TAS 35! How To Wreck A Death Star, pt. 1

A/N: Thanks be to the reviewers, especially MFB and LiMiYa. This one's to Mr. George Lucas, who also understands the challenge of writing multiple endings at once.

Their progress had taken them to the edge of the canyons and the beginnings of the plains, and Han Solo had reflected, for not the first time, that Imperials went for quantity, not quality.

Massive mechanical weapons walked the snow outside, and explosions plumed about snowspeeders and the ion cannon and the figures of unevenly dressed Rebels digging themselves into the snow, running, shouting and shooting and falling, occasionally not to get up again. Han's own squad rushed to join a shallowly entrenched force of their companions covering the launching of the few snowspeeders in need of last-minute repair. Han stood with commlink in hand, buzzing with the lost, quickly cut signal of Paqs Patra. It cut out to silence punctuated with chaos, and Han dug through his memory to where he had stored the old codes, shortbanded free information at the time, on how exactly to destroy a Death Star.

"Chewie!" Han shouted, and the Wookiee looked up over the barrel of his bowcaster, fur tangled with snow, lips parted to show the impressively understated fangs. "I'm goin' back to the ship! Cover this crowd until somebody decides to stop messing up killing us..." and he turned and began to run for the base's entrance, tucking his blaster and commlink back in their places and pulling his fur-lined coat around his slowly freezing self.

Paqs Patra could see Hoth at a distance, and the asteroid belt the other way on the same relative plane, and the Death Star between them impossibly huge, with its own shadow.

Much more important was the TIE fighter directly ahead of them, weaving in and out of targeting circles, its engines wailing, and then that one wasn't important anymore because claws depressed triggers and two guns fired into the TIE's aft, and with his wingtip grasping claws Patra slued the Orion onto another course, another horizon, and there was another TIE like to the first.

To many. Patra had time to think.
They did not want to be here. Something made them long for the homeworld, where you could feel your feet clutch the cool ground and exchange death there if you liked, within no space at all between yourself and your enemy.

Another TIE, skewered through the center by neat-, pin-point lasers, drifted dead in space. Patra's mind located in the head whose cheek feathers now stood straight in excitement worked in blink-speed, pushing their body's reflexes to spin and orient the ship, to line up targets the computer could not handle, because;

"There's too many of them!" Someone's voice over the Rebel squadron's comm channel, opening up a wave of shouts and breathy expressions.

"Blue six, I've got that one."

"Aye, two, watch ten-nil-beta,"

"Got it-gaah!"

"Two's battered--"

Patra stabbed their comm control. "Cut the comm chatter an' try to stay alive until Solo comes through with the codes."

Double clicks; approval from the nine of them. The three other squadrons, with Patra leading all of them, had nine or ten X-wings apiece; forty against a fleet. Corran Horn had given Patra this information--that if what he 'shakily sensed' was correct, Han Solo was present, and he had the coordinates for a strike by a single X-wing down a open shaft on the Death Star that would utterly destroy the battle station, provided they gave Corran the time he needed to take the station's shields down.

Three determining factors; three people that must have success.

Three TIE fighters angling toward Patra--his smaller self caught them and tuned in the larger, so that again his six hands flew over the controls. They looped away, back again on the enemy's tail, blew two of them apart in a sweeping strafe that gave the third time to come around below them--an X-wing tore through that one, chased by another, that Patra disintegrated between breaths. The X-wing barrel-rolled, possibly a salute more probably a resetting and desertion of the trajectory that was just now streaming into Patra's computer as a hot zone; one of the Star Destroyers moving into position to take out a heavily-populated area of Hoth-ward space.

Flurry of battle took over both of his selves again.