Suddenly the next vehicle in his sights was an A-wing. Kell rolled into a loop so hard that it exceeded the power of his inertial compensator and pressed him down in his seat. He had to grunt out his next words: "Is that Blue Squadron?"

"Blue Nine here to save your tail, Wraith Five." The A-wing shot through the s.p.a.ce Kell had just occupied and fired, vaporizing the TIE Interceptor that had been d.o.g.g.i.ng him.

"You know some of these TIEs are friendlies-"

"We know."

Kell finished his loop lined up once again with the heaviest concentration of TIEs. He dove in again, this time on Blue Nine's tail, using rudder to slew to starboard and port, scattering fire in a cone around the A- wing now breaking trail for him.

Admiral Trigit walked at a fast clip toward the cl.u.s.ter of Interceptors remaining in the now cavemously empty TIE hangar. He spoke into his comlink. "Main computer. Verify ident.i.ty by voiceprint. Code omega-one, prepare self-destruct."

"Verify self-destruct."

"Apwar Trigit commands self-destruct."

"Confirmed. Verify timing."

The mechanic on duty opened the access port to Trigit's Interceptor. The admiral climbed in, still talking. "Five minutes from mark. Mark."

"Confirmed. Timer running. Verify resources."

"All remaining power. All weapon systems capacitances. All fuel reserves.

"Confirmed. Self-destruct operational."

The sky brightened behind Face.

He twisted to look. Phanan's X-wing was still tucked in behind and to the starboard of his, but its entire stern was ablaze and burn marks peppered his c.o.c.kpit. The starfighter that had hulled him, an Interceptor with a set of distinctive horizontal red stripes on the upper and lower portions of its wing arrays, was roaring by at an angle. Now well past Face and Phanan, it began looping around for another pa.s.s. "Seven, punch out-"

Phanan did so, firing up and away from his crippled fighter. An instant later, it blew. Face felt debris hammer into his stern. "Wraiths, Seven is EV, repeat, EV. Narra, can you pick him up?"

"If he doesn't land in Night Caller's dust cloud, will do."

A TIE fighter dropped into position behind Face. Face saw his sensor board try to light up with a laser lock. He rolled left and dove toward the gigantic cloud of smoke concealing the corvette's position.

His sensors showed a clear laser lock. Then the red dot of his pursuer lost resolution and disappeared. "Who did that?"

"You owe a drink to Rogue Two, son."

"Drink, h.e.l.l, I'll buy you a distillery!"

The dozen blue dots of Rogue Squadron lit up the sensors, and suddenly the odds against the Wraiths didn't seem quite as deadly.

Lieutenant Gara Petothel, her shoulders set with anger, recorded two quick messages on her comm console, then took the next turbolift up.

She exited at the deck of officers' quarters, picked up a sealed package from her small room, and took another lift to the level where the admiral kept his chambers.

Those doors were unguarded. No surprise; Trigit would have taken his favorite bodyguards to be his escort pilots. Gara told the doors, "Emergency override zero seven nine seven Petothel."

The doors slid open.

She entered, shut them behind her, and quickly peeled out of her uniform and undergarments. Let Trigit remember me as a willing sacrifice, she thought. Let him regret an affair he wanted but never had time for. Let him think whatever he wants. He'll he dead in ten minutes.

How dare he? Thirty-seven thousand men and women.

Angry, she pulled off her black wig. It was the color her hair used to be, at the length she wore it when she entered service with the New Republic fleet and then joined the Implacable's crew, but now her real hair was much shorter, a downy blond. She threw the wig atop her clothes.

She tugged at the mole on her cheek. It came free. There had once been a mole there, a real one, but she'd had it removed by a Rebel ship's doctor and replaced it with an item of makeup. She tossed it onto the pile.

Now, the container. She opened it to reveal clothes-if you could call them that. Lingerie, sheer stuff made from Loveti moth fiber, the garment would have cost her six months pay had she not stolen it.

She put it on. Beneath it in the case were datacards, her choices for a new ident.i.ty. Beneath them, a makeup case; she'd use it once she was in the pod.

Beside the makeup case was an injector unit already filled with an illicit substance. She picked it up, hesitated. It was a necessary part of the deception. She just had to make sure she was clearheaded enough, in spite of the drugs, to finish what she was doing here. She jabbed herself with the unit, felt the flow of alien fluids into her vein.

Before the drugs took hold, she spoke aloud, a variation on the code that had given her access to this chamber.

A portion of one wall slid aside. Beyond was the access to Trigit's personal escape pod. The one neither she nor anyone else but Trigit was supposed to know about.

She ignored the feeling that swept through her, the sensation of drifting, long enough to grab up her identicards and makeup case and stagger into the pod.

Had Wedge's vision not been obscured by the dust cloud he was maintaining, he would have seen the tiny flight of three Interceptors leave Implacable's launch bay and angle away from the crippled Star Destroyer.

The Wraiths, Blues, and Rogues battling for their lives against a numerically superior force also paid the flight no attention. Those Interceptors weren't entering the fight. They'd be dealt with later.

Gara Petothel's voice came across Implacable's intercom. "Attention, crew. Implacable is losing power and will crash in five minutes or less.

Abandon ship."

All over the Star Destroyer, officers and crewmen looked at one another.

Only the ship's commander was authorized to issue such an order. But the chain of command could be breaking down just as the ship's systems were.

Crew members began racing toward the escape pod accesses. Only the most loyal, the most foolhardy, remained behind at gunnery positions.

Kell completed his third pa.s.s through the TIEs, alone this time-Blue Nine was off again with her wingman, Blue Ten. There were fewer of the TIEs this time around. Much of that was Rogue Squadron's fault; he'd never seen such coordinated skill, such squadron-wide competence in dogfighting, as the Rogues had demonstrated while eating away at the TIE fighters' numbers. But the odds were still bad and he knew his luck could not continue to hold.

It didn't. He heard Runt's voice, "Five, roll out-"

He snapped up on his starboard wing, but the crossfire from an oncoming TIE Interceptor, a gray craft sporting rakish red stripes on the outer surfaces of its wings, struck him with casual accuracy. The first laser blast battered at his stern shields; the second penetrated, burning its way into his fuselage behind his R2 unit.

His flight stick locked up and his control board went dead. All electronics gone... he swore to himself as he began a slow, graceful plunge toward the moon below. The interceptor pilot waggled his wings, then rose toward a distant cl.u.s.ter of A-wings.

Kell opened the panel to his left and hit the b.u.t.ton for a cold start.

Nothing happened.

By his best guess, he had about thirty seconds until impact. Thirty seconds to get an inoperable X-wing started... a.s.suming it could be.

And he couldn't partic.i.p.ate in the start-up. Only Thirteen, his R2 unit, could reach the damage.

He switched on his helmet comlink, heard the hiss indicating that the interference from the relay dish was still in effect, heard fuzzy voices of the pilots involved in the fight. With his left heel, he yanked at a small, innocuous tab extending from the c.o.c.kpit hull by his foot.

"Thirteen, can you hear me?"

The astromech responded with a whistle.

"Can you get at the damage? Can you bring us on-line?"

Thirteen's next whistle was a low, mournful one.

Kell's tub popped out a short metallic bar. With his foot, he began pumping it, manually generating the current necessary for an emergency deployment of his landing gear. "Are you sure? Not even one engine?"

Thirteen's answer was the same, a sad trill.

Kell heard the landing gear pop open and into place. But there was no power-up of the repulsorlift landing engine, not even its emergency backup power. "Repulsorlifts?"

Again, the low tones of a negative answer.

"Wraith Five to Narra. Can you get me? Repeat, Five going down. Can you grab me?"

No answer. Kell's helmet comlink didn't have the range of his fighter's comm unit, didn't have enough power to pierce the interference from the dish.

Kell counted the seconds as the ground came closer and felt a heaviness settle on his chest. He turned to look through his aft viewport at his astromech; the R2 unit regarded him steadily. "I'm going to go now, Thirteen. Thanks for everything."

A trill of good-bye. Then Kell faced forward and yanked the handle for his ejection seat.

The explosive bolts in his canopy blew, sending it up ahead of him, and the thruster under his seat fired off. He felt a blow to his rear as he was launched up and away, momentarily defying the moon's weak gravity.

The pressure sensor in his suit registered the sudden drop in atmosphere and activated the small personal magcon field that would protect his body from vacuum exposure.

He watched his fighter speed away ahead, locked in its fatal descent.

He felt almost as though he were losing a fellow pilot. He'd never known, no one seemed to know, just how alive droids were, just how much of their behavior was programming and how much was true personality.

His X-wing hit the far lip of an impact crater and instantly became flattened garbage and flying shrapnel. It did not explode.

Coldness gripped at Kell as his body heat fled his inadequately insulated pilot's suit and the magnetic containment field around it. But for the long moments while he still rose on that rocket thrust, he had an incredible vista of the flaring lasers and bright explosions of the fighter battle before him, of the battle-scarred Star Destroyer beyond.

Wedge's sensors officer said, "Implacable's silhouette is expanding."

Wedge gave the officer a puzzled look. "How again?"

"She's falling, sir."

"Sithspit! Tell Wraiths Three and Four to get out of there." Wedge pulled back on the control yoke, leaning Night Caller over at a steep backward angle that, if it continued, would result in the corvette's crash. "Cut the tractor, now."

A moment later Night Caller lurched upward, accelerating smoothly but slowly at an angle that would carry it out from under the Star Destroyer.

"Drop all shields. Put everything into thruster power."

"Yes, sir!"

The corvette's rate of speed increased.

So did Implacable's rate of descent.

Grinder's last proton torpedo vaporized more ma.s.s of the Star Destroyer's increasingly widening power center.

The illumination from that blast also showed Falynn something else.

"She's dropping!" Falynn inverted her TIE fighter, goosed the thrusters-but before she could dive something hit her from the rear. Her ion engines fired, but the thrust merely made her swing to starboard, then back again, and to starboard once more.

She swore. Her starboard solar wing array was hung up on something flexible. "Grinder, get out of here."

"Not without you."

"You moron, if you don't get clear of the way out, I can't get out. Go!"

She watched as, dozens of meters below, the silhouette of Grinder's X-wing rotated, then its thrusters lit off, pushing the snubfighter down toward the way out.

She waited until she was lined up again with the hole in the keel, then she brought her engine thrust up to full power.

She swung to starboard, hit a bulkhead hard, and swung back again.

This time, her front viewport was starred with cracks.

As Grinder shot through the hole, his starboard laser cannon clipped a piece of wreckage. His X-wing tumbled, uncontrolled, as it exited.

The Bothan struggled with his stick and brought his fighter back in line.

The instant he was back in control, one of Implacable's turbolaser blasts washed across him, engulfing him cleanly.

When the beam faded, Grinder was gone.

Janson saw Implacable's blast hit Wraith Four.

Janson climbed, firing. His first shot pinged the turbo-laser turret. It rotated to target him - And Piggy's shot punctured it, the Gamorrean's linked blast hulling the turret. The emplacement went still, its lights '

dead.

Janson sent his X-wing into a tight, irregular circle around the hole in Implacable's keel. "Gray Two, this is Gray Three. Do you read?"

"I'm here."

"Get out of there. Implacable is falling."