54. Bat Out Of Hell
Rong-Arya gazed at the map, watching symbols vanish one by one. The current casualty rate was acceptable, but still a bit high, and whilst they had lost few of the all-important control vessels so far, the number was rising with disquieting speed.
In building their fleet, Chaos's shipwrights had run into one major problem – they needed to match the numbers of the enemy, and whilst the gods' powers and the mining operations in the Stargate universe gave them the time and resources they needed, they didn't have anywhere near enough people to crew all their ships. As a result, they'd had to compromise, crewing most of their ships with daemons (both ascended and the more numerous but increasingly unpredictable crafted) and mindless, cloned servitor-cyborgs. The fleet was divided into groups of roughly thirty, each led by a large, heavily-armed, and well-defended control ship whose human, daemonhost, and ascended officers would try to keep the rest of the group pointed in the right direction.
Unfortunately, this still left them with a major, obvious weakness, and it seemed the enemy had begun to figure it out.
"All groups, they know about the control ships. Respond accordingly. I'll leave the details up to you, but whilst the Suzumiyaverse devices are an option of last resort, they are still an option."
There was another problem – the enemy hadn't taken the bait she'd laid out for them yet, and as her window of opportunity closed, the trap she'd set remained unsprung. Fortunately, this was rather more easily solvable.
The map also showed the current state of the Warp, colour-coded according to the severity of the 'weather' in that strange and alien realm. Dark red smears covered the battlefield, each indicating a particularly heavy bit of turbulence created by her sorcery cadre. As she watched, another one slowly began to emerge in the heart of the allied fleet.
Just what I was looking for.
The X-wing starfighter banked sharply, the G-forces squeezing its pilot back into his seat. A screeching, winged shape drifted across his heads-up display, and his thumb tapped the firing stud on his control stick. The four laser cannons lit up, sending streamers of crimson fire across the howling Warp… and missed. Again.
Not for the first time, Corran Horn wondered how he'd been talked into this.
One of the first things the New Republic had learned about the other universes that had intruded on their own was that the Force didn't exist in them. The Jedi, being entirely concerned with understanding and manipulating the Force, had naturally been rather curious about this – or, to be blunter, Master Luke Skywalker was trying to figure out what the hell it meant before his entire Order schismed over the philosophical implications.
The problem was that their entire contact with those other universes had been in the context of a colossal interdimensional war, meaning that militarily-useful personnel were far more likely to get a chance at obtaining an exit visa. Jedi without the Force, as a whole, were nothing more than pacifist monks armed with hideously impractical flashlight-swords, and were only militarily-useful if you wanted to distract the enemy with a really creative suicide.
The important part, of course, was the 'as a whole'.
Corran had always been a bit of an oddity in the Jedi Order. In an organisation that mostly recruited children and teenagers, he had joined in his early thirties, after a long and distinguished career with the New Republic Navy's legendary Rogue Squadron. In fact, he had only become a full-time member of the Temple six months ago after spending almost a decade juggling his duties as a Rogue and a Jedi, foolishly believing that he would finally be able to relax in peace. On the one hand, this meant that the more traditional Jedi tended to look at him as if he was about to turn to the dark side at any minute. On the other, it meant that he had combat experience with Rogue Squadron – in other words, he was militarily-useful.
Or, at least, he was supposed to be.
Whilst he had only been a Jedi for a small fraction of his life, Corran had been using the Force unconsciously for far longer, and it was not until he left his home universe that he began to realise just how much he'd relied on it. His simulator scores on the way to Bloodhaven had been abysmal, and his hopes that he'd fare differently in real combat had been swiftly dashed. It was like losing a sense, feeling only a blank emptiness that had once been filled with light and life. He was missing shots that he could once have hit in his sleep, whilst taking hits that a first-year academy student should have been able to dodge. If not for his gradually failing shield and for the increasingly-shrill warnings from his astromech droid, Whistler, he would have been dead a dozen times over.
It wasn't just a lack of skill, though. He was Rogue Squadron, one of the best-trained pilots in the Republic, mentored under legends like Wedge Antilles and Tycho Celchu. Given enough time, he should have been able to compensate and adapt, even if he couldn't quite reach the heights he'd once been used to.
It was the Warp, the mad hellscape that had become their battlefield. He couldn't trust his eyes, couldn't tell what was illusion and what was reality. A wall of fire searing across his path might dissipate harmlessly once he was halfway through, or set his little fighter to trembling and his shield gauge to dropping. The physics, too, were askew – being unable to tell what was up or down was perfectly normal for a starfighter pilot, and of no great concern, but Corran often felt the nagging suspicion that up and down did exist here, and wherever they were, he was on the wrong end.
Worst, though, were the sounds. Space was silent, famously so, and the only noises a pilot in combat typically heard were simulated effects electronically pumped into his cockpit to aid his situational awareness. The Warp, though, was not, and even seemed to pervert every sound that passed through it. Whistler's chirps and beeps had an eerie, mocking edge to them. The satisfying blat-blat-blat of the X-wing's lasers had become the sickening thud of a club hitting flesh. The transmissions from his wingmen seemed to be spoken in two voices at once, the second whispering secrets that he knew were true and didn't want to hear. Behind it all, creeping through and digging its claws into his brain, was the wailing, the endless wailing. Sometimes it was a voice he knew, sometimes it didn't even sound human at all, but it was always there, quiet and distant but impossible to ignore.
This place hates us. It hates us, and it wants to kill us.
There was a truth, there – something useful, important, hammering at the front of his brain – but Corran did not have time to concentrate on it. The daemons were back.
He heard them before he saw them, a chorus of atonal shrieks that seemed to come from every direction at once. Then a dark mass appeared from behind a wisp of Warp-matter, bearing down on him like an avalanche.
The swarm was huge, numbering in the hundreds – far too many for him to take on alone. He opened his comms, trying to contact his fellow-pilots, but found nothing. He checked his sensors. Nothing.
Then they were on him.
Corran pulled back on the stick, lurching his fighter out of the way as the daemons opened fire. Bolts of squirming night slid past centimetres from his shield's outer edge, followed by jets of glowing bile, showers of brightly-coloured sparks, and even stranger things. He zigzagged frantically, sawing the controls from side to side as stray projectiles splashed against his shield and unpromisingly-coloured lights blinked into life on his dashboard. A long wisp of cloud licked out and he dived into it, firing off a shower of photon flares to throw off his pursuers. It would barely even slow them down, he knew, but 'barely' was better than nothing.
"Whistler," he gasped, "where… exactly are we?"
The astromech droid fed him the co-ordinates with a tired, you're-not-going-to-like-this beep. He looked at them. He didn't like them.
Corran had been dimly aware for the past quarter-hour that he might have strayed a little too far from his mothership. He just hadn't realised until now quite how spectacularly lost he was. The Errant Venture was now almost a million kilometres away and headed at high speed in precisely the wrong direction, and the rest of its fighter screen were nowhere to be seen. To make matters worse, he wasn't even that close to the last known positions of any other allied units – in fact, the closest sighting to his current position had been…
Oh. So that's where the daemons came from.
The clouds parted, and eight kilometres of Chaos battleship hove into view.
Corran's brain shut down. He registered the glowing runes, the thousands of inlaid bones, the row after row of massive, gargoyle-mouthed turrets. He registered the whine of the enormous ship's weapons coming to bear, the hunting calls of the pursuing daemon swarm, and Whistler's desperate, panicked warble. He did not, however, process them in any conscious, intellectual manner.
The first dark lance beam stabbed past, and he dodged. A cluster of daemons swooped in, and he shot them down. A web of unholy light spun around him, each strand capable of inflicting certain death at the slightest touch. He didn't touch them. He didn't flee, suicide, or try to surrender. Instead, the starfighter's four engines glowed like miniature suns as he danced through the maze of fire, drawing ever closer to the titanic battleship.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, a voice began reciting the Jedi Code. It might have been his own.
A flicker of movement, almost too faint for the human eye to detect. A disintegrator turret had drawn a bead on him. The daemons behind him screeched in mindless hunger, clawing at the void as they closed the distance. He shut off the main engines and fired the fighter's retro-thrusters, slamming forward in his seat as the overstrained inertial dampeners failed again. The daemons flew over and past him, slowing slightly as they realised their mistake, before the bolt from the enormous defence cannon incinerated them. A blast of Warp-magic smacked into the X-wing's rear, sending it tumbling end-over-end, and he rode with it, firing the main engines again to turn the roll into a demented, drunken corkscrew.
There is no emotion. There is peace.
The deaths of their own comrades at their hands did not seem to slow the battleship's gunners down. They lit up the Warp, trying to achieve with saturation what they could not with accuracy. Corran was too close by now, though, under the ship's vast guns and diving into the buttressed, gothic maze that was its surface. He weaved around spires of bone and under barbed, jagged arches, snapping off bursts of laser fire at anything that looked important and/or likely to shoot him down. The vast bulk of the Chaos ship became a wall, a floor, and a ceiling, bulging out in front of him as he approached its aft.
There is no ignorance. There is knowledge.
A lance beam flashed up behind his fighter, the heat from its passage collapsing its abused shield and melting the rear edge of its upper starboard S-foil. He rolled down and sideways, trying to get closer to the battleship's surface… and ran right into another daemon swarm. There was a moment of pure anarchy, a jumble of wings, eyes, teeth, and deafening screeches, and then he was out and away, spraying flares into what passed for their faces.
There is no passion. There is serenity.
Whistler's scream was all the warning he had before the daemon-crow's beak slammed into the cockpit, hairline cracks appearing in the transparisteel canopy. It was clinging to the X-wing's back, beating its massive, clawed wings against the fighter's hull as Corran's astromech droid tried vainly to dislodge it with his static probe. It drew back its head for another stab and he shoved the stick to one side, trying to shake it off. There was an outraged squawk and a cloud of rotting feathers, but the daemon refused to budge.
There is no chaos. There is harmony.
They were approaching a protrusion from the ship's hull, an enormous fin blistered with observation bubbles, held in place by hundreds of seemingly delicate, cobwebbed buttresses that in truth had to each be a metre thick at minimum. Corran dived towards the adamantium maze, paying no heed to the way the massive struts and arches seemed to move in a nonexistent wind. He rolled his fighter onto its side, tapping the button to close the S-foils that gave the X-wing its name. The port foils came together smoothly, forming a single, straight line as the narrow gap drew closer, but the starboard side's damage had taken its toll, and the upper foil's descent was jerky and slow – too slow. The buttresses pressed together, mockingly forming a too-narrow outline of his ship for him to squeeze through.
There is no death. There is the Force.
Corran fired his proton torpedoes just before his fighter entered their predicted blast radius. The buttresses jerked back, a psychic scream of pain ripping through his forebrain as viscous liquid blossomed out from their chipped adamantium skins. He barrelled through, hearing the reassuring click of the other two S-foils locking into place, and made for the next gap in the maze. It was already closing – not fast enough to catch him, but quite enough to serve his own purposes. He glanced up, seeing his daemon passenger's eyes widen in panic as it realised what he was doing, and then there was only a grey blur and an unpleasant thud as the starfighter slid through the narrow arch with millimetres to spare – and none to spare for a certain unwanted corvid.
His mind was beginning to resume some semblance of its normal functions, ideas and concepts trickling back in and connecting with each other in unusual ways. I am a Jedi. This place hates us. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate…
They burst out of the buttress-maze, arcing over the broad flank of the battleship's engine block. There were little circles pockmarking the surface, exhaust vents to bleed off excess heat from the reactors. He looked at them, and everything came together.
The Warp feeds off our emotions. It sends them out of control. It drives us mad. I've seen that before. I know what it is.
The Warp is the dark side. I am a Jedi. Jedi fight the dark side.
This ship is an abomination, built for slaughter and terror. It's equal parts weapon and symbol. I know what it is.
This ship is a superweapon. I am a Rogue. Rogues kill superweapons.
The battleship's point-defences had noticed him again, swinging to bear as yet another daemon-swarm burst from their nests in the shadowy recesses of the hull. They were too late. Corran pulled the stick back, looping out and away from the enemy vessel. He could see the vent below him, see how it snaked down into the battleship's thermonuclear heart. There was a sound playing through the cockpit, text blinking on the screen, but it was not relevant.
The X-wing descended like a blade of divine retribution, torpedo launchers loosing one projectile after another as a storm of black light sleeted overhead. Corran pulled out at the last minute, almost splitting his fighter open on a gnarled spire as he soared skyward again… and shuddered to a halt, just in time to see the last of his torpedoes detonate harmlessly against the secondary void shield across the vent's entrance.
They hung there for a moment, suspended in the tractor beam – the New Republic tractor beam – and then the electronic-intrusion alarm sounded and the heads-up display began to shift, reshaping itself into bright red letters.
WE SAW THAT MOVIE TOO, DICKWEED.
The X-wing began moving again, the beam's operators angling it carefully so that its weapons were pointed away from the battleship but its pilot could still see where he was headed. Their destination was a shallow crevice, a crack in the mighty leviathan's skin in which daemons crawled like maggots in a wound. Those that could stare were staring. Those that could grin were grinning.
Corran should have been afraid. He was meant to be afraid. The Warp was goading him, whispering in his ear. Perhaps, once, he would have been, but he was a Jedi now, and he knew where fear led. Besides, if I die, I become one with the Force. Or the nearest local equivalent.
One of the larger daemons outlined, in remarkably illustrative gestures, precisely what that nearest local equivalent was and how enthusiastic it was about sending Corran to become one with it.
… Or I could try escaping. Which appears to be totally impossible. Fantastic.
That sound was back again, the same one he'd heard during the abortive attack run against the battleship. For lack of better options, he listened to it.
"… I repeat, this is the Space Grappal Jiiha. Green Six, we have received your transmission and will be with you shortly. Do you copy, over?"
Wait, when did I send a-
"OK, Judah, I think that idiot's had enough time to get out of the way. THIS ONE'S FOR KAMINA CITY, ASSHOLES!"
A thousand metres of grey-armoured titan burst from the Warp-clouds, trailing streamers of green fire as it emptied its impossibly vast assault rifle into the Chaos battleship's shields. They collapsed in a burst of light, seconds before the towering war-machine's massive, outstretched feet slammed into the daemon-ship's hull in a flying kick that carried enough force to crack a planet.
Corran was already gunning the X-wing's engines when the tractor beam vanished, the Gs hammering into his gut as he steered the fighter through a sky that was suddenly full of tumbling wreckage, barn-sized shell casings, and very surprised daemons.
"And just what," he wheezed, "the kriff was that?"
Whistler gave a beep. A very smug beep. The text he'd seen before flashed on-screen again.
This is astromech droid R2-R7, on board New Republic fighter Green Six. We have located a Chaos command vessel at the following coordinates. My pilot has gone temporarily insane and engaged the enemy on his own. Help would be appreciated. End transmission.
Corran grinned a woozy grin. "Thanks, Whistler. I owe you one. Again."
Another beep. This one needed no translation.
The Jedi looked out of the window, trying to get his bearings. The Jiiha's charge had blown away the living clouds surrounding them, and the entire battlefield was laid out beneath him. At this distance, it was strangely beautiful, an array of tiny lights that occasionally linked together with little glowing threads before one of them went out. It was easy to forget that each time that happened, hundreds or even thousands of people died… particularly since something kept encouraging him to forget.
"Whistler, can you get me on comms? I think I've figured something out about the Warp, and I'd like to talk to someone high-ranking about it."
A mournful whistle.
"Network difficulties? You got a bead on what's causing… no, no, wait. I see it."
A dark bruise was spreading in the heart of the allied fleet, one light after another blinking out as they were caught in its inky grasp. The massive armada's formation started to break up, its ships' movements becoming messy and uncoordinated as their enemies pressed in with even more ruthless ferocity.
Well, that doesn't look good.
There was a flash of golden light in the heart of the Warp-cloud. Then another.
"Whistler, magnify."
The view through the canopy distorted as the augmented-reality cockpit display zoomed in, lurching vertiginously towards the hell-storm below. The next flash he saw was still distant, still indistinct, but familiar despite the few times he had seen it beforehand. It was the light of reality pouring into the Warp, the light of a ship arriving from realspace… and it was fairly obvious who that ship and all those that accompanied it belonged to.
Corran thumbed the comm button. "Jiiha, you're going to want to see this…"
Another light blinked out. He hoped it wasn't the Venture.
Author's Notes: Speaking of characters from the X-Wing series...
With Corran, I needed an 'air support' perspective for upcoming events, and since poor old Wedge is stuck behind the front lines, he seemed to fit nicely. You'll be seeing a bit more of him later.
