The door of the flight lounge opened with a barely-discernible pneumatic hiss. The eyes of the pilots within flicked over to look for the source of the noise, their reflexes alert even while their postures remained relaxed. No conversations ended, and no hands groped for blasters, but they still looked; these pilots were all experienced enough to automatically check their surroundings, and still young enough to be sharp of hearing and fast of reflex—not that slow pilots often lived to be very old.
The figure who walked through the open door was not arresting enough to merit a second glance, and the pilots went right back to what they had been doing (mostly regaling one another with outlandishly exaggerated tales of their exploits, or those of comrades). The man was tall and thin, with just enough thickening around his middle to attest to his age without being so paunchy as to indicate that his career was now a desk-bound one, although it was. His posture was still ram-rod straight: the kind of stiff military bearing that was still described as Imperial, never mind that the Galactic Alliance was no longer the ramshackle Rebellion, and could now boast even more career soldiers with perfect posture than it did former smugglers with spines like sagging snakes.
The man's hair, aside from the gray streaks creeping in at his temples, hovered right at that indeterminate shade between brown and blond; it was the sort of hair that would lighten easily in the sun, and gave records-keepers fits because it was impossible to indicate accurately. He wore it in an old-fashioned cut, longer than starfighter regulation called for, but then there were few fighter-jocks still flying snubfighters regularly at his age. The man had an aristocratic face, thin and sharp, and the haughty features would have made him look arrogant had it not been for the deep wells of kindness and sorrow that were his eyes. The man wore an ordinary, plain black flight suit. It showed a number of worn places were battle tags or rank bars might have been ordinarily attached, but now gave no indicator of rank or service. The assumption one would might made, upon first glance, was that he was a retired officer who still had enough friends and pull to be granted occasional access to the simulators on base, so that he could pretend that he was satisfied with his retirement.
A second glance would have revealed the very short figure behind him. The child stood at average Core-world height for a human child of eleven, but had the bearing and eyes of someone much older. Ramrod military posture, nearly as precise as the older man; hair even paler, to be nearly white; and eyes that were deep, pale, and calculating. That white-blonde hair was cut short to Starfighter-regulation, while the flightsuit the child wore was old-style standard New Republic orange, blisteringly bright. The thin, aristocratic features of the child's face were sorter and more delicate than those of the man, but there was enough similarity of feature to mark them as close relatives. They walked with perfectly-matched steps, marching in precise military unison, but for all the firmness of posture there was something almost ethereal and haunted in the man's bearing, and a hint of that reflected in the child's.
The presence of the child at his heels gave the lie to the assumption of retired officer here for a simulated lark. Maybe in some places a former fighter-pilot of sufficient rank and respect might have been able to get away with bringing a child or grandchild in to gawk at the snub-jockeys; but this was not one of those bases. Here, on this small orbital base right at the edges of Coruscant's gravity-well, things were much stricter. Colonel Scotian, base commander, was not the sort to permit joyriding or tourists in her base, no matter what political favors they had pulled in. If this man had managed to force his way onto Corusca-14 by calling in more favors than she could deny, then Scotian would have been here at his heels, scowling, dogging his every step and making it clear to all under her command that these were guests not here at her will. Whatever purpose the man and child had on Corusca-14, it had to at least be legitimate, if not entirely regulation.
It was the child the pilots stared at, at first. With that white-blonde hair, cropped close, and features that were dainty but sharp, it was impossible to tell if the skinny figure was male or female, and equally impossible to guess at an approximate age. Surely the child was older than the eleven years its height seemed to suggest, because no eleven-year-old had ever evinced that sort of dignified self-possession; but how much older, even the other humans in the room could not guess. In curiously studying the child, the watching pilots glanced back at the man, looking for clues; they found no answers regarding the child, but the man himself was a different matter.
The first pilot to leap to his feet was one of the oldest in the room of youths: he was twenty-nine, and a comparative veteran, having fought in numerous engagements throughout the last ten years of wars and peace. He was an A-Wing jockey, and only an unfortunate habit of speaking his mind kept him in his cockpit, because his skills with his snubfighter—while not legendary—were perfectly decent, or he would not have lived to be nearly thirty.
He snapped a sharp salute, his dark features going pale and his eyes wide as moons as he stared at the pale-haired man.
Less than a second after he stood, a twi'lek woman with pale purple skin scrambled to her feet as well. She fumbled her lekku out of the way and threw a salute of her own, her eyes as wide as the A-Wing pilot's. She was younger, at only twenty-four, and customarily flew B-Wings. She had once been on a joint-operation with the illustrious Rogue Squadron offering support to her flight of bombers. The tips of her lekku twitched nervously.
Around the room, other pilots started rising to their feet, either suddenly as they recognized the man, or more slowly, following the lead of their fellows without understanding why. Half-way across the flight lounge, with three-quarters of the pilots within standing at attention and the rest of them clearly thinking about the merits of rising to join in, the man stopped. The child behind him stopped as well, neatly and precisely three steps behind. The man shook his head slightly, a rueful smile tugging at his mournfully-serious expression. He sketched a salute of his own. "At ease, ladies and gentlemen," he said. "As you were, please. Don't let me interrupt your downtime. This isn't an official visit, we're still no decor."
The pilots eyed one another, and slowly dropped back into their seats. Most of them kept sneaking glances at the man and the child as they crossed the room to the rack of simulators against the far wall. The pilots lounging against the machines snapped to attention, then exchanged guilty looks and eased back down, balefully watching the fair-haired man.
General Tycho Celchu suppressed a sigh. He had come here in a plain flightsuit rather than his uniform because he hadn't wanted the attention that his rank and name brought with them, but while Tycho's face was not as famous as those of many of his closest friends, he was still well-known enough that his casual anonymity hadn't held up to starfighter scrutiny.
"Told you so," the child at his heels murmured, lips barely moving. "You should have listened to mom and worn a disguise."
"I've worn too many disguises in my life," Tycho replied, speaking almost as quietly. "I'm not going to do it in a GA base—not unless I have to," he amended, with a smile that was grimmer than his tone. "Avoiding salutes isn't a good enough reason to have to," he finished lightly.
"Uncle Wedge would have," the child replied, with a faint trace of a smirk.
"And that's why your uncle gets a pair of lavender short pants for his Life Day every year," Tycho replied smartly.
His daughter grinned, and didn't argue further.
Tycho swept his eyes across the bank of simulators, and chose two unoccupied A-Wing sims next to each other. He cracked the simulated cockpit seal on one and turned to look at his daughter, who hadn't moved. She raised one pale eyebrow and stared at him in silence. Tycho smiled. "You're sure?" he asked.
The girl nodded. With the sort of shrug that the parents of stubborn and logical children learn early, Tycho shut the cockpit and moved down the line to the section of simulators that were designed to replicate X-Wings. This time his daughter smiled, and followed. The pilots standing around the sims politely stepped out of the way, although they continued to not-so-politely stare. The Celchus pretended not to notice the way all the eyes in the room were, if not fixed on them, at least continually flicking in their direction.
Tycho helped boost his very short daughter up into the X-Wing simulator. He gave her a rare, wide smile, and squeezed her shoulder. The girl gulped, forced her features into an expression of confident calm, and nodded. Tycho dogged the hatch closed above her pale head, and hopped back to the floor. He drew a data spike from one of the pockets of his black jumpsuit, and inserted it into the simulator bank. Then, carefully without turning to look at the pilots staring at him, General Celchu said quietly, "We'll be on simulator frequency nine."
Breha Ibtisam Celchu forced herself to take deep, slow breaths. Her helmet, a little overlarge, wobbled on her head. This wasn't the first time she had been in a simulator, but this was more serious. The last time she had been in a professional simulator that was currently in-use by an active military, she had been six, and sitting on Uncle Hobbie's lap while her twin brother flew with Uncle Wes. That had been their idea of proper babysitting, and they had grinned unabashedly all through the dressing-down they received for taking civilian minors into off-limit areas and letting them fool around with military equipment. Breha remembered the experience perfectly—she remembered everything perfectly—and it still made her smile. Uncle Wes and Uncle Hobbie had that effect on people.
But Janson and Klivian weren't here right now, her father was. And this was not a playdate. It wasn't quite official, either; Breha Celchu was by no means old enough to enter pilot training, and her scores would not be recorded for submission to the Academy. But her father would see her scores, and that mattered even more. Breha wanted to fly—no, more than that, Breha wanted to be a Rogue. And she knew that, unofficial or not, she was about to take her first step on that path.
Provided she was as good as she thought she was.
The blackness around Breha hummed to life as the simulator fired up. Breha didn't bother looking around to familiarize herself with the cockpit; she remembered the precise layout of an XJ7 as exactingly as she remembered everything else. Without looking, Breha reached behind her for the crash webbing that, were this a real ship and not a simulator, would hold her in place if her inertial compensators failed. She had to tug and fold the straps a little awkwardly—they weren't designed for someone her height—and she hit the buttons to raise the seat as high as it would go. Breha edged forward in the seat, feeling blindly with her feet; if she stretched, she could reach the foot-pedals that would control the ship's maneuvering, although it would be a strain if she had to push anything down to the floor—and her father had chosen the mission profile, so Breha anticipated the need to strain.
She looked around once, making sure that her field of vision was clear; she was still situated lower in the cockpit than the Incom designers had anticipated, but not so low that she would have difficulty seeing—and besides, she could always rely on sensors if she had to. Sullustans flew X-Wings, after all, and she was comfortably average height for a Sullustan; granted, diminutive species like that usually had their snubfighters modified slightly to be more comfortable, and Breha was in a factory-standard simulator, but she could make do. After all, one never knew when one was going to be forced to fly in a factory-standard snubfighter, whatever species one might be and whatever modifications one might be used to. In Starfighter Command, everyone had to make do some time.
The cockpit lights brightened. Breha sat up a little straighter, and forced her breathing to stay slow and even. The mission was starting. Around her, the blurry lights meant to simulate a hyperspace flight slowed and broke down into elongated stars, which finally snapped into the pin-points of light that marked a subspace starfield. Breha narrowed her eyes, studying the constellations; she was uncannily good at sight-navigation, thanks to her memory, but with space being three-dimensional it took time for her to correlate different angles into something she recognized-providing that it was a system she would recognize at all. Breha wouldn't put it past her father to pick somewhere so obscure she'd never seen it, or even to have the computer make up a system out of bits and pieces assembled at random. No, something about these stars looked familiar, but the angle wasn't one which Breha had seen before; it would take her a few minutes to work out where she was...
"Red Two, this is Red One, are you receiving, over."
Her father's voice, distorted just slightly by comm-crackle—that was a nice touch. These simulators must be very high-end. Usually sims, Breha knew, sounded crystal-clear in a way that real snubfighter comm-units rarely did; it was because the communication circuit for simulators was a closed loop, transmitted directly between systems rather than through crowded space.
"Red Two, read you clear," Breha replied succinctly. "Mission brief, sir?"
"Take a look around," her father said, a faint smile in his voice.
Breha bit her lip to keep from uttering one of Uncle Wedge or Uncle Han's favorite Corellian swears. She knew she'd recognized her surroundings, but not quite quickly enough. Her pale eyes burning from the intensity with which she studied the simulated stars, Breha raked her gaze across her cockpit viewscreen, searching for the piece that would make this starfield-puzzle fall into place.
Then her breath caught in her throat, and her mouth dropped open. Breha cleared her throat and forced herself to speak calmly. "Red Flight, is it?" she said, her voice cool. "Nice touch, dad."
"Thought you'd like it," Tycho replied, his voice unabashedly cheerful.
Breha shook her head and looked at the small orange sphere that they were slowly angling in on. She could already see from her sensors, and with her naked eyes as they drew closer, that a number of smaller objects orbited the big gas giant.
"Shouldn't we be coming up from the moon, not coming in from hyperspace?" Breha asked, her tone casual. "There weren't any reinforcements at this battle, if I recall correctly. Well, no official reinforcements."
It was a joke, a long-standing family one: Breha, like her brother and mother, always recalled things correctly. She wondered sometimes if her dad found it difficult, being the only Celchu whose memory couldn't be relied upon as concretely as a holorecording, but he never seemed to mind when one of the others corrected him on some forgotten point or detail. In fact, her dad liked to tease that it saved him a lot of money on expensive recording units and data storage, because he could use his kids like datapads and only had to shell out money for snacks and games to keep his data secure.
Right now, he chuckled, clearly pleased with himself. "Who says we're reinforcements?" Tycho asked blandly. "I don't see any battle down there to join in on, do you?"
Breha scanned her sensors, knowing it would be just like her dad to pull a fast one and see if she would be clever enough to confirm what he said before she spoke. "No sir," Breha said crisply, "all I'm reading are low-level power and communications emissions, which would be consistent with a small base on stealth-readiness footing."
Her father was still grinning. She could hear it in his voice. "Let's go pay them a visit, then," he said.
"Copy, sir. Following your vector."
"No, Red Two, I'm your wing. You lead the way."
"Yes, sir." Breha rolled her X-Wing sideways and banked down toward the planet, aiming for the small moon from which the readings were coming. Her father's snubfighter slipped in behind her, following her ship's movements perfectly. Breha thought about throwing in some stunt-flying, just to show off, but decided that wasting the simulated fuel would be a bad idea, and her father wasn't the sort to approve of stunt-flying under pre-battle conditions—and even without any enemies on screen, or indication that any were coming, Breha knew that this was definitely pre-battle conditions.
After all, the Death Star was on its way.
Breha shivered. She had been born decades after the Death Star's destruction—both of them—and decades after Alderaan itself had been destroyed, but she still considered herself an Alderaanian, for all that she was Coruscanti-bred. There wasn't any way for someone to be born Alderaanian these days, but Breha's parents were both Alderaanian, and Breha had been raised with Alderaanian values and traditions, for all that her parents had both led lives more violent than the traditional Alderaanian aspired to. Her birth certificate read "Coruscant," for homeworld, but Breha and her brother had been born in space, aboard a Mon Cal cruiser. She felt that under those circumstances, she ought to be able to choose any world that was willing to take her; and Alderaan was in no position to object.
There was a movement, organized by the Alderaanian survivors, to have standard Galactic Law amended so that their children could be classified as native Alderaanians, despite the fact that they demonstratively couldn't be; it had been hung up in the courts for decades, because people had a hard time telling Alderaanians "no," when it came to their attempts to cling to the last vestiges of their lost homeworld. The Ithorians, Breha knew, had recently started pooling resources with the Alderaanians, for similar albeit less gravitationally-cataclysmic reasons. But the courts were slow, and so Breha was technically a native of Coruscant.
Her brother Bail was going to hack into the records systems, he had told her, for a fifteenth birthday present to the both of them, and have their records changed. Breha thought it was a lovely gesture, even though she knew it wouldn't be able to stand up to scrutiny, no matter how good her brother's hacking was; there was just no way for a fifteen-year-old to have been born on Alderaan, and the facts would catch them out even if his data-work was unimpeachable, and he did manage to convince one of the most sophisticated computer systems on Coruscant to overlook significant factual contradictions like the fact that the planet no longer existed. But mom would probably still be impressed with his artistry, if Bail could pull it off.
Still, regardless of what her records indicated, Breha was an Alderaanian, at heart if not quite by birth, and the idea of the Death Star made her shiver like monsters out of childhood nightmares. (In fact, the Death Star had been the biggest bogeyman in her childhood nightmares. It took a lot to scare the daughter of Tycho and Winter Celchu, but a device capable of destroying their home planet had done it.) The look in her parents' eyes any time the subject was raised had been enough to make Breha fear that obsolete mechanical travesty; her parents were two of the bravest people Breha had ever met. Anything that made them look that hurt, angry, and vulnerable was something to be feared and hated.
And now her father was going to make her face a simulated version of it.
No. Breha took a deep breath and settled her hands more fully on the control yoke. Now her father was letting her have a chance at destroying a simulated version of it. Provided that she didn't choke-up at the sight of her childhood nightmare.
"Red One, detecting launch indicators from the moon,' Breha said, speaking before she had even finished conciously processing the information that her sensors were giving her.
"Read you, Two," her wingman said. "Let's see if they're friendlies. Bounce them a comm-foray."
Breha bit her lip against her objection; Red One was the senior pilot in command, and by rights he should be the one to initiate contact, but there were all sorts of reasons why a commander might have a junior officer handle the communications, and she shouldn't argue with orders. Especially when the reasoning was obviously, "let's see how the trainee handles herself in the simulator."
"This is Red Flight, calling unidentified ships, please identify." Breha winced at her poor phrasing, then shook it off. She wasn't here to win awards in eloquence, even though her father was probably hiding a smirk right now at her clunky repetition.
"Red Flight, this is Gold Squadron. Command detects a large, unidentified object moving into orbital sight-line with their position. We are to intercept and destroy, over."
"Gold Squadron, we have your backs," Breha's father cut-in. "Good to have you flying with us."
"Acknowledged, Red Leader."
Studying her sensor screen as the unknown ships drew closer, Breha saw the blur of signal resolve into six distinct ships, all of them B-Wing class bombers. She nodded; of course. The simulator could easily manifest Y-Wings—or any other ship's profile it had in its databank—to be computerized allies or enemies, but there were no Y-Wing simulators on Corusci-14 base. Her father had probably talked one or two of the lounging pilots into joining the simulator run, to add an air of authenticity, and he wouldn't want their ships to stand out from the computerized ones, so the whole flight had been upgraded. For that matter, Breha and her father were both flying XJ7s, rather than the T-65s that the original Red Squadron had piloted. This was the Death Star mission, but with modernized equipment.
Breha shivered again. She wondered what her father had done to upgrade the Death Star and its defenses, in order to keep pace with the newer ships arrayed against it. Breha shook it off; she would find out soon enough.
In fact, as their course took them around the edge of the moon's gravity to join up with the erstwhile Gold Squadron, Breha's sensors suddenly showed another large mass, one that had been shielded by the bulk of Yavin itself until her angle of approach changed. She caught her breath, then forced her hands to relax on the control yoke. "Red One, I am detecting an anomalous signal on the other side of the main planet, approaching on a course to bring it within targeting sight of the fourth moon."
"Acknowledged, Two."
"Red Leader, that bogey is our mission objective," one of the Gold pilots piped up. Breha rolled her eyes; whatever his skills at piloting might be, they clearly didn't extend to playacting. He sounded far too excited for the simulated situation, and almost sycophantically eager. No wonder her dad had planned to be incognito.
"Then it's our objective, too," Tycho replied calmly, not chiding the pilot for his lack of character awareness. "Red Two, mission briefing: protect the bombers while they make their run to take that thing down."
"Acknowledged, One."
Breha's throat had gone dry. She swallowed several times, reminding herself that this was just an unofficial simulator run, and her scores today would have no real bearing on her eventually admittance to Starfighter Academy. They would, of course, have bearing on whether or not her father thought she was worthy of submitting an application, and that was actually more nerve-wracking. Breha pushed the thought out of her mind, and forced herself on concentrate on the mission.
The Celchus' two ships led the way toward the Death Star, Gold Squadron following behind. Breha's eyes widened; she couldn't help it. She had seen the holos of course, and heard the stories, and she thought she had been prepared, but she wasn't. The Death Star was huge, unbelievably huge, bigger than anything that flew under its own power should ever be. Sitting here in her simulated cockpit, staring out at the huge, mechanical sphere as it loomed out of the blackness of space, the Death Star didn't just look monstrous—it looked real.
Muffled comments and muttered explanations from the members of Gold Squadron behind her told Breha that she wasn't the only one surprised by the scale of the technological terror they pretended to be flying toward. She was somewhat gratified to know that she wasn't alone; but then again, it was rare for Starfighter trainees to bother with the Death Star Run these days. Giant super-weapons were played out; if the Empire hadn't gotten them right by now, odds were that no one ever would, and there were more important, more relevant missions to train snubfighter pilots on.
The only people these days who flew Death Star Runs were flight jockeys looking for a kick from the classics, or hotshots who thought they could show-up the old guard by flying their missions better than they had (which rarely worked anyway, and got rarer and rarer as the "old guard" got older, and more deskbound). Probably the only pilot in the simulators right now who had actually seen a Death Star in front of his cockpit—real or simulated—was Breha's dad, and he had seen a bigger one.
Breha decided to take comfort in that fact. Her father had seen a bigger one. Never mind that this thing was the size of a small moon; it could have been larger—it had been larger, and her dad had helped destroy that one. If he could handle the second, superior Death Star, surely Breha would do all right facing off against the first one. After all, her dad was her wingman. With Tycho Celchu flying at her side, was there anything Breha couldn't handle?
Well, she was about to find out.
"S-foils in attack position."
Her father's voice, tense now; all his well-honed instincts telling him that he was about to go into combat, no matter how well his brain knew it was just a simulator run.
Breha swallowed, and flipped the switch to transfer power from thrusters to blasters, and felt the X-Wing shudder as the simulated S-foils opened, widening her field of fire. In front of her, the Death Star loomed closer, filling her viewscreen. She could make out details on its surface now, particularly the gun-emplacements.
"Shields up."
Breha shifted most of her power to the front deflector shields. She knew better than to think herself safe from attack to the rear, but the half-squadron of B-Wing fighters were behind her. Anything diving in to attack from the back was likely to target the bombers first, and right now they provided a nice screen between Breha and any laser fire from that direction.
And she figured she would be needed all the forward defense she could get. Those laser turrets looked big.
"Upgraded?" Breha murmured to her father; he ignored her, but Breha fancied she could almost hear him grinning. Of course they were upgraded. The original turbolasers on the Death Star would have been plenty strong enough to give an XJ7 trouble—there wasn't a capital ship out there whose armaments didn't make a snubfighter pilot sweat—but if this mission was going to be authentically dangerous, then those guns would be just as upgraded, comparably, to the Death Star's original equipment as Breha's XJ7 was to a T-65.
Breha looked over her ship's data, wondering if she could coax a little more power to the shields if she diverted a few systems, then decided not to bother. If she caught a turbolaser blast straight-on, a few more ounces of shield energy wouldn't make any difference. She goosed the thrusters, and let her snub inch out ahead of Gold Squadron. After all, she was their escort; she'd be able to protect them better if there was a bit of maneuvering room between her and the B-Wings. Off to the side and just behind her, she could see her father doing the same thing, matching her perfectly.
"Incoming!" one of the Gold Squadron pilots shouted. This one, too, sounded overly excited, her Ryloth accent thick enough to Breha's fine ear to detect, even in that solitary word.
"Bearing?" That was her father's voice, calm and slightly amused, as if the eagerness of these children to impress him was humorous rather than annoying.
"Er—bearing 15 mark 124, Leader," the Twi'lek said, chagrined. "Enemy fighters, looks like a full squadron's worth."
Breha frowned; that wasn't right. She had seen plenty of documentaries on the first Death Star battle, and her memory never ailed her: she knew the Imperial snubfighters didn't enter the battle until after Gold Squadron's first run on the reactor shaft. Breha smiled grimly; well of course, her father had changed things. He knew how perfect her recall was, now he was going to show her that a perfect memory could be a detriment as well as an asset. This was a lesson in the dangerous of assumption, in relying too much on her memory to the exclusion of current facts that contradicted what she thought she knew. Her father would have changed enough details to throw her off. If Breha relied on what she knew about this battle, she would get herself "killed" and probably ruin the whole mission. She would have to forget—or at least, put aside—all the facts she knew about the first Death Star assault, and react to the current mission as it presented itself to her. For all she knew, her father had altered the whole reactor shaft weakness, and the B-Wings would be aiming for a different target. Whatever their goal, her mission was to protect them.
"One, with me," Breha said, frowning at the way her voice wavered over giving orders to her father.
"I'm your wing," was Tycho's bland reply.
Breha banked hard, standing the snubfighter up on its starbord S-foils and swooping around to come up and between the B-Wings and the group of incoming Imperial fighters. She swallowed, then steeled herself. Just her and her dad, against a whole squadron? They could handle that. She could handle that.
Breha saw the distinct wedge-shaped profile of the Interceptors even before her sensors told her what they were. This close to the simulated Death Star, there was enough jamming that her sensors were barely functioning. "Squints," she announced, even though she knew her father not only would have seen the fighters himself by now, but had been the one to program the advanced TIE-fighters into the simulated mission.
"Stay calm," her dad said. "You can handle squints."
Breha felt her cheeks flush. Of course she could handle squints. She didn't need her dad soothing her over an open comm channel, with all those pilots listening in.
In an effort to prove as much, Breha flicked her X-Wing into a tight spiral, so that she presented a rotating target to the squints; she would be hard to target that way, although she was coming on straight so a snap-shot laser blast still had a good chance of hitting her. But Breha was counting on the TIEs not expecting two lone X-Wings to dive directly at a full squadron of fighters.
She wasn't disappointed. Breha led her father into, and then through, the very center of the TIE squadron. The squints scattered, snapping desperate shots as they dove around in a dismayed flurry. Breha checked her sensors; a few shots had brushed her shields, but the power levels were already creeping up again. "Status?" she asked her father, and reached to even-out her deflectors between front and back. She knew that the TIEs would be regrouping, trying to come around on them from behind.
"All green," her wingman replied. "Good furball charge."
Breha grinned.
Then the squints were back, and Breha's face settled into a tense frown of concentration as she juked and swerved, trying to avoid taking any serious hits while still attempting to return enough fire to give the simulated squints a bad day. She was certain that if she had been facing regular TIE-fighters she would have vaped two or three already, but Interceptors had shields, unlike the first Death Star's real defenders. These ships would not be destroyed so easily.
Breha managed to keep half-an-eye on her sensors, and half-an-ear on the comm chatter going on between the members of Gold Squadron. She was beginning to think that all six B-Wings were being flown by actual pilots; she had detected at least four distinct voices so far, even with the auditory interference, and while simulated pilots could talk their responses usually sounded canned. Certainly a computerized pilot wouldn't have been vibrating with eager anxiety over the prospect of impressing General Celchu. She almost rolled her eyes at herself. Of course they were all actual pilots; everyone in the flight lounge had probably jumped at the chance to fly with her father. She was surprised he had managed to keep the number of assistants down to a mere half-a-squadron. Probably no one else was qualified to handle the tricky B-Wings, and hadn't wanted to risk embarrassing themselves in front of the General.
Right now, that half-a-squadron was about to be menaced by half of the flight of TIE-fighters. The squints had broken into halves, with six of them staying to deal with her and her father and the other half angling away to take on the B-Wings. She frowned; that would never do. Breha dropped her snub into a steep dive, falling out of the bottom of the furball; her father stayed tight on her wing, and the squints raced to follow.
"Time for an Ackbar Slash, I think," she told her father. Breha was pleased that she managed to keep her tone of voice so mild. An Ackbar Slash was one of the most dangerous, desperate maneuvers that the old Rebel Alliance hero had ever devised, and was only attempted when one was outnumbered, outgunned, and in danger of loosing badly. It involved flying between two groups of enemies, so that they would be forced to shoot at one another in order to hit their targets.
"The TIEs are flying away from us," her father pointed out. "Not much of an Ackbar Slash with half the enemy facing the wrong way."
"They're squints in pure vacuum," Breha retorted. "They can turn around on a decacred—they just need incentive to make them do so."
"Ah," said her father. He sounded like he was smiling again. "Then by all means," he said, "let us entice them."
Breha's lips curled in a smile, and she flicked her weapons system over to proton torpedoes. She wasn't about to waste any of them on squints so far away—the odds of hitting any were low, and she didn't have many missiles. Nor would Breha put it past her father to have designed this mission so that she would end up needing her missiles for that reactor shaft, in the end. She wasn't about to risk facing the famous Trench Run with nothing but lasers. But the squints didn't know any of that.
She saw the fighters in front of her scatter, and knew that the tone of a missile lock must be ringing in at least two of their cockpits. Breha targeted another pair, and then another; she never fired her missiles, but she kept the squints jumping, because their sensors told them she was trying to. That was a favorite trick of the Rogues, Breha knew: one didn't need to actually have missiles to make an enemy think that one had missiles, and one didn't necessarily have to fire those (potentially non-existent) missiles to use them. There wasn't a snubfighter in production today that wasn't capable of detecting a ship trying to get a missile lock on it; most larger ships had the same tech, even those that hadn't been designed for combat. And there was nothing like the prospect of being blown to tiny, flaming debris by a proton torpedo to make one go desperately evasive.
The squints were just slightly faster than Red Flight's XJ7s, but Breha and her father had shot off away from the furball so quickly that the TIEs they had been dogfighting with were still scrambling to catch up. The ones in front, that had been chasing the B-Wings, had already turned; apparently they had decided to let the Death Star's guns take care of the bomber force, while they eliminated the pesky X-Wings that were trying to get missile locks on them—or seemed to be, at least.
"Arm one proton torpedo and set it to proximity detonation of one meter," Breha ordered. "Then get ready for a hard break to port on my mark," Breha said quietly, watching the TIEs in front of her, and those in her rear sensors, grow larger. "MARK!"
Breha shot off at a sharp ninety-degree angle, her father so close behind that their snubs nearly clipped one another. Tycho followed her as she rotated back sharply, flipping around so that she was facing the cluster of TIEs again, although they were now upside down relative to the TIEs position, and the Death Star's surface far below them. "Target the center, and fire on my mark!" The two half-squadrons of squints were almost on top of one another, and were maneuvering to form back into a full squadron before they turned to chase the two X-Wings. They would swarm them, box them in with their superior numbers, and destroy them.
Breha pressed her finger down on the firing button. "MARK! And pull up!"
Two contrails shot out in front of the X-Wings, as the proton torpedoes fired. Neither she nor her father had bothered to get a lock on any of the squints, so their sensors hadn't warned them the missiles were coming. With the TIEs this close on the X-Wings tails, they barely had time to scatter away from the missiles—which, being set to detonate on proximity rather than impact, exploded anyway.
Even with her transparisteel visor automatically darkening to protect her eyes, Breha winced. She felt—or at least heard—small metallic pings as bits of shrapnel hit her ship's hull. These were very high-end sims.
Breha had pulled her X-Wing into as tight a climb as she could manage, her small foot pressed all the way to the floor of the snub, and her butt almost off the edge of the seat. Her crash webbing dug into her neck, and Breha squirmed upright again. She checked her sensor board first to make sure that her wingman was still with her, and saw Tycho locked in at her tail so precisely they might have been practicing formation flying drills.
Then Breha looked at her sensor board where the TIE-fighters were. The confusing mess of half-jammed, overlapping symbols made her frown; she couldn't get an accurate reading of the damage she had done. Still, even if none of the squints had been outright destroyed by the missiles (and Breha was anticipating at least three targets vaped, if telemetry data and statistics was any indicator), most of them would have been damaged at least somewhat, and a damaged fighter, her father always said, was a slow fighter—and a slow fighter was a dead fighter.
"Let's hit them while they're flustered," Breha suggested to her father, and together the two X-Wings dove back in to the furball.
A little under an hour later, Breha popped the hatch on her simulator, pulled off her helmet, and ran a hand through her sweaty hair. She tried to keep her features schooled into a properly reserved expression of expectation, but couldn't quite keep all traces of a grin from tugging at her lips. Breha was on pins-and-needles waiting for her father's verdict, yes, but she had done good—she knew she had done good.
After all, she had blown up a Death Star.
Breha climbed out of the simulator, let herself dangle from her fingertips a moment, and then dropped into the air. She was ready to hit the floor in an easy crouch, but never made it there; her father caught her halfway down. He gave Breha a quick hug, then set her on her feet. Tycho's lined, aristocratic face was cool and inscrutable, but his blue eyes danced brightly. Breha held her breath, waiting; she could sense the other pilots in the room watching, and failing to pretend that they weren't; their wide-eyes and awed stares meant nothing to her, though, and she ignored them all.
Then her father smiled, just slightly, and he told her, "Very impressive."
Breha beamed.