Chass adjusted course and yanked a control lever. Servos issued a grinding noise as her strike foils extended and reshaped the line of the vessel into a cross. She scanned status displays as the computer automatically redistributed power and heat. Ion cannons came online. The primary torpedo launcher registered fully functional; the secondary registered dead as it had since Pandem Nai, but Chass knew better. If she needed the secondary launcher, it would work.
Finally, she adjusted her comm system. A low drumbeat and swift, Huttese-accented lyrics splashed against static and filled the cockpit: Narvath retro-shudder, from a music chip she’d stolen off a drunk fool in the Western Reaches. Satisfied, she leaned into her seat and let her first torpedo fly.
The target was an asteroid the size of an orbital battle station. The torpedo, with a flare bright enough to blind anyone within a kilometer, shattered a small mountain’s worth of stone and left the rest of the rock uncracked. Chass loosed a second torpedo before adjusting her systems and spraying particle bolts. She sang as she fired, let the music dictate the rhythm of the violence, and adjusted her vector so that she could batter the asteroid as she passed. Her scanner indicated Quell’s X-wing maintaining its distance on her wing, ready to move in but not engaging.
She watched the torpedo novas, moved to the beat of the music, and periodically checked her depleting munitions supply. She barely noticed her scanner flash until Quell’s voice broke through the music. “Fighters on the move. Break away from the rock and check your deflectors.”
Chass looked between her scanner and the asteroid. A moment later she spotted the glinting vessels erupting like a geyser from a chasm, the spout compact closest to the asteroid before dispersing farther out. She counted at least a dozen ships—all basic TIE/ln fighters, with two broad, flat panels protecting the central cockpit eye.
In the hands of a skilled pilot, a TIE fighter was a knife—swift and slender and deadly against a lumbering beast like the B-wing. In lesser hands a TIE was a garbage pail strapped with guns. Clumsy and defenseless.
Alphabet Squadron had been in Cerberon long enough for Chass to understand what to expect.
“Look at them,” Chass muttered. “They can’t even stay in formation.”
Quell grunted but didn’t disagree. The TIEs broke into separate flights, sweeping away from the chasm as one last ship emerged: a cargo shuttle, boxy and asymmetrical with a four-winged design out of fashion for decades. Chass called out its coordinates and said, “Looks like it’s running—you want to go after it?”
“No.”
“This why we’re out here?”
“Yes,” Quell said. “With the hideout on Troithe gone, we know exactly where it’s going. But we can’t let it look like we’re letting it escape.”
Eight TIEs moved between the New Republic fighters and the shuttle, dividing into pairs and sticking close to the rocks. “Two ways of doing that,” Chass said. “We’re outnumbered, so we could run like idiots—or we could fight as hard as we can while trying not to win. You know my vote.”
Chass expected she knew Quell’s vote, too. But anything sounded better than returning home, lying in her bunk, and waiting for the next mission. The Narvath retro-shudder came to a close and a new song, squealed at high speed in a language she didn’t recognize, began.
“Sixty seconds of fight time,” Quell offered. “If we’re hard-pressed, we blow one of the big rocks for cover and bail in the debris shower.”
Chass laughed, boosted power to her deflectors, and tumbled toward the enemy. Maybe Quell had changed, but she liked her new commander. “Deal. Try to keep them off me, huh?”
The TIEs were using the asteroids for shelter. It wasn’t a bad plan, but the counter was straightforward: Chass squeezed her trigger and filled the sky with particle bolts, raking the asteroids and sending granite shrapnel flying in every possible direction. Her own shields flickered as she was pelted by stone fragments. If she was very lucky, a shard would puncture an unlucky and unshielded TIE’s engine, but all she was really looking to do was make a mess and reduce scanner visibility—and in that, she had succeeded.
She called out her target as Quell swept around, attempting to intercept the first pair of TIEs heading their way. Instinct told Chass what could happen next—told her a dozen ways she could win and fifty more she could die, but she’d learned in the past weeks that death was a broken promise. Verzan, the system’s airless garrison world, had been a fortress that cracked open under the Lodestar’s fire and Alphabet’s proton bombs. Catadra’s temples and palaces had burned as its defenders spat impotent turbolaser volleys. The battle group had seized Troithe’s main spaceport in less than a day of fighting. In Cerberon there was no sense that any lost battle could be the last in the war, as there had been with the Rebellion; there was no failure the New Republic couldn’t recover from against a scattered and diminished Empire.
People died. Infantry died. But TIEs were in short supply and death was for the stupid and careless, not for heroes.
It wasn’t what Chass wanted, but she figured she might as well enjoy it.
She adjusted her aim and fired at the first of the TIEs as Quell’s X-wing tore through the second fighter. She hauled her control yoke to port, barely avoided a volley of particle bolts as her opponent sped past her, and rather than pursue, focused instead on the six fresh enemies closing fast. “Got to hit one of them,” she muttered, and loosed quick pulses at the cluster.
“I’m taking a shot at the cargo shuttle,” Quell said. “Hold on.”
Chass half snarled, half laughed as the X-wing slipped between the asteroids and fired wildly at a target she could no longer see. The seven surviving TIEs changed course to surround her—she shot down one, grazed another, and watched emerald streak past her canopy. One of the nearest asteroids was burning, releasing some combustible gas from a punctured pocket. She put her aft to the flames and wondered how she would survive.
She transferred power to her forward deflectors. She wasn’t surprised when the TIE closest to her exploded instead of shooting. The dagger of an A-wing interceptor cut through the blooming flames and then spun about, eliminating another opponent in a single maneuver.
“You knew they were on their way?” Chass asked, less irritated than she sounded.
“I knew,” Quell said. “You got your sixty seconds.”
Chass looked to her console. With the debris still cluttering the scanner readings, she couldn’t make out the U-wing or Y-wing, but she was confident they were there, too.
“Good to see you, too,” Nath’s voice snapped through the comm. “Play us some music and let’s save your butt.”