The pair of B-wings emerged at the end of their first programmed jump. Both of them turned to kill velocity, scanning each other to see that they were in one piece, then searching out. This was supposed to be one of the rendezvous points, and their fighter comms were on rebel bands - helmet comms still on Imperial, so they could talk to each other out of character.
'Galactic Spirit, what a barrage. Are you sure they were shooting to miss?' Aron asked.
'I think so, just very, very well.' She replied. 'Time to start the spiel.'
She took her helmet off, turned the B-wing's com unit to broadcast, began to call 'Any alliance forces, please respond, this is B-wing Test Flight Epsilon, help.'
The rendezvous point they had arrived at must have been a main fallback position. It was a more or less permanent problem for the Rebellion, and far worse for a junkheap like the B-wing whose nav systems were so limited; hit and run tactics required somewhere to run to. That meant staging areas, covered retreats, ambush points to deter pursuit, and, when they were lucky -no, she told herself, think opposite, when the rebels were very unlucky - confused, sprawling running battles that gave hyper capable fighters lots to do.
Long range sensors revealed small craft in the area, the outsystem of a barren star; a tramp freighter, apparently prospecting, and two mercenary fighter escorts. Supposedly. It was a fairly good cover, in the intelligence sense. Somewhere nearby with a precalculated route in would be cover, in the military sense.
One of the mercenary fighters broke off to investigate; they headed towards it, reactivating shields - just in case.
'Identify yourselves.' It said. Z-95; fractionally more agile than a B-wing, which wasn't hard. In common use the galaxy over, by innumerable local governments - hefty and robust, it had never done well in fleet service but had been a standard garrison fighter of the late Republic. Common enough in rebel hands.
'We're Imperial, we want to defect to the Alliance.' Aron said, quickly, before the first part made him do anything stupid.
'In B-wings?' the pilot didn't believe them.
'Captured, rebuilt, we were assigned to test them, we decided to see if they knew the way home.' Franjia said.
'We've said enough to doom us, you've said nothing. Are you Alliance or not?' Aron challenged him - powering up the B-wing's weapons.
'Easy, hotshot. This is a holding area. You wait here while we check you out. Where did you leave from?'
'Imperator-class, Black Prince.' Aron told him. 'Snap it up, they've probably got hunting parties out.'
The other fighter and the tramp - CorelliSpace, rounded triangular prism main body, bridge module on a stalk out ahead of it - turned towards them and moved to intercept.
'What do you reckon the drill is?' Franjia asked him, on the rebel channel.
'Well, they probably use that freighter as a shuttle.' He thought about how he would do it. 'I don't see them trusting anyone with nav coordinates straight off.'
'So you think we abandon ship, board the freighter, get blindfolded or something similarly melodramatic, and ferried to somewhere safe - hopefully - but wouldn't a litter of drifting ships be a dead giveaway?' she wondered.
'I suppose even fleet recon couldn't miss that.' Aron said. 'Whatever sort of checks you're making, freighter man, want to speed it up? We left with a flight group of Avengers chasing us.'
The freighter's crew heard all of this; they were intended to. The team on board consisted of four guards, an intelligence officer and the two crew, and they were arguing it out between them.
Mainly, there was an urgent call out to a watcher unit on Ghorn IV; their response was just coming in now- unanalysed, unfiltered crackly com intercept and fuzzy point-camera-at-sky home holovid footage. They heard the call to clear the line of fire; heard the intership between the Lancer and Black Prince, saw the unmistakable flares, visible even in broad planetary daylight, of turbolaser flak bursts.
What they were meant to hear. They also had, in a separate, self-erasing communication, an intelligence report from the ship in question.
'Identify yourselves.' The voice from the freighter - the pilot - said.
'We've already told you, we're on the run, and we'd like to do some more of that before they kriffing come after us - get us out of here, you can shoot us later.' Aron snapped at them.
'They mean personally.' Franjia told him. 'Flight Lieutenant Franjia Rahandravell, Starfighter Corps, Strike Wing attached ISD-721.'
'Oh. My previous comment still stands - get the hfredium out. Squadron Leader Aron Jandras, Imperial Starfleet attached Starfighter Corps, Strike Wing nominal 721.'
'Legitimate defectors or not, they'd be valuable captures.' The intelligence officer decided. 'Send for the frigate.'
'Clear on sensors?' the pilot asked his flight engineer, who checked - and they were not.
'Negative, negative, incoming, small capital - light or medium corvette, fast, ten, fifteen seconds.'
That was only enough time to prepare themselves, raise shields and activate weapons; one triple laser turret. Nothing spectacular.
Stretched and slightly off-centre white flare; a poor hyper exit from a ship in a hurry, it was the Lancer-class Dubhei Targe, Kondracke's command. It swept the area on active scan.
'Renegades! Stand down - and we'll only disintegrate you once.' Kondracke sounded as if he was enjoying himself; he was certainly hamming it for all he was worth.
'Each?' Franjia called back, acidly, shunting energy to her own weapons. This had been one of the contingencies in the script.
Depending on how you looked at it, the Lancer's shape served it very well, or very badly. It pretty much enforced all round fire - the other side of the coin was that it couldn't concentrate on any one target. And it looked stupid.
'I suppose I can finally admit,' Franjia said, 'just how much those things remind me of a sex toy.'
'Considering what it's supposed to do to us, that's not an image I wanted.' Aron replied, turning and heading for it. Franjia followed.
The two Z-95 followed them in. Not the rebellion's best, not its worst, they were tour-expired main line pilots; in theory, this was their spell of soft duty, away from a front line attack unit to rest and recover before being thrown back into the thick of it.
Attacking an antifighter frigate was not their idea of fun. Doing anything involving combat in a B-wing wasn't exactly Aron's and Franjia's.
'Think TIE fighter.' She told him. 'The firepower that thing puts out, you can't afford to get hit. Jink, stunt, don't be afraid to break off and run for it.'
'Is that what you did when you were back in TIEs?' he couldn't resist asking her. Both the Alliance pilots noticed that, banter aside, the two B-wings were coming in moderately far apart, close enough for mutual support, far enough not to crowd each other, jammers active, sensors picking out point targets, in slow, deceptive weave.
'Stang yes. I survived. The really clever part is managing to make it not look like you're running away…95's, are you loaded?'
'Affirmative, flight lieutenant.' One of them said, in a senior officer sounding voice.
'Good,' Aron said, blandly ignoring the tone, 'one of you follow each of us in - that ship did get fairly well shot up. Do you suppose it still has any blind spots?'
'Mirannon didn't get to it, so probably. We're not going to take it down.' Franjia said, and spectacularly optimistically at that. 'Our best option is to pick off it's com antenna, so at least it can't report which way we run.'
'Right.' Aron acknowledged. 'I'll lead in.'
So slow, so inexorably slow; Aron wanted to get out and walk, it would be faster. 'Headhunters, start lobbing your concussions at the turrets.' At least it would force the Lancer to waste time shooting them down.
'You refuse the order of the Empire? Then DIE!' Kondracke shouted, all the Lancer's guns that could bear opened fire on Aron. If we ever get back, Aron thought I'm going to recommend him for psych-eval.
What's even worse is that the rebels don't seem to get it. I mean, he's shooting at me, and I can see the silly side. Humourless bastards.
Aron surged the B-wing into a diving right - hand spiral, aiming under the Lancer. He was hoping that even if he couldn't dodge the fire control systems, at least he could fake out the gunners. Zigzagging, twisting and weaving to draw their fire away from Franjia's attack run, and hopefully not get killed himself - he was, when it came down to it, a better pilot than she was, and she was a better shot. That meant she got the easy job.
B-wings didn't dodge. Not well, anyway. The quad-lasers spat green fire at them, and reflexively he twisted in his seat, trying to make himself a smaller target. The cockpit was well away from the centre of mass, so the ejectors probably would have time to function. That was pretty much the only comfort.
The Lancer seemed to be having trouble with it's fire control systems. Twenty quads, eight could reach Aron, three of them were empty sockets; for a second he wondered why he wasn't dead, a glance aft - they were tracking him, theoretically perfect, but it was pure ballistic prediction.
None of the advanced modes, like calculating and coordinating to flood his manoeuvre envelope; Kondracke's gone and left them unmanned, hasn't he? Aron thought. They weren't even trying to predict what he would do next. They could still kill him if he was dumb enough to let them.
The rebels seemed to be flinching, hanging shy of the stream of green light pouring out of the Lancer; small wonder. One of them shot off a missile, the turret flicked round on to it. Franjia rolled to bear on the turret and sent a stream of autoblaster fire though the shield gap; the missile warhead detonated, Aron used the cover of the flash to reverse course and head for the dorsal mounted antenna, the ship rocked as the turret blew up.
Not before the last of it's stream of shot had followed on to the evading Z-95. Shields blown out, shunted aft, blown out again, engines crippled; the pilot ejected before the fighter shook itself to pieces.
It didn't save him; one of the other turrets caught him and turned him into a luminous smear.
So much for plan A, Aron realised; fly the B-wing into the com antenna, eject before impact. Ouch, Franjia thought; that would be a public-display atrocity, then. To make this look right, he has to be prepared to do the same to us.
Vicious but dumb was what the script called for, and he delivered on the second half of that; the guns spurted bolts - what some of the bomber crews called 'hard rain' - at her, two glancing shield hits, then switched back to following Aron.
Her target-warning was howling, but no actual incoming, she ignored it; doubled shields forward, set the guns for simultaneous fire.
The surviving '95 had backed off, locked on from relatively long range and rippled all its missiles, one at each available turret; they switched into self-protection mode long enough for her to get a good, steady shot.
The heavy laser, twin autoblasters, triple ion cannon pounded into the shields around the com antenna; it had been shot off in the initial Rebel rocket attack, the dorsal aft generator crippled, and it was now covered by stretching the main dorsal midships shield emitter's field over the area. It was no easier to knock down - probably beyond fighter energy cannon anyway- but it was possible to get a local burn through.
The shield flared, crackled, became patchy. The Lancer's cannon, still pulsing out their bolts, swung off him on to her, she held steady on target as the streams converged on her. Front shields fraying, split second to weigh the odds, break away- she shut down weapon charge, dumped it into stabilising the shielding, twisted away in an asymmetric corkscrew.
They turned back to track Aron as he swung in to finish the job, started shooting- and she curved back in again, shifted from shields to weapons, hammered it again; that was enough. The shield gapped and blistered long enough for a stream of blaster shot to leak through, the com antenna shattered, the guns turned back to her and she ran for it, all shields aft, dancing and twisting. Aron pulled away to join her.
'I've changed my mind.' She said, on private com. 'Let's go back to the Empire.'
'Just when we were having fun?' he said, sardonically.
'It's the worst job in the book, defence suppression. Turning out to be good at it is write-your-will time- the tour survival rate's only about ten percent. I sure as sunspots don't want to do it for the Alliance-'
'Galactic Spirit. I should have realised I was tempting fate.' She said, as the slightly larger, slightly more ridiculous shape of a Nebulon-B wearing an Alliance transponder emerged from brilliant white flare.
'It's going to tear the Lancer apart.' Aron realised what she meant. 'Unless there's a friendly fire hazard in the way?'
'You lead, I'll cover.' Stabilise shields and weapons, and back in again. This time, they were simply trying not to be hit. Very close, high aspect, lots of twisting, unpredictable moves.
If there had been men in those turrets, gunners to second guess them and take the processing burden of judgement away from the computers, they would have been toasted on the first attack run.
For a moment Aron thought of flying in front of the bridge and making rude gestures at Kondracke, try to make sure he took the hint; a sure way to get a laser bolt in the face. He settled for hosing down the ship's shields with ion and blaster fire, and weaving to avoid being hit. Franjia did the same- pressed in to close range and swarmed all over it. It seemed to be working; the rebel frigate was holding its fire. Neither of them were sure if Kondracke actually deserved that much luck.
Dubhei Targe rolled to bring fresh guns to bear, sent a stream of fire after the freighter; emerald sparks flew off it, it accelerated out of the way and moved to hide behind the Nebulon.
The lancer turned to accelerate away; that left Franjia and Aron with the choice of thrusting after it to keep up - predictably - or breaking off. Hoping Kondracke had the sense to hyper out, they turned away, opening a gap between them with the total acceleration of forty-seven hundred g. Almost enough to feel safe.
The Nebulon sent a relative handful of LTL shots after the Lancer; too late.
'You may win this one, traitor scum, but we'll find you.' Kondracke was still ranting, some quirk in the signal processing software caused his words to Doppler shift as the frigate made for light speed, trailing off in basso-profundo.
'Nebulon frigate,' Aron called to it, sounding and feeling tired as the adrenalin started to drain away, 'permission to land?'
'Test flight Epsilon, this is Chandrillia Rose Actual; the suggestion has been made that we should turn you down, your brand of madness may be contagious.'
'All right, plan C, where's the nearest Hutt arms dealer?' Franjia said, over open channel, to Aron; they intercepted it.
'We can use maniacs like you.' The Chandrillia Rose's captain responded. 'You are number one on approach.'
As they cancelled vector and moved towards the Nebulon, Aron private-channelled across, 'So that much of the plan worked, at least.'
'Yes, and that was supposed to be the easy part.' Franjia replied. 'Scramble your helmet com, they'll inspect it.'
'Doing it now.' He did; they were on official channels until they touched down.
The B-wing landed on it's side; crazy way of doing things, they both thought. The side fins folded in and the cockpit rotated. Aron's fins worked, the cockpit didn't.
He hated Nebulons on principle, chiefly that they were damned difficult to land on. There had been so little manoeuvring room, even when he had been riding a TIE off one, that he had started taking a gas gun with him - hand held EVA thruster.
The principle was, it gave him the option of ejecting and space-walking home. He wished he had it now. It was very tempting.
'Tractor beaming you in now.' The ship com'd to him.
'Negative, I'll bring this junker in myself.'
That would have been disastrous. The compensators would have reacted to the tractor beam as if it was being brought in sideways, would have tried to rotate into an upright position. At the least, it would give him a headache - slam the cockpit off the hangar ceiling. At worst, boom.
There was virtually no room within the hangar bay; two half- squadrons, X's and Y's, sat parked there. Coming in damaged, effectively - he came in dead slow, rolled to line up, coming in on the fighter's side, crossed his toes, hit the edge of the frigate's relative- inertials and the B-wing nearly kicked itself out of his hands.
He had to wrestle it down on to the flight deck, steering jets flaring, threatening to twist itself out of control; there was a bang and a molten- insulation smell from behind him.
No room for this, he thought - more of a glandular scream - he bounced the B-wing off the deck, it skidded and came up trapped against the nose of a pair of X-wings.
The cockpit opened, he tumbled out on to the deck, landing on his shoulder. He got up, rubbing it, took his helmet off with the other hand, threw it at the B-wing, then started kicking the grounded fighter.
'Useless piece of crap.' Kick. 'Slow, unreliable, worthless junk.' Kick.
There was a squad of Rebel infantry, civilian blaster rifles and Alderaanian- pattern uniforms standing there looking at him; there were a couple of pilots too, one of them looking annoyed. It must have been his X-wing Aron had landed on.
Franjia's B-wing arrived with fewer problems. She touched down, vaulted out.
'You could treat it with a bit more respect. They got us here, after all.' She advised him. 'At the most, spit on it.'
The infantry were glaring at them, one of the pilots was laughing at the other one.
One of the infantry came forwards; a rank insignia neither of them recognised. He seemed to be an officer, from the attitude; sandy hair, pockmarked face like grit had been blasted into it, and it probably had.
'Your sidearms.' He held out a hand. The troopers behind him looked menacing. They were surprisingly good at it. They weren't heavy, not physically impressive, but they looked as if they held life very cheap indeed.
'What for?' Aron asked.
'So you can't shoot him, I expect.' Franjia said, unclipping the holster from her vac suit.
'That's daft. If I wanted to do something like that I'd have strafed the hangar bay. Scrap these-' he waved an arm at the fighters, 'their power cells and ordnance cooking off could be enough to break a Nebulon's back.'
'As twistedly useful an idea as that is, we should probably hand over your gun and start with "hello."' She gave him her gun, took off her helmet. One of the rebel pilots wolf-whistled.
'I think I might just go and do that.' she said turning back towards the B-wing.
'Come with me.' The rebel infantryman ordered.
They were led out of the bay, past a workshop - the air smelt of metal filings; did they have to hand-craft their own replacement parts? Interesting.
Nebulon-B's actually did have an inside, although it often looked otherwise, as small as they were. Down three levels, left two corridors, a couple of heads poked out of doorways to look at them in passing.
Eventually, they were led into a chamber that seemed to be some kind of ready room; it reminded Aron of a doctor's waiting room.
'What is this?' Aron asked the one man already there. The squad of troops and the two pilots, as well as a ship's officer, filed into the room behind them.
'Debriefing.' The man already there, in basically civilian clothes - from somewhere deeply unfashionable on the outer rim - said, in a grey, nondescript voice. Instantly both the pilots' hackles went up.
'What the smenge? You don't trust us?' Aron snapped.
'Aron,' Franjia said to him, 'we've put our lives in these people's hands. There probably will be a time to start screaming at them, but I doubt if this is it.'
'We have very little on you.' The grey-voiced man said, as if nothing had been said.
'Small wonder; if you tried to assemble a file on everyone in the Starfleet, you'd need more data pushers than you have infantry.' Franjia pointed out, looking at them, trying to decide who the head man was. Probably one of the pilots, by the vibe.
'And they might do you more good.' Aron added. 'Look; we came to join the Alliance. Join. So why are you treating us more like prisoners of war?'
'We do have a file on the ship you claim to come from.' The greyish interrogator said. 'The same ship that eliminated a frigate division and a local force fighter wing.'
'What's your score?' Franjia turned round to what looked like the senior of the two Rebel pilots.
'Fourteen.' The man said. He was shortish - meter seventy - dark haired, pale skinned.
'Thirty-four. Fifteen rebel and nineteen renegade Imperial. We're a-' she realised where she was going with that, 'we're from a theatre fleet unit, we see more of the Empire than most.
'The so-called loyal opposition, the local powers with grudges, the power-crazed within our own ranks, the criminals and shysters and arrogant upper-class shits that the New Order hasn't got around to purging yet- or got bought off by…turning your back on that, how much comes down to reason and how much to revulsion?' she asked, angrily, rhetorically.
'We quit,' Aron said, 'because of what was going to happen. We were elsewhere at the time, but I know the Black Prince took that fast frigate more or less intact, with something around two thousand prisoners.'
'How?' the Rebel naval officer asked.
'Burnt her shielding off with LTL fire, kept her evading long enough for a transport wing to ionise and board. The crew were turned over to the locals, who plan a mass public execution. The Captain ranted about it in the alpha wardroom, the senior officers told the juniors - and so on down to the disposables like us.' Franjia smiled a ghoulish smile.
'Mass public execution?' The pilots, the naval and the intelligence officer looked at each other, assessing, giving their opinions by expression. The pilots believed it instantly. The intelligence officer was more sceptical.
'One of the reasons Captain Lennart never rose any higher is because he has a bad habit of telling the truth, especially when he's annoyed. In furor veritas.' Franjia continued. It was actually more or less true.
'He viewed it…for complicated reasons, he viewed it as a deliberate attempt to marginalise the ship, and have the sector fleet do things their own way. He had plans for comprehensive brainripping and follow up strikes; we had already been briefed on some of them. Then Sector threw us - sorry, him - out, seized your people, and basically plan to put them through blenders.'
She was being deliberately, brutally flippant, and it had the desired effect. The intel type was still uncertain, but the naval officer and the pilots thought otherwise.
One of them did remember his duty well enough to say 'You don't seem very- anti.'
'The Empire, I don't regret leaving behind- but Black Prince, maybe. She was basically a happy ship, and there are few of those on any side.' Aron decided to say.
'The other side of that - the easier it actually is to get away from, the less you need to. Usually. That was just sick, though. A fair chance is one thing. Well, for a certain value of fair anyway.'
'A fair chance? You call what the Empire does fair?' the naval officer snarled.
'For a given, sneak up on them and shoot them in the back before they see you coming, value of 'fair' - where does your Captain Lennart come from?' the more senior of the two Rebel pilots asked. Perception was part of the game, too.
'He's old Republic fleet, joined a few years after Naboo I think.' Aron said. 'Look - I'm a hunter, not a butcher. It is relative, I can stomach one but not the other, and aren't you going to do anything about it?'
The senior pilot and the ship's officer left; the interrogator, the junior pilot with the bent-nosed X-wing, and the troopers, and the two Imperials still in TIE flight suits. Routine interrogation, names, dates, places, technicalities.
Aron's service career was fairly straightforward; young swoop ganger from Coruscant, enlisted one step ahead of the planetary police, did well enough at the Academy to go to fleet rather than garrison duty. A convoy-escort Nebulon-B, then an assault ship, then flight command, then shifted to an Imperator-I, moved up to Interceptors, then transferred to the Black Prince as a squadron commander. Most of Aron's score was pirates and local government rogues.
Franji's was slightly more tortured. Policewoman, air branch, Chazwa- Aron nearly jumped out of his suit at that. Hovers and skimmers mainly, observation and rescue work. Compulsorily transferred to the militia during a period of piracy, she had been among the group that had intercepted a major pirate attack - and been drafted into the Starfleet fighter corps for her pains. Fighters, then TIE bombers off a Venator, then the frankly strange Int/Xt- and at that point she was questioned primarily by Aron.
'The Xt has a weird reputation. Do they live up to it?'
'What's an Xt?' the rebel pilot - Comran M'lanth - asked.
'Squint Special.' Franjia replied. 'It must have seemed like a good idea at the time- maximum possible firepower; it retains the chin guns the standard Interceptor loses; and adds two more laser cannon in each wing hub.'
The Rebel pilot's jaw dropped. 'It does what?'
'Flies very, very badly. There was a reason they drafted bomber pilots to them. Ten guns sounds wonderful - the idea was to hit hard enough to knock out things like YT's, shuttles and transports quickly and neatly. Six extra guns draining the power banks- or carrying their own capacitors, in addition to the weight of the weapon, and six more guns' worth of waste heat, on a fighter with too small a wing radiator area to begin with.'
'It didn't work?' Aron asked.
'Like skis on an AT-AT. By the time they stripped the guns and capacitors down to save weight, you only had eight, maybe nine shots before the capacitors ran dry or the barrels melted, take your pick. It was the wrong spaceframe for the job; a version based on the Starwing hull would be more effective.'
Basically, it dissolved into three pilots talking shop. The little grey man took notes on both sides.
'OK, but if I get anything - any fighte r- in the killing position, above, behind and close, one or two shots and its dead anyway and your shields don't do you any good. They might count for something against high tangent snapshots when you can't get a consistent sequence of hits, or against light PD, but the whole idea is not to get shot.' Aron was ranting.
'Without the protection of a decent layer of shields, the chances of getting killed before you learn not to get shot-' Comran said.
'I don't understand how you expect to win a war on the basis of on the job training.' Franjia interrupted him.
'What about getting your shot in first? Past about Interceptor, and I reckon the A-wing goes too far, you are better off with shields to hold the thing together, because something that agile is too twitchy to be a good gun platform.'
'Which side are you on, anyway?' Aron asked her, mostly in jest.
'The side of superior firepower, of course.'
'On many things you seem to be, in fact, broadly in agreement.' The little grey man said; impossible to tell if he approved or disapproved.
'Well, it is supposed to be a civil war. You expect the sides to have nothing in common?' Aron said, still too flippant.
The squad leader clenched his fist and stepped forward, about to punch Aron; Comran stopped him.
'There's no call for that, Lieutenant.'
'Perhaps there is.' Greyface said. 'Loyalties. I need to know more about your loyalties.'
'Well,' Franjia said, openly sneering at him, 'you qualify as an outright mirror image.'
'I have not had you tortured.'
'The most efficient seldom do.' Franjia said. 'They erode their way to the truth, that way they find it in fewer pieces when they get there. All right; I admit it. I'm human, sometimes conscience and pragmatism trip over each other, and loyalty is a stranger beast than most people like to think.'
'We believe that the cause of the Alliance is just. A search for justice is not as powerful a motive as we would want.' The interrogator said.
'Forces within the empire; old guard and new men, radicals and moderates - some leave the Imperial armed forces and some are ejected. Centrifugal forces.'
'No, no, linear forces, I'm a third dan master of the Cult of Thrust.' Aron pushed his wit a shade too far, and then turned serious. 'Why is it so bloody hard for you to accept that you might be right? There weren't exactly an abundance of Rebel recruitment offices on Coruscant. Now I find myself on a ship loose enough to make a getaway from, with a hyperspace capable fighter that probably knows the way, and a messy atrocity in progress to turn my back on. Why don't you think that adds up?'
'Have you ever considered defecting to the Empire?' Franjia asked him. Eyebrows shot up around the room.
'As an academic possibility.' The interrogator replied.
'Why didn't it add up for you?' she said, innocent sounding.
'You plan to stand my reasoning on its head?'
'Basically. Why don't you think that your reasons to belong to the Alliance and not to the Empire are enough?'
'Because I have yet to be convinced that they are also your reasons.' The grey man said. 'You put up with the Empire and served it loyally this far, did you not?'
'Actually, as a regional fleet unit, and an ex-cop, cynicism is part of the territory.' Franjia answered. 'You get to be familiar with the brutalities that local forces perpetrate. In fact, you recognise them as exactly the same sort of bloody-minded stupidity that tore the Republic apart.' The rebels looked unfriendly upon her.
'I thought being part of the loyal opposition was enough; that things were no worse than they would be otherwise, and perhaps a little better. Then you come face to face with a genuine, full-blooded psychotic, and the shock of realising that they believe that you, in fact, are on their side. That they expect you to hear and obey, as if nothing was wrong.
That their sense of what is and isn't right is so far out of touch that they don't understand why people are shocked by them any more - you expect to find that huddled in the gutter, not in power.'
The Alliance naval lieutenant re-entered the room. 'Would you care to prove your loyalty to the Alliance?' he asked, bluntly. The grey faced spy glared at him; the first sign of real emotion he had displayed.
'Depends whether our propaganda people are right about your initiation rites.' Aron replied.
'Aron, think about it. We refuse, at best we get to spend the rest of our lives as prisoners of war.' Franjia said.
Comran couldn't help it. 'And at worst?'
'Spend the rest of our lives in 'debriefing'. I don't know who you, personally, would be prepared to kill to avoid that fate, but-'
'So what's the mission?' Aron asked. 'Let me guess. Recon run?'
'Correct.'
With suitable destruct charges bolted under the ejector seat, Franjia guessed. 'Provided you don't make us fly it in B-wings.'
