The final briefing was delivered by Commander Brenn himself. Normally it would have been a relatively junior officer's job, but there was nothing normal about this situation. The two fighter pilots opposite him certainly didn't think so.
'In theory,' he began, 'you're going to pretend to defect and feed them false information. In practise, we're sending you to take those pieces of dreck back and trade them in for a pair of X- wings.'
It was a fairly crude attempt to lighten the mood; even Aron thought so. It didn't stop him laughing, briefly.
'You have read the briefs?'
'Of course.' Franjia said. 'Someone worked very hard, polishing that plan to the point where it almost makes sense.'
Brenn glared at her. Parts of it had been his idea.
'Just getting into practise, Sir. After all, we are supposed to be joining the ranks of anarchy.'
'Don't believe it. The rebels run their armed services on the old Republic model - the higher command levels may be fractionated and disorganised enough, but they are strong on the minor discipline.' Brenn reminded them.
'Military police; the common enemy?' Aron suggested.
'Not that far from the truth. You will be interrogated, we expect the urgency of what you have to tell them to push them into a rush job. Some will be suspicious-'
'Rightly.' Franjia pointed out. 'I would be very suspicious of a Rebel defector to us.'
'Maybe.' Brenn knew, more or less, what Captain Lennart was planning. 'On the other hand, some of them will want to believe you.'
'So what you're saying is divide and conquer, but take care not to look like it.' Aron said. 'Have I got time to go on a refresher course for escape and evasion?'
'Getting you out is less than predictable. No preset plan for that would be enough.'
'Who did we annoy to get this job?' Franjia asked.
'Who else would you send? The Alliance is so fighter-centric, you're the obvious choice. None of our people are from Alderaan, good riddance to it, or anywhere else the Empire's sat on heavily recently. If there are any experienced ISB or Ubiqtorate watchers on board, they're so experienced that we don't know who they are to ask them. Our organic intel consists of subsections of Navigation and Com-Scan who know too much to be allowed to go, or stormtroopers who simply wouldn't be believable. You were unlucky enough to stand out.'
'I promise, Commander, that if we get back alive, I will never, ever distinguish myself ever again.' Aron snarled at him.
Franjia managed not to say what came into her mind- that shoving a laser cannon up the chief navigator's arse and pulling the trigger would be a distinction of a sort. 'Sir, we hate this plan.' Was what she actually said. 'Why doesn't that rule us out?'
'Because you can make it work. All you're doing is bombing them with payloads of lies instead of proton torps. Has anyone told you to shut up and soldier yet?' Brenn replied.
They got the hint.
'Officially, this meeting has been about my giving you a flight test program to conduct with the reconstructed fighters. A tactical evaluation exercise. Unofficially, it has too.' Brenn said.
'As you are going to be masquerading as Rebels, I suppose I should wish you - what is it they say, "may the Force be with you?" '
'Try "Farce", Sir.' Aron stood, saluted, Franjia did the same, they turned to go.
In the corridor outside Commander Brenn's office, he started to say 'Flight Lieutenant Rahandravell-'
'We make a good combat team.' She cut him short - then changed her mind about what she intended. 'Do you think we could pretend to an, ah, sufficiently tortured relationship to catch their attention, serve as motive and distraction?'
'Sufficiently tortured would be the right term for it.' He said, wondering what she meant. Did she mean it literally, was she teasing him, or for whatever reason torturing herself - probably a combination of the first two. Which was, in itself, warped. If he was right, she was asking him to prove that he could fake it, lie to her with believable passion, as a pass to get to the real thing, which - suddenly amateur spying seemed relatively straightforward.
Which was probably exactly how she wanted him to feel, and now his head was starting to hurt. 'I'm probably going to regret this, but yes. I think.' He decided.
'Well, we're definitely going to regret having anything to do with B-wings,' she covered her relief with flippancy, 'so let's get on with it.'
Port-4 main turret, bunk spaces; most of the team were catching up on their rest. They had been officially notified that they were to stop their 'liaison' mission. Wonderful what you can cover up with a single well chosen word, isn't it, Suluur had thought. They had celebrated with a round of pillows, and only himself and Aldrem were awake.
'What is it, Pel?' The turret chief obviously wanted to ask him something. Probably going to be bad.
'The skipper himself spoke to me about- a couple of things. Was it me, or did I see a few of the white-hats pacing it out afterwards, trying to work out what we had done and how fast?'
'What did Captain Lennart say?' Suluur asked, instantly alert.
'Um.' Aldrem said. This could be touchy. 'He said that he didn't care much whether or not you were what it looked like you were,'
'Which is?' Suluur said cautiously, after mentally decoding the gibberish. No security presence, so he was in no real danger- even if he could bring himself to hurt the crew chief.
Aldrem looked round carefully - as if he could spot listening devices - and said, in a whisper, 'A deserter from the Republic Navy.'
'Very nice of him not to care. Covering something like that up could get him in a world of dreck.' Suluur said, sounding much calmer than he felt.
'Is it true?' Aldrem asked.
'Did he tell you to ask?'
'No. No, he didn't, and he said he wasn't going to. Also said you needed to get shot more often because if he could work it out-'
'Yes. Yes, it's true.' Suluur admitted. It was a long complicated story, one he more than half wanted to tell.
'Then I'm going to need your help.' Aldrem moved straight into that, careful not to ask why or how. Not yet.
'What? You're not planning to run, are you? Are you really that sold on that woman that you'd take the chance?' Suluur didn't believe it- Aldrem could be that crazed, but not this time.
'No, look-' he did, glancing around again, all still asleep. 'I need to get her to desert to us.'
Suluur started to ask who from, got it, then decided to ask anyway. 'I'd look like a kriffing idiot if I assumed I knew what you meant, went ahead and acted on it, and turned out to be wrong, so you had better tell me who from.'
'And convince you I haven't gone from hallucinations to outright paranoia- who else? Them. The enemy.'
'Big R?' he was referring to the Alliance to Restore the Republic.
'She's some kind of spy for them, she's been sending messages.'
'You're taking this very calmly.' Suluur told the senior chief. As for whether it was true or not - possible.
'Well, I couldn't start breaking down and gibbering in front of the Captain, could I? After that, the time never seemed right.'
'There is a right time, when what you see, and especially what you know is going to happen next, gets to be too much to bear.' Suluur said, slowly and reflectively. 'A decent commander, a competent commander, gives you confidence and hope, postpones the day. An incompetent rat-bastard-'
Aldrem was just sensitive enough to try not to let his own urgency show. 'Areath, if you need to talk about this.' What he wanted to do was scream at Suluur to help him with his problem.
'Some time.' Suluur, on the other hand, was sensitive enough to pick up on it. 'Are you sure you want to help her change sides, rather than just... run?'
Aron and Franjia, suited and helmeted, checked out the rebuilt Rebel bombers as planned. Neither of them trusted their own acting abilities enough to go through it barefaced. Fooling their colleagues, people who knew them, would be harder than foxing strangers, wouldn't it? It had better.
The filed flight plan had them following a spiral outward to distance, then a series of standard flight manoeuvres, then a return to base.
For a moment both of them were tempted to just fly the set plan, land, and see if Brenn could come up with any charge even remotely public to do them on.
The captain certainly could. And after all, the objective was right.
The initial tests went perfectly to script- it was as bad as they thought.
'I want to see what the actual peak performance is - I'm shutting everything down except the engines.'
Franjia advised, as they were both nearing the point in the other plan laid down as breakaway.
'Tensors and compensators, too?' Aron asked, drymouthed. Go-code received and accepted.
'Congratulations, you remembered something mechanical - we'll make a Starwing pilot out of you yet.'
'Anything other than a kriffing B-wing.' He said, turning the brickish fighter to follow her.
Actually, they weren't that bad. Short, low power thruster bells were their main curse - the power systems put out watts on par with the Starwing, if not a shade better, but they had to butcher the engines to actually fit torp launchers in.
As planned, Black Prince called them - on main intership, not the fighter control bands. That was supposed to look like a simple mistake, that would 'accidentally' allow them to be overheard.
'Epsilon Test, that is an unauthorised manoeuvre. Return to the flight plan at once.' Olleyri, in flight control, ordered.
No response. As planned. Any rebel agents on the planet - which there apparently were - would have noticed nothing more than two speeding B-wings, which was still enough of a contradiction to attract interest.
'Scramble Beta squadron.' The order, open mike, was heard by all.
Aron and Franjia kept building vector, one eye on the monitors - engine temps rising - one eye on what passed for a nav unit.
Beta cleared the bay. 'Epsilon Test, are you in trouble? Do you require assistance?'
'Beta One, Epsilon Test - emergency. Engines overheating, throttle locked, ejection systems disabled. Get a rescue shuttle out here.' Aron replied, sounding genuine. The thought of being in that situation helped.
'Epsilon Test lead, burn towards us, I think we can shoot the canopy off.' Beta One decided.
Franjia and Aron both boggled at that. Somebody had far too much faith in their skills.
'Command, negative, negative, clear the line of fire.' Flight control announced, on the proper bands this time.
Port-4's alarms went off, cutting Suluur's and Aldrem's conversation short. The collection of sleepy gunners jerked awake, blasted back to consciousness. The drill was well established. The emergency action bell meant drop everything and get to your duty station, from wherever you were and whatever you were doing. It took the lead pair thirty seconds to get to main gun control, and they both stood down a step- Suluur working Fendon's board until he got there, Aldrem tapping into comms.
'Control, what's going on?' he said, genuinely startled; he had forgotten about the set up.
'Our test flight's gone rogue- attempting defection. Shoot them.'
The guns came up to power, just as Fendon arrived. 'Oh.' He said, looking disappointed; they took their proper seats.
'Control,' Aldrem asked, remembering, 'are you sure?'
'Acting Exec's orders. Do it.'
'You're convinced it's not just a malfunction? You know I need confirmation.'
The blips that overlay the two fighters changed colour. Rebel red. 'There's your confirmation.'
Aldrem settled in, rotated the turret to bear, set the gross motion tracker; 'They're over dex; 3hk out, this is going to be barrage fire.'
3hk; h-hundred, k-thousand. Faster than spelling it out. They were flying straight courses, slight tangent though; the cruciform shape of the B-wing was tempting.
For a second he wondered if it would be possible to bracket it perfectly, one bolt each side of the cockpit, one bolt each side of the fin - at better than three seconds round trip delay, against a target that would start stunting when it got locked on to, probably not. And he was supposed to miss.
'Fendon, set sub-2 up for flak bursts, one hundred thousand and rct, set sub-1 for stutter, give me fifteen thousand.'
One hundred thousand terawatts on the flak bursts, rangefinder controlled timed detonation, fifteen thousand terawatt shots cycling as fast as sub-1 could put them out. A tiny fraction of capacity, but more than enough for the target.
He played with the shot dispersal a little; pointed on to the fleeing B-wings, made the deflection, held his finger on the trigger and moved the grip in a small circle around the aimpoint.
Four screaming streaks of green, one burst low, right and behind the B-wings, one left and a shade low, one almost directly above and ahead, one right, above and ahead.
'That's a warning shot?' Aron screamed at Franjia. Their fighters kicked on the fringes of the blast waves- dumb luck or very, very good shooting to narrowly let them live.
'Nav laid in, get out of here.' She shouted back, shoving the B-wing into a wild half- bank, half- roll. The first handful of stutter shot screamed by close to her- she knew this was daft. The more she manoeuvred, the more likely she was to simply fly into a shot.
The second seemed to assume she was going to break low and right. A tactical memory - steering for the fall of shot - came back to her, and she turned to follow them. Sure enough, the next volley of flak bursts would have been right down her mean line of vector.
Aron pulled the red lever - activated hyperdrive, and a sequence of shot followed him, across the track of the ship lunging for conversion threshold; Franjia followed, before the guns could turn back on her. Safely away.
The Lancer, partially repaired, turned to lumber after them. This was part of the plan; so was the argument Lennart and Kondracke - skipper of the Lancer - had on open com channel.
It started with Kondracke saying how usual it was to have to pull the destroyer's fat out of the fire, passed rapidly through accusations of blind incompetence on both sides and peaked in his accusing Black Prince of being a nest of traitors.
To most of the watchers, it probably seemed as if the Lancer was escaping from the destroyer as much as leaving in pursuit.
'Fire direction, they got away. Like trying to pick up a grain of sand with a piledriver.' Aldrem announced.
'Port-4, that doesn't make sense.'
'You noticed?' Aldrem tried not to be that sarcastic, and failed. 'Are we clear to stand down?'
'Checking- yes. Release to normal watch pattern.'
'Right.' Aldrem looked round at Suluur. 'Can you give me turret internal, and isolate us from the rest of the ship?'
'Done.' Suluur set it up. 'I know what this is about, yes?'
'Afraid so. Team, I don't know about assigned, but we've definitely been detailed to something that I reckon is out and out espionage work. It's also a painful subject for me personally, something I expect you'll enjoy ragging me about later.'
'Gun crew, storm trooper training, now intel? What's next, reassigned to fill two vacancies in the starfighter wing?' Hruthhal asked.
'Remind me to put in for qualification bonuses on the strength of that.' Aldrem postponed it, hoping one of them would work it out.
'Hold on.' Tarshkavik- gun maintenanceman, looking silly in his balloon- bulging, perfectly mirrored, magnetic shielded suit.
Ground combat exposed him to less energy than his everyday job, one reason he had taken to it so well; the handling suit he wore was attached by a ten centimetre thick umbilical to the turret's heat and static dispersion systems, otherwise he would have taken it with him.
'This is about that woman, isn't it? So the espionage connection- ah.'
'So it wasn't just your dashing charm, then?' the other subsection leader, Gendrik, asked.
'Considering she was still talking to me after I nearly threw up on her, I should have known it was too good to be true.' Aldrem said, suspecting that if he didn't say it they would.
'She snuck on board to spy on us?' Hruthhal wanted Aldrem to confirm.
'That's the theory, yes.' Aldrem admitted.
'So,' Suluur backed him up, 'if we promised to buy you an E-web for your name day, on condition you shot her with it, what would you do?' It got a chuckle, and it let Aldrem handle it as seriously, or not, as he wanted.
'I need to talk to her, and I want you there for moral support when I do. Not fire support.'
Fendon shut down the turret, it took ten minutes for everyone to get out of protective gear and into day uniforms.
Aldrem checked; as a steward, she had no fixed schedule any more than the officer she looked after did, and he didn't like the thought of knocking on the exec's door looking for her. Only thing for it, though.
He did, his fourteen men behind him; it was the exec who answered. Looking past him, Aldrem could see rank after rank of protocol droids. What was going on?
'Commander, Sir, I'm looking for Steward Jhareylia Hathren. This isn't a private visit, Sir, I wish it was.' He went on, before Mirhak-Ghulej could lose his temper with him. 'Check with the Captain, Sir.'
The exec thought hard about it. 'If you turn out to be lying, I'll have you used for reactor shelding.'
'That might be a less painful alternative, Sir.' Aldrem said, sincerely.
Mirhak-ghulej looked closely at the senior chief. His file had come up, and the exec's memory was good; maybe too good, on occasion. It kept him brooding over the past.
Aldrem had risen rapidly to his present rank on the strength of his specialist skills, and then stuck there, failing the academy entrance exam twice - both times on leadership issues. Attitude problem, the file had said. Utterly incapable of providing ideological and doctrinal support and guidance.
Some of his irresponsibility came from that root cause, Mirhak-Ghulej thought; knowing that he was never going to be asked to be responsible, and had no more to gain by trying to be.
'You wish to see your girlfriend, on ship business.' Sarcasm dripping off his voice. 'What?'
'Can I speak freely, Sir?' the chief sounded desperate.
'If you are fool enough to think you won't be handing your career to me on a plate, you might be fool enough to make this entertaining. Speak.'
'Sir, the captain's got it in for me as well, and this is my dreck job to do. The only thing you could do would be to make it worse.' Aldrem took a chance on saying.
'Why shouldn't I do that?' the temporarily disemployed exec asked, thinking that perhaps if he did, it would make him feel better.
'Because he actually needs this job to get done.'
Just as well the exec's face was pretty impassive at the best of times; it meant Aldrem didn't realise how much trouble he was in.
Jhareylia was busy supervising the protocol droids; they were doing the datawork. She heard the tail end of the conversation, recognised Aldrem's voice; came to the door, saw the entire turret crew behind him.
'Pellor, really, when you come to court, you're not supposed to bring your own jury.'
He turned round to them and said 'See why I wanted you here?' and to Mirhak-Ghulej, 'Sir, you can screw this up, or not.'
'I want a full report.' He snapped. Jhareylia ducked under his arm and out into the corridor with him.
He looks terrible, she thought. Half-slept and stressed out. I wonder how he scrubs up? 'Where are we going?'
'Well, my first thought was a nice stroll in the training garden, but this lot might mutiny.' The growl from behind them served to prove that. 'We could go down to engineering, find an inspection port and watch the ion drives glow?'
'Considering what I've heard about them, that might be just as dangerous.'
'I knew it wouldn't take you long to find your way around this ship.' He bounced back at her.
Actually, she changed her mind, he looks about how I feel. Like something terrible is about to happen.
'There's always the water tanks; we use them as a swimming pool, but the white-hats use them as an exercise tank too. A hint; if you hear that strange coloured clouds have been seen in the exercise tanks, don't shower for a while. The filters are supposed to take it out, but I don't trust them myself.' He rambled.
She turned a corner at random; he followed her, she went down three more twists and turns. 'Where are we going?' he asked.
'Somewhere where we aren't expected. Somewhere we can sit and talk without anyone knowing we're there.' She said.
Kriff, he thought. If she's going where I think she's going with this, we have a crisis. We did anyway.
Counting tags on the bulkhead, they were on the lower starboard side of the ship; quarters blocks, storage spaces, the forward end of the engineering workshop space, a few point defence turrets.
He pushed open a door into a storage room; realised it was a bad idea. 'We must be right against the outer hull, that's a blowout panel. I think this might be the wrong place.' Automating security had been tried and failed. Too easily cracked; human recognition worked better. This was still on the old system, the code locked door had opened for the transponder in his rank cylinder. Gunnery branch.
The room looked like a mesh of steel stalagmites, with a corresponding pattern of them hanging from the ceiling; three meter wide cones, marked with a handful of glyphs, access, handling points. Large enough, they loomed larger in the eye of an expert.
'I shouldn't think anyone comes down here if they can avoid it.'
'What are they? Some form of abstract sculpture?' she asked, looking innocent.
'Only if you consider 'kaboom' to be art…which personally I do, but I thought it was just me.' Aldrem said, quietly, trying not to breathe too hard.
'Chief?' Hruthhal asked. 'What are we doing with this lot? We don't have the launchers for them.'
'This is Commander Mirannon we're talking about here. Give him a couple of months.' Tarshkavik said.
'We can sit and talk here,' Aldrem turned to her, 'provided you don't mind my skin crawling so bad it tries to escape independently.'
'If you're scared, then I am too- but do you think anyone would come in here?'
'No-one in their right mind would be within ten kilometres of this lot.' Suluur stated.
She mentally compared that with the length of a star destroyer, took a deep breath, and sat down with her back against one of the antiship proton torpedoes. She couldn't actually touch the metal; the magazine safety systems wrapped a shield over it.
Aldrem sat down opposite her.
'Jhareylia, you know I'm not very…well informed outside my profession. It takes up most of my common sense.' He said, nervously looking at the torpedo and wishing it would take the rest; she couldn't help smiling.
'The thing is…I'm supposed to tell you that, ah-'
'It's all right, Pellor, I know what you mean.' She said, hoping they were talking about the same thing.
'Then you will?' he said, face brightening.
'Um - perhaps I don't know what you mean.' She was confused now.
'Oh. Right. I wish anyone else but me had been sent to do this. Anyone. The captain thinks you're a rebel spy.'
'What do you think?' she asked him. This was the nightmare she had been half hoping wouldn't happen, half wanting to get it over with.
'I think I'd prefer it if it wasn't true.' He said, slow, sad and sincere.
'Does he have...evidence?' she asked, nervously.
'He thinks he has. Tell me it isn't so.'
'I could, but…' she could get angry with him, shout at him for taking the system's word over hers; demand that he trust her. That was why he had brought his friends. She couldn't fight her way out; too many of them for that, either. 'Would you hate me for it?'
'Eventually. Maybe. Look - we get away with a lot on this ship that we shouldn't be able to, because there was a monumental paperwork snafu when she was commissioned and we've been in no permanent command, with nobody's particular job to keep us orthodox, ever since. In fact, we're ahead of the game, because we're a theatre reserve unit, it's our job to keep others in line, so our loyalty is taken for granted as part of the system and we don't get watched as much as most ships. I'm not saying the rest of the Empire's like us. But are we that bad, really?'
'Yes, you are. Your commanding officer makes you do dreck jobs like arresting your girlfriend yourself.' She flashed back at him. 'You admit yourself that you're the exception that proves the rule.'
'Pel, it's not going to work.' Suluur said.
'Yes, it is, it has to. What do you think they - the regulatory branch and the organic intel and the legion's interrogators - would do to you, if they had an excuse? I don't want that to happen.'
'Listen to yourself!' she shouted at him. 'You admit you're afraid of what the Empire does to people, what it would do to you -or me - if it caught us - Pel, you're not a bad man at heart,' she blushed slightly, 'you can't approve. You can't want that to happen.'
'No but - I don't know what your parents told you, but I was an inner city kid. The closest we got to justice or any of that abstract crud was the idea that you stand by your friends, and try to hurt your enemies. Maybe there is some ideal concept, some big idea out there, but it's amazing just how straightforward galactic politics starts to look when you boil it down to gang kid logic.' All fourteen of the team behind him were nodding.
'It's not like that.' she said, passionately. 'This is about-'
'I do read, sometimes. The empire is average, it's us, it's Dexter and Aldric and Elan and Garvoth from down the road, it's - the Empire inherited the galaxy. Whatever that is, the Empire is - despite what those New Order nutcases tell you, the bulk of the Starfleet, even, is ordinary stiffs like us.'
'You've already said enough to get yourself into trouble.' Jhareylia said, almost demanding that it was so. 'I could walk out of here, steal a shuttle and escape to the alliance, and take all of you with me.'
'My career may be a dead end, but I'm not that crazy. Why - actually, what made you become a Rebel?'
'I told you, my parents had a light freighter.'
'What happened to it?' Aldrem asked her, softly.
'We were - just doing business as usual; it was a typical run, out of Correllia to Brentaal, and we were stopped by an Imperial interdictor. It boarded us, and murdered them.
They hid me in one of the cargo pods; I heard the argument, and the shots, and the sound of my mother and father being dragged away and thrown out of the airlock. Don't try and tell me ordinary people would do that.'
He looked away, and from the eye she couldn't see gave Gendrik the wink. He felt rotten.
'What was the name of that ship?' Gendrik asked her.
'HIMS Antorevan.' She said it like it was burned on her memory.
'Suluur,' Genrik asked him, 'we did shoot at an Interdictor once, didn't we? Do you remember her name?'
'Fantastic bloody coincidence, if it was.' Suluur said. 'Stranger things happen, though - to the turret.'
They were all happy to leave the vault.
'Typical.' Tarshkavik said. 'Blunder into a sealed, out of the way compartment on any other star destroyer, what would you find? A still, a spice farm, a sabacc pit maybe. On this ship, we find an illicit stash of proton torpedoes.'
'I'm sure we've got all those things as well.' Aldrem said.
Jhareylia leaned on him on the way. Another day, it would have had him bouncing off the ceiling. Now he was scared, more than anything else. Both of them were preoccupied, she too much so to notice Suluur and Hruthhal disappear, sprinting back to Port-4 for the fastest slicing job of their lives.
She should have been taking notes; it wasn't so often the Alliance got a good look inside imperial HTL turrets. She was in no state to. She did notice, irrelevantly, that it smelt like them. Aldrem sat her down in the com/scan chair. She wasn't sure what to believe was happening. Would they fake it - was it even possible? Did he have the sheer twistedness to manipulate her like that? She didn't think so.
'Rebels and minor powers are one thing, but you'd be amazed; we spend the vast majority of our time chasing down rogue units of the Imperial fleet, and hauling them back into line. Usually it's fairly easy; all we have to do is roll slightly, show them our kill scores.' Suluur said, as he was digging in the action logs.
'Speaking of which…' Aldrem said, using his own range taker to look down at the hull. 'I thought so. Two Interdictors.'
'I'm sure I've heard that name somewhere.' Suluur said, fingers dancing on the keypad. 'I don't think it's us, though, ours were the Ildomir and the Yelduro-Vartha. Where else would - I knew it.'
The data came flooding up on the main holodisplay in front of all of them.
'It was in a squadron tactical circular. Tector-class Indomitable intercepted the Antorevan, ordered her to stand down and receive auditors and inspectors from sector group command.' Aldrem read out, and interpreted. 'She must have been under suspicion already, especially if she was shaking down the convoys she was supposed to be escorting.'
He didn't add, at least not out loud, 'and not giving his squadron commander his cut.'
'Antorevan refused, Indomitable opened fire, shooting to disable - one heavy turbolaser shot hit a grav well projector, dead centre, imploding it and overpenetrating to the reactor which, well, this calls it 'regrettable accident', I'd call it 'small supernova.'
Quietly, Jhareylia watched the ship which had been responsible for her parents' death rack and twist, then expand in a turbolaser-greenish tinted flare of white light as the energised implosion wrapped itself round the reactor, and rebounded.
'The Indomitable's one of ours - also part of 851 Squadron, that's why we heard about it. A crime was committed, detected, and punished. The Empire can look after its own, and the Alliance is so thinly spread, running as fast as it can to stand still, it can't. It wasn't the Rebellion who avenged your parents' murder. Remind me why you're with them again?' he said, feeling thoroughly rotten, and weirdly relieved at the same time.
It was enough of a shock, it robbed her of the presence of mind necessary to suspect a lie.
'Shall we go and talk to Commander Brenn, then? He's the navigator, this sort of thing defaults to him in the absence of anybody else. Let's go talk to him.'
Head reeling, she was in no position to say no. Her brain would pull itself together before long, and he intended to be there when it happened. For now - get it on paper, make it too late for her to turn back. Square it with his own conscience, which was about to have an almighty falling out with his libido anyway, later.
He did spare a second on the way, as she was being helped down the accessway, to talk to the com/scan tech.
'So that's one outrageous lie told in the interests of truth and justice.' Suluur said.
'Sod truth and justice; in the interests of not handing her over to the pointy stick boys in Interrogation.' Aldrem replied. 'What did you actually do? That looked a bit too good to be that instant a creation.'
'Changed the name on the ship it happened to.'
