before. Given that
he was alive, he assumed they had not proved too much of a
problem for him.
Something about that assumption niggled in the back of
his mind. He knew it was not incorrect. He was a good pilot
and he knew it, but his assuming superiority seemed wrong.
He hadn't made the assumption on the basis of the fact that
uglies seldom had the performance characteristics of the
fighters from which they were created. He realized he'd as-
sumed anyone flying uglies would be pirates or smugglers,
and had instantly assumed they were his inferiors. While he
could find no facts to dispute his assumption about his foes,
he knew there was something wrong with his having made it.
A warning klaxon blared in the cockpit, alerting him
that one of the uglies had gotten a torpedo lock on him and
had launched a proton torpedo. Corran banished thoughts
about his enemies' combat-worthiness, rolled the ship up
onto its port wing, then dove. His abrupt maneuver hurled
his ship onto a course at right angles to the one he'd been
traveling previously. The proton torpedo, which was travel-
ing roughly twice as fast as he was, shot past his starboard
wing and started on a long loop to head back at him.
A proton torpedo has thirty seconds of flight time. I
can't outrun it, but I can out-maneuver it. Corran smiled. Or
deal with it more directly!
He reversed the squint's thrust and hit the port rudder
pedal. This threw the Int
erceptor into a flat spin that brought
the nose around to face back along his flight path. Where the
proton torpedo had been coming straight at his back before,
now it was coming straight in at his cockpit. He killed the
thrust and glanced at his scanner monitor--750 meters and
closing fast.
At 400 meters he flicked the lasers over to dual-fire and
tightened his finger down on the trigger. Pairs of laser-bolts
burned green through space seeking the torpedo. One bolt
hit the torpedo at 250 meters out. It failed to destroy it, but
did melt its way into the body and ignite a fuel cell. The
subsequent explosion pitched the torpedo off course. When
the onboard computer calculated the torpedo would not hit
its target, it detonated the warhead, but the Interceptor re-
mained a hundred meters outside the blast radius.
Switching thrust forward again, Corran throttled up to
full and punched up profiles of the uglies. One was an X-T1E.
It had the body of an X-wing fighter with the hexagonal
wings from a TIE starfighter. Corran found the ship hideous
to look at and would have dismissed it immediately except it
had launched the proton torpedo.
The other ship looked fairly ridiculous. It mated a TIE's
ball cockpit with the engine pods from a Y-wing. This partic-
ular hybrid was rare because it combined the TIE's lack of
shields with the Y-wing's lumbering, slothful handling. Cot-
ran knew this type of ugly was often referred to as a TYE-
wing, though DIE-wing was a common nickname for it as
well.
Corran cut his Interceptor on a course that shot him past
the X-TIE, then broke on down into a series of maneuvers,
twisting and turning, that left the TYE-wing far behind. The
X-TIE hung with him long enough for Corran's scanners to
pick out details. X-wing fighters had two torpedo launching
tubes in the nose and four lasers, one mounted on each end
of the stabilizers that supplied the ship with its name. Lack-
ing those S-foils, the X-T1E had replaced one proton torpedo
launch tube with what Corran guessed would be a laser can-
non.
Undergunned and overmatched. Cotran rolled his way
down through a corkscrew dive that lengthened his lead on
the X-TIE and the TYE-wing. The X-TIE's pilot began to
pull the fighter's nose up, as if he intended to return to his
wingman's side and the safety the TYE-wing would provide
him. Corran watched him turn away, then inverted and
pulled the Interceptor through a tight turn and shot back up
and in at the X-TIE's exposed aft.
Clearly unaware of Corran's maneuver, the X-TIE's pi-
lot inverted and headed back toward the TYE-wing. Corran
saw the pilot's head come up as he scanned space for signs of
the Interceptor. Coming in from behind made spotting the
squint difficult. The pilot never managed it, though Corran
did see the R5 unit's head swivel around and spot him.
Corran hit the trigger and walked laser fire from stern to
nose on the ugly. Two bolts blew the R5's flowerpot head
off, theft.two more punctured the cockpit, exploding it into a
cloud of transparisteel and duraplast fragments. The last
bolts hit forward and touched off a proton torpedo's fuel
cells. The fuel's detonation filled the slender craft with fire
and sent the nose spinning wildly off into space.
Pulling back on the yoke, Corran brought his nose up
and spitted the DIE-wing on the crosshairs. The ugly began a
roll, so Corran matched him and tightened up on the trigger.
Green laser-bolts slashed at one of the Y-wings, but the ugly
flashed on past beneath him. Corran prepared to invert and
loop, but a hail of angry red laser-bolts sliced across his flight
path.
"What? Who?" He kicked the squint up on its right
wing, wrenched the wheel right, and tugged back on the
yoke. The maneuver pulled him sharply out of line with his
previous course, but he wasn't content with just doing that.
He broke again, to port and up, then searched his scanner
monitor for whomever had shot at him.
The scanners reported two ships, both of them X-wings.
"What's going on here?"
"Nemesis One, we have two hostiles. X-wings. It was an
ambush. Engage and terminate."
Ambush me, will you? Corran translated his outrage
into fluid maneuvering. Cutting and jumping, he bounced his
Interceptor through a series of jukes that shook the X-wings
from his tail and brought him around on the DIE-wing.
Without really thinking about it, he pumped laser-fire into
the ugly's ball cockpit, then pulled up and away as the misbe-
gotten fighter exploded.
Two on one--same odds I've had all day. Despite that
hasty assessment, he knew the odds were actually quite dif-
ferent in this battle. The squint's speed and maneuverability
gave it an edge over the X-wings, but they had shields. They
could take more damage than he could, and the ability to
survive damage had a very direct relationship with the ability
to survive in combat. More importantly, the two X-wing
pilots seemed determined to operate together. They flew in
tight formation and seemed familiar enough with each other
The X-wings came around on a vector that brought
them straight at him. Corran knew head-to-head passes were
the most deadly in dogfighting, and given the enemy's superi-
ority of numbers, he had no intention of engaging in such a
duel. He cut his throttle back and dove at a slight angle so he
would pass beneath their incoming vector. They made a
slight adjustment in their courses, apparently content to get a
passing deflection shot. Corran then goosed his throttle for-
ward, forcing them to sharpen their dives, yet before they
could get a good shot at him, he had passed beneath them
and had started up again.
One X-wing inverted and pulled up through a loop to
drop on Corran's tail while the other broke the other way.
The second X-wing's looped out and away from the Inter-
ceptor, momentarily splitting the two fighters. Corran knew
the second pilot had made a mistake and instantly acted to
make the most of it. Cutting his throttle back, he turned hard
to starboard and then back again to port.
Corran's sine-wave maneuver brought him back on
course, but the X-wing that had been following him now
hung up and out in front of him. The X-wing's pilot had
continued on his course, assuming the Interceptor had been
trying to evade him. It wasn't until he shot past the Intercep-
tor and it dropped into his aft arc that he realized his error.
Corran throttled up and closed with the X-wing. You're
mine now, all because your buddy made a mistake. He
pushed the Interceptor in to point-blank range and started to
fire---then he saw a blue crest on the X-wing's S-foils. It
appeared to be the Rebel crest with a dozen X-wings flying
out away from it. Though no words accompanied the crest,
Corran knew they should have. Rogue Squadron!
The second he recognized the crest, his finger fell away
from the trigger. He didn't know why he didn't fire. Fear
crystallized in his belly at the sight of it, but he knew he
wasn't afraid of the Rogues. It was something else. Some-
thing was wrong, hideously wrong, but he could not pierce
the veil of mystery surrounding that sensation.
Suddenly something exploded behind him, pitching him
forward. He slammed hard into the steering yoke, crushing
his life support equipment and driving the breath from his
lungs. His chest burned as he tried in vain to catch his breath.
He caught the fleeting scent of flowers, then a painful bril-
liance filled the cockpit. He waited for the pain in his chest
and the fire in his lungs to consume him, but those sensations
dulled, and his ability to focus on them or anything else
eroded.
A woman's voice spoke to him. "You have failed, Neme-
sis One. You are weak." Her words came tinged with anger,
bitten off harshly and clearly meant to hurt him. "Had this
been other than a simulation, your atoms would be floating
through space and the rabble would be laughing at you. You
are pathetic."
Corran's right hand rose toward his throat and pressed
itself against his chest. The shattered remains of his life sup-
port gear prevented him from touching his breastbone, but
he knew something was missing, something that should have
been laying against his flesh. He did not know what it was,
but he knew he would draw comfort from it.
In its absence, despair flooded through him.
"I had thought you worthy, Nemesis One. You told me
you were, didn't you?"
Though he recalled no such declaration, he confirmed it.
"I did. I am."
"You are nothing unless I say you are something. Now I
say you are nothing, nothing but a failure!" In the light he
saw the silhouette of a tall, slender woman. The sight of her
made him shiver more than her words. He knew he feared
her, but he also wanted to please her. Pleasing her was very
important to him, the only thing that was important in the