Марта Уэллс - From a Certain Point of View

Acceleration pressed him back into the pilot’s seat, briefly dimming his vision as his X-wing shot forward. He kept his hand steady on the control yoke, knowing his body would adjust and the disorientation would pass. Kott’s and Darpen’s X-wings hurtled along behind his.

R5-G8 shrilled an alert—a minute to target.

Wedge’s eyes flicked to his sensors. The pirate mothership was definitely some kind of modified freighter. His lasers would take it apart—provided it didn’t have a course locked in that allowed it to make a quick jump to hyperspace.

“Commander, incoming,” Darpen warned, and a moment later Wedge’s X-wing was kicked sideways by an impact. Two starfighters streaked past in front of him, R5-G8 squealed in indignation, and red lights lit up across the console.

“Arfive, patch the starboard deflectors,” he ordered.

Thirty seconds to target.

Darpen had barrel-rolled his X-wing to chase down one of the fighters, but where was the other one?

An alarm wailed—it was behind him, in the kill zone.

Wedge juked the X-wing left, right, and then left again, lasers sizzling past his cockpit.

“Sila?”

“On it, Commander,” Kott said, but her voice quavered.

Wedge kept dodging and weaving, but he had to stick close to his trajectory or risk missing his shot at the freighter. Another hit rattled his starfighter.

Ten seconds.

“Sila! Take the shot!”

Five seconds.

Wedge forced himself to keep the X-wing steady. The starfighter’s sensors blared a warning—his pursuer had a lock. Wedge felt the hair rise on the back of his neck.

His targeting computer flashed red and he mashed down the trigger, sending bolts of destructive energy hurtling toward the pirate mothership. At the same moment his X-wing bucked and he heard a roar in his ears.

Then all was still.

Was he dead? He closed his eyes experimentally. It felt about the same.

“Great shooting, Red Leader,” said Janson. “You too, Kott.”

Wedge opened his eyes and saw nothing but stars ahead of him. His targeting indicator blinked—the freighter had been destroyed.

“Still with us, Commander?” asked Kott.

“Thanks to you,” Wedge said, then switched to a private channel. “You all right, Sila?”

“No,” Kott said. “But I will be.”

Which struck Wedge as both halves of the right answer.

—

Nine X-wings returned to Home One. The Contessa was waiting in the hangar, next to the chancellor. When the pilots recognized the slim figure in white, they stopped chattering and got into line, without Wedge or Janson having to give an order.

“We will mourn those we’ve lost,” said Mothma. “I will always be grateful to them for their sacrifice, as I will always be grateful to you. Your bravery has given us something precious in wartime—time. To gather those who have yet to find us. To recoup our strength. And to ensure that those we’ve lost will not have died in vain.”

Mothma walked among the pilots, taking a moment with each of them. She spoke quietly with Kott, who listened intently and then nodded repeatedly, and reached Wedge and Janson last.

“You and your pilots have done far more than anyone could have fairly asked of you. Thank you. And now please get some rest.”

Wedge had been trying to think of something to say, but found himself too tired to form words. Janson had no such difficulties, though.

“In addition to my other talents, Double…um…ma’am, I am a highly decorated napper,” he said. “Maybe you could drop us off at a beach planet for the next month or so?”

“I’d like nothing more,” Mothma said, while the Contessa made a face at Wedge. “But I’m afraid the Alliance will have to give you a raincheck. Because I suspect we’ll need your squadron sooner than that.”

She smiled and moved off alongside the Contessa.

“Highly decorated napper?” Wedge asked Janson. “Really?”

“Just making conversation.”

“Making a mess, you mean. Wait, shh.”

Mothma had bent her head close to the Contessa’s, and Wedge was able to just catch the end of her question.

“…but why do they both smell like they’ve been in a barnyard?”

The Contessa offered a whispered explanation, and the Alliance leader looked at her curiously. Mothma shook her head, sighed, and then Wedge saw her smile.

“Pilots,” she said, and Wedge wondered if that was admiration or exasperation in her voice.

He suspected it was a little bit of both.

THE FINAL ORDERSeth Dickinson

“In time of peace, the Imperial Star Destroyer will disburse the Emperor’s peace and justice, and by its presence deter disorder, both material and ideological.”

His new XO paused here for breath. Captain Canonhaus wondered if they’d trained her when to breathe on Carida. You may take the initiative, Cadet Tian; you may even take unscheduled breaths. The Imperial Naval Academy on Carida produced superb officers, officers like Kendal Ozzel, who had taken the initiative and would never again take a breath, scheduled or otherwise.

Certainly Tian was also superb. She had excellent marks, except in Tabor Seitaron’s history class. Seitaron always downgraded students who missed his hints about what had really happened. No special insight, he’d written on Canonhaus’s own file, when he was Canonhaus’s captain. Officer must seek this insight through experience. Fine, old man, give us poor marks for regurgitating official history—but COMPNOR will give us good ones. The Commission for the Preservation of the New Order approves of those who know the official truth.

Look what had happened to Seitaron, after all. Disappeared. Proscribed.

Her name was Tian Karmiya, Commander Tian to him, and with her prime marks from Carida and her fine service on Enigma and Victory at Batonn, she must have expected to serve under Commodore Rae Sloane here on the Ultimatum. But Sloane was indisposed. So Canonhaus had received Ultimatum, and this bright young plaque of New Order excellence as his XO.

She was calm, cheerful, occasionally quite droll at the captain’s table. “An officer’s love life,” she would say, “operates under the same rules as old religions: two sides, and they must never meet.” When he laughed at her quips, Canonhaus felt his dry scabs crack, and some of the old blood, the old love for the work, welled up to stain his thoughts.

Bad luck for both of them.

Full of breath, Tian now said:

“In time of war the Imperial Star Destroyer will seek out the enemy’s principal force and close, by means of superior speed and protection, to destroy the enemy with massed fighter strikes and the fires of the main battery; and, if the enemy is planetbound, by the deployment of the embarked legion.”

“Very good. And in which element of the doctrine are we now engaged?”

She sometimes had a sly way of looking, this Tian. Just a little flash of teeth. “Pursuing an escaped transport falls under disbursing peace and justice and deterring disorder.”

“The Emperor’s peace and justice, Commander.”

“Yes, sir. It goes without saying, sir. As there is no other source of true peace or justice.”

They stood side by side, hands clasped at their backs, before the incredible panorama of Ultimatum ’s bridge. Ahead, the endless chaotic detonation, the swarming scatter of the Hoth system’s fragmentation-cascade asteroid field. They had sent fighters in after an escaping rebel ship. None had returned.

“And the need to pursue one small transport with all our forces, rather than attempting to vector the other rebels?”

“As we said on Iloh, better to catch the fish at hand than to cast at shadows, sir.”