Sublight Drive (Star Wars)

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…

There is no peace found in heaven. In an age of warring states, the CORE and the RIM fight amongst themselves, and against each other. They have split the starry sky in twain in their unending crusade, by the largest battlefield the galaxy has ever known.

For over a hundred-thousand light-years, the border of the Confederacy of Independent Systems carves creation between Core and Rim; from the corporate vaultworlds of the New Territories, to the untamed expanse of the Western Reaches; there is only war.

For over twenty years, an endless tithe of lives, steel, and tibanna have been fed into a furnace kept burning only for the warmth of its flames. An entire generation has lived, fought, and died–with blasterfire for mother’s milk, the thunder of artillery for lullabies, the howl of sublight drives for eulogies, and silent tombworlds for gravestones.

For this reason, this battlefield, this border, this furnace, has come to be known as…

THE FIRMAMENT FRONTLINE

It is a line of black powder drawn across a garden of sand, tended with great care to smoulder and simmer, but never quite catch. The littlest sparks, however, can create wildfires. They find the line and take hold, and where they do, the powder burns in great roaring conflagrations that consume everything within reach. When at last the fires exhaust themselves, the gardeners return to the ash, and redraw the line again.

Hundreds of these little sparks appear upon the line at all times, and most of them never take hold. Those that do, however, those that have ignited wars to redraw the line, are known as flashpoints.

This spark began with a murder.

The esteemed Senator from Umbara, Mee Deechi, found dead at his desk, in his own office, in the most secure building in the capital of the galaxy. Every soul inside the Senate Building on Coruscant had been thoroughly vetted, but no alarms had been tripped, no transparisteel windows had been shattered, and no doors had been opened. The camera feeds showed Mee Deechi walking his corridor, entering his office, and never coming back out.

It was as if a ghost had reached through the centre of the galaxy and seized his heart.

The Loyalists were quick to blame the Restorationists for the assassination of the Senator from Umbara, by virtue of Umbara’s close proximity to Alliance lines. The Restorationists responded by blaming the Separatists, who would profit most from another war in the Interior. The Separatists, for its part, condemned the accusation as irresponsible, and turned its criticism on the Loyalists for the poor security that had allowed for the murder of a senator in the first place.

On Umbara itself, the planetary capital had already begun to come apart.

The Umbaran Rootai–the planet's ruling council–fractured along factional lines within hours of the news breaking. With the Loyalist-aligned Deechi dead, Umbaran Separatists moved to seize the capital, only to be thrown back by a hastily assembled coalition of Loyalist and Restorationist factions. As the Separatists fled into the countryside, the coalition, with its purpose spent, promptly turned on itself. Public order in the capital collapsed, with fighting in government halls and in the streets all the same.

Umbaran Separatists called on the Confederacy to restore order. The Loyalists called on the Republic in response, as did the Restorationists called on the Alliance.

Umbara’s location made sure that these calls were answered. It sat deep within the Ghost Nebula, on the Great Kashyyyk Branch hyperlane, at the intersection of three powers' spheres of influence; a world that whoever held it could use to project force towards the Arrowhead, the Slice, and the Northern Core, all at once. Furthermore, the world was a prime exporter of doonium–starship steel. Its strategic value was not a matter of debate. Within days, all three fleets had broken from their moorings and set course for the same system from three different directions.

The Confederate 23rd Assault Fleet under Rear Admiral Etahn A'baht arrived first, extracting at the border of the Umbaran Star System. During the week-long sublight burn toward the planet, however, did the Restorationists and Loyalists arrive on the opposite side of the system.

Fortunately for Admiral A’baht however; the Restorationist First Battle Group under Line Admiral Firmus Nantz, and the Loyalist Task Force Demolisher under Vice Admiral Terrinald Screed, extracted from hyperspace within range of each other.

While Nantz and Screed conducted a fighting race towards Umbara, A'baht's ships completed their burn unmolested, and Confederate boots touched Umbaran soil before any other power could contest the landing.

But he would not enjoy his orbital superiority for long. Within days, a three-way battle in orbit had begun. With none of the three admirals willing to concede, reinforcements were subsequently called in, wherein a snowball effect would take place, with the already deployed reinforcements calling for even more reinforcements to be sent in.

The murder of one man was but a mere spark. But when the flames are fanned, even a mere spark can erupt into an inferno. Flashpoint Umbara was a fire at the centre of the galaxy, an all-devouring furnace which burned through lives, steel, and tibanna from every corner of heaven. From the murder of one man, into the largest fleet engagement since five-thousand warships fought tooth and nail at the Battle of Columex twenty-three years ago, from which there could only be one winner.

Last. Man. Standing.

UMBARAN CIVIL WAR

DAY 233

Umbara is known as the Shadow World, for it is said that the light of its sun never truly reaches its surface.

But mankind has a way of defying nature. For the first time in its millennia-long history, Umbarans could look up to their crepuscular sky and see the first rays of light beaming down through the cloud cover. They could look up from the towers of their skyscrapers, through the canopies of their overgrown, bioluminescent jungles, and think it beautiful. For the first time, they could catch glimpses of their own heaven from earth.

But it was not sunlight.

It was war.

“Corona Squadron, this the Boss. Skiamachia Wing Commander reports FST contact; bandits, dead ahead. A full fleet division of HLAFs. At least a hundred-thousand. They’re sending everything they have.”

Heavy/Light Attack Fighter 500. The workhorse of the Restorationist starfighter corps. Their version of the Separatist Drexl-class. They should be more or less evenly matched, but today, the Confederate Drexls had been outfitted with heavy proton torpedoes instead of their usual complement of anti-fighter missiles.

Not only that, but they were terribly outnumbered. The 23rd Fleet LAC Division mustered up every last flying pilot it had for this critical operation, and could yet field sixty-thousand battered and tired Drexls and B-wings.

A beat of static. Then Bluebird, almost conversationally; “Well. That's not ideal. Were they supposed to know we were coming?”

“You know the hop. Our only mission is to get in, blow those daggers to hell, and get out,” the Boss said, “That being said–fangs out!”

War is at one moment dark, the next full–full of crossing cannon fire and the strobing flash of detonating warheads and the ghosts of ships that were there a second ago and aren't anymore. War is the galvanized particle beam crossing your canopy at point-blank range and your cockpit ringing like a cracked bell, every instrument needle swinging wild for a half-second while your hands shunt the stick sideways. War is the sphere of space immediately around your starfighter, and everything in that sphere is trying to kill you, and the only thing that matters is the next half-second of your life.

They came out of the dark at a closing speed that left no room for anything except for his body's base instincts.

“Tally, tally!” Rette yelled, “Eight, ten– no, twelve bandits, two o'clock high!”

“That’s our pick, eh?”

“Break into them!” Missus called, “Don't let them have their angles!”

The two starfighter formations hit each other and the engagement shattered into a hundred-thousand individual fights, stretched out across a hundred-thousand miles of space.

Broadcast hauled his bird as a pair of sapphire bolts slashed across his nose close enough to throw shadows across the cockpit instruments. He frowned severely; his bird was responding slightly more sluggishly due to the added mass, but even an added degree to turning radius could mean life or death in a dogfight.

“Rette!”

“I see him, I see him–!” he could see Rette craning her head above and around through his rearview mirror, “–BREAK RIGHT!”

War is when the stars are screaming cannon bolts, the spiral arms are missile trails winding through the black in long spiral arcs that went on into eternity, when the planets are warships pounding each other into oblivion, when the asteroid ring was an endless field of drifting durasteel grey, and the nebulae were enormous clouds of micro-debris and frozen atmosphere and things that had, minutes and hours and days before, been people, formed by great blinding flares of miniature-star reactors gone supernova.

“Corona Six is hit!”

“Six, do you–”

“I'm good, I'm– shit! No, I'm not! Left engine's gone, I'm losing–!"

War is the sick lurch of your stomach when a voice on the squadron frequency cuts off mid-sentence and doesn't come back.

“I just saw Eleven get vaped!” Bluebird swore, “Where the hell are our Vultures!?”

“Two Flight, stay on me!” Missus ordered, “The enemy fleet is right ahead of us!”

War is the boot-sole shock of a proximity fuse detonating right below your feet, separated by only a flimsy sheet of metal and an invisible deflector shield. War is the way your eyes go automatically to where your friend once was in your peripheral, and find only empty space. War is the way you swallow the realisation that you will never train and eat and play and laugh and bicker with them again.

“Broadcast, he’s on us! Kriff, he’s right on us!”

A HLAF crossed Corona Three’s zero angle and he was already jinking before Rette called it, the Drexl groaning under the break, the gravwall pressing him down into his seat like a physical hand.

“He's staying with us,” Rette said, “He’s good–!”

“Chaser, you still with me?”

“Right here, Three. I’m lining up a shot–shit, DEFEND!”

Broadcast kicked his Drexl into a screaming, diving spin.

“CHASER!” Rette screamed, her fist punched against the chaff and flares.

The RWR cut off. The HLAF disappeared from the scopes without a sound. Corona Four ripped through the puff of smoke and glittering shards where it once was.

“Splash a bandit,” Chaser breathed heavily, “You're welcome.”

This is war. And war is the desperation and terror and the stomach-churning certainty that the whole galaxy is out to kill you. On the Firmament Frontline, the galaxy is at war, and the average life expectancy of a Confederate starfighter pilot was eleven to fifteen sorties.

CLACC, 23RD FLEET LAC DIVISION, SKIAMACHIA 1ST VOID WING, CORONA SQUADRON

CORONA THREE, BROADCAST

SORTIE 29

“HLAFs are breaking off,” Chaser observed, “They– they’re disengaging?”

Broadcast watched the contacts bleed off his scope one by one, the HLAF formations pulling back and regrouping at the edge of his EPR’s range, like fish receding at the sense of an incoming predator. His thumb gravitated towards the trigger out of instinct, but he resisted the impulse to waste an entire anti-ship torpedo on mere birds.

“Corona Flight,” the Boss’ voice was unchanged, the same room temperature tone, which meant either everything was fine or everything was not fine and he'd decided it wasn't worth conveying, “The Division Major reports that our forward carriers are in range. Expect droid escorts. Get your heads in the cockpit and your eyes on your scopes. Is everybody still with me?”

A chorus of callsigns answered. Broadcast counted them. Corona Two, Corona Three, Four, and Five… and an awkward silence where Corona Six should have been. Corona Eleven was gone too, he knew. Corona Seven reported a gripe on his port beam microthruster. Corona Eight was fine. Corona Nine… didn’t respond.

“Where’s Nine?” Bluebird asked, “Corona Ten? Where’s your wingman?”

“...I lost him somewhere in the fight.”

“Anyone have eyes on Nine?” blank static replied to the Boss’ question, “Ten, Twelve?”

“...Present. Sorry.”

“All dandy. Can’t say the same for my lead, though.”

“Corona One Flight reports nine birds accounted for, three down,” the Boss summarised, “No ejections observed.”

“Two Flight reports two birds down,” Corona Thirteen, Missus said, “One ejection observed.”

“Three Flight lost four,” Corona Twenty-Five grumbled, “One ejection observed.”

“Wing Commander says they’ll get search and rescue on them,” the Boss answered, “One Flight, form up on me and meet her at five-hundred gravs.”

Across the entire line, the fleet LAC division lines were regrouping, an enormous slow choreography of tens upon tens of thousands of starfighters splitting and converging into their individual delta-shaped formations. And across the entire division, similar accounting was happening at every level. The numbers came up in fragments; squadron by squadron, wing by wing.

“What does it look like, Boss?” Bluebird asked.

“Not great, not terrible,” the Boss said flatly, “Enough of us remain to complete the hop.”

“We ain’t squeamish, Boss,” Chaser prodded.

“The Major counts twelve-thousand out of action. At least–”

“–Broadcast,” Rette’s high-pitched voice filled his comms, “The DER’s reading new sigs. Sickles, and a whole lot of them. Too many for me to count.”

“Boss,” Broadcast toggled the switch, “Rette’s seeing Sickles. Can someone confirm?”

“...I gotta polish my scopes,” Missus mumbled, “How can you see that at this range?”

“–Skiamachia Wing Commander confirms,” the Boss returned to the frequency with dread news, “Twenty-thousand at least, dead ahead, range two-mil klicks and closing.”

“Aw, kriff.”

“Where are our escorts?”

“We gotta slow down!”

“Maintain speed and heading, Flight Three.”

Broadcast kept his nose on the target and kept flying. But even he couldn’t help but feel acutely the sweat breeding between his palm and the centrestick.

Sickles. That’s what they call the ARX-T3 Suncutter light interceptor. The most dangerous starfighter in the galaxy. Koensayr Manufacturing’s–the same corporation that designed the Y-wing–answer to the Loyalist X-wing and Separatist TIE Vulture. Shaped like an unbroken crescent moon, with an in-line ion turbine engine right beneath the cockpit where the forward-swept wings met; it outran, outgunned, and outarmoured just about every other starfighter in the galaxy.

And that wasn’t mentioning the rumours that every Sickle was flown by an ace pilot.

The Sickles came on fast and kept getting faster, their drive signatures climbing on Rette's DER until she could begin to pick out each individual one. Broadcast watched their intercept closing on his HUD, and the HLAFs forming up behind their spearhead, and–their velocity, his velocity, the time to intercept–came to the conclusion they would all be dead in approximately ten minutes.

Maybe in an unladen Drexl, he could hope to survive, but with his current payload?

“Boss,” Bluebird’s tone was rising towards the end.

“Maintain heading,” the Boss replied.

“They’re going to reach us before–”

“Maintain heading, Two.”

Nine minutes. Eight minutes. Broadcast peered to his left, and then to his right, and saw the stars flying in formation. Seven minutes. The Alliance LACs were fanning out, into an intercept arc wide and sweeping, like a fisherman casting his net. Driven onwards by the stars flying by his side, Broadcast looked at it on his scope and felt the cold clarity of resolve, to keep flying onwards and see what happens. It was all in the hands of the stars.

Six minutes. Five.

“Boss!” even Chaser sounded alarmed now.

“I can see them, Four,” the Boss sounded almost annoyed in comparison, as if Chaser was pointing out the obvious.

Four minutes. Three.

Broadcast didn’t need his scopes anymore–he could see those rival stars approaching with his own two eyes, streaking like comets through the void. He could see their ion blue tails, and the glint on their fangs.

Two minutes. One–

They came from above and behind and to both flanks simultaneously, emerging from behind them, their TIE drives screaming across every electromagnetic band on Rette's full-spectrum transceiver in a signature so dense it briefly saturated the display. They came in waves, each one cresting behind the last and breaking forward, fifty-thousand droids riding drives that had never been constrained by what flesh and blood could survive.

“Oh kriff!” Bluebird cried, “Here they come!”

The Sickles and Vultures met ahead of them, and the result was not a collision. They merged into each other, melding into a one great revolting mass of streaking missile trails and flashes of explosive light.

“Corona Squadron, on me!” Corona One flipped into a dive just before they flew into the melee, and Broadcast had but a split second to snap his jaw shut and follow him down.

“Damn.” Rette whistled, free to crane her neck at the free-for-all blooming above them.

The TIE Vultures he had flown against in the past had been performing at parameters calibrated for training. What was happening above him now had no calibration and no restraint. The Vultures were flying at the absolute ceiling of what their airframes and their drives and their processing could produce, and the result was something that the word flying was not quite adequate to describe.

They did not quite maneuver. It's more as if they translated from position to position, vector to vector, with the instantaneous commitment of things that had no instinct for self-preservation for second-guessing. A Vulture in combat did not weigh its options. It did not hesitate at the edge of the firing envelope. It ran the numbers, and then it was there, and the interval between those two states was short enough to be practically nonexistent.

And the Alliance Suncutters—

Broadcast found himself leaning forward against his harness without meaning to.

The Suncutters were keeping up.

The airframes they flew in were one thing, he knew, but so were the pilots. They were responding, making choices fast enough and well enough that the engagement was more even than it had any right being. A Vulture would commit to a firing solution and a Suncutter would not be where the solution expected it to be, because the pilot already knew what Vulture would do and had already decided on a response. They were losing, twenty against fifty-thousand made that inevitable, but as the HLAFs poured into the scrimmage, the outcome of the fight grew more precarious than he would like.

“Mark your chronos,” the Boss’s voice pulled him back to the hop, “Fourty-five minutes.”

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

“Forty-five minutes,” Rette muttered, “Mark.”

Broadcast whistled out a slow, long breath. The Vultures were holding the attack corridor open with little over forty minutes worth of fuel remaining, buying time for their attack fighters to reach their targets, and return.

They come out of the furball and into clear dark, and their target resolved itself on the scopes. A gas giant suspended in space, blue-green and vast, the surface swirling with distant storms, its rings catching the distant light of Umbara Prime in thin, pale arcs.

Before it, the Alliance fleet may as well have been a wall on the FST. The Alliance’s First Battle Group in all of its steel glory, a constructed horizon of IFF contacts, stretching from the top of his canopy to the bottom, and in both lateral directions until it went beyond his peripheral vision.

“By Caraya’s soul!” Chaser laughed, “They’re really going all out for this!”

Data from fleet flagship Intrepid suggested the Restorationists were mustering ships and troops in the outer system in order to mount a renewed assault on Admiral Etain A’baht’s blockade around Umbara. Broadcast identified Venators with empty hangars, legions of Gladiators and Victory-IIs, and a single massive, overbearing Secutor-class Star Destroyers in the centre of the formation. It was the shape of a half-sphere, like a dome protruding out of the surface of the gas giant, and within the dome…

“Eyes on,” Rette hissed, and the IFF boxes reorganised–a number of them sprouting arrows and bolder borders, “There are at least two-hundred Acclamator-class troopships. Probably more.”

“That number’s wrong,” Broadcast frowned.

“Somebody on the Intrepid can’t count!” Missus complained.

The fleet flagship Intrepid had the estimate at two million Alliance soldiers waiting to hit Umbaran soil. Enough to turn the surface war around. It was an existential threat to their war effort on Umbara. A pre-emptive raid was all but necessary, but with the Loyalist fleet posturing on the other side of the system, Admiral A’baht didn’t dare weaken his fleet strength in order to hunt down the First Battle Group. His plan was as such thus; first create a limited fleet action against the Loyalist Task Force Demolisher in order to distract them. Simultaneously–have every jump-capable attack fighter available launch themselves across the star system at the First Battle Group with one goal in mind: destroy those troop transports.

“I know,” Rette replied, “This is closer to three.”

“Corona Squadron, confirm target assignment,” the Boss ordered, “Acclamator-class Harilin, bearing oh-two-niner relative. All elements readback.”

The confirmations came across the frequency in sequence, twenty-seven callsigns spread across three flight deltas.

Broadcast looked at the Harilin on his scope. At eight-hundred meters, it was not the largest thing in the fleet, not even close–but it sat in a position in the Restorationist formation between and behind the envelopes of two flanking Gladiators. He could see the shape of it on the Sightline, Rette having resolved it from a contact into an actual rendered hull: broad, blunt-prowed, the characteristic dagger-profile of a Star Destroyer, painted in the calm blue of the Alliance First Fleet Group.

“Shame,” Bluebird crackled over the comms, “I wanted the Secutor.”

“In another life, Two,” the Boss said, “Three Flight, go annoy those Gladiators. Two Flight, dive now; you will have the ventral approach. One Flight, stay on me; I want to see the captain’s face. Let’s go earn our pay.”

“Alright,” Rette huffed, digging herself into her seat, “Here’s the fun part.”

Broadcast grinned until his teeth were clenched tight. Here was the fun part.

Three Flight’s eight Drexls immediately banked hard to starboard in the corner of his eye, going wide to engage the Gladiator-class Star Destroyers, and then they were gone from his canopy and he was following Corona One into the gap between the two frigates and the whole world became light and noise.

The Alliance fleet’s point defense came at them like a wall of fire. As soon as the first fighter entered its collective effective range, it was as if the entire planetary ring erupted at once; interlocking fields of laser fire from the close-in turrets, punctuated by the slower, heavier thumping of fragmentation missiles coming off their racks in continuous ripple salvos. Corona Three’s HUD came alive with warnings, the RWR going ballistic with manic bleating.

Rette caught her panel and screamed at him, “DEFEND!”

Broadcast pulled Corona Three into a steep climb, before flipping and kicking it back into a rolling dive. Left! Right! Throttle forward! Nose down! Reverse thrust–now full! Rette read each burst-pattern spewing out of the Gladiators and directed him into the gaps between them. Despite his best efforts, Corona Three’s deflectors rippled with absorbed hits time and time again. The Drexl moved badly, he felt, with eight heavy torpedoes hanging off its hardpoints, until it was almost as if there was an input delay between him throttling and the thrusters actually executing.

“Break left!”

Broadcast’s hand moved before he even processed the words, instinctually trusting his backseater’s words as he slammed the stick hard to port, rolling left in a frantic maneuver just as the space where he once was detonated. Flames and shrapnel washed over the canopy, ringing the chassis like a tuning fork.

He looked sideways, and saw Corona Five get peeled open the flak.

“Five’s down!” he gritted his teeth, fighting the stick, “Rette–!”

“No ejection!”

“Shit!”

Thirty-seven thousand Drexls and B-wings across the entire ring of the gas giant, flights and squadrons and wings all pressing in toward the Alliance fleet from every available angle, their approach vectors visible as the traces of their engine wash, lit blue-white against the dark. Behind them, the gas giant filled two-thirds of the sky, its blue-green atmosphere banded in slow moving storm systems decorated with fields of rapid fire, stalks of missile-smoke, and starbursts of steel.

Another detonation lit the canopy, this time further away enough to pose no threat. It was an expanding fireball in place of where a Gladiator once was, an exploding reactor sucked in every direction by vacuum until it was swallowed entirely.

“Splash one Gladiator!” came the call from Corona Twenty-Five, “We’re moving over!”

“There are HLAFs on us!” Missus shouted, “Persistent bastards came back around!”

“Can you make it, Thirteen!?” the Boss demanded.

“–Negative, Corona Leader,” Missus replied after a heartbeat, “Two Flight, torps away! We’re breaking off! We’ll cover you, One Flight!”

Proton torpedoes roared away off the racks, their pale-smoke paths sprouting from somewhere beneath his feet, before the fighters once carrying them wheeled back toward the HLAF intercept. They went light and fast in an instant, unburdened, and Broadcast watched them go with a tingling sense of envy.

Eighty torpedoes raced towards the Harilin, and the Acclamator responded with blazing blue point defense. But the torpedoes were far too slow, and launched from too far. Great whips of sapphire flame raked across the void and cut down the slow fishes out of the sky, and those that made it through splashed ineffectually against her deflector shields.

But it wasn’t completely useless. With one Gladiator gone, and the Harilin’s point defense preoccupied–

“One Flight, that’s our opening,” Corona One flipped and rolled onto the approach angle, “On me!”

“Three and Four are with you, Boss,” Chaser said, “Two and–” a burst of static “–what the!?”

“Corona Eight and Ten got kriffing vaped!” Bluebird yelped, her Corona Two suddenly crossing Broadcast’s own bow.

He angled up on the Boss's wing and pointed his nose at the Harilin.

Rette swallowed thickly, “Directing all power to forward shields!”

Perfect timing. The flak thickened as they crossed inside the Harilin’s defensive sphere–rather, the black void of space disappeared the moment they crossed that threshold. One moment, the fire was heavy and dangerous and required continuous active evasion. The next moment, it was everywhere, omnipresent, so dense that the laser light filled the space around his hull in overlapping sheets, and all he could do is trust in the Force that his shields will hold and they’ll make it through.

He lost visual with the rest of One Flight somewhere in the thickest part of it. Bluebird was somewhere to his left, and Chaser somewhere to his right, and the Boss somewhere ahead, but then the curtain of point-defense fire closed between them and they were gone, all all he head was Rette guiding him in on the approach vector.

“Do we have eyes, Rette!?” he shouted.

“I can’t paint in this racket!” she yelled, “We gotta get beneath their angles!”

“Roger!” he gnashed his teeth and pushed his Drexl even steeper into its dive.

A blaring klaxon told him his deflectors gave out, but Broadcast would either see his target on the far side or he wouldn’t. Corona Three shuddered and jumped, sear marks on her fuselage and holes in her wings and her engine cowlings tearing away. But he kept flying, and she kept flying. A Drexl was built like… well, a Drexl, and this was exactly what she was made and armoured for.

And then–the weather cleared. Harilin’s blue-painted hull filled his entire canopy, and he could make out the individual turret barbettes tracking and firing and tracking again. What mattered was that they weren’t tracking him, because they couldn’t depress this low. Broadcast levelled off along the dorsal ridge and ran.

“Painting!” Rette cried.

With one hand kept steady on the stick, Broadcast throttled down before flicking his Sightline into anti-ship mode. The target boxes immediately snap-tracked to identifiable hardpoints, appearing and whizzing past as Corona Three ripped a seam of thruster wash across the length of Harilin’s dorsal ridge. The troopship’s superstructure rose and rose ahead of them, starting with a sloped terrace inclining into the near-vertical bridge tower.

“Come on come on come on!”

“Fish away!” Bluebird whooped. Broadcast snapped his attention to the side in surprise to see Corona Two racing alongside, a percussion fence of fire and black smoke in her wake.

Ahead and above, Corona One and Four were unleashing hell upon the superstructure, sixteen torpedoes racketing off their pylons and straight into the bridge stalk. And just as promised, Corona One even saved one fish just to jam it straight into the base of Harilin’s pilothouse as the Drexl’s climbed up the stalk and swept around as he reached the apex of the climb.

“–Eyes on!” Rette slammed her fist into the console, “Salvo pattern set, we’ve got tone!”

A red targeting box materialised in front of him, right where the superstructure met the hull. Beneath it, somewhere, was the Harilin’s main reactor. He waited until the reticle on the Sightline hovered over the box

Broadcast's thumb found the trigger.

Corona Three bucked eight times in sequence, each torpedo leaving its pylon with a thump and flare that traveled up through the seat and into his spine, the weight of the starfighter changing with each release–lighter, lighter, lighter–until the last one went and the bird seemed to leap with joy beneath him, suddenly and shockingly responsive, the sluggishness of the approach burned away in eight hammer-blows against the Harilin's spine.

“Shit, Broadcast,” Rette screamed, “PULL UP!”

“Oh– kriff!”

He hauled back on the stick and the Drexl answered instantly, climbing hard off the ridge, up and circling around the shattering bridge stalk, until he crested right over the top and all his nose was pointing at was the massive expanse of a gas giant.

The Acclamator's stern lit up behind them.

It began as a series of bright points, small blasts flaring along the underside of the engine section from amidships to the aft, in a line one after another. Then it reached the thrusters and stopped being a series of bright points and became a rolling detonation that started in the hull and worked its way out, each explosion feeding the next, the stern sections coming apart in expanding rings of fuel and fire and venting atmosphere.

“Good hit! Good hit!” Rette pumped a fist, “Splash one troopship!”

Broadcast all but deflated. A weight left him, one not physical but very much as real as the now-absent payload. A sudden, total clarity of mind came upon him. The stick was light in his hands. His Drexl was flying unmolested by cannonfire. The sky ahead of him–if you could call the space above a burning troopship a sky–was clear.

The Harilin was dying beneath him. He could see it on the Sightline and with his own eyes even as he climbed away from it, the hull breaches spreading from beneath the superstructure in all directions, blasting out atmosphere and dropships and walkers and tanks and bodies in the thousands. She was not going to make it to Umbara. Whatever she had been carrying, she was not going to deliver it.

All across the front, it was a painted scene, brushstrokes of white leading into great flowers of a hundred colours–fiery gold, sapphire petals, and every colour of the rainbow–all over a swirling canvas of storms. Confederate starfighters ripped through the Alliance fleet like gnats, hounding down every last one of the troopships, entire wings diving into nets of flak if it meant just getting one kill–and twenty-thousand. If it took every last pilot of the Confederate fleet to kill this invasion force in its crib, then that is the price they were glad to pay.

It almost doesn't matter, he thought just then, whether we make it back.

Three million Alliance soldiers would not land on Umbara today because of what sixty-thousand brave souls had just done across the entire breadth of the Alliance fleet. The Confederate positions on the surface would be free to continue their offensive on the Umbaran capital without worrying about enemy reinforcements. They could still win this war.

It was enough. It was more than enough.

“Folks,” Bluebird's voice, lighter and casual. “Do you know what this means?”

“We're alive,” Missus said, almost incredulous himself.

“This makes twenty-nine. Just one more sortie–” Bluebird said, and Broadcast could hear the grin in it, “–one more hop after this one and we're done. We go home. End of this wild ride”

“Corona Squadron,” the Boss came over the frequency, a heavier breath betraying his tiredness, “Skiamachia Wing Deputy Commander reports mission success. All elements are to regroup and– what’s this?”

Broadcast reached for his comms, “Something’s up, Boss?”

“Are we going for the Secutor after all?” Bluebird chirped, half-sarcastically and half-excitedly.

“–All elements are to extract and RTB ASAP,” the Boss’s voice was grim, “The fleet is under attack.”

He could hear Rette swear, “What the kriff…”

“Under attack!? Is it the Loyalists!?” Chaser demanded, “Did they call the Admiral’s bluff!?”

“They must have,” Missus crackled, “Because the alternative is that they are in bed with the Restorationists.”

“Broadcast,” Rette was knocking on the canopy. He glanced over his shoulder, and saw their starfighters withdrawing en masse, drive trails doubling over themselves ending in blinks of Cronau radiation.

“You have the plot?”

“Do I have–” Rette scoffed, “I always have the plot.”

He didn’t reply to her, thumbing the comms instead, “RTB, roger that, Corona Leader. Permission to jump?”

“Corona Squadron, all elements switch to local drive control. Expect a hot extract. See you all on the other side.”

“Heading two-thirty and depress twelve,” Rette told him, and he pushed his stick forward until his Drexl’s nose dipped slightly, “No contest?”

Broadcast swivelled his head around, searching for anything that might interrupt the jump, “No contest.”

“Roger. Jump to lightspeed in five.”

He moved his hand to the lever, and the stars elongated into lines. The jump back to base seemed somehow smoother and more effortless than the jump to the Alliance fleet. Broadcast knew that sensation was an illusion–there wasn’t any actual physical exertion on his body like with a rough landing–and he wondered about it for a moment or two. Maybe it was because his Rette had been in control of it, and not some invisible operator on Skiamachia’s third bridge syncing a hundred starfighters together.

In any case, there was something peaceful about hyperspace, this tunnel of swirling black and blue. The way the comms cut out, the chatter and the orders and the screams–

“Woah woah woah–” and suddenly Broadcast’s confidence in his backseater came crashing down, “–what the hell is this?”

“Don’t tell me we’re about to have a summer vacation in Umbara Prime, Rette.”

Mistakes made in calculating a hyperspace jump could be fatal, and mistakes made in calculating an in-system micro-jump were doubly as common to make. His co-pilot started scrolling sensor data over his cockpit screen as if it would explain it, but to be honest Broadcast hadn’t brushed up on that gibberish ever since he handed the job to her.

“Uh–,” but he could make out the important bits, “why is Umbara emitting the mass shadow of a star? That’s not right, unless…”

The automatic safety cutout on the hyperdrive kicked in. Corona Three burst through an incandescent white wall and into the orbit of the Shadow World–and directly face-to-face with an angry Lancer-class frigate.

“Oh–shit!” Broadcast threw the stick hard to port and pushed it forward, just as a curtain of laserfire washed over where they once were, “Rette, I need tags!”

“Working on it!”

Work faster! He wanted to scream, but his teeth were as clenched as his asshole as he weaved around the Lancer’s twenty dedicated point-defence quad-laser cannons. He thumbed his weapons switch out of habit, but Corona Three had no torpedoes to spare, and so he could only rely on his laser cannons. But that Lancer was a starfighter devourer, a frigate purpose-built by the Loyalists to support their comparatively weak voidcorps, a frigate built for the sole purpose of swatting Vultures out of the sky.

The only reason Broadcast was not a fine mist in space right now was his Drexl’s deflector shields. The moment he diverted a watt of power away to his cannons–he was a dead man.

“Incoming, Three!”

Broadcast jinked as Chaser dove towards them, his cannons strafing the length of the Lancer’s hull. There was little effect. The frigate’s shields were so tightly hugged to its armoured belt their starfighters couldn’t dive beneath it. It did, however, check the frigate’s lock long enough for him to put some much needed space between it and Corona Three.

Bluebird made her presence known with a shout, “What the hell is going on!? Why are there–”

“Enemy ambush!” Rette cried, sending the IFF tags to his HUD, “We ran straight into a Loyalist picket line!”

That confirmed what Broadcast already knew. They had been pulled out by a Loyalist Interdictor cruiser. Its quartet of gravity well projectors allowed it to create a hyperspace shadow roughly equivalent to that of a fair-sized star. They were useful when you needed to prevent your target from escaping via lightspeed. Put dedicated anti-starfighter frigates in front of them, and you had the perfect grounds for a fynock shoot.

Just then, a second wave of contacts cascaded onto his HUD from the long-range FST. Blue for friendly, red for hostile, and there was a great deal of red, far more red than he'd expected, great sweeping formations of it pressing in from Umbara’s outer moon where the Loyalist fleet had emerged from hyperspace.

The 23rd Assault Fleet, for lack of better words, was fighting for its life. Bulwark-class and Providence-class battlecruisers lit from every quarter by incoming and outgoing fire in approximately equal measure, their point defense systems cycling at maximum rate, laser bolts streaming off their hulls in every direction while the Loyalist Imperators pressed in from every direction. And the X-wings…

By the Force, there were a lot of X-wings.

In the absence of Confederate starfighters, the Loyalist starfighters had the orbital space to themselves, sending proton torpedoes barrelling into Confederate warships with near-total impunity. What few TIE Vultures, Drexls, and droid Tri-fighters that remained were being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of hostile craft. And with the Confederate capital ships forced to split the attention of their batteries between anti-ship and point defense fire, those great doonium Loyalist swordforms were butchering through the Confederate phalanges with ease.

“They planned all of this shit out,” there was a sinking feeling in Broadcast’s gut, the high of their mission success mere minutes earlier falling off a cliff, “Do you think…?”

“That they’re working together? Kriff man, I don’t wanna believe it.”

“Is everyone here? Good, Corona Squadron, form up on my position,” the Boss said, “That makes six One Flight birds and two from Three. We’re going X-wing hunting.”

“Roger that, Corona Leader,” Broadcast rolled toward the Boss’ transponder marker, “Rette, can you find a vector through those Lancers?”

“No joy,” Rette even keyed into the squad comms, “Boss, those Lancers are going to be a problem for the returning wings. They’re sitting right between us and the fleet.”

More and more Lancer-class frigates were pushing in to engage at knife-fighting distance, their dedicated anti-starfighter batteries creating overlapping kill zones that returning Drexls were going to have to cross to reach their fleet. Before long, there were hundreds of Loyalist frigates out there, spread in staggered, overlapping Battle Order Three that stretched for leagues, firing envelopes raising up a wall of light that prevented any of the thousands of extracting Drexls and B-wings from getting home.

Corona Leader’s reply was clipped, “I see them. Anyone got fish?”

“No fish, Corona Leader,” Bluebird answered, “No shot we’re getting through the picket like this. We need to find a B-wing squadron.”

“Fly alongside a Base Osk Three looking for a B-wing?” Chaser hissed, “You’re not a very funny bird.”

“Very well. Thirteen, read me?”

“Loud and clear, Corona Leader,” Missus replied, “Two Flight’s got three birds and a headache.”

“So we’ve got nine birds and no fish,” Chaser paused, “This is going to be a problem. Anyone see the Skiamachia?”

“Not in this mess,” Rette replied.

“How about our Vultures? They’ve got fish.”

Their TIE Vulture escort had been last seen engaging Alliance Suncutters. They should’ve been withdrawing to their nearest forward carrier asset the moment the division was called back. But that took time. Time for them to land, time for the carriers to extract, time for the birds to rearm and refuel.

“I’d give them twenty minutes,” the Boss said.

“I think I can last twenty-minutes.”

“Right,” Broadcast agreed, and was surprised to discover that he was not more frightened than he was. He identified this as either remarkable personal equanimity or the specific dissociation of someone who had been running on empty for long enough that he had run out of fear to give.

He suspected the latter.

There was a silence on the frequency. The brief, collective silence of a formation of pilots who were tired and dry and down to their last rounds, considering what had just been proposed.

The Boss was quiet for one breath, “I’ll run it by… nevermind.”

There was a pop and crackle, and suddenly they were hearing the Boss’ voice on division comms, a mere squad captain being heard by tens of thousands of starfighters, “Twenty-Third Div, this Squadron Captain Arhul Narra. Our fleet, our Admiral, is counting on us beyond this picket.”

Broadcast looked out his canopy at the battle–the Imperators and their walking turbolaser fire, the X-wings still pressing the Confederate formation, the Lancers moving up with eager, bared fangs, and the debris of ships that had been here doing this while he was somewhere else. He looked at all of it and felt, beneath the exhaustion, the same thing he had felt on the parade ground at Jelucan what felt like several lifetimes ago.

The thing that got you somewhere, elsewhere.

“Our Vultures should be on the way, but I would not leave it to chance,” the Captain Arhul Narra continued, “If there are any birds with fish left, or any B-wings with gas to spare, please take point. We are counting on you.”

Rette was already pulling up the combat display, already running the Sightline across the Lancer formation, already doing the dozen things she did before an engagement that he never had to ask for because she was always already doing them. He heard her settle into her seat.

“I’m painting the priority target,” she said. “If we can force it out of the formation, the other two will lose their coordinate spacing.”

“I see it.”

“Chaser, one we drive the target out, you need to–”

“I’m in your head, Rette,” Chaser was winking, Broadcast just knew it, “I’ve gotcha.”

“I’ll take point, Three,” the Boss said.

He rolled Corona Three toward the Lancer formation, and opened the throttle, and the rest of the squadron came with him, nine Drexls in a spreading delta, exhausted and dry and outgunned and flying toward the thing anyway, because their fleet was on the other side.

The electro-photo receptor was already identifying twenty retractable point-defence cannons rising out of the Lancer’s cylindrical hull. Target lock. One was looking right at him. The RWR started screaming.

“Corona Squadron, fangs out!”

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