Free Web Novel“Alright, One Flight, this is the Boss. I’ve got FST contact for six bogeys, bearing two-seven-oh, crossing the CAP line. Range four-thousand klicks. We are going to assume hostile.”
The Boss’ voice came cool and strong through the radio. Squadron Captain Arhul Narra was this old timer who used the same tone for just about every situation imaginable, and delivered bad news with the same cadence. So they called him the Boss, because he never let anything break that tone, and always seemed to know what he was doing. Word on the deck say he used to be an Old Republic pilot, before he got shot down over Serenno. His homeworld then joined the Confederacy, and so did he.
“Six bogeys, Boss?” Chaser’s voice came across the clutch frequency from Corona Four, riding Thane’s starboard half a klick out, “You sure that’s right? Seems a little overkill. We ain’t aces.”
“Yet,” Bluebird chirped lightly. Thane still couldn’t get over how different she was within and without the cockpit, “Think of it as a trial by fire, aye? Pass this, and we’re going to the front.”
GRYYYL ASTEROID BELT
Thane ran his thumb across the throttle grip and checked his scope. The asteroids of the Gryyyl Asteroid Belt rolled past his canopy in slow, massive silence, tumbling on orbits they'd been tumbling on for a billion years, and six new contacts bloomed on his long-range full-spectrum display.
“My old man’s promotion is riding on this, guys,” he could hear Two Flight’s leader saying. He could just imagine the Twi’lek lieutenant lounging in the ready room with the rest of Two Flight, taking bets on how hard they would eat the rocks, “Don’t let him down.”
“Don’t get too cocky, Missus,” Thane said, “You’re up next if we die.”
“That’s enough, Broadcast,” the Boss’s voice came in like a boulder, “One Flight, switch to squad comms. IFF’s painting contacts hostile. We’ve been cleared to engage. Form up on me and move to intercept vector.”
“Copy that, Corona One,” said Bluebird as Thane toggled the comms, “Corona Two’s with you.”
“Copy. Corona Three, moving to intercept.” Thane breathed out. Six bogeys, spread out in loose formation, moving fast and getting faster.
“Corona Four forming up. Let’s start the clock!”
One by one the eight Drexl’s of One Flight formed up on the Boss’ flanks into a flying wedge, burning hard for the intercept.
“Rette,” he didn’t need to say anything else.
“Already on it, Broadcast,” his backseater’s voice slightly clipped–her working voice, the one she used when her eyes were on the holographic imager and her hands were moving, “Spinning up the Sightline now. Give me ten seconds.”
Thane pushed the throttle up a notch and felt his Drexl respond, the big fighter settling into a purposeful growl, its twin engines cycling up with that deep-chested vibration he’d come to know the way you’d know a person’s breathing. The Drexl was handled well enough, but it couldn’t be described as graceful. Nothing about it was built for grace. But it was solid, the way a good wall is solid, and right now solid was all that Thane wanted.
The FST caught the bandits before long, Rette’s skilled fingers pulling out the shapes of ion drive wash from the static noise of the Belt. The Sightline resolved them, painting contact signatures in her backseat display before–
“I’ve got tone!”
He was already reaching for the trigger. The Sightline had the lead contact boxed; range three-thousand klicks and closing velocity high enough to keep the intercept window short. He selected a prox-fused missile off the starboard pylon, let the tone warble in his ears for a single held breath, and fired.
“Taking the shot!”
The concussion missile left the rail with a thump he felt through the seat, streaking out ahead of the Drexl on its bright line of exhaust. At least ten more missiles came slinging out of One Flight’s formation in quick succession. Broadcast watched the RWR of his own track. Watched the bandits scatter like startled birds the instant the missile entered their formation bubble.
“No hit–!”
weewooweewooweewooweewooweewooweewoo–
“Oh shit–defending!”
Thane gritted his teeth as he kicked his Drexl into a reciprocal turn, pulling hard on the centre stick until he couldn’t hear the RWR bleating in his head anymore. As he pulled back to their original vector, he could spy where the offending missile had torn through empty space. A Drexl could carry twelve missiles, and as both flights burned towards intercept, One Flight was expending as much of their semi-actives as possible without being vaped into non-existence themselves.
Alas, they were facing–
“Toggling the dedicated energy receptor,” Rette said. “Reading their drive sigs,” she paused–maybe one, two seconds, which meant she didn’t like what she was looking at, “Broadcast, the DER’s reading TIE drives across the board. These are Vultures, I’m thinking Mark Four, they way they’re vectoring.”
“Have we fought these before?”
“I’ve seen them in the maintenance bays before.”
Thane grunted, “Not very reassuring.”
The CAF LAC Corps had this sadistic streak of testing their latest iteration of droid starfighters against biological pilots, citing it would be most accurate to the actual foes the droids would be facing at the front. While true enough, it meant that whenever CAF’s biological squadron do train against droids, highscores aren’t counted in how many one splashed, but rather how long one survived against them.
No blood, no bones, no organs. No inertial limits, no biological ceiling on what the voidframe could pull. Droid starfighters were flying the same vectors as something that didn't have a squishy meatbag inside to protect, which meant the gravwall applied to only one side of the engagement. And TIE Vultures were the worst of the lot. Half the size of a Drexl with twice the firepower, and apparently infinitely more maneuverable.
Six Vultures against eight Drexls was going to be a walkover–for the Vultures. As far as he knew, the only starfighter in the galaxy that has a positive track record going one-to-one against TIE Vultures were those overtuned Koensayr Suncutters flown by Alliance aces.
Thane looked up through his cockpit canopy and felt mild panic when he couldn’t see with the naked eye what his instruments showed so plainly on his HUD. Vultures anywhere beyond visual range was bad enough, Vultures in SCM range was practically a death sentence.
“Anyone wanna point out we’re being treated like womp rats out here?” Chaser asked.
“It’s a test, Chaser,” Bluebird was grinning, he could just tell, “A test!”
“For us or them?”
“Flight One,” the Boss’ voice rang, “Switch to SCM. Pick your targets and fangs out.”
Thane punched the HUD selector over to SCM mode and watched the display reorganize itself–threat vectors, intercept angles, energy states, a three-dimensional holo of the engagement laid out in neon green light across the transparisteel. He had a contact on the scope at a thousand klicks, and closing quickly. Rette was already transitioning from the FST to the EPR, her hands moving in the backseat with an reliability he'd stopped appreciating only because it had become invisible with familiarity.
“Chaser,” Thane told his wingman, rolling into intercept course, “Stay with me here.”
“–With you, Broadcast.”
His voice seemed, like the Boss’ order, to betray no nervousness at all. The bitter taste slicking Thane’s tongue surprised him because he’d flown against Vultures in real life and endless simulator battles before. Maybe it was because that’s all he had ever done. Sure, he got to fly everyday, sometimes all day, at first in simulators, then in real starfighters. But what began as
hunger simply to leave Jelucan had ripened into genuine wanderlust. A career in the Confederate Navy would allow him to stand in the deep snows of ice planets, to dive into the depthless oceans of a waterworld, to bask in the searing heat of a beach beneath a binary star system.
If all he had to do was shoot down Loyalists and Restorationists and whoever else threatens the Outer Rim, he could do that too. But right now, pitted in endless training exercise after exercise, he had begun asking himself that question: just how many more do I have to fly before I get to go out there?
Out there. Out there beyond the bubble of the Star Station Independence.
“Painting the target, Broadcast,” he could hear Rette say from behind.
“I see it.”
Pull yourself together, Thane. He scolded himself. Your squadron mates are counting on you–and the Boss’ fourth slice too. Besides, the harder you struggle here, the easier your first engagement will be against real Alliance HLAF-500s and Republic X-wings.
Because the break he’d executed had taken him up, the Vulture flight was coming in below his line of sight. Pushing down on his stick, Thane thumbed the switch for heat-seekers.
“Forward shields, Rette.”
“All power to forward shields.”
A targeting box appeared on the HUD and Thane maneuvered to drop the sight on the painted Vulture. The range indicator dropped digits as the Drexl closed in. Just like in the simulations, he told himself.
He nudged the flight stick to the left and framed the incoming bird perfectly.
“I’ve got tone!”
The box went red and a strident beep filled the cockpit. Thane hit the trigger and the missile roared off its pylon. Another missile streaked past his cockpit as Corona Four launched its own payload. Two missiles on one contact–it should’ve been a confirmed kill, but the contact was a TIE Vulture.
The bird jinked. It pitched up and spun ninety degrees on its axis in the fraction of a second and then roared right out of Thane’s view so fast he almost broke his neck trying to track its bluish-grey blur leaving the canopy. The twin missile sliced through empty vacuum.
By all right, a Vulture was a suicide sled with no shields, but their Xi Charrian designers subscribe to the idea that you didn’t need shields if you couldn’t be hit.
“Chaser! Do you see him!?”
“He’s jumping onto your six!” Chaser called out, “I’m throttling back and see whether I can get a zero angle on him, just stay alive for a little–”
Rette’s voice came screaming into his skull; “Spike! Spike! We’re locked–”
beepbeepebeepbeepbeepbeepebeepbeep—BEEEEEEEEEE—
The noise reached down past his brain and grabbed his spine at the base of his skull, and wrenched it upwards.
“RETTE!”
Rette punched the chaff as Thane ratcheted the throttle up to full and wrenched the Drexl hard left, corkscrewing it down in a diving roll. The fighter groaned around him as the inertial compensator fought to keep him from becoming a red smear across the inside of the canopy. He felt the gravwall at the edge of the maneuver, that threshold where the compensator ran out of capacity and the Gs came through like a boulder sitting on his chest. He held it.
The RWR shriek cut off.
Thane gulped air and leveled out his wings– “Tally tally tally, two o’clock high!”
“I’ve got him!” Corona Two hollered as the Drexl screamed above them, a burst of red lasers streaming out its wingtips, “Splash one!”
“There’s a bandit on your six Boss, break left–!” Corona Five warned, “–Splash two!”
“Splash three!” Corona Two laughed cheerfully, carried across the frequency the particular quality of someone who was biologically unable to be modest about a kill, “Anybody got eyes on four’s vector!?”
“Quit the chirping, Bluebird,” the Boss said, “and stay on me. Corona Seven, I’m trying to lead a bird into your zero angle.”
“I’m spiked–no chaff–!” A burst of static that the system translated into a flatline tone. That was Corona Five!
That bluish-grey blur returned, ripping right over his fighter’s canopy. A line of crimson laser followed, so near Thane could see the glow bleed through the transparisteel.
“Oh shit–!” Rette shrieked, instinctively ducking so hard she almost hit her head, “Watch it, Chaser!”
Thane slapped the stick hard to port, and felt the gravwall hit him like a wall of wet sand as the compensator maxed out, bringing the Drexl in a snap-roll towards the bandit’s tail.
“Woahwoahwoahwoah–watch the wall! WATCH THE WALL!” Rette shrieked from the back.
“Watching it!” he said, through his teeth, and held it there anyway. He had no other choice if he wanted to bring his nose onto the targeting box.
Come on, come on, come on! Thane repeated in his mind as the Drexl’s nose inched closer and closer–the Vulture leapt to the right in an effort to break their flow. But Thane didn’t spend all those weeks in the simulator and in the cockpit for no reason. With a response time that surprised even himself, he slammed the stick to the right, squeezed the trigger, felt himself slam into the side of the cockpit and the gravwall slam into him, and continued holding the trigger down until his knuckles were pale white. A stream of red light roared out as he strafed his nose across the targeting box. The HUD flashed a positive hit, and the TIE Vulture cut its drives and powered down.
“Splash… four!” he announced, breathing heavily “Good assist, Chaser.”
“I’ve lost one of my engines!” Corona Seven cried, “Oh kriff–I’m out–!”
“Yeah well, we’re dropping like flies,” Chaser hissed, voice strained, “And I’ve got a birdie on my six!”
Thane checked the IDs. Half of Corona Squadron’s One Flight were all dead. He didn’t even notice, that was how quickly the Vultures made swift work of them.
“I see it!” Rette was looking around, “Tally, four o’clock high!”
Thane looked up. Corona 4 was in a hard defensive turn, the Drexl's nose tracking through a lateral plane–trying to out-turn a Vulture–and on Chaser's six, sitting in zero angle as comfortably as if it had been parked there, was the Vulture droid in question. It was a futile effort on Chaser’s part; a Drexl couldn’t possibly beat a Vulture in a two-circle flow, not unless it had support.
Thane huffed, digging himself into the seat as his fingers curled around the twin throttles, “Raise the ceiling, Rette!”
“On it!”
“Tell me when we’ve got tone!”
As soon as he felt the weight on his chest lift, Thane kicked the starfighter into a dive, rolling it to starboard before–slamming its port engine to the front and yanking the starboard engine into retrograde. The Drexl spun on its axis like a lashed top, whipping around in its bubble–“TONE!”–as he triggered off two missiles before compensating the throttles and equalising out the yaw again. Even with the increased ceiling, he felt the gravwall slam back down, his lungs squeezing and stomach flattening. If Rette hadn’t worked her magic, they would be bloody pancakes against the gravwall.
“Chaser, break!”
Corona 4’s compliance came immediately, wrenching out of the missile’s sensor cone as it rode the lock towards the Vulture’s drive signature. And then, the Vulture did something Thane knew that Vultures could do, yet his brain still refused to accept at full speed.
It deflected its vector, just like that. Not into a banking turn. Not into a climbing break. Ninety degrees, instantaneous, perpendicular to its previous vector, as if the laws governing mass and momentum had simply excused themselves from reality for that brief window. The missiles didn't even have time to adjust. They flew straight through where the TIE Vulture had been and found nothing.
“What the kriff was that!?” Rette craned her head as they sailed past.
“Yeah yeah,” Thane grumbled, “I saw it.”
And he'd seen it before. On training footage, on after-action holos, during the sims and training flights, in every pre-mission brief that had ever covered Vulture droid combat maneuvering. The fact was: even Vultures had aces. Birds who were either uploaded with, or survived long enough, accumulated libraries of combat and flight data in their memories. Droid starfighters learn, just like biological pilots do. And the sort of things droid aces could pull off… could only be described as sorcery.
You prepared yourself to process it rationally, and then you saw it in person at combat acceleration and your rational mind can only step back and let the rest of you stare. It was the same for every pilot, the first, second, third, and fourth time they encountered a ‘bossbird’.
They'd stared for a half-second too long.
The Vulture screamed past somewhere beneath their feet, followed by–
“Where the hell–below!?” Corona Two yelped, “Boss, you’ve gotta pitch up! Get outta here–!”
Silence. Then, quietly, almost offendedly, “Splash me. Unbelievable.”
“Holy bantha balls,” Chaser sounded amazed and horrified at the same time, his Drexl somewhere overhead and upside down, “It passed right across Corona One and Two and vaped the both of them.”
Rette giggled nervously, “I think we’ve got the bossbird, Broadcast!” freewebnøvel.com
Corona Four’s transceiver ID flickered for a moment, but Bluebird must’ve thought the better of running her mouth. She was dead, after all. Making callouts from the afterlife would be cheating.
The same Vulture was on their six now–the RWR confirmed it with a rising warning tone–and Thane did the only thing left to do, which was put every throttle input and every control surface input he had into violent, simultaneous use. Yanking the stick to starboard, Thane rolled the fighter a hundred-eighty degrees. At the same time, he pulled the stick back to his breastbone, bringing the Drexl's nose up in a reciprocal turn. All the while, he kicked down on the yaw pedals, until it felt like his knees would snap.
The canopy rattled, the titanium armour alloy screeched in protest. The gravwall hit him like a charging muunyak. He felt the compensator give up somewhere around six-hundred gravities' worth and deliver the rest directly to his spine–his vision blacked at the edges as he held on with a death grip and pushed through the turn.
Rette was completely silent. Hopefully not knocked out cold.
The lock tone cut out. He rolled out of the turn breathing hard, checked his six, found it clear, and then found Chaser.
“Chaser–”
“Coming to your eight o'clock,” a grunt, “I've got the bandit in my zero angle. I have a lock–!”
Rette suddenly gasped, “Broadcast, do something like that again without warning me and I’m going to–”
“Shields to port!”
“–Copy, shields to portside!”
Thane did something like that again. He imagined where the Vulture would be, and swept his nose across the bird’s predicted position and squeezed. Cannon fire, twenty bolts a second, for three seconds, came roaring out. The Vulture swept through, his HUD flashed a positive hit, but the Vulture kept going. Thane swore loudly, and swept into the zero angle, taking Chaser’s spot on its six.
He swept his nose over it again. The bird jinked. No tone.
Chaser was somewhere above them, so the bird swept downwards. Thane saw it coming, and let it dash straight into his crosshairs. He squeezed off another hundred bolts in a third pass. Nothing again.
“I’m hitting it!”
Rette replied loudly, “Sim says you’re not.”
“What the–”
“Just kill it, Broadcast!” she screamed. He winced. “Just put your nose on him and KILL IT!”
“I’M– I’M TRYING!”
He bit down on an expletive Ciena would scold him for. He felt the frustration build inside his chest. It was as if there was nothing else left in the galaxy, just this stupid damn bird that refused to die, Chaser and him weaving in and out of a one circle flow trying to get their nose on it, and his backseater screeching in his helmet.
And just when he got back onto the Vulture’s six, it did something new.
It all happened in about half a second, but at that moment, Thane’s mind replayed it over and over for what felt like an hour.
Rette caught it on the Sightline the instant it started; the droid's drive signature reversing, and then on the electro-photo receptor where its aspect indicator flipped, the contact marker rotating through one-eighty degrees while its velocity vector held perfectly steady along the same rail of inertia. In a vacuum, with no atmosphere to bite against, there was nothing stopping a Vulture from spinning its voidframe while its momentum carried it in its original direction.
There was nothing stopping it from pointing its nose directly at the ship currently behind it while continuing to travel away from it.
And then Thane saw it when, at that fraction of a second, Broadcast and the Vulture were face to face–two ships traveling in opposite directions on the same vector, staring directly at each other. In that fraction of a second, he had the distinct, irrational, completely insane impression that one of the droid’s red sensor ports blinked off and on.
beepbeepebeepbeepbeepbeepebeepbeep—BEEEEEEEEEE—
Something hit the Drexl that wasn't real and his HUD went red anyway. The tone cut out. His displays flickered, flashed the dark crimson of a dead fighter, and the program locked out his controls.
“...Huh,” Rette uttered.
Thane slumped back in his seat. Through the canopy, the Vulture was already breaking off in a clean, unhurried arc, as though it hadn’t just spun three-hundred and sixty degrees on a dime and fragged him mid-turn.
Corona Four’s ID went dark a few moments later.
“Well,” Chaser said, “Damn.”
Thane sat with it for a moment, watching the droid's drive signature dwindle on his locked scope, trying to work out the mechanics of it. Split throttles, maybe, or thrust vectoring. Differential thrust across the port and starboard engines, allowing a rotation without a direction change. He’d done it before–done it just now, partially, done it to death in the sims–but he’d never done it on a dime like that.
He turned the image of it over in his mind, trying to figure out how hard you'd have to push the maneuver to replicate it in a Drexl. He didn’t even know if it was possible to replicate it in a Drexl. What if it was only possible with Santhe/Sienar ion engines?
Well, it wouldn’t hurt to try… maybe a little, maybe a hell of a whole lot, actually.
“Don’t.”
He looked up at his mirror. Rette was staring right back at him, through her helmet. And even with her helmet, he could tell her expression was entirely serious.
“I know what you're thinking, and don't. I would like to survive my posting to the front, and I would prefer not to be flattened against the gravwall by my own pilot before a Loyalist missile ever gets the chance. So. Don't.”
“I wasn't going to.”
“You were absolutely going to.”
He was probably going to. He would have to analyse the holo-record and experiment in the sim later.
“Corona Three, Corona Four,” the Boss’ voice was dry, like he had watched the entire thing and found it instructive if nothing else, “That’s the hop. One Flight, you’re all dead. Missus, you're up. Two Flight, the CAP line is yours. Three Flight, standby”
“Copy that, Boss,” Corona Nine, Missus, was already in the frequency, “Two Flight, gear up. Let’s show Three Flight how it's done.”
Thane sincerely hoped the Twi’lek would have a better time at it than them.
“One Flight, RTB,” a beat. “Well flown. Mostly.”
He reached up, pulled off his helmet, and ran a hand through his sweat-damp hair. Through the canopy, the Gryyyl Asteroid Belt rolled on in its ancient, indifferent silence, the asteroids turning on their billion-year trajectories, the ‘dead’ Vulture droids that were already restarting their programmes and vectoring back to the exercise’s starting positions.
“Hey, Rette,” Thane had a thought.
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“Yes, Broadcast?”
“We got killed by a droid that winked at us.”
She was quiet for a moment.
“Yeah,” she said, “We did.”
Thane sighed, put his helmet back on, and turned his Drexl for home.
STAR STATION INDEPENDENCE
Thane was making a grab for the hydrospanner when the repulsor-howl of returning starships pulled his attention sideways. The fingertips of his right hand brushed against its tension adjustor, narrowly missing and sending it sliding from the Drexl’s port engine cowling.
“Awh–” he winced as it bounced off the wing with a ringing clank, and hit the ferrocrete deck below with a sound that carried halfway across the hangar, “Kriff.”
He straightened up slowly, one knee cracking in protest, and gripped the forward edge of the Drexl's folded-up wing to steady himself while he considered his options. The ladder was a long way down. On the other hand, so was the hydrospanner. He scanned the hangar for a maintenance droid he could conscript without having to explain himself too thoroughly.
Unfortunately, most of the deck crew were preoccupied guiding the returning Drexls of Three Flight onto their painted lots. Further down the bay, six Vulture droids cut through the atmospheric containment field one by one, their variable geometry voidframes morphing from flight configuration to walker stance as they landed. They could walk on their own, unlike Drexls, and so ambulated to the maintenance gantries without prompting.
The gantries would pick them up like enormous mechanical hands, right off the deck and lifted them to the ceiling, where a colourful network of pipes, catwalks, and umbilical cords made up their roost. Up there, dormant Vultures hung in rows, attended to by maintenance droids.
He was still looking at them when the freight doors groaned open at the far end of the bay accompanied with a blaring alarm. A platoon of droids marched out onto the deck, each one carrying either a chair or a crate for some reason or another.
“Stop looking for your girlfriend, Broadcast,” a voice drifted up from the cockpit, “She ain’t walking through every open door.”
“Can you not–” he caught himself, sighed, and thought better of it. No need to continuously live up to his callsign. “I wasn’t looking for her.”
“Could’ve fooled me,” his backseater climbed onto her seat, interrupting her own work as she hooked a hand around the raised canopy and peered over the side of the starfighter… to find the hydrospanner laying on the floor, “Hah. Dumbass.”
“Whatever, man,” Thane grumbled as he straddled over the open engine compartment and swung himself onto the ladder.
Rette–full name Myrette Davani, though nobody calls her that–was Corona Three’s backseater. While Thane handles the flying, Rette handles everything else: comms and sensors, weapons systems, shields and dampener management, astrogation, the hyperdrive. Most CAF pilots flew with astromech droids in the rear seat like it was second nature. Sure, his family had an old caretaker droid, but Thane had never put his life in a droid’s hands before–there weren’t even any droids on Jelucan at all before the Confederacy came! And after struggling to learn droidspeak for the better part of a year, he requested for a living backseater instead.
As it just so happened, Rette was in a similar predicament. They had hit it off the first time they met, in the voidcraft maintenance course. Maybe it was because they were similar in age, maybe it was because they both hailed from backwater worlds in the ass ends of galactic nowhere. For Thane, the freezing mountain-world of Jelucan. For Rette, the scorching desert world of Beheboth. Jelucan had only joined the Confederacy in the Third Expansion. Beheboth joined even later, in the Fourth Expansion.
They were two black nerfs in the midst of ‘civilised folk’ from ‘civilised worlds’. It was natural they stuck together to survive Star Station Independence.
And it was natural they had a shared distrust–not quite distrust, more unfamiliarity–with astromech droids.
Thane was happy with Rette watching his back. She hadn't ditched him yet, which he took as a sign she was fine with him too. ƒreewebɳovel.com
“Looking for this?”
He had just reached the last rung of the ladder when something appeared in his peripheral vision, and he turned to find a smug Pantoran leaning against Corona Three's landing strut. He glared at the item in her hands, as if it had personally caused him grief.
“You could have appeared ten seconds ago,” he said.
“I could have,” Bluebird agreed pleasantly, “But I live to inconvenience.”
Flight Lieutenant Kay Karno, pilot of Corona Two and second-in-command of Corona Squadron. Ciena Ree’s bunkmate, and Thane Kyrell’s personal pain in the ass. Ciena had warned him about her, early on, through a call that he soon realised had been less of a warning and more of an advance apology. Bluebird had decided, within approximately fourty-eight hours of putting two and two together, that she would never let him live down the fact that he and Ciena were involved.
Barely an adult and still more juvenile than he’d liked, Thane had tried to deny the allegations for the first few months–loudly and indignantly at times–earning himself the callsign Broadcast. About a year ago, Ciena and he decided to make it official, just so the heckling would stop. Apparently, the higher-ups didn’t care about on-station relationships as long as they kept affections to strictly off-work hours. They could live with that.
“Thank you, sir,” he mocked a salute and snatched the hydrospanner back.
"You're so welcome," she said, in the same tone.
“Hey Bluebird,” Rette called from up top, peering towards the centre of the bay, “What’s with the welcoming party?”
The three of them looked toward the centre of the bay. The droids were now setting up some sort of lecture hall in the centre of the hangar deck, arranging the chairs in neat rows. Others were opening up the crates with prybars, revealing stacks of metal lockboxes inside, which they systematically retrieved and slid underneath the chairs.
He was already saying, “I think it’s another batch of–”
“–Tannists,” Bluebird finished, “Got it in one. I’m here to tell you to wrap up whatever you’ve got going. There’s an onboarding event scheduled later in the evening.”
Rette came back down the ladder and landed beside Thane with a soft two-footed thump. She stood with her arms folded, watching the droids work. “I've always wondered why they do these in the hangars.”
Bluebird shrugged, “Keeps empty plates from wandering the station. They try to use empty ones, but the Independence ain’t got any empty bays right now. We’re all packed to the brim to support the war over on Umbara.”
She flicked her chin towards Corona Three’s folded-up wings, as if it illustrated her point. Thane supposed she was right. It wasn’t often the Independence Fleet parked so close to the Firmament Frontline–only a sector’s jump away from an active combat zone. It did all add up; if there really was a new cadet intake, the Independence would have to make room for them–by posting out its combat-ready units.
And the Boss seemed pretty confident Corona Squadron was counted among them.
Personally, Thane was looking forward to it. Ports of call were few and far in between, and land leaves long enough to enjoy were even rarer. Umbara would be the first alien world Thane will get to experience since he joined the CAF. The Shadow World, the HoloNet called it, hidden deep within the Ghost Nebula. Thane imagined standing on alien soil, in the endless night of a world sunlight doesn’t reach, somewhere further than where he'd started… and could scarcely wait.
Ciena would definitely know more. She was in the command team, brushing shoulders with four and five-slicers. He wondered if he could ask her, and whether she was allowed to tell him. He frowned at the thought. If there was one thing he hated about the Independence, it was that nobody told him shit. It was as if everything, down to the ration rotations in the mess hall that week, was treated with a need-to-know basis. Their already limited HoloNet access was definitely monitored, and even the Shadowfeed broadcasts on the leisure deck displays ran a day or two behind. Or even straight up faked, sometimes, if Bluebird’s fat mouth was to be believed.
“Oi, what’s this now?” the voice came from the next lot over, half-muffled and aimed from the underside of a starfighter–Corona Four's leaf-shaped thorax blocking its owner from view.
Rette cupped both hands around her mouth. “Wrap it up, Chaser! Bay's getting cleared out before dinner!”
A moment later, Cartha Phennir emerged from beneath Corona Four, a diagnostic cable in one hand and a smear of hydraulic fluid across his right cheek that he hadn't noticed yet. He straightened up, squinted across the lot at the droid activity in the centre of the bay, and appeared to arrive at the same conclusion Thane had.
“Another batch?”
“Another batch,” Bluebird confirmed.
Cartha wiped his hands on a rag that accomplished nothing, and came around the nose of Corona Four and joined the loose assembly of pilots that had formed at the edge of their squadron apron.
He was a few years older than Thane, broader across the shoulder if not quite taller, and carried himself with the particular ease of someone who had grown up rather privileged. He was from the planet Valahari on the Hydian Way, a mere stone’s throw away from Jelucan. But while Jelucan was a freezing dump, Valahari had a reputation as a world of master craftsmen, celebrated starship engineers, and legendary flying aces. Cartha’s father, a Count Phennir, was a former ace himself, and Cartha grew up on stories of local aces like Tofen Vane and his Raider Squadron, heroes of the War of Independence.
It was only natural he dreamed of becoming an ace himself. Cartha had a number of years on Thane, but boarded the Independence in the same batch, and ended up as wingmates. Thane then won a bet, taking Corona Three, and Cartha had to settle for ‘chasing’ him everywhere in Corona Four.
“So,” Chaser said, watching a droid slot a lockbox under chair forty-seven, “anyone actually know which formation we’re being deployed to?”
Rette crossed her arms skeptically, “That’s confirmed.”
“The Second Fleet, I would think,” Bluebird mused, “If we really are going to Umbara.”
“Think we’ll get to meet the Old Spider?” Chaser wondered, rubbing his hands together.
Thane laughed, “Maybe if you ask your dad.”
Maybe we’ll get to see Admiral Trench’s fleet over Umbara, he added internally. Despite that, he wondered, too, whether he’ll get the chance to even encounter any one of the Four Warlords of the Outer Rim. It was the sort of wishful thinking that would drive one to join the army in the first place. Every one of them were war heroes, the victors of the Confederacy. They still commanded the CAF–Admiral Dua Ningo, Admiral Trench, General Atticus Farstar, General Horn Ambigene–but news had gone around that the first and fourth were on the verge of retirement. If that was the case, Thane wondered what they were waiting for.
“Or we could just ask the Boss?” Bluebird stepped away, waving at a pair of approaching figures.
Of the two figures approaching from the far end of the apron, Thane recognised the Boss first. The bright hangar lights then caught on blue skin, and Thane recognised the Two Flight leader, Corona Nine, callsign Missus. Flight Lieutenant Yendor Brethen was a Rutian Twi’lek with an expressive but soft-featured face, and large doe-like eyes, and a pair of patterned lekku that was easy to mistake for a woman’s.
Thane had called Lieutenant Brethen ‘ma’am’ in the middle of a briefing room, in front of nine people, on the first day they met. Missus had received this with the dignity of a man who had been through the experience enough times to have a standard response prepared. Thane had apologized. Missus had told him, pleasantly, that it happened all the time. This had not made Thane feel meaningfully better.
“Boss on deck,” Rette murmured.
Broadcast, Chaser, and Rette all found their hands to salute before they knew it. Squadron Captain Arhul Narra waved them down before they'd even finished.
“As you were,” he barely glanced at them, beckoning his second-in-command Bluebird over. The two of them moved off toward the far side of the apron to speak in privacy. Thane watched them go for half a second before turning back.
“How was the debrief, Missus?” Chaser asked.
Missus extended a gloved fist, and Chaser met it, “Can’t say we did any better than you guys.”
“We had the Boss and Bluebird flying with us,” Rette pointed out, as Missus fist-bumped her too.
“They didn’t survive the longest,” Missus grinned toothily, raising a fist to him, “Right, Broadcast? I saw the holo-record. Nice flying out there.”
Thane met it, “Thank you, sir.”
“Crazy flying,” Rette mumbled.
As if in response, came a heavy thump and low-tone warble that sounded rather indignant. Missus’ gaze shifted, upward and over his shoulder, and the Twi’lek’s expression shifted in surprise and amusement.
“Yes, yes, you too, girl,” he craned his head up even more, “Gave us a real run of it, didn’t you?”
Thane spun around, and came face to face with a wall of alclad alloy plating. He stumbled backwards, raising his gaze up and even higher. Despite being a veritable combat walker, he somehow hadn’t heard over seven-metres and two tonnes of military-grade voidframe approaching across the ferrocrete deck. The elongated sensor array of her head was angled down toward them as if she was expecting praise.
He looked at her for a moment.
Then he raised a fist.
The Vulture tilted her head. Then one of her forward claws lifted–that enormous articulated limb that towered four times his height–and descended toward him until it met his fist. The fist bump, when it happened, was the gentlest thing Thane had experienced all day. The claw met his knuckles with a precision measured in millimetres, applied a pressure equivalent to approximately nothing, and withdrew.
He stared for a moment. The bird chirped in self-satisfaction.
It was the same appendage that had been pulling anti-gravity maneuvers in the Gryyyl Asteroid Belt a couple hours ago. The same gyros and actuators that made it untouchable in a dogfight were calibrated to not crush his hand. He found himself thinking about whoever was behind that, the Xi Charrians that designed it, the Baktoid engineers who manufactured the components, the Geonosian technicians who programmed the code behind its red eyes.
He was still thinking about it when the Vulture's head snapped up, the sensor array lifting from its low peer to high up and straight-ahead. Her entire voidframe went from loose and relaxed to towering upright and stiff as a statue. Her eyes caught something in the distance, and a horn sounded–a single, resonant blast from somewhere in the TIE Vulture’s chassis that filled out the entire hangar.
Every other Vulture in the bay snapped to attention in the same instant, a synchronized motion that ran from the birds high in their roost down to the walkers on the floor. The deck crew and the maintenance droids froze. The Three Flight pilots who had been chatting by their lots went straight-backed on instinct. The whole enormous hangar came to attention in the space between one heartbeat and the next, every pair of eyes and photoreceptors and every sensor array oriented toward the same point in the distance.
“ATTENTION ON DECK!” That was the Boss–no, Captain Arhul Narra’s voice.
Thane snapped straight by reflex, the motion moving through his spine before his brain had finished processing the command. Beside him, Rette and Chaser had gone rigid. Down the apron, the pilots of Three Flight were doing the same, backs going straight in a ripple across the lot.
The figure was coming from the bay's main access corridor, but two things were immediately legible from fifty meters away in a hangar full of Confederate grey: a walking cane, lacquered to a black so pure it drank the overhead lighting rather than reflecting it, and a voluminous cape that flowed like something alive, the color of deep rich purple. In a military station that only existed in various shades of white and grey, the sudden splash of colour was completely out of place, and impossible to look away from.
Thane had never seen anyone personalize a CAF service uniform before. Four slices–no, five slices, at least, he thought. The cape hid the officer’s shoulders, however, so he couldn’t confirm his suspicions.
Captain Arhul Narra was already crossing the hangar to report to the officer, and as he passed them, Thane saw something he would have never expected to see. The Boss was pale, so visibly pale, like all the blood had left his face.
“Behave,” he hissed at them in the brief window they were in earshot, a sheen at his temple despite the climate-controlled environment.
His voice, which Thane had heard deliver briefings and holo-record breakdowns and adverse astrographical assessments in the same even calm assurance, had come out strangled. For the first time in his life, Thane realised the Boss was nervous. Clearly, the Boss recognised whoever was walking towards them, and was not alright about it.
Captain Arhul Narra stopped in his tracks and saluted. The officer saluted back. The conversation that followed was brief and inaudible. Captain Narra inclined his head, and saluted again, and the two of them turned towards Corona Squadron.
Thane had perhaps five seconds to compose his expression into something that did not reveal he had just watched the most unflappable man he knew sweat through a thirty-second conversation, before they were upon him.
“So this is Corona Squadron,” the man mused. The officer, despite being Human, towered over them easily, seemingly nearly two-metres tall.
“Flight Lieutenant Kay Karno reporting, sir,” Thane had never heard a more respectful tone emerge from the Pantoran, “Corona Squadron, One Flight. We have eight pilots and four backseaters, but only five are present right now, including Captain Narra.”
“Well met, Lieutenant,” the officer smiled kindly, which did nothing to unwind the tension in their bodies, “I spoke with the Corps Marshal the other day, and he told me Corona Squadron is the best performing LAC squadron aboard the Independence.”
He spoke with the Corps Marshal the other day? Corps Marshal was a six-slice rank. A full plate of sky blue. It was the highest rank an officer in LAC Command could attain, and like all full plates, the number of them across the entire Outer Rim could be counted on two hands. The Corps Marshal of CAF Headquarters Fleet was Marshal Shea Hublin. Thane had lived on the same station as Marshal Hublin for over two years and never once been in the same compartment as him.
The officer before them had mentioned a conversation with the man in the same tone Thane might mention stopping by the mess.
Which means–his eyes shot to the purple weave draped over his shoulders, narrowing his eyes as if it would let him see through fabric–does he have a full plate as well?
Beside him, he heard Rette swallow.
It can’t be. There was only one Corps Marshal in the entire HQ Fleet. Full plate admirals command entire Fleet Groups, of which there were only four. Full plate generals command entire Oversector Armies, of which there were also only four. That was eight additional faces to remember, and Thane had remembered them all–the officer before them had a face that belonged to none of them.
A really senior five-slicer, then? Thane squinted. The officer had a face that could belong to a man of thirty or fifty depending on the light. He knew of ageless species, like the Tholothians, but he was fairly certain the man before him was Human.
“Marshal Hublin is overly generous with his praise, sir,” Captain Narra said hesitatingly, as if he was unsure what to say.
The Boss knows who he is. Thane thought to glance his way in order to catch a hint, but something about the caped officer prevented him from doing so. It was almost enchanting, the way his cape flowed without wind, as if underwater, the way his hair was almost the same dirt-hue as Ciena’s, or how the colour of his eyes changed every time he blinked.
“Marshal Hublin is generous because he has earmarked your squadron for the frontline,” the officer paused, scanning their faces, “Did you know that?”
“We suspected, sir,” Lieutenant Karno said, before quickly tacking on, “But we do now, sir.”
“Might we know where we’re being deployed too?” Pilot Phennir asked, “If it’s alright, sir.”
The officer strode past them, his cane echoing against the deck, and only then did Thane noticed for the first time the LEP attendant droid trailing behind him–small, rabbit-like, almost entirely hidden in the shadow of his cape.
“I am sure you already know, but Tann had parked the Independence Fleet here because Flashpoint Umbara has become of increasing concern for her,” he spoke without looking at them, running a hand along the nose of Corona Three. A plain black ring glistened on his third finger, “Fleet Admiral Etain A’baht has sent his third call for reinforcements this year. If there is a fourth, Corona Squadron is first on the list.”
He looked over his shoulder, “I’d thought to visit the assigned units. See whether they deserve such a fate.”
Lieutenant Karno looked dismayed.
“Speaking honestly, sir,” Captain Narra said, “I wouldn’t say no to giving Corona Squadron more experience first.”
The officer raised an eyebrow, “What more experience could you possibly have than being at the top of the scoreboard?”
“If I may speak, sir…” Flight Lieutenant Brethen started.
“You may.”
“...I think the Boss is trying to say that our first deployment being Umbara is kind of like throwing us off the deep end,” he continued, “Surely there are other flashpoints on the Firmament Frontline… Agamar?”
“–But we will fight wherever the Supreme Commander sends us!” Thane blurted out, “–Sir!”
The officer turned around, regarding him as if he had only just noticed Thane for the first time. And Thane felt drawn, like he couldn’t look away, staring into the eyes of a viper, as if a single flinch or sign or weakness would prompt it to strike. Thane felt cold, in the way of a vacuum, as if there was no air brushing against his skin.
“Broadcast,” Rette hissed very quietly.
The officer approached him, “You look a little young to be a pilot. How old are you?”
“Nine… nineteen, sir. I was born the year the war ended,” Thane mentioned, because he always mentioned it when introducing himself.
The officer stalked closer, placing a hand on his shoulder and leaning down until they were level at the eyes, “You must have been… seventeen, when you boarded this station? Pray tell, what is it exactly that brought you here? The credits? The promise of glory?”
He swallowed, “There was nothing on my homeworld worth staying for. I’ve always wanted to leave. The CAF promised that, while paying me for it.”
Something moved across the officer's expression that Thane couldn’t place. He reached out and, with a matter-of-factness that caught Thane entirely off guard, unclipped his rank plaque from his shoulder and held it low for the LEP droid to scan it.
“Pilot Thane Kyrell. Homeworld, Jelucan,” the droid stated, “Enlisted in thirty-two GrS. Currently serving in the Corona Squadron, Thirty-Seventh Training Wing.”
The officer nodded, and slapped the plate back onto his shoulder, “How is your flying, Thane?”
“He is one of our best, sir,” Lieutenant Karno intervened, nodding at his fighter, “He flies Corona Three with his backseater, Pilot Myrette Davani.”
Myrette Davani straightened at the mention of her name, “Sir.”
She was barely spared a glancing look; “I see you have been working on it. Pilots usually leave maintenance to the deck crew.”
“Rette and I like to know what we are flying, sir.”
The officer glanced at the open engine cowling, “And what were you working on?”
“Well,” Thane wetted his lips, “We whiffed a few shots in today’s exercise, so I thought I would zero in our cannons again. And…”
His eyes flickered towards the TIE Vulture still towering over them, “I also thought to overtune our engines a little.”
Cartha made a strangled sound that wasn’t quite a cough.
“Saw the Vultures pulling stunts again, did you?” the officer raised a hand into the air, and the Vulture droid obediently lowered its head onto it.
“...I would jury rig TIEs on my fighter if I could, sir.”
But he couldn’t. SIE-TIEs were many things that made them perfect for droid starfighters; cheap, reliable, efficient, extremely maneuverable, and yet powerful for their size. All these advantages came with one crucial drawback, however: they possessed power-yield compatibility issues with hyperdrive, life support, and shielding equipment. As droid starfighters became more and more advanced, Santhe/Sienar Technologies had put rectifying these incompatibilities on the backburner in favour of improving the already existing SIE-TIE technologies for increased adoption across the CAF’s infinitely vast droid corps.
“That’s just Thane, sir,” Cartha said apologetically, “He’s always trying to outperform the birds. There’s no problem with the Drexls; they perform much better than the old Rogues.”
“I would hope so,” the officer laughed lightly, scratching the Vulture’s cheek, “considering it was me who had signed off on them.”
The TIE Vulture warbled pleasantly as it flexed its limbs, almost like a seven-metre bird ruffling its feathers.
“It is a funny story,” he sighed, scratching the droid’s beak, “How people will do anything to build their killing machines, and how people will do anything to fly them. Santhe/Sienar and SoroSuub were in a nasty scrap trying to secure a contract with the CAF. Santhe/Sienar was a newcomer in the defense industry, and bet everything on their proprietary SIE-TIE technology. SoroSuub, as you know, is an old player of the game. Santhe/Sienar introduced their TIE starfighters, intending on replacing our existing fleets of Vultures and Tri-fighters. They were gaining ground with that idea, so SoroSuub came to me privately with the designs for the Drexl-class.”
“They named it after a particularly murderous creature native to my homeworld’s moon,” he inclined his head, “Though I suppose you can find them on the forested parts of Geonosis and Eriadu now. Perhaps they thought I would appreciate the honorarium. They didn’t need to. I, alongside General Ambigene, General Farstar, and Admiral Trilm, opposed the TIE fighter with everything we had. A promotion to however correctly guesses why.”
A round of sideways looks ran through the group, telling Thane he was not alone when he couldn’t tell whether the officer was serious.
“TIE fighters would be short-range interceptors due to a lack of hyperdrive, shields, and life support,” Thane ought to try anyway, “Vultures and Tri-fighters already fulfill the same role for the same reasons. It would be prohibitively expensive to replace our existing infrastructure and doctrine for a marginal improvement.”
“I suppose so,” something in his tone told Thane it wasn’t the answer he was looking for, “Though through exercises, Santhe/Sienar proved their TIE fighter, piloted manually, performed far greater than our old Vulture stock at both interception and dogfights. SIE-TIE thrusters, applied via a biological brain, were a vast improvement over our existing droids.”
Rette opened her mouth, closed it, and opened her mouth again, “–It’s because we’d be replacing droids with pilots.”
The officer looked at her fully for the first time, “Pilot Myrette Davani, was it?”
“Yes, sir!” Rette straightened.
“Hare, please.”
The LEP droid produced a datapad from its storage unit. A few seconds later, a second sky-blue slice materialised on Rette’s shoulder plate. Thane stared at it.
“You are correct, Section Sergeant Davani,” the officer snapped his fingers, “Practical reasons such as manpower aside, sending our own people to die when we already have an adequate solution that costs nothing in comparison–is our entire purpose not to save lives? Is the purpose of a military not to preserve life? Is our job not to stand on the frontlines so that trillions won’t have to? Is our objective not to sacrifice as little as possible in order to protect as much as possible? When you have a choice, a choice, between sacrificing lives and protecting them, there should be no choice at all. People like us, we hold the power of life and death. Everytime we have a finger on the trigger, we have a responsibility to ask ourselves; will doing this save more lives than not?”
“...It is such a shame, then,” the officer released a laborious sigh, retrieving his hand from the bird, and it made a disappointed growl from its chassis, “that the Confederacy is so terribly insistent on giving itself excuses to pull the trigger at every slightest opportunity.”
Just then, a great howl blasted through the hangar bay. A shuttle had crossed the hangar’s atmospheric shields, the sound of its repulsors arriving with it, the same kind that Thane had been on only a few years ago. The accompanying gusts of displaced air blew against them, catching the officer’s cape an sending it flying to one side.
A full plate of steel slices.
Thane’s heart stuttered at the confirmation, torn between leaping and dropping.
A Theatre Admiral. A commander of over ten-thousand warships. A commander of vast legions of spacers and even vaster legions of droids. As the HoloNet likes to say; a Warlord of the Outer Rim.
Thane’s neck started to ache, as if he was suddenly staring up at a tower. If the Admiral had noticed that they noticed, he made no mention of it.
“In truth, I have not been entirely honest in coming here,” the Warlord was staring at the first cadets disembarking from the shuttles. They were the same way he was back then, wearing the colours of their homeworlds with stars in their eyes wide as rank plates and mouths open agape in awe, fortunate there weren’t any insects on the station to fly into them, “I thought I would stop by to convince as many of those children as I could to go home. Corona Squadron was simply in the same place. Every time Admiral A’baht calls for reinforcements, he too is making that same choice, and pulling the trigger.”
“And every time Admiral A’baht makes that choice, the lives of millions hang in the balance. That is the responsibility he must bear. When I made the choice to accept SoroSuub’s design, the Confederacy had no standard service assault fighter. Back then, Vultures were only three-metres long and had a maximum flight time of thirty minutes. Today, they are seven-metres long, five times as large, and yet still can only fly for a mere hour. We were on the defensive every time the Republic struck our fleets from across hyperspace. Our Vultures had to shoot down every bomber. A Y-wing only had to make one good drop. We needed a way to strike back, a long range assault fighter, a role droids could not fulfill.”
The Warlord looked back at them with a sweeping glance, “Know this, when I made that choice, I balanced your lives against the lives of thousands of spacers aboard our warships, decided it would save more lives than it would cost, and pulled the trigger. Your lives are a consequence of that choice. Your lives are a responsibility I must bear.”
“As mere pilots, you only have a responsibility for yourself, and for your comrades flying beside you,” he took the time to lock eyes with each and every one of them, “The Confederacy has no need for unwilling soldiers.”
Yendor’s hand twitched–he had to resist the urge to reach for his lekku–“Admiral sir, if the Supreme Commander made the choice, as you say, to fight at Umbara, and Admiral A’baht makes the choice to call for us, it is our duty to go and fight there. We have no reason to refuse.”
The Admiral pursed his lips, “If the Supreme Commander’s choice was to protect the citizens of our Confederacy, we would not have fought even half as many wars as we had since the end of the Clone Wars. Right now, the Confederacy is in a state that fights wars for war’s sake. Umbara is a senseless battle, a sunk cost fallacy the Confederacy is far too deep in to claw out. What if the correct choice to protect life is to cut our losses and withdraw from the system?”
What the hell is this? Thane tried to gauge the reactions of his squadron mates. Is this some sort of–
“–There is no reason to test us, Admiral sir,” Thane said, he said, and his voice came out steadier than he expected, “We knew what we signed up for. Our job isn’t– our duty is to serve the Confederacy over all. You don’t need to indulge us, sir.”
He looked directly into the eyes of the Warlord of the Outer Rim’s state, and held it. They were fractured, like a sphere of glass someone had taken a hammer to and smashed in, a hundred and one colours refracting off its jagged edges. The long Thane stared into it, the colder he felt, all sensation leaving his skin and a great numbness taking over his body. Is… is this the Force? Ciena always said I would know the moment I felt it, but she had never described it to be like this.
For a moment, Thane thought that this must be how it felt to be stranded in the void of outer space without a vac-suit.
Then, as if the sensation had never been there at all, it was gone.
“I suppose I should commend you for the principle of your men, Captain Narra.”
The Boss didn’t say anything. Nobody said anything.
The Warlord barked a laugh at his silence, straightened up, turned on his heel, and brushed off his cape. As it rustled, it revealed the unit badge on his other shoulder. Thane came face to face with the golden Shield of the Confederacy, encircled on all sides by six revolving serpent heads, each one with a baleful gold eye that seemed to pierce right through him. Of all the four Fleet Groups of the Confederacy, Thane didn’t recognise the badge to belong to any of them.
“Thank you for humoring me. I suppose I should take my leave,” more and more shuttles were flying into the hangar now, cadets herded off them in rows, “And I suppose you should too.”
All of them snapped up salutes.
The Warlord saluted back, and told them then; “I lament for the old ram dragged to the butcher against his will. I pity the ewe that walks herself there, either because she has no other choice, or has something to protect. But I feel nothing for the young lamb that willingly throws itself into the furnace, for no other reason than to feel warmth of its flames.”
“If you decide to change your mind, your Squad Captain will know how to find me. If not…” he turned away and waved over his shoulder, “I would prepare myself, for when Admiral A’baht pulls the trigger, you will be flying into the hottest furnace in the galaxy.”
His cane struck the ferrocrete, once, twice, and the purple cape carried him away across the hangar, and the LEP droid scurried after him, and the noise of the bay slowly, gradually, returned to what it had been before, as though the space he left behind was filling back in.
Nobody said anything for a long moment.
Then Rette looked down at her shoulder, at the new slice on her plate, and then back up.
“What the hell?”
