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Wing 86 'Neebrays' Pilot Ready Room, ISD Slash Hangar deck level, Ro-loo Sector
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S-7-12, newly assigned to Seven Squadron of the 86th Assault Wing, wasn't Force-sensitive, as far as she knew, but the light side was certainly telling her that she was bone tired. The thing was, on this particular morning, she didn't think she'd be able to sleep even if a gundark pounded her squarely on the top of her helmet.
The young pilot stood at the back of the briefing. Around the edges of the ready room it was standing room only. The chairs in the center of the room were filled with the Flight and Squadron Commanders and a few senior pilots. Her own Squadron Commander, S-7-1, sat in the middle of them joking with several of his peers. She wondered if she'd ever be comfortable enough to chat so freely with these giants of the TIE Corps. The front row was filled with the Slash's Executive Officer, the Flight Directions Officer and the Four Wing Commanders. Two extra assault wings had been crammed aboard the Slash for this mission. Several of the newcomers looked back to where the short S-7-12 stood and pointed her out to their pals, no doubt their curiosity was peaked more by her lineage rather than her own abilities as a pilot.
She was an all too familiar face to the top aces of the TIE Corps who had known her since she was a youngling. Because of who her father was, she had been accepted into the Imperial Military Academy on Mars at fifteen and was commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant at nineteen. She had been fast-tracked into flight school graduating three days before the nefarious attack on Nal Kuat. She'd been on the colony world of Simal visiting her family when the sneak attack had occurred. Shocked and angered by the raid she, like the rest of the Empire, had watched those Star Destroyers burn on the HoloNews. Her celebratory leave was prematurely cancelled and she had joined the rest of the fleet under Fleet Admiral Gentis at Jastawui and been slotted into Wing 86, an Interceptor Fighter Wing just like the one her father had served in during the Empire-Earth War.
At Jastawui and then at Nal Kuat, the pilots had watched and listened as their rimward brethren fought a failing retreat. Squadrons of TIE/Ln fighters were cut down by the surprisingly advanced X-Wings and A-wings of the Confederacy's new Space Force. Scuttlebutt was dominated by fear and worries over the mysterious copy-cat Imperial Navy that had attacked Nal Kuat and their high-tech, top-of-the-line fighters that ran circles around everything the Empire fielded. Only in the last few weeks had the odd name 'The First Order' trickled down from high command and FleetIntel. Rumors were much more abundant than facts but it was quickly ruled out that they were some sort of splinter group or defectors from the 1st Galactic Empire. They had no love for the Empress that was for sure. One thing was certain from the mountain of evidence since Nal Kuat, they were working hand and hand with the Solars.
At the front of the room stood the FleetOps Commander operating a large holoprojector which emitted an image of a planet with several dozen moons. Admiral Vertitas was there with him and utilized a long pointer to slash and prod the holoimage. "Our target today is Ro-loo. The Confederacy has held it for six weeks now, nearly half the war so far. It's a Royal Colony world chartered by the Empress for the Ahia-Ko species. Their largest city is the resort town of Witchwrist with a pre-war population of thirty-five thousand beings and according to FleetIntel has been occupied by the CEN's 20th Legion and 99th Infantry Division. Unfortunately, this is not a liberation mission. Not yet." Vertitas warned.
Admiral Vertitas was a strange flag officer, S-7-12 thought. He had once been a Squadron Commander and then a FlightOps officer aboard the Quill, Emperor Yos's flagship during the last war. He'd been given a barony when he took over the Space Ministry after the war and some say it was his machinations that linked Empress Phasma together with his top hyperspace scout which inevitably led to the current Royal Family. Now, recently returned to the Imperial Navy, his experience and friendship with Fleet Admiral Gentis and War Minister Saria had gotten him his Admiral cubes and command of this secret task force.
"Admiral Akfar is concentrating his Space Force at Kafrene Outpost. We believe their advance has finally been stalled due to lack of fuel rather than anything the Navy has done to halt them. The Earthlings are turning Kafrene Outpost into a fortress world and our surviving hyper-route watchers are reporting massive amounts of transports moving coreward to reinforce Kafrene. They haven't secured most of its moons yet, which is how we managed to slip through and how we will get back out once we're done. We assume Akfar is going to use Kafrene Outpost to either launch more invasions coreward or possibly strike up the Kuat Spur towards our main base at Nal Kuat. During their drive down the Bloodstripe many of his ships were damaged and are currently in need of repair. Our partisans behind enemy lines have reported a large concentration of ships congregating at Ro-loo, while his heavies protect the build-up on Kafrene Outpost. Furthermore, our spies have identified several airfields and landing pads the Earthlings are using as stepping stones to bring their squadrons of Y-Wings and B-Wings forward. As you all know those bombers have much greater range than our own TIE/sa bombers. We're going to burn them all."
That declaration got a hearty round of applause. The Empire had been on the defensive for three months now. Everyone wanted to start hitting back, S-7-12 among them.
Admiral Vertitas had been a good choice to lead this mission. The other Star Destroyer in their van was the Flood, whose new Admiral Banjeer had been held in reserve on Nal Kuat to prepare further defenses with just the Quill and the currently docked, and undergoing refits, Ares. Admiral Vertitas had used his time in the Space Ministry wisely and there wasn't a hyper-route or connection jump point along the Bloodstripe Run he didn't know about. He had successfully snuck his task force past the enemy fleet at Kafrene Outpost, floated silently past the enemy garrison on Protivos and taken a secret route into the Ro-loo System. The Admiral had known about a large un-named comet that spit off chunks of ice in its tail the size of walkers that lay on the edge of the Ro-loo system and had used that tail to silently infiltrate his flotilla into enemy territory.
Last night at midnight one of their escorts, the Auxilla Pursuit Destroyer Almak's Glory, had detected a blip on its passive long-range sensors, bringing the fleet to battle stations and ripping S-7-12 out of her bunk to sit in her cockpit for several hours locked into the ship's launch rails. It was a Confederate Y-Wing on patrol that flew as close as thirty-four thousand kilometers to the hidden fleet, but it did not make contact and sent no hyper-wave radio message on the monitored Confederate frequencies. The blip had crept across the fleet's sensor screens and trailed off rimward. As the range grew, it became evident that the task force had been lucky.
Vertitas recalled the incident in his mission briefing with his pilots, "That Solar scum was just thinking about his French fries and hamburgers." The mentioning of the popular Earth foods got a good laugh out of the gathered pilots.
Vertitas explained that he had FleetOps prepare a leaflet to be dropped on the Earthlings during the mission by one of the Wing Commanders which said, "It is a pleasure to thank you for having your recon aispeeder not sight my force."
S-7-12 and the rest of the pilots had remained awake after the scouting airspeeder had passed. There were pre-combat fears and jitters throughout the fleet. Sleeping was nearly impossible.
The task force had turned out of the comet's tail and began their run at the planet at 0400 hours. The decks vibrated at the reactor engines muscled across the Void at top sublight speeds. The sabacc was played. By the end of the day they might be celebrating the first significant victory of the war, or the Slash and the Flood might be bits of durasteel scrap blown across the Void.
Below, on the hangar decks, the ordnance gangs were loading energy bombs into the bellies of the attack craft. Their labor was edgy and intricate as they showed newly assigned KX droids how to perform their duties. The weapons were hoisted gingerly from the magazines situated alongside the hangars, pushed across the deck on repulsar carts by astromechs, and locked into the bomb rack on the bottom of the TIE/sa bombers. An officer insured the fuses were programmed correctly in the bomb racks' targeting computers. No mistakes were tolerated. All had to be checked and checked again.
The pilots departed from the meeting and headed for their individual TIEs. They spoke freely among themselves as they took the turbolifts to their fighters primarily focusing on the details of the mission. Most had slept little, if at all; they were running on adrenaline and caf. S-7-12 found herself face-to-face with S-7-1.
"Sir." S-7-12 smartly saluted, eager to look ready for her superior. Captain Stalgis was a veteran of the last war and during the interwar years had earned the right to wear the yellow markings of the TIE pilot's elite Hunter's Guild across his helmet's face. She glanced down the legs of his olive drab Desolator Flight Suit and noted that he didn't sport either red or gold bloodstripes. Her father had earned gold stripes by the end of the last war, she remembered with tremendous envy. Only a dozen pilots had earned them since the 'big jump', half of them posthumously. One of their recipients was the Admiral of this task force now, another one had married the Empress herself.
"Lieutenant August, remember keep your head on a swivel out there. Call out all your contacts right away and once we go down into the goo don't get caught above the clouds." Captain Stalgis waved a finger in her face while he drilled in his reminder.
"These aren't your old man's TIEs." Stalgis continued. "This batch has the new Sienar Reflec Hull. The Solars won't be able to pick us up at long range with their sensors." S-7-12 didn't know what to make of that. Reflec armor may be stealthy but its hull integrity left a lot to be desired. Hopefully the new Twin Microthrust Engines that had replaced the old standard TIE Ion Engines would help her escape if she found herself in trouble. "Just listen for my targeting commands and you'll do just fine out there, Lieutenant."
"Aye, aye, Sandtusker." S-7-12 replied. She stood in her regulation Reinforced Flight Suit, the black shoulder and chest plastoid armor the largest difference between what she and her father once wore. The Technical Helmet was a large leap from her father's bucket. It was bulkier and contained more life support features and an improved HUD. She had vowed to earn an elite Star Stalker or Deadeye helmet before the new war was finished.
"Save the call-signs for the cockpit, Lieutenant. Now get hooked in." He dismissed S-7-12 who turned and started climbing down the loading ladder into the cockpit of her Interceptor. "Oh, and one more thing, Strikeout. May the Force be with you."
Strikeout smiled underneath her helmet and gave her commander the thumbs up before he left for his own fighter. As she hooked into her crash webbing she smiled at the thought of her own call sign. Another pilot had publicly asked her out on her arrival aboard the Slash. She had instantly shut him down as she hadn't yet settled in and had given no thought to establishing a social life. The name was an homage to the incident and her famous father's own call sign. She looked around the cramped cockpit and whispered to herself and her absent father, "Hope you're watching over me, Striker."
A Chief Petty Officer in FlightOps listened to reports from the bridge and FleetOps and relayed them to the waiting pilots across their comm channels. The TIE pilots tinkered with their navigation plots, correcting for the Star Destroyer's position, course and speed. Not all of them would be coming back, and they knew it.
At the moment of truth the chief passed on the order from FlightOps, from the Captain and from the Admiral. "Pilots ready for launch!"
Strikeout made sure the air hoses were firmly connected to her life support system. She primed her chin cannons and then armed her ejector pod as she had been trained then made sure her comm channels were ready to switch to the Squadron's designated signal as soon as her Interceptor left the ship. From the audicaster situated high in the hangar came the order. "Start engines."
Several squadrons launched before hers as deck chiefs ran between the parked rows of fighters hanging in their racks. One of them listened to the sound of her engine, as soon as he was happy with the noise it was making he released the rack lock on her fighter. The fighter in front of hers zipped away. Strikeout shoved her throttle all the way forward while mashing down on the brakes. As soon as the rack was clear ahead she released her brakes and felt her fighter lurch forward with the last bits of the Slash's artificial gravity pushing her back into her seat before her TIE's inertia compensators caught up again. A second later she was pushed out of the Star Destroyer, her cockpit viewport filled with millions of stars. She was space-borne.
Once in the Void the Interceptors flew a circular pattern until the TIE/sa and TIE/Ln could be launched. Getting the TIEs into the Void was no great problem, but the rendezvous of nearly two hundred TIEs hadn't been attempted since the last war and the new pilots were unaccustomed to such tight formation flying. The TIEs launched at a rate of one every fifteen seconds. Each pilot straining to keep sight of their Squadron leaders as their sensors were inactive to avoid detection and the Slash and her escorts were heavily jamming everything in the system to mask their approach.
The attack group vectored in one Ro-loo, a blue ocean covered world laced with island chains that pockmarked its perfect orb. Dozens of moons were bypassed. Strikeout kept a leery eye on them. At least five of them had atmospheres of their own and could easily support one of the new airfields the Solars were in such a hurry to throw up all over the Bloodstripe.
They hit the upper atmosphere of Ro-loo during its night cycle, with one of the planet's larger moons hung full in the middle of their cockpit viewports. The squadrons formed individual V formations and descended for their attack runs. The moon was so full that the pilots could exchange hand signals with one another. Spread out beneath them was the moonlit ocean of Ro-loo and occasional stretches of surf-lined beaches. The Squadron leaders matched the coastlines of the islands to maps given to them by Ahia-Ko refugees. They directed their squadrons onto vectors that aimed the whole attack toward Witchwrist and known enemy-held airfields. Strikeout was worried. They had no idea what sort of anti-airspeeder defenses the Earthlings had brought coreward with them.
Something was wrong. The Wing Commanders were taking too long to identify the targets. They craned their necks as they peered below looking for anything that resembled an airstrip. The whine of their ion engines alerted the Confederate defenders, who rushed to man their anti-airspeeder and missile batteries. There would be no surprise.
When two suspected uninhabited islands to her port side erupted in slug fire that exploded at ten thousand meters right next to her Interceptor, it certainly surprised Strikeout. She nearly jumped out of her seat and mashed her fist down accidently onto her countermeasure controls. Immediately her TIE dropped two pulsating pink flares away from her speeding craft. The flares lit up her entire squadron of twelve fighters.
"Strikeout, what the kriff are you doing?" Vyvya, Strikeout's panalman, shouted over the comm.
"Fierfek." Strikeout was about to apologize for her mistake when an ion stinger raced past the squadron's formation and impacted one of the flares. She never saw the speedy projectile until it exploded in their wake.
The large island that held Witchwrist came into view. Several light starships could be seen parked alongside service hangars overlooking white, sandy beaches. Strikeout identified three air bases by the X-wings rising from their landing bays.
The 86th Attack Wing was the first assault group over the target. Their bomber squadron commander pushed his nose down and began his approach. The other TIE/sa followed close behind. Their commander gave up too much altitude before arriving over the closest airfield, and therefore came in low and slow, his airspeed was practically crawling at two hundred knots. He dropped his energy bomb, the first Imperial bomb dropped on enemy-held territory, but an A-wing locked in on his tail and hit him with a mix of blaster and chain-slugthrower fire. His bomber blew apart and spun into the nearby water. Three more bombers in the 86th were lost to flak or fighters, but they also scored several well-aimed hits on the ground. Several buildings were destroyed and their fighter escorts shot down two Space Force fighters.
The fighters of the second wing bore in and saw their bombs fall and explode among the hangars and along the rows of sandy landing pads. They came in with considerably more speed than the first wing and although the Earthling gunners were now fully awake and waiting for them, they were able to fly right through the flak, rocking their solar panels back and forth as the black bursts appeared on either side. Peering in their direction, Strikeout could see enemy snub-nose fighters lifting off from various landing pads. A bomber squadron leader dived low over the airfield and dropped a pair of energy bombs on a complex of new buildings adjacent to the landing pads. A bomb from his panelman hit a tibanna storage tank and touched off a secondary explosion that flattened every building in the vicinity. A tremendous, churning fireball rose hundreds of meters into the sky. Strikeout thought it was the most glorious fireworks display she had ever seen.
All over the island with the first airfield there was an extravagant flowering of flames. Great white and pinkish streaked mushroom shapes bloomed profusely, each for just an instant. But these became unimportant as more bombs went off in big blueish flashes each time another TIE/sa glided in.
After dropping their bombs TIE/Ln fighters swung around and flew over the landing pads and airfield for low-altitude strafing runs. A rain of red slanting lines from the TIEs shredded rows of parked fighters and bombers and cut down Earthlings running across the tarmac.
The bombers that had dropped their entire payloads turned away to make good their escape. They were chased by flak bursts, ion stingers and Space Force fighters, mostly now above them and looking for opportunities to make high-speed side runs. The TIE pilots and bombardiers poured all the throttle their ion engines would take. The bombardiers turned in their seats and charged their rear-facing blasters to beat the enemy fighters off. Those fighters weren't the dreaded A-wings and X-wings but less maneuverable F-55 atmospheric fighters brought coreward aboard Space Force transports for local planetary defense. Strikeout witnessed at least one of the enemy airspeeders blasted from the sky by the retreating bombers.
"Attention, 86th Wing. Scouts have spotted several suitable objectives at anchorage near Witchwrist." The Wing Commander announced with the code word for grounded enemy starships. "Bombers on me. Interceptors keep that enemy scum off of us."
"Roger, roger, sir." Sandtusker replied for their squadron. Strikeout drew her Interceptor closer to Vyvya's for mutual protection. Everyone going into this battle knew they were the equal of the Confederate Space Force but if the First Order made an appearance in their supped up advanced TIEs it would devastate the entire raid.
The 86th flew on to attack the ships parked at Witchwrist nearly thirty kilometers to their south. Several TIE/sa bombers from the other three wings that had yet to drop their bombs joined the 86th's formation. Admiral Vertitas ordered the reserve bombers still aboard the Slash and Flood to be launched to join the attack as well.
The southward flight across the shallow Ro-loo Ocean was slow as they approached Witchwrist because most of the bombers had already dived low over the defending airfields and would have to climb back to altitude to regain proper attacking positions. They soon caught sight of the sprawling Confederate anchorage aligned in a row along a white sanded beach. Coral reefs had been pounded flat by the Earthlings to construct massive landing pads large enough to hold the starships and the repair equipment needed to service them. The enemy ships were edged on one side by a lazy surf and the other by the green, tropical jungle that enclosed Witchwrist. There were about forty Confederate warships moored there including a pair of Eiffels that Strikeout's targeting computer identified as the Hagia Sophia and the Lady Liberty. A few of the smaller warships were visibly lifting off very slowly from their landing pads. All of the starships were blasting their anti-airspeeder weapons, and a complex geometry of tracer slugs and plasma bolts reached up for the onrushing Imperial TIEs. But there was no enemy fighters over the anchorage and the accuracy of the untested Confederate anti-airspeeder slugthrowers and blasters was very poor.
The TIE bombers of the 86th made proper dive-bombing attacks, at a 70-degree dive angle with lots of flak bursts blossoming in the air around them, but none were shot down. Bombs struck around the parked warships, sending up tall geysers of sand and surf that fell across their hulls. Three minutes later, the reserve bombers from the Star Destroyers arrived and made a low run, flying through the largely, ineffective flak, and sent proton torpedoes into a Spielberg fuel tanker and two Magnificent transports that had already been hit in the first attack. A Naruto cruiser made a run for it but was stopped cold by a trio of torpedoes before it made a hundred meters into the air. It slammed back down in its landing pad in a cloud of sandy dust and smoke.
The bomber pilots were already exaggerating their kills over the Wing's comm channel as they pulled away from their dives. Strikeout looked down at the stricken anchorage and knew they hadn't performed half as well as they claimed. It appeared to her as if nine out of every ten bombs had missed their targets and enemy jamming had caused dozens of proton torpedoes to veer off and hit empty beaches. Nearly every enemy ship was straddled by craters yet the score was still good, she decided. Besides the vital fueler that burned fiercely, they had destroyed one Magnificent transport and a Revenge corvette along with damaging nine other ships including the Eiffel, Hagia Sophia. The local shore support facilities were very limited and had been damaged or destroyed, and couldn't be replaced until more equipment could be brought up from Earth. By the bodies she spotted along the beach, she assumed they had killed nearly a hundred Earthling ground crew in just this location. She growled into her unkeyed mic. "We're still a long way from paying you scum back for Nal Kuat."
Strikeout witched her comm channel to the wider Wing channel to get a bigger picture of the unfolding battle. Comm discipline had completely broken down in the excitement of battle. Every few seconds a new voice cut over the squadron commanders assigning new targets. The exultant voices and even whoops as somebody hit their target was more than the adrenaline-fueled excitement of atmo fighting and vape fights. It was a dam burst of pent-up anxiety, a flood of relief to be finally engaged with the enemy almost three months after Nal Kuat. "Wizard! Wizard! I got one! . . . Ease off on the right. . . . The big one's mine . . . Get that corvette heading off to the right . . . Take 'em home, troops, take 'em home . . . I'm all out of tibanna . . . Who has lots of fuel and tibanna left? . . . Affirmative from Slash. . . Alright, I'll be along . . . I will pick up that guy yet . . . We sure got that big bishwag, didn't we, sir?"
"All squadrons, round them up and return to ship. We've done what we came here to do." The 86th's Wing Commander's voice cut across the channel followed shortly by the affirmatives from each of his subordinate squadron leaders.
Strikeout turned to find the rest of her squadron and as she did so a glint of light caught her eye. Something had lifted off from the ground on the far side of Witchwrist. She locked onto the bogey with her long range sensors. The computer instantly identified the object as a Space Force A-wing nearly sixteen kilometers away. There wasn't supposed to be any air bases over there according to FleetIntel's briefing. "Echuta."
"Sandtusker, I've got enemy bogey at point zero three." She checked her sensors again. "Correction, I've got two bogeys on that heading."
"Seven Squadron, check out that sighting." The Wing Commander ordered Sandtusker's squadron.
"Roger, roger, sir." Sandtusker responded and then turned the entire Seven Squadron onto Strikeout's sighting vector. Sure enough at least two A-wings were circling over something on the far side of Witchwrist. "Good eye, Strikeout."
Strikeout was about to reply to the unexpected praise when her thumb accidently activated her personal music playlist. She had downloaded several songs to help her concentrate in the simulators a few days ago but had forgotten to delete them before battle. Her secret love of Earth's disco music blared across the Wing's comm channel in the form of Lipp's Inc's Funkytown. Strikeout suddenly wished she was blasted out of the sky from sheer embarrassment. First she had prematurely dropped flares during the initial attack run and now she was scrambling to cut the feed from her TIE's comm hyperwave transceiver.
"What the kriff is that?" The Wing Commander demanded.
"Cut the noise off right now." Sandtusker ordered. Not helping Strikeout's frustration in the slightest.
Vyvya blunted some of the other pilot's ire. "I think that's enemy jamming."
Strikeout mouthed a silent thank you to her panelman. He knew of her musical tastes having heard them several times during the past week. No doubt she was in for some endless teasing when they returned to ship. She didn't quite cut the music off as they angled in for a new attack but she was able to limit it to play solely inside her own bucket. She found the tunes helped her focus and calm herself.
Three Space Force A-wings managed to get into the air right ahead of the arrival of Seven Squadron's fighters, and they rose to intercept the Interceptors. Below them a new, undiscovered airfield was laid out. There were half a dozen large hangars and support buildings. Several large A/SF-01 B-wings were parked along the runway. The base was aware of the approaching TIEs and was already a hornet's nest of activity. Sandtusker pushed down the nose of his Interceptor and led his Seven Squadron of makeshift ground-attack TIEs in to attack the parked B-wings. Strikeout knew what those bombers represented. If they were armed they meant an existential threat to the Slash, the Flood and the rest of Admiral Vertitas's task force. Better to wipe them out while they were still on the ground. The Interceptors dived low and strafed the bombers, but they had not been armed with incendiary rounds best suited for this kind of work.
The A-wings gave heated pursuit. Strikeout maneuvered beneath one of them, as it tried to get into a rear blasting position on Vyvya, and blasted a close-range burst that tore the Confederate fighter's bowels out.
The enemy fighter expanded magically as if pulled apart by the Force into a ball of flame and plunged into the coastal jungle below, leaving a hot red streak above it. Strikeout couldn't believe it. Was this what her father had felt in the last war? Her squadron's first kill and it had gone to her. Only later would she realize that someone, enemy or not, was no longer alive because of her quick reaction.
The other fighters of the squadron made sloppy work of the other two fighters, forcing one to perform an emergency landing on the airfield where it was destroyed from the air and the other to retreat to the north after it had been stranded by its comrades.
All that time, the Space Force ground crews bravely soldiered on, pushing their fighters and bombers with tiny little forklift vehicles into takeoff positions. Several more enemy snub-nose fighters rose from the airstrip and surrounding landing pads while the aerial melee raged over their heads. A few Y-wings ignored the TIEs and raced into orbit where they attacked the first picket line in the Imperial task force. The Corona Frigate Strangled Hutt maneuvered violently to avoid the enemy attack but she could not manage to escape on of the Y-wing's proton torpedoes that made a steep climbing run at her and planted one of their shots on the frigate's stern, blowing a hole in her shield and hull and killing thirteen of her crew. She was able to proceed under her own power and under the Admiral's orders quickly made the calculations to escape via light speed back to Nal Kuat. Admiral Vertitas, perhaps realizing they had pushed their luck as far as it could go sent the recall order for all ships to start pulling back to the edge of the system while they retrieved the returning wings of TIEs.
Sandtusker reported to the Wing Commander that only one of the new air base's B-wings had been set afire on the ground. The Wing Commander wanted those bombers knocked out and ordered Seven Squadron to attack again. This time TIE/sa bombers joined the attack. The energy bombs carried in the bellies of the Imperial bombers did not have to score direct hits on the parked enemy bombers; a near miss was enough to wreck those airspeeders. The Confederate fighters had left the air space to go refuel and rearm leaving no air protection over the bombers for a few short critical moments. Six of the bombers were quickly destroyed along with a large hypermatter storage tank, three hangars and a hyperwave radio station in two more subsequent attacks on the target. None of the Imperials were lost.
The TIEs were ordered off Ro-loo before things got too hot. Strikeout wondered why the Admiral didn't allow them to stay longer and really work over those parked starships more. When someone else in the Seven Squadron asked that very question Sandtusker replied that High Command was worried that no counterstrikes had been launched against the task force. Surely they were on the way.
Had the Imperial airstrike been so effective that the Solars couldn't mount a counterstrike, Strikeout wondered? Or did they simply not know the Slash and the Flood were there. As soon as Seven Squadron was back aboard the Slash the deck plates shuddered as the reactors powered up to their max thrust to escape Ro-loo's gravity well quickly.
No sooner had Strikeout unbuckled her crash webbing was FlightOps back on the comm channel. "Seven Squadron scramble. We have incoming bogeys in sector three."
Strikeout revved the thrust and didn't bother to wait for the deck chief's clearance this time before shooting back out of the hangar and into the Void. She only carried a third of her remaining tibanna and about half her fuel load. Vyvya was right on her panel as they left the Star Destroyer. Strikeout kept her gloating to herself but she noticed she had beaten Sandtusker and his panelman by almost a full minute.
Five undamaged B-wings had followed the Interceptors back to the Slash. New sailors manning the subspace radar stations hadn't detected them among the returning Imperial fighters or had mistaken them for part of the 86th's Wing. The Interceptors of Seven Squadron made visual contact at 150 kilometers where they were doing their best to stay hidden in the Star Destroyer's engine baffles. Before the Interceptors could get into proper attack positions the task force's screening escorts opened up with their anti-airspeeder batteries, and the Interceptors were forced to veer away.
The B-wings dropped out of the baffles at nearly 60 kilometers and sped directly towards the superstructure of the Slash at a speed of 2500 knots. The Slash's anti-airspeeder turrets opened up with almost a wall of turbolaser fire. The Star Destroyer visibly shook when every one of its blasters discharged at the same instant. The warship maneuvered to spoil the aim of the enemy bombers, turning violently to starboard, causing the deck to heel sharply to port.
The Star Destroyer and her escorts threw up an impressive volume of blaster bolts, but it was largely futile, as the flak bursts tended to erupt well behind the rapidly, oncoming bombers. Strikeout lamented from the safety of her cockpit that the Slash's turbolasers might have well been a youngling's water blasters. As the enemy airspeeders drew closer the 1.1 cm blaster mounts on the superstructure opened up.
All five Confederate bombers continued charging along their fixed bombing track. At 9 kilometers, their bomb bay doors opened up and sticks of magnetized gravity bombs fell in a diagonal line behind them. Admiral Vertitas must have been watching those well-aimed bombs grow larger as the Slash performed a hard turn to port. But now the Admiral performed an ingenious maneuver, calling for full reverse rudder to starboard with the effect that the Slash suddenly moved sideways out of its own track. The Star Destroyer neatly crab-walked away from the bombs, which passed in a tight pattern off her starboard bow, some as close as twenty meters away.
Sandtusker keyed his mic to fill all of FleetOps combat channels, "Knock off the kriffing AA blasting! We'll take 'em!"
Seven Squadron bore in and registered several initial long distance hits. One of the B-wings, possibly hit by Vyvya's Interceptor, burst into a cloud of fire and debris that quickly burned away before drifting off into the Void. Three of the other bombers turned away to escape with one of them trailing heavy smoke from its engine.
The leader of the bomber flight however had been struck several times and had smoke trailing from three of its four thrusters as he continued to bare on the Slash. Perhaps its Solar pilot judged that his B-wing had been mortally wounded and could not make the flight back to Ro-loo. Strikeout feared that the enemy was determined to make a suicide crash attack on the Star Destroyer.
The damaged B-wing approached from below the stern, much in the same way that a friendly TIE would approach for a normal landing. A lone turret on the underside of the hull poured an endless stream of anti-air blaster bolts at the incoming B-wing. Admiral Verititas, understanding the enemy's intentions, ordered a reverse turn to starboard with a 90 degree climb. The lone turret kept blasting steadily as other turrets slowly came to life. Strikeout and the rest of Seven Squadron bore in.
Strikeout didn't wait to rely on her targeting computer and instead ripped off an unaimed stream of bolts at the B-wing. The Force must have been on her side that day as her burst smashed through the B-wing's cockpit. The enemy bomber didn't seem to maneuver at all in the last stage of its attack. Its left side S-foil struck a glancing blow off the port side of the Slash's belt armor, ripping it in half and leaving a bright flash of fire and carbon scoring along the side of the warship. Seven Squadron caught up to the wreckage and filled it with more holes to insure the threat was fully extinguished as the Slash pulled away.
Admiral Vertitas shocked each of the Seven Squadron's pilots as his voice came across their private squadron channel. "Back off, Seven. Let that son of a bishwag burn!"
They followed the Admiral's orders and once they were certain there were no more surprise guests they entered the retrieval pattern to return to the Slash. They were one of the last squadrons from the raid to do so.
I survived, Strikeout thought to herself as her TIE snapped back into the launch rails. Palp's ghost, if Father could have seen me out there. Two confirmed kills. She wasn't aware of any other pilot who had scored so well on their first outing.
As the Slash jumped to lightspeed, she had the troubling thought. Now I just have to survive the next one and the next one and probably a few more beyond that. And the enemy isn't going to be sitting on their shebs the next go around. They'll be ready.
How long until my luck runs out? Until the Empire's luck runs out?