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 performance 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 inefficient 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 windows. “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 nervousness. 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 remember; 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 tightened 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 quad-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 cockpit, sheering it off just above the engine assembly. Corran imagined he could see the pilot’s blackened body in silhouette 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 terminate.”

“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 assumed 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 traveling 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 Interceptor 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 remained 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-TIE. 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 particular hybrid was rare because it combined the TIE’s lack of shields with the Y-wing’s lumbering, slothful handling. Corran 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. Lacking those S-foils, the X-TIE had replaced one proton torpedo launch tube with what Corran guessed would be a laser cannon.

Undergunned and overmatched. Corran 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 pilot 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, then 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 misbegotten fighter exploded.

Two on one—same odds I’ve had all day. Despite that hasty assessment, he knew the odds were actually quite different 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 that he wasn’t so much fighting two foes as one meta-foe.

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 superiority 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 forward, 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 Interceptor, 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 Interceptor 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. Something 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 brilliance 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, Nemesis 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 support 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 world. “You have failed me and yourself.”

“Please,” he croaked, but her silhouette gave no indication she had heard him.

“One more chance, perhaps.”

“Yes, yes.”

“If you fail again …”

Corran shook his head adamantly. “I won’t, I won’t.”

“No, for your next failure will be your last, Nemesis One.” The silhouette folded its arms together. “Disappoint me again and what is left of your life will be spent in agonizing atonement, disgrace, and, after a long time, death.”