~
This fic was originally posted on theforce.net, where I go by the screenname of SaberBlade. If you recognize this, don't worry, it isn't plagiarized; I'm simply reposting it here also.
~
General Disclaimer: Star Wars belongs to George Lucas and the characters belong to their respective authors. Anything you don't recognize is mine; please respect my muse. I don't intend any infringement with this fic; it was created because I have an abiding love for Star Wars and a wish to share my interpretation of it with the world.
~
~
Details:
Name: Whole
Time Frame: Post-NJO
Pairing: Kyp Durron and Jaina Solo
Rating: PG to PG-13
Post: Chapter 11 of ?
Story Status: Work in Progress
Notes: There is a prequel, Broken, which can be found both on this site and on theforce.net. I recommend reading it before this fic, though it isn't technically needed. This story starts a few hours after Broken ends.
~
As always, reviews are appreciated.
~
~
Keshli was nervous. The hanger bay was a hive of frantic activity all around her. Lights were flashing; alarms and warning sirens blared; mechanics were darting away from the snubfighters, fuel lines trailing in their wake; pilots were sprinting across the hanger to their X-wings and hauling themselves up the access ladders; ground crew officers were taking positions with their flashing glowrods, preparing to direct out the squadrons.
Keshli hadn't been the first pilot into the hanger, but she had been one of the first five. She carefully fitted her helmet on over her lekku and made a last adjustment before she laid her hands down carefully in her lap and tried not to think about what she would soon be doing.
Her astromech– she had nicknamed it Friend, because she so often felt that it was her only one– tootled and whistled and finally settled down. Keshli reached out and switched on her comm unit; the cackled of static was all that greeted her. She took a calming breath and looked out on the chaos of the hanger bay.
Kithris was kissing Breana goodbye; it was a small ritual that all the Dozen knew about, and Master Durron hadn't ever stopped the husband and wife from taking that extra minute to say what could be a last farewell. Kithris and Breana spun apart to their separate X-wings; behind them, a Bothan was sprinting toward a white X-wing emblazoned with the black symbol of the Yuuzhan Vong's Trickster Goddess. He nearly collided with the tech lowering his astromech in place, but regained his balance and hurried up the ladder into the cockpit.
From her cockpit, the similarity between her squadron and General Solo's squadron was striking. The pilots from both squadrons were a mix of races and backgrounds, all rushing haphazardly across the hanger bay to their respective snubfighters, all pulling on flightsuits and helmets, all wearing the boxy life-support units on their chests. Keshli had thought that the difference between the two squadrons would be obvious from flightsuits alone– the Dozen's pilots wore notoriously random flightsuits, scrounged from wherever they could be found and patched up to be space-worthy. But though the Trickster pilots all wore the dark grey flight jackets that the Alliance military issued, their flightsuits were random- a green spacer's suit there, a black Imperial fighter's flightsuit there. Only a few wore the trademark orange flightsuit that had been the Republic's trademark since the Rebellion.
Keshli wasn't surprised that Jaina Solo was one of the few still in orange. The commander of the Tricksters darted across the hanger bay toward her own X-wing, for all appearances just another pilot madly racing to answer the scramble. Her astromech had already been lowered into place; she called something to the tech as he backed away from her ship, and quickly scrambled up the ladder and over the side into her cockpit.
Like the Dozen, the Trickster's commander had a ship that was different from the rest of the squadron. Unlike the Dozen, the only difference between the commander's ship and the pilots' ships was purely cosmetic. The pilots under General Solo's command all flew X-wings painted a pure white. On either side of the X-wing's nose, the black symbol of Yun-Harla was painted, an intricate swirl of thick and thin lines endlessly entwined. To Keshli's eyes, the symbol itself was a writhing, living mass of swirling darkness; it hurt her eyes if she looked at it for too long. But the symbol was mercifully small, painted forward on the X-wing's noses so that the pilots still had room for their kill marks under the cockpit. On the S-foils, Trickster squad followed normal Alliance protocol: a thick black stripe showed squad affiliations, and smaller hash marks denoted the pilot's call-sign. The Bothan Keshli had watched earlier was Trickster Nine; the human male with dark hair who had tripped over a refueling hose in his haste was Trickster Three.
But their commanding officer's X-wing was decorated differently. Where her squad's ships were white with the symbol black along the nose, Jaina's ship was black. Her kills, Keshli supposed, were impressive; there were enough to nearly cover the space left beneath the cockpit, but a few of her pilots had just as little space left as their commander. Two white voxyn, one on either side of the ship's nose, snarled and reached out for enemies, caught mid-leap by whatever artist had painted them onto her ship. She didn't have a thick black line and a small hash mark on her S-foils to denote her as Trickster One. Rather, there was simply the Trickster's symbol, pure white and somehow nearly glowing against the black S-foil. Keshli assumed that it denoted her as the Trickster herself, and wondered why Jaina continued to identify herself with the Yuuzhan Vong goddess long after the war– and her role as a psychological distraction– were over.
She glanced at the voxyn, then at the large and prominently placed symbol of Yun-Harla, and as Jaina's canopy shut, Keshli shivered. She knew Jaina had been flying with the voxyn for years, knew that Jaina had been identified with the Trickster-Goddess for even longer. But still, Keshli wasn't sure she'd be able to shut herself into a snubfighter covered with pictural evidence of the might of her enemies. She wondered if Jaina ever even thought about the statement her X-wing made.
"Dozen, this is Lead." Her Master's voice buzzed through her headset and Keshli abruptly called herself mentally back to where she was. In her study of the Tricksters, she hadn't noticed that all the pilots had shut themselves in; it was time to leave. She glanced down at her chronometer. It had only been six minutes since the scramble, but she still winced. Master Durron and General Solo wouldn't be happy. True, most pilots would have been asleep when the scramble was called, but they had been expecting this for a day. Six minutes wasn't their best time.
She tuned herself back to the present when she realized that her thoughts had been wandering– her equivalent, she supposed, of nervous babbling. "All right, Dozen, check in," Durron commanded.
"Two, ready to fly," she said, even as she doubted whether or not she was truly up to this. It wouldn't be her first space combat, but she was by no means as experienced a pilot as most of the others in the squadron. If she wasn't Kyp's apprentice, she doubted she'd ever have been offered a position in his Dozen. Add to the Dozen the veteran's of Solo's Trickster squadron, and Keshli felt like a complete rookie.
Just as Twelve checked in, the bay crew began waving their directional glowsticks. The directionals shone red, hazing and blurring into an arc of light as the suited crew prepared the ships for launch. Keshli didn't want their job; it was hard enough to realize that cold space lurked beyond her cockpit, much less realizing that they dealt with airlessness just beyond their spacesuits. If, for any reason, the hanger bay's magcon field failed, the crew– along with everything else in the hanger bay– would be exposed to cold vacuum. The thought made her shudder and cinch herself in tighter. She knew pilots who had gone EV. Most of them lost their edge; many slowly grew to fear returning out into the vast darkness of space for fear of being lost to it.
Keshli didn't think that she'd enjoy going EV. It would probably wreck what little safety she felt while flying her X-wing. Oh, she knew some pilots that had gone EV two, three, four times and remained perfectly willing to cram themselves back into another confining cockpit as soon as they stepped out of the bacta tank. General Solo had gone EV three times, twice in combat situations; she knew that both Dozen Eight and Dozen Twelve had gone EV twice. Dozen Four had only gone EV once. Keshli knew that her Master had been flying long enough to have probably gone EV, but she had never dared ask him how many times. And something kept them rushing back to the imagined safety of their cockpits, even after having a ship explode around them, even after being ejected out into the vast, airless darkness of space.
Whatever that something within them was that allowed them to continue flying, Keshli didn't think she had it in her. If she ever went EV– her lekku shuddered– and she managed to survive it, she didn't think she'd ever be able to fly again.
The hanger crew, safely oblivious to the dangers of space in their suits, began to direct the X-wings out of the Nightfall, through the magcon field, and into the deadly blackness of space.
"Switch over to shared channel, Dozen," Durron ordered. Keshli twisted her comm dial until she could hear Jaina's voice commanding her squadron out of the hanger bay. In barely two minutes, all twelve Tricksters had glided through the magcon field and out into space.
As she fired up her repulsorlifts, Keshli took a deep breath and reached for her control yoke. All right, she thought, forcing herself to relax. Time to save the galaxy.
As laughter from both squadrons rang through her headset, Keshli realized that she had said her thoughts out loud. Horror and embarrassment mingled, but to her surprise, her Master merely chuckled without reprimanding her for cluttering up the comm channel. "Are you sure you haven't been spending too much time with Sticks?"
As she passed through the magcon field and into the starry sky, "Sticks?" she asked, confused.
Another laugh, this one feminine and light even though the grainy distortion of the comm. "You're behind the times, Two. I haven't been called Sticks for years. I've moved up in the world."
"Your callsign was Sticks?" Keshli's readout board identified the incredulous voice as belonging to Trickster Five. "When was this?"
"Back when she was a mere mortal like the rest of us," Master Durron's said drily. As his strange Sekotan fighter shot forward from the hanger bay into space, he added, "And you're behind the times yourself, Goddess– I'm no longer Twin Suns Two."
There was another burst of laughter over the comm as Jaina paused and recognized her error, and Keshli wondered how the other pilots could be so cheerful, so casual, even as they closed in on a besieged cargo ship.
"Oh, well, since you're flying under my command again, I just assumed you were Two," Solo said, her voice still teasing. But then came the abrupt change that Keshli had witnessed before. "Tricksters, S-foils in attack position, form up by wings. All pilots, we have two cargo haulers, flag as friendly; a Nebulan-B Escort Frigate, a Corellian Blockade Runner, and two Skipray Blastboats, flag as enemies. The Frigate's launching fighters now; we've probably got two squads worth of trouble heading our way."
Keshli watched in disbelief as the larger of the two pirate ships began discharging its squadrons. Even as the Nightfall and the Last Chance maneuvered into attack position, the Escort Frigate spat out pairs of cobbled-together Uglies.
Durron's voice was steely. "All pilots, prepare to engage."
~~
Reviews make my day! Tell me what you think I did well or horribly. I appreciate constructive criticism and honest appraisals…
Thanks!
-Keth
~