Solid Ground 

by Katie Zajdel
thumper [a] coronasquadron.com

All characters are mine, but the universe and all its toys belong to Lucasfilm. Also, many, many thanks go out to all the people who have helped me with this story, my characters and writing in general. That list is longer than normal for this story in particular, and if I were to name everyone individually I’d soon reach my time limit and someone would come and drag me offstage, but you know who you are, and I’m most appreciative of your help.

“Flight Officer Stanic,” Weas said in a subdued voice.

Darin looked up in mild surprise at the formality. “Sir?”

“Come with me, please.”

Darin wearily pushed himself to his feet again and followed the XO over to where he and Mackin had been talking in the soft light of a glowrod.

Mackin looked up as they approached and managed a small smile. “Have a seat, Thumper. Just be careful of our rocks.”

Darin looked down and barely made out some small rocks placed seemingly randomly in a small area on the ground, connected and surrounded by lines in the dirt. Guessing they were meant as some sort of planning map, he made sure to avoid hitting them as he sat down across from the other two pilots. When he looked up again, for the first time he noticed Mackin’s and Weas’s bloodshot eyes, and he wondered how long they had been awake since all this began.

“Any reports over the comm?” Mackin asked.

“Yes, sir,” Darin answered. “They know they lost us in this area, so they’re starting to do tight-beam scans of the entire canyon and valley while biker scouts patrol the surrounding woods. A tight-beam scan aimed in here will find us, sir.”

Weas and Mackin exchanged a look that suggested the news had just sealed their fates by forcing them into action. Mackin tiredly ran a hand through his black crew cut and then met Darin’s gaze. “Lieutenant Weas and I have been discussing our situation at length, and we believe we have a plan to escape. However, we need a third person, and we believe you are our best candidate.”

Darin was a bit surprised, but he answered, “Anything, sir. Just tell me what to do.”

Mackin looked like he’d rather be doing anything but talking to Darin right then. “Hear the plan first, Flight Officer. Then decide.”

A red flag went up in Darin’s brain, eclipsing the small glimmer of hope he had begun to feel at the prospect of escape. “Yes, sir,” he said more carefully.

Mackin nodded. “You know our situation: too many injuries and too few fighters to fly everyone out of here. We’re essentially out of food, too, and we won’t find any in this cave. So, unless we want to wait around for a rescue that may never show, we need to get some sort of ship that will allow us to get all our people out–in other words, a small shuttle or transport.

“We figure if one of us can get into the colony, that person will be able to steal a suitable transport and bring it back here, load it up, and escape. We might even get lucky and find an Imperial transport on the way to take instead. Regardless of where or how we find it, finding it is going to be my task. I’ll need one of the X-wings to get to the colony. Lieutenant Weas is going to stay here with the remaining X-wing to guard the others in case something goes wrong.”

Mackin paused for such a long moment that Darin thought he was done and wondered if his tired brain had just missed something obvious. “Uh, sir? Then what do you need me for?”

His commander seemed to snap out of his thoughts and looked again at the younger pilot. “The third person would be coming with me partway. With all the Imperials here looking for us, there’s no way that I could survive getting into the colony on my own to look for a transport. Plus, they know we have two X-wings, so we’re going to show them two X-wings.”

He took a deep breath and began to explain further. “I will drop off the third pilot at Quiver’s X-wing, since from the reports I have, that one is damaged the least, and it’s also close to being on the way. That pilot and I will head toward the colony, avoiding detection as long as possible. If we avoid it altogether that would be wonderful, but realistically I don’t expect that to be the case. In any event, the closer we get to the colony before they spot us, the better off we’ll be.

“Once the inevitable dogfight starts, I’ll fake a bad hit to my X-wing and go down as near to the colony as I can while out of their direct line of sight in the hills, probably using my last torpedo to trigger an explosion on the ground to give the impression of a crash while I actually land, since we can’t have them picking up an ejection. Now, that would all be well and good except that if I was alone, the Imperials would come to investigate, find an intact X-wing and hunt me down within minutes, maybe less. There’s no way that I could obtain a transport in that amount of time, so I need a distraction to pull their attention away from my ‘crash’ and make them forget about me, writing me off as dead at least in the short-term in order to focus more on something else. That’s where the third pilot comes in.”

Mackin took a second deep breath. “When I go down, the third pilot will need to draw them away from that area. The Imperials are undoubtedly monitoring different frequencies by now, so the pilot will put out a distress call that the Imperials will hear, calling any Rebel ships within range, which won’t be any if that solar storm is still active and disrupts the signal beyond the magnetosphere, and saying that he’s the last survivor and has important information to bring to the Alliance, something like that. Something to make the Imps believe that he’s the last remaining target and they had better focus on him. Something to make as many of the Imperial ships currently engaged as possible go after him. Once he leads them far enough away, he does whatever he can to escape the system on his own. By that time I should be in the colony securing a transport, which I’ll fly back to get everyone else out. Then the rest of us will head out, escorted by Lieutenant Weas.”

Mackin stopped and studied Darin a bit, who had an unreadable, blank expression on his face. “That’s the best plan we’ve been able to come up with, and with the Imperials breathing down our necks we don’t have time to come up with another unless someone else has a good idea.

“I will not order you to fly this mission, Darin. You can say no, and no one will hold it against you. But after seeing the way you handle your ship and how well you evade TIEs when you and Quiver play that bait game of yours, not to mention that because of that, you’re somewhat more accustomed to having TIEs on you so you won’t have as much tendency to panic when it happens...I hate to ask you to do this, but you’re by far our best candidate. Think it over for a minute.”

Darin stared at the ground while that all sank in. His first reaction was to say no. He was scared and not at all ready to die yet, especially on a suicide mission like this; however, a few heartbeats later Darin felt guilty and selfish, and he tried to think things through a little more rationally. He knew he got impulsive when he got emotional, and now was not the time to be impulsive.

He’d been hoping that his bleak assessment of their situation had just been pessimistic or unfounded, but as he realized that his leaders seemed to think the same way he began to get more nervous. They were all going to die here unless they could escape, and to escape it sounded like they’d have to pull this off. What were the odds? Not good, he thought. Not good at all. He was going to die here. They were all going to die here. The Imperials would find them and kill them.

He looked over his shoulder at the other pilots, their silhouettes barely visible in the muted light coming in from the cave’s opening. All of them were injured. All of them were scared, though none would admit it. All of them were like family to him, the only family he had left. And all of them were going to die.

...Unless they pulled this off.

The more Darin thought about it, the more he realized that Mackin was right–he was the best choice for this ominous “third pilot” role, as much as he wished he wasn’t. He often allowed TIEs to sit on his tail while Quiver snuck up behind them and picked them off, almost always without Darin getting hit by the TIEs himself, at least if Quiver was prompt. Whether he liked it or not, he was one of the best pilots in the squadron when it came to not getting hit if that’s what he was solely focusing on, like he would be in this situation. Besides, if he didn’t do it then someone else would have to, and he didn’t want to push this off on someone else because he was too afraid to do it himself. Thumper honestly doubted that he’d be able to live with himself if his “replacement” was killed. Plus, there weren’t that many left who were healthy enough to fly a fighter to the extent required by this plan, which narrowed the other choices considerably.

Still unsure, Darin looked back at the ground in front of him and studied the rocks to distract himself a bit and give his mind a chance to breathe and sort things out. Now that he got a good look at the rocks and the dirt, he realized it was a rough map of the area, showing things like the canyon, the valley, the colony and each intact X-wing or crash site. There was a particular group of three rocks that he knew must be representing his X-wing and Quiver’s, and where CC’s had crashed. There were more rocks indicating the relative locations of Pellicer’s and Snubber’s snubfighters as well as Slurry’s and Kalre’s crash sites.

His gaze found its way back to the rock he knew represented CC’s fighter, or what was left of it. Darin blinked hard a few times and unconsciously fiddled with his wrist binders while he stared at the rock, knowing they’d suffer a fate similar to CC’s if they were captured. They’d escaped that fate once already, and he didn’t think they’d be lucky enough to do it again if the Imperials caught up to them.

Darin’s thoughts drifted back to CC’s crash site, and in his mind’s eye he saw the TIE fighter flying closely overhead and that long stretch of nothingness between him and his X-wing. All he would have had to do was get to his fighter, and things would have been a lot different. As much as he’d wanted to, he hadn’t taken that big risk to help CC. To some degree he still intellectually knew it would have been suicidal, but then again, so was this. The others needed him to take that big risk for them now, and he wouldn’t make the same error again when so much was at stake.

So much was at stake...“I don’t take orders from someone who makes such bad puns!” CC’s teasing voice cut through his memory, putting Darin back in the briefing room just a mere couple of days before when his good friend had still been so alive. Now she was dead, and Quiver, his best friend, was almost as lifeless.

That whole fake briefing by Quiver had been a farce, just a silly way to have some fun, but now Darin recalled some of his own words there and felt uneasy at how eerily similar they were to what he now faced. “That’s a suicide mission! We’ll never make it!”

And Quiver’s response to that, though Darin knew it had only been made jokingly, had stuck with him nonetheless: “We have to try, though, Thumper.”

They had to try. He had to try. Too much was at stake for him not to. Even if he ultimately wouldn’t make it out alive, which he recognized as a distinct possibility, he had to do his best to make sure the others got the chance to avoid CC’s fate or something worse...and that meant agreeing.

Darin jerked his head up. “I’ll do it, sir.”

Mackin nodded sadly. “All right, then. We’ll brief the others on what we’re planning, then the three of us will get some sleep. I don’t want to commit to this just to discover too late that my sleep-deprived brain forgot something important. We’ll go over it again before we head out to ensure that and also to go over details. Okay?”

“Yes, sir,” Darin and Weas answered.

“I’ll get the others up,” offered Weas as he rose and walked back to them.

Darin and Mackin stood up stiffly. “I truly wish we had another way, but this is the most feasible one we could come up with,” Mackin said quietly. “Just so I’m clear, Flight Officer, you do understand the full extent of the danger in that third pilot role, correct?”

Darin nodded absently, looking back again at the other pilots as Snubber woke them. “Yes, sir,” he said with considerably more courage than he felt. “I do.”

“So that’s the plan,” Mackin said to the pilots as they stood at the nose of his fighter by the map of rocks. “Comments?”

There was an uncomfortable silence until Kalre shook his head and said, “It’ll never work, sir. You’re betting too much on being able to find and steal a suitable transport without getting caught. Alone, no less. Plus, if you don’t pull it off successfully, the Imps will have a much better chance of finding us, and we’ll be much worse off.”

Pellicer nodded. “You’re risking everything on this, sir. We could lose you and Nine and also be down to one fighter. Then what?”

“Then Lieutenant Weas gets the promotion he’s always wanted.” Mackin smiled a bit and tried to make his words a joke, but the humor fell flat.

“You should have more of us going,” Ikoa added in agreement with the others. “Two X-wings is too few. Besides, what if the Imperials took them or something?”

“We have to hope that the fighters are still where we left them–yes, it is a risk. Anything more than two will be picked up by their more concentrated sensors around the colony while we’re still too far away. Two is pushing it as it is.”

Chopper spoke up. “They have to have guards at the fighters. Once they see you coming, all they have to do is report that an X-wing’s coming, and the Imps will know that if they see a second fighter after that, it’ll have come from that site and there’s another one still out there somewhere.”

Mackin nodded. “Good point, but it’s covered. Rudder has assured me that jamming them won’t be too difficult. As a backup, we can always transmit something on the Imperial tactical frequency to throw a little confusion into the mix.” He paused, but was met with only silence. “I’m not denying that this is a risky plan. If anyone has a better idea for a way to get off, now’s the time. I’ll be more than happy to listen.” Mack looked around, but no one offered anything.

Quiver had been unusually quiet during the discussion, just standing next to Darin with his arms awkwardly crossed and looking more unhappy every minute. Suddenly he whirled around, grabbed Darin’s arm and yanked him over toward the waterfall at the other end of the cavern. “Come ‘ere,” he grumbled.

“Hey!” Darin said in surprise before letting Quiver tow him across the cavern.

Quiver took him to the far side of Ikoa’s snubfighter where he stopped and pinned an angry look on Darin. “Are you crazy?!”

Darin was caught completely off-guard by his best friend’s hostility. “What?”

“Your role in this mission is suicide, Thumper. Suicide! What the hell were you thinking when you agreed to this?!”

Quiver’s anger started to become infectious as Darin hotly answered through his ragged emotions, “I know full well what I’m getting into. And you know what? Out of all the pilots able and available to fly now, I’m the one most likely to make it out of that alive. I know how to evade, Quiver. The others don’t have the bait experience that I do. You of all people should know that.”

“And you of all people should recognize the difference here!” Quiver retorted, the roar from the waterfall behind him giving him the impression of being even more upset than he already was. “We’re not talking about one or two TIEs on your tail with your wingman there actively trying to take them out. We’re talking about five, six, seven, even potentially an entire squadron after you. And you’ll be alone, which means the Imps will have no reason to stop chasing you. They will keep after you until they shoot you down.” Quiver emphasized each of his last words individually.

Darin narrowed his green eyes. “We’ll all be dead soon anyway if we don’t get off this rock. The Imps get closer to finding us every single second we’re here, and I have no desire to be captured and executed. I’ll take my chances in the air, thank you very much. And if doing it this way means you all have a better chance of getting out, that’s really the only reason I need.”

Quiver was clearly getting fed up. “Didn’t your near-death experience with the biker scouts teach you that that damn loyalty of yours is going to get you killed?! Why can’t you learn that before you learn it the hard way?”

“This is different!” Darin argued.

Quiver lost the remainder of his patience and raised his voice considerably. “No it’s not! It’s not different, you’re no different from anyone else, and your fate shouldn’t be different! There isn’t a person here who doesn’t want to escape, since so many of us are hurt and especially after what happened to CC and what almost happened when we were caught! But there has to be a way to get all of us out safely! A suicide mission on your part isn’t the answer!”

Darin immediately matched Quiver’s volume. “This is hard enough already, Quiver! Don’t make it harder!” He spun and stalked back to the rest of the pilots, leaving Quiver there fuming and glaring angrily after him.

There was dead silence when Darin returned to the group, and the majority of the pilots studiously avoided looking in his direction. When Darin parked himself in the spot where he had previously been standing and crossed his arms tightly, Mackin simply looked at him and asked, “Everything all right, Nine?”

“Yes, sir,” Darin answered through anger he was having trouble controlling. “Everything’s fine.”

“Then I want everyone to get some rest and do what you can to get ready, okay?” Mackin said with an inaudible sigh. “Make sure the watches are covered. We’ll aim to head out at sunset so we’ll have the cover of darkness unless we’re forced out before then.”

As the pilots walked away to tend to their duties, Mackin motioned for Darin to stay. When everyone else was out of earshot, he came up to Thumper and quietly asked, “What’s going on?”

A small sigh of frustration escaped from Darin, who never met his commander’s gaze. “Nothing, sir. Really.”

“You need better acting lessons.” Mackin paused a moment, then said a bit more gently, “He’s just worried about you, you know.”

“Yeah. Doesn’t help, though.”

“I know.” Mackin tried to smile at him. “Go get some rest, all right? Try to sleep if you can. A lot’s going to happen soon.”

“Yes, sir.” Darin slowly walked toward his sleeping area, then he lay down and buried his face in his arms and flak vest pillow. He tried to fall asleep, but the person who could doze off on an X-wing’s stiff, hard S-foil was having problems doing the same thing there on the cave floor. He could never get comfortable...either inside or out.

Mackin was there, doing the same thing. “Get some sleep, Thumper?” he asked.

Darin nodded. “A little, sir. How long until we go?”

“Another two hours. Thirty minutes from now, suit up and we’ll go over everything again.”

“Yes, sir.”

Mackin walked away. Darin finished his water and then ducked down to open the cargo hold in the belly of Mackin’s fighter. All the strut-riders had stowed their bulky chestboxes in there when this all started, and Darin started looking for his; after a thorough search of the hold, however, it was apparent that his equipment wasn’t there, even though the others were. Certain he had stashed it in the hold, he frowned in puzzlement and widened his search area to include the bare cavern floor in the immediate area, but he still couldn’t find it. Darin was completely baffled.

The next logical course of action was to ask someone about it. He looked up to do just that but hesitated. Most of the other pilots were sitting together beside Ikoa’s X-wing, and it looked like they were trying very hard to have a normal conversation together. Thumper couldn’t hear the topic of the talk over the waterfall’s echoing noise, but he knew the specific topic wasn’t necessarily important next to the act of having the conversation. Some of the Coronas were chuckling at something Slurry had said, and the Bilgana looked confused about why they were laughing so Pellicer started explaining something to him. Probably just a cultural difference. From that small amount of laughter and from the looks on some of the pilots’ faces, Darin figured a few had been able to put their current situation out of their minds for at least a short time, and he had no desire to remind them of it again.

Mackin and Weas were deep in their own conversation, so that left one person he could ask: Quiver. His wingman was sitting by himself against the cave wall a short distance down, working on something. Normally Quiver would have been talking with the others and enjoying their company, but he’d been unusually withdrawn ever since CC was killed. Their earlier fight was still fresh in Darin’s mind and he briefly considered not going over by Quiver, but he really needed to find his chestbox to see if he could patch up the hose somehow before he left.

He hesitantly walked up to Quiver and tried to sound casual. “Hey, Quiver, have you seen my...” He trailed off as he looked down and saw Quiver with his missing chestbox plus another one. “–Chestbox.”

Quiver glanced up. “Yeah, just a minute.” He punched a few more buttons on one chestbox, hit a couple others on the second, then flipped the same switch on each. “There.” He stood up and offered one to Darin. “Here you go.”

Darin looked at it in puzzlement. That was Quiver’s chestbox if he wasn’t mistaken, and Darin’s, the one with the cut hose, was still sitting on the ground. He turned his confused look to Quiver. “That’s yours.”

“Don’t worry, I adjusted it for you. I was going to just switch hoses, but we don’t have the correct tools with us so it was easier to change box settings. Here, you’re going to need it.”

When Darin realized that his wingmate was trading boxes and that Quiver would be keeping Darin’s useless emergency life support system, he shook his head and didn’t take the equipment. “Quiver, I–”

“If you protest,” Quiver interrupted in a deliberate voice, “I will hurt you so much that no life support system in the galaxy could help you.” He cocked his head a bit and shifted his tone of voice to a more reasonable one. “Think about it. If this all goes as planned, I’ll be on the transport and I won’t even need it. You will.” He casually stepped beside Darin. “And you know you can use my X-wing if you want, but this will allow you to use yours if you so choose and have Botch there to help. You’ll fly better in your own X-wing with him, and you’ll need all the help you can get. Besides, we don’t know how damaged my engine is after that wreckage fell on it. I don’t know if I ever remembered to tell Mack about that. You can’t use an X-wing that only has three good engines for something like this, especially when going up against TIEs, which are faster to begin with.”

Darin nodded slowly, still somewhat bewildered at the situation; because of that, he wasn’t sure if he was joking or not when he heard himself saying, “Well, I can’t reach your rudder pedals anyway, and I know how bent out of shape you get when someone adjusts your seat.”

“That’s right–I’d forgotten about that,” Quiver said thoughtfully. He calmly reached over and put Darin in a headlock with his left arm. “Take the good chestbox, you crazy Cracian. My seat is perfect. Don’t you touch it.”

“Okay, okay!” Darin surrendered, feeling a little better now that Quiver was reverting a bit to his old antics. “You know, when I get there I should move it just to annoy you.”

Quiver sighed, barely seeming to notice Darin’s half-hearted struggles to get free. “When you stop to think about it, it’s really a shame that we’re all about to die. I mean, we can’t let Slurry go to his grave without knowing about that time you–”

“Okay, okay, okay!” Darin interrupted loudly. He softly elbowed Quiver in the side, and Quiver released him. “I’ll get you for that,” Darin said, trying to smile as he straightened up.

Quiver sobered as he looked Darin straight in the eye. “I certainly hope so.” He thrust the working chestbox at Darin, then leaned down to pick up the damaged one. Quiver started to walk away toward Mackin’s X-wing but stopped and looked over his shoulder at Darin just long enough to say, “Chopper won’t be flying anytime soon–I’ll go steal his chestbox and set up that one for you too. Then you can have a backup, and it’ll double the time you can spend in space between escaping and reaching safety. If you want any more, just let me know. We’ve got a bunch.”

“You know, I think I’m more scared of the upcoming strut-ride than I am of anything else,” Darin said to Quiver with a nervous half-grin. He absentmindedly scratched a cut on his face, then when he lowered his arm he brushed his hand against a hip pocket. Earlier, Darin had decided to take along the rock that had been representing CC’s fighter on Mackin’s tactical map, and he was reassured to still feel it in his pocket. He wasn’t sure why he kept it, except maybe for some sentimental reasons, but he hoped it would give him a little bit of good luck in this escape attempt.

The Coronas were all gathered around Ikoa’s snubfighter next to the cavern opening, about to see off Mackin and Darin. Most of the pilots were subdued and not saying much. Quiver looked down at his wingman and quietly said, “You’ll be fine as long as you hang on. Then all you have to do is hang on until you can get away from here.”

“And you’d better be hot on my six,” Darin told him as he saw Mackin indicate that it was time to go. He patted Quiver’s uninjured shoulder before he stepped away and sat on the nose skid, getting his customary death grip on the strut after fastening his belt around it. He had Ikoa’s sleeve combadge and one of the blasters, and Chopper’s auxiliary life support system was strapped to Darin’s back for use after his first one was depleted.

Mackin hadn’t been happy about it, and in fact had unsuccessfully tried at length to talk Darin out of it, but he was allowing Darin to fly his own X-wing with Botch as long as he had the working chestboxes. Darin couldn’t help but wonder if Mack had finally agreed to it in order to fulfill the condemned pilot’s last request or something like that. Thumper hadn’t taken any more chestboxes since he figured with two of them he’d now run out of fuel before he ran out of air, so bringing additional ones wouldn’t necessarily help him.

Once he was settled on the skid, Darin looked back at the Coronas. Mack said something very quietly to Snubber and pressed a datacard firmly into the lieutenant’s hand before he began walking toward the X-wing. Quiver, barely visible except for the light of a glowrod Slurry was holding, was watching Darin with an odd expression that he had never seen before and didn’t know how to read. The other pilots were looking between Darin and Mackin. Some strange combination of hope that the plan would actually work and sad resignation that it probably wouldn’t was evident on most of their faces, though he also saw appreciation and a few gazes that seemed to be seeing the “rookie” in a whole new light. Thumper wasn’t sure what his own expression was telling those he was leaving behind, but he sure knew what was on his mind. He wanted nothing more than to see all the Coronas again and would have given anything to ensure that happened. He hoped they lifted off before he changed his mind and stayed.

Then Kalre shook his head and stepped up to the X-wing just as Mackin climbed into the cockpit. “Commander, there has to be a better way. Don’t do this. It’ll never work.”

“I figured the Battle of Yavin would have taught you at least one thing,” said Mackin while he donned his helmet and readied the fighter.

“And what’s that?”

Mackin stopped and looked down at the Rodian. “You say something’s impossible, but the impossible has happened. Never underestimate it.” He looked back out at the rest of the pilots. “Be back before you know it. Snubber will take good care of things in the meantime.”

He made sure Darin was secure, then he closed the canopy and fired up the repulsorlifts while the Coronas backed away to give him room. The water impacted the snubfighter with a loud noise and jostled it hard while the craft backed out of the cavern and passed through the falls, and with that they were gone.

They didn’t.

The two other X-wings were not there.

Mackin’s chest tightened while he checked his scope again. The sensors had been acting up during this entire flight, possibly due to the impact of the fighter’s sensor housing against Mackin’s fighter when Ikoa had flown into the waterfall cave, so Mack also looked out his windows at the darkened landscape. They were practically on top of CC’s crash site, and Darin’s and Quiver’s fighters should have been visible on sensors or to his own eyes, but they weren’t. If there was a bright spot to the situation, though, the only life sign was the one showing Darin on his nose skid below the sensors, which likely meant no Imperials were lying in wait for them.

A strange blip flickered on his sensor readouts. Mack turned his attention to it, but it was gone as soon as it appeared. Before he could even begin to wonder what had caused it, he was given an answer.

An explosion erupted from very close by, hurtling a thunder clap and a shockwave of heat and energy outward. The shockwave impacted the X-wing’s portside shields, violently knocking the entire craft upward and to starboard and throwing Mackin against his seat restraints and the inside of his cockpit. He desperately tried to right the fighter and gain control again. His best guess was that they had just tripped a landmine that the Imperials had planted at the crash site, and there could be more. As long as they stayed in this area, they were in danger.

The shockwave had long since passed by this point, and Mack finally brought the X-wing under control. One quick glance at his scope told him everything he needed to know for the moment: the life sign still present on his sensors meant Darin was at least still alive, his shields had been almost completely knocked out by the blast and there were no Imperials in the vicinity. Time to get out of there before that last part changed.

Altitude would make them more visible, but the explosion had already erased whatever stealth they’d had, and altitude would also help keep them out of range of more mines. Mackin increased power to his repulsors and lifted them above CC’s crash site, picked southeast as a random direction and accelerated as quickly as he dared with Darin in an unknown condition on his strut. Once they were well clear of the crash site, Mackin dropped to terrain-following flight over the hillsides again and channeled power into his shields to recharge them faster.

A couple minutes later they passed over a small river, and a bluish reflection from the water caught Mackin’s attention. Glancing down at the river, he winced and then looked over his shoulder to confirm his fears: he hadn’t even thought of the red glow from the X-wing’s engines and in particular how visible it was in the darkness. He might as well get on the comm and tell the Imperials their location.

He paralleled the river a bit and desperately looked around for any type of hiding spot, but he only found one place that was even remotely usable. The river he was flying beside forked into two branches. One branch continued on in a southwesterly direction, and the other was entirely blocked by a crude stone dam, turning that branch into a dry riverbed. There was room between the dry banks to land the X-wing next to the dam.

The X-wing settled in place after half a minute more, and Mackin powered it down as quickly as he could. “Power yourself down, Rudder,” Mackin called to the astromech. “We can’t have any power signatures in case they come looking.”

The droid beeped a few times and shut down. As soon as the pilot was done, he opened the canopy and jumped out. “Nine?” he called softly. “You all right?” He hurried over to the nose strut and ducked down. Darin was still seated cross-legged on the skid and strapped to the strut with his belt, but he was slouched forward against it with his eyes squeezed shut. He had the palm of one hand pressed against his forehead and the other arm looped around the strut to hold on. “Nine?” Mackin repeated in a low voice.

Darin’s voice sounded dazed as he reluctantly opened his eyes. “Huh?”

That couldn’t be good. “Come on, let’s get you lying down. Where are you hurt?”

There was a pause before Darin slowly replied, “Um...just a headache, sir.”

Mackin took Chopper’s chestbox off of Darin and carefully worked at unbuckling Darin’s belt. It was hard to see in the dark, so Mackin couldn’t immediately tell if Darin had any other injuries he wasn’t speaking up about. For the time being, he concentrated on helping Darin move underneath the center of the X-wing. He’d put the camouflage netting on top of the X-wing to give them some amount of protection and then check Darin over more thoroughly.

“Anything yet?”

“Not yet, Major Wendessin. The TIEs just reached the site.”

Major Wendessin paced a few times behind the corporal’s makeshift sensor station. “And you’re certain there are no indications of which way the Rebels went?”

The corporal nodded. “I’m certain, sir. Shrapnel from the landmine’s explosion destroyed the sensor beacon we were using as a trigger, so we couldn’t get any readings after the detonation. Given all the debris in the area and the limitations we faced with making it undetectable while still being able to detect, sir, it was the best we could do on short notice.”

Wendessin nodded. “It worked at least, and hopefully well enough to cripple them or slow them down at a minimum. Perhaps the ground team will be able to find some debris caused by damage from the mine, a lead as to what direction the Rebels went, or even confirmation that it was them. I don’t want to commit every available resource now only to discover some wild animal wandered too close and set it off. What’s the ground team’s status?” He directed his last question to the soldier manning a comm station.

“ETA ten minutes, sir.”

“Tell them they have five minutes to get out there. Every minute’s delay means the Rebels’ trail gets colder.”

“Yes, sir.”

Wendessin left the men to their tasks and headed over to the room where the communications group was working, figuring a new script should be ready for his approval soon. They had long since stopped using the original tactical frequency for official communications and instead were sending out fake broadcasts designed to sound authentic. A few comm specialists and tacticians had been tasked with creating scripts that sounded believable without giving away any important information while at the same time hiding the Imperials’ true actions. It was tricky to come up with the right mixture of falsehoods and truths, since if the Rebels heard something they knew wasn’t true, then the frequency’s credibility would be lost forever. Major Wendessin wasn’t certain if the Rebels were still believing the information they heard over that frequency, but he wanted to keep that path open in case they were and he needed to use that tactic again.

For now, he was content in the knowledge that the Rebels were slipping, and in doing so were slipping closer to his grasp.

In the span of ten seconds, Commander Mackin had scrambled over to the flowing water, taken a drink, run a handful of the refreshing, freezing water over his unshaven face, dunked the lower part of one arm and sleeve in the river, and scrambled back to the camouflaged X-wing nestled between the banks of the dry riverbed. Mack crawled underneath the X-wing and knelt beside Darin, who was lying down. With the wet part of his sleeve, Mackin began to clean off the new cut on Darin’s forehead.

Darin flinched, squeezed his eyes shut again and moaned, “Ow...”

“Quiet, Nine,” Mackin said softly. “Keep it down. Let me clean this.” He tried again and was met with another cringe. “Sorry. That sting?”

“A little, sir.”

“Almost done.”

“Sir?”

“Yes?”

“I hate strut-riding.”

The way Darin said that simple statement almost made Mackin laugh. “I don’t blame you,” Mack replied. “Now you’re sure you’re not hurt anywhere else?”

“Yes, sir.” At least Darin was sounding more coherent. “I think I just hit my head on the strut when whatever-that-was happened.”

“Are you well enough to still strut-ride, fly and fight?”

“Yes, sir.”

Mackin wasn’t sure whether to believe that or not, but before he could ask further, Darin quietly continued, “As long as that earlier thing doesn’t happen again. Sir, what was that?”

Mack finished with the cleaning and wished they hadn’t left all the medical equipment with the others; a bandage would have been useful. He whispered, “At the crash site, we got hit by what I can only imagine was a landmine or some other explosive device courtesy of the Imperials. The shields protected you from the blast, but we still got knocked around pretty hard, as you know.”

Still on his back, Darin was staring at him. “A landmine? They mined the site, expecting us to go back there?”

“I think so.”

Darin was beginning to look more anxious than hurt. “Then all the other landing sites could be mined, and the fighters are probably gone from them, too. Sir, what are we going to do now?”

“For right now, we’re going to stay here under the X-wing. If any TIEs come, maybe it’ll shield our life signs from their sensors.” –Assuming the TIEs don’t first recognize the scans of the hidden X-wing for what it is, Mackin mentally added. He continued in a firm, reassuring voice, “As for what’s next, I’m working on it now. You need to stay still, rest and let your head heal as much as it can in the short amount of time we have. I can get you some cold water if you need it. Okay?”

Darin was silent for a moment, and then he said in a subdued voice, “Yes, sir.”

“Don’t worry, Nine. We’ve come too far to let a little detour ruin things. Everything will be fine.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Rest.” Mackin patted Darin’s shoulder before moving over to sit against one of the main gear struts. That was a good question: what were they going to do now?

Mackin considered. They were in no-man’s land, and the chrono was ticking. Options... Scrap this whole plan and go back to the cave hideout behind the waterfall where the other pilots were? No–he’d barely been able to sneak out unseen. They couldn’t sneak back in and not be noticed, and that would in turn lead to the discovery of their hiding place by the Imperials. They’d literally gone past the point of no return unless the Imperials happened to completely vacate that area. What else? Continue on to the colony to get a transport? No, because a fight on the way was inevitable, especially as they got closer to the colony, and he couldn’t dogfight with Darin on his strut. Drop Darin off right here on the ground and continue on alone? No, absolutely not. He wouldn’t abandon Darin in the middle of nowhere on this Force-forsaken planet: it was a guarantee that Darin would get caught by the Imperials, and Mackin didn’t have confidence in his own ability to make it into the colony and out again alive by himself.

The commander absently ran his hand through his hair, thinking hard and trying not to let the pressure get to him. The options were dwindling, and time was running out. Any second now, the Imperials would detect the X-wing through any number of different means at their disposal, and it would be all over. The longer they stayed there, the greater the chance they’d be discovered. This escape attempt could be over before it really began.

The next ten minutes provided Mack with no solutions, only a growing need to move farther away from CC’s crash site. He hadn’t heard any TIEs come near yet, and he hoped moving away would help keep that streak alive. Part of him argued that his hiding place was good enough for now and that he should stay there and regroup, but another part believed that the hideout wasn’t nearly as good as it needed to be and it was only a matter of time before they were found, particularly when they were still so close, relatively speaking, to the location of the explosion. At the end of the ten minutes, Mack’s increasing desire to have shields, powered weapons, and distance between the Imperials and the two of them won out. He stowed the camouflage netting, helped Darin back onto the strut with the extra chestbox, powered up and took off.

Roughly two minutes into the aimless, anxious flight, Rudder whistled and caught Mackin’s attention. It was then that Mack noticed the light flashing on his communications console, indicating an incoming transmission. His first thought was that Darin was breaking comm silence and trying to get in touch with him via Darin’s combadge, but a closer look at the panel allowed Mackin to discount that. Surprisingly, the transmission was coming over the Rebels’ secure mission frequency, one which hadn’t been used since the Coronas’ last communication with the Special Forces units.

A text message on a screen from Rudder told the pilot that the transmission had been a short burst only and used the same encryption the Rebels had on this mission, so the droid had recorded and decrypted it. Puzzlement, hope and skepticism all vied for dominance in Mackin. “What did it say, Rudder?”

The droid’s answer across the screen was simple: 063'187.

Mackin frowned in bewilderment and slowed the fighter a bit. “What? Rudder, do you have any idea what that means?”

Working.

The R2 processed the numbers for an agonizingly long minute before replying, The numbers match the local populace’s format for global coordinates.

Coordinates? Mackin frowned. “If they are local global coordinates, where are they? Are they nearby?”

Twenty klicks west-southwest of our current position. Plotting.

A blue dot appeared on Mackin’s scope to indicate the location of the coordinates. The commander thought hard, staring at the dot until the image burned into his retinas. He’d been presented with another option, but this almost seemed worse than the others. Someone was sending that transmission, and he wasn’t inclined to trust anyone on this planet aside from his pilots, not after the trap that had been set for them. It could be another trap, set by either the colonists or the Imperials. It was doubtful that it was a rescue party since the transmission wasn’t following any rescue protocols that he knew of. But on the other hand, what if one of the Special Forces soldiers had survived? What if one had managed to get away from whatever had happened in the colony to start this whole mess, and he was the one sending the signal? Given the properties of the signal, wasn’t that the most likely possibility?

More seconds ticked by. Mackin posed one more silent question to himself: given his lack of other options, did he really have any other choice?

Yet more seconds passed. He turned the X-wing and headed for the blue dot.

“We should be going after them,” Quiver blurted out.

“Give it some more time, Ten,” Weas replied.

“What if we don’t have time? You heard the Imperials’ tac frequency! They responded to a landmine explosion at one of our crash sites!” Quiver stopped his incessant pacing in the cave and now faced Lt. Weas. “What else could have caused that except One or Nine getting too close to it? They could be injured or dead or in the hands of the Imps as a result.”

“If the Imperials had them, don’t you think they would have reported that too? They haven’t, which means One and Nine got away at least. If One had the shields up, a mine wouldn’t do a lot of damage.”

“If it was the X-wing that set off the mine, and not one of them on foot.” Quiver shook his head adamantly. “Something’s wrong. If they did get away then they’re still in trouble, because if they weren’t in trouble and everything was fine and they had the second fighter, we would have heard from them twenty minutes ago!”

“Try to relax, Quiver,” Ikoa said gently. “There are lots of reasons why we might not have heard from them yet. Maybe they’re laying low until the Imps move out of the vicinity. Maybe they had to take the long way around due to a patrol they encountered. Maybe–”

“Maybe the Imperials are executing them this very second,” Quiver snapped.

“Ten. Enough,” came Weas’s harsh reply.

Quiver spun around and resumed pacing. “Should never’ve let’m do this insane mission,” he muttered under his breath. Then he gradually raised his voice as he said, “Because how are we ever going to know if they need help? When we get the broadcast from the Imperials? It’ll be a little too late then!” He heard Pellicer mumble agreement.

Weas looked between both of them before saying, “You know, Ten, it would be nice if you trusted your CO a bit more than that. He knows what he’s doing.”

Quiver turned his attention to Weas as he continued to pace. “I do trust Mack!” he said in aggravation. “That’s not the problem here. The problem is that I don’t trust this whole damn planet!” Every milligram of sarcasm in his being went into his next sentences, the first of which was delivered in the most girly-sounding voice he could muster and accompanied by melodramatic gestures with his uninjured arm. “‘Oh, no, there are one or two Imperials here in our precious colony, please save us!’” The next set was an impromptu impersonation of Trainneer’s voice, which was adequate enough to get his point across, with more gestures. “‘Hello, I’m Lieutenant Colonel Special Forces Man. Yes, we’re part of the same organization as you, on the same mission and therefore are your allies, but at the first sign of trouble we’re abandoning you to the enemy. Good luck, see you around if you happen to make it back alive.’” Quiver’s voice returned to the angry version of “normal.” “Not one single thing on this whole blasted planet has been what it seemed, so no, I don’t trust the situation One and Nine are in. I don’t trust anything about it!”

Weas looked hard at Quiver. “Like it or not, One and Nine are now part of that situation. Trust them.”

Quiver gave up trying to get through to the XO. At least Pellicer seemed to understand what he was saying, which helped in some ways but also indicated that Quiver wasn’t just imagining things, and that made his concerns more valid. Quiver’s pacing never lessened, and he consciously tried to hold on to the anger. At first he had been frightened by this sudden, aggressive mood swing, but he had soon found that it was more easily defined and therefore more comforting than the alternative, a feeling more empty than the incoming comm frequencies. That frightened him even more.

Things just kept getting worse and worse.

Darin’s head hurt. More than that, his stomach was twisting and growing more unsettled with every passing moment where his brain insisted on thinking about the landmine explosion, the other strut-riding mishaps, the biker scouts, CC... Every one of those thoughts was punctuated by a fresh realization that there was no fighter fuselage around him to protect him. Absolutely no place was safe here, and the landmine had proven that the enemy wouldn’t necessarily be seen before they attacked. He could be dead before he knew what hit him. Imperials could be anywhere. TIEs could detect them at any moment. Any number of things could go wrong as they flew over the hillsides, again with Darin strapped (even more) tightly to the nose strut. Darin had felt very exposed, and he had put a hand on his holstered blaster, something that in this situation was meaningless practically but comforting psychologically.

Mackin hadn’t given any solid details when they’d taken off, only that they were moving away from the riverbed for safety. The farther they went, the more Darin hated the comm silence requirement. Thumper fidgeted a bit while looking at the unfamiliar, dangerous, darkened landscape surrounding them, glanced at his forbidden combadge, and then sighed and closed his eyes. He rested his head against the strut while trying to hold onto it more tightly. This was hopeless.

A couple minutes into the flight, the snubfighter slowed, then adjusted its course west-southwest and gradually regained its speed. Darin opened one eye and then the other, squinting against the wind before finally raising a hand to partially block his face from the rushing air. He tried to remember the maps they had of the colony and local area, but he couldn’t remember anything being in this direction. There had to be something, though, or else Mack wouldn’t have turned that way. Or maybe he had turned to avoid some Imperials.

The more they flew, however, the more it was apparent that there was nothing out there. They were roughly following the river from earlier. The hills tapered off into light woods, so at least Mackin didn’t need to be bobbing over the hills quite so often and could remain in more level flight, but Darin still couldn’t see why Mackin was so doggedly heading this way. Remembering the lesson from the flight into the waterfall, he closed his eyes again and tried to relax, trusting that Mackin could see the safe destination even if Darin couldn’t.

Some minutes later, the X-wing began to slow again. Its speed kept decreasing until it gently circled toward a small clearing in the trees and set down. A movement in the trees seen out of the corner of his eye made Darin jerk his head around. After that, he stayed still and watched with ever-widening eyes how the shadows jumped around him. Was that a movement of a tree limb from the cool night breeze, or was it an Imperial sneaking up on them and taking aim? His hand moved down to his blaster again, and this time he went so far as to take it out of its holster.

The X-wing stayed powered up for a short amount of time, and then the hum of its systems gradually faded away into the night. Darin heard the canopy hiss open a moment later. “Nine?” Mackin called in an extremely low, quiet voice.

“Sir?” Darin replied in kind.

“Come on, let’s go.” Mackin climbed out of his cockpit and lightly jumped to the ground, then pulled his blaster out and warily came over to where Darin sat on the nose skid. Darin set his blaster on the ground just long enough to unbuckle his belt from around the strut and reattach it solely around his waist. Grabbing the blaster again, he crawled out from under the fighter and stiffly stood on legs that were numb from the ride. Darin steadied himself against the nose of the X-wing before looking to Mack for guidance.

The commander was keeping a close eye on their surroundings. “An encrypted transmission came through over the mission frequency and gave some coordinates.” Mackin spoke so softly that it was hard for Darin to hear him, even from less than half a meter away. “Picked it up again about halfway here. I’m hoping it’s a survivor from the Special Forces team that went into the colony, but it could be anything. Sensors didn’t find anything on the fly-by, and I landed a short distance out. Stay close and keep your eyes open. And unless I say differently, stick to our story–we’re the only two survivors.”

“Yes, sir,” Darin said, gripping the blaster more tightly. He helped Mackin quickly put the camouflage netting over the fighter, and then followed as they moved into the trees.

The two pilots walked as quietly as they could and attempted to remain close to trees and bushes for cover. Concealment was essentially out of the question due to their orange flightsuits which, while dirty and grimy, were still orange and made Darin feel very obvious.

Thumper didn’t know exactly where they were going or what they were looking for, but he stayed right on Mackin’s heels while his eyes darted around in every direction, searching for the source of every rustle of leaves. Out here, it was just him and Mack against the entire world. Did his heart always beat so loudly? The only thing that could have made the situation worse, Darin reflected, would be the inclusion of a thunderstorm. The thunder, wind, rain and deadly lightning would just add to the already-frightening setting and–

A gruff voice from the trees behind and to their right commanded, “Hold it.”

Startled, Darin spun around, lifted his blaster and backed up into Mackin, who had stopped in his tracks. Maybe a thunderstorm wasn’t the only thing that could have made the situation worse.

“I said hold it!”

Darin froze with his blaster raised, though he couldn’t see anything to aim at. He couldn’t get air into his lungs fast enough, and the tip of his blaster kept wavering back and forth as his unsteady hand held it in a death grip. It was a trap. The Imperials had caught them again. They were going to die. Flashes of horrible scenes from the previous morning with the biker scouts assaulted his mind, and Darin figured the only thing preventing him from losing his mind in a panic was feeling Mackin at his back like an anchor, even if Chopper’s chestbox was poking into him uncomfortably as a result.

“Drop your weapons,” came another voice from the opposite side.

Darin heard Mackin’s blaster fall to the ground, and then Mackin calmly said over his shoulder, “Nine.”

“Sir?” Darin managed to ask. Some cold beads of sweat formed on his forehead.

“Drop your blaster.”

Thumper suspected that the strength he found to finally loosen his grip on the blaster and drop it came solely from the strength in his commander’s voice. Once his hands were empty, he held them up.

“A’right, just stay right there now,” said a third voice, this one from the direction toward which the pilots had been walking. “We don’t want to shoot you, so don’t make us.”

Out of the trees emerged four men. Each had a blaster pistol trained on the two pilots, and Darin was quick to notice that he and Mack were surrounded. He chewed on his lip and hoped the others could still escape eventually. It was a horrible feeling, letting them down like this.

The four men weren’t Imperials–far from it, actually–but that didn’t raise Darin’s spirits too much. After all, the colony was involved in setting up the trap the Rebels had fallen into, so despite their words, there was no reason to think these four burly locals wouldn’t shoot the two Coronas where they stood or, worse yet, take them to the Imperials.

The second man who had spoken came up and took the pilots’ blasters while the other three stopped well out of reach but kept their weapons raised. One briefly shone a glow rod beam over the two pilots. Now that they were closer, Darin could make out more details in the darkness: the men were definitely strong, and their clothing was the type worn by people who did lots of manual labor.

The third man spoke again. “Who are you now, and what are you doing here?” he demanded.

“As is probably obvious from what we’re wearing, we’re Alliance pilots,” Mackin said carefully. “We followed a transmission here. In short, we’re survivors of one trap who just apparently walked into another.” The last sentence and especially the coldness of Mackin’s voice as he said it surprised Darin.

“Just hold on now, Alliance pilot,” the man said brusquely. “Sorry for not serving you Whyrren’s and nerf steak, but we do have to be sure you’re not Imps and didn’t bring them along.”

The situation remained unchanged for another minute until a series of clicks sounded over one man’s comlink. At that, the four men relaxed slightly. The one who was doing most of the talking slowly holstered his blaster pistol, and the other three did the same. Darin cautiously lowered his hands but remained where he was. At least things seemed to be getting better, not worse. Breathing came easier now.

“You’re not the only Rebels on-planet, you know, even though we don’t a’ have fancy equipment and titles like you do now,” the man said. By looking over his shoulder, Darin could see that the large man had short, curly hair and a beard, and he was addressing Commander Mackin. “When the Imperials came, some of us formed a local underground resistance. You’re forgetting now that this colony was sympathetic to the Rebels long before this invasion.”

“You’re right,” Mackin replied, crossing his arms. “I forgot that a few days ago when this colony led us into a trap where we were ambushed by the Imperials. Sorry if I’m sounding a bit testy, but understand these haven’t been the best days of my life.”

“A’right, if you understand that we had nothing to do with that ambush,” the man shot back. “Show some gratitude, pilot. We’ve been monitoring the events as best we could, and we want to try to help you. We sent the transmission, hoping you would come here.”

“How did you get access to that frequency and encryption?” Mack asked, not acknowledging the offer of assistance or even the denial of involvement with the Imperial trap.

“We managed to get a comlink off one of your commandos after he was killed inside the colony,” the man said. “We used that.”

Mackin considered that for a moment, and Darin wondered what had happened inside the colony to the Special Forces soldiers at the start of all this. Maybe these men would be able to tell them.

“So, pilot,” the man continued after a small stretch of silence, “do you want to talk, or should we let you be on your way now so you can face the Imps alone?”

The commander was silent for a few seconds more, then he took a deep breath and said, “Let’s talk.”

The man nodded. “A’right now. We’ll take you back to our meeting area so you can talk to the leaders.” His eyes went from Mack to Darin and back to Mackin. “We only detected one X-wing coming near here,” he said suspiciously. “They’re one-man craft, so you needed two to get here now. Where’s the other one?”

“Imperials took it,” Mackin answered in a level voice. “He’s been riding around with me by hanging onto my landing gear.”

The man looked at Mackin skeptically but didn’t press it; instead, he started the pilots walking back toward Mackin’s X-wing. The other three men moved off into the woods and came back walking beside one speeder bike each. Darin noticed one of them pull out a comlink, but he couldn’t hear what was being said.

“You can bring your fighter with,” the man said. “There’s plenty of room there to hide it: you’ll see when we get there. It’s a much better hiding spot than out here now, anyway.”

“Good.”

“You’ll get your blasters back when we’re given the okay by our leaders. Security concerns, and a’ that.”

The local with the gruff voice spoke up. “Wait, wait, that doesn’t seem right. We’re letting him fly his X-wing to our base, but we’re only worried about what they might do with a blaster pistol? That’s completely backwards.”

The locals’ leader looked a bit flustered, and Darin figured they were all a bit new to the whole “secret resistance” thing and simply hadn’t thought everything through. The leader stopped, bringing the entire group to a halt as well, and studied Mackin, who apparently was realizing things were getting worse for them. “You’re right,” the leader said to the other man. He thought for a moment and then said to Mackin, “I’m sure your other pilot here doesn’t want to hang onto the landing gear of your X-wing anymore now, so how about this: if you want to fly your fighter to our meeting place, we’ll bring him along with us on one of our speeder bikes.”

Mackin turned to fully face the man and narrowed his eyes dangerously. “That’s really not necessary,” Mackin said in a low, steely voice, which Darin recognized as a sign that he was getting angry. “We are not a danger to your hideout.”

“If you’re truly Rebels now, then no, you’re not,” the man answered, not backing down. “But what proof can you give us that you’re not just Imperials dressed up like X-wing pilots, waiting for us to unwittingly lead you to our base so you can destroy everything on sight? We need to be a little more conscious about security. I think this compromise now is more than fair, since you actually still have the upper hand in that starfighter of yours.”

Darin glanced at his chrono and then uncomfortably looked around again at their malevolent surroundings. “Sir, please, let’s just get going,” he said softly.

The commander looked at him and then turned back to the local. “Fine,” he said, clearly unhappy, “even though we have no proof that you’re not working for the Imperials either and aren’t just going to deliver us to them.”

“Aside from the fact that you haven’t been stunned, tied up and taken to them already, which would have been the easiest course of action.”

“I’ll be following closely enough to keep a sharp watch on things.”

“I expected that much, but you won’t need to, pilot. Nothing will happen.” The man started the group toward the X-wing again. “What about the rest of your pilots now? Do you need to contact them? Where are they?”

Darin sensed an even further defensive withdrawal on Mack’s part, and the commander just replied shortly, “Dead.”

“Oh.” The man coughed slightly and scratched at his head before mumbling, “Sorry.”

Mackin sighed and turned his gaze ahead, though he didn’t appear to be looking at anything while he solemnly said, “Yeah. Me too.”

The floorboards creaked, the windows were dirty, and the air circulation was poor at best. And this, Major Wendessin reflected, was one of the most prominent buildings in the entire colony, as it served as their main governing hall.

It was without a doubt the worst government office building Wendessin had ever set foot in, and he had only done that because this building was the logical place for his temporary command and control center. It was centrally located within the colony, it had all the needed utilities and capabilities, and it was one of the nicest buildings there. But if this was considered “nice,” he couldn’t bear to see what “dirty” was.

Really, how could these people live like this? Didn’t they realize that if they simply joined the Empire, they would get all the benefits a galactic government could offer them? They could clean this place up, attain a higher standard of living...why not do that? Why side with the bankrupt insurgents? It was completely irrational, and he couldn’t fathom it.

“Major.”

Wendessin turned away from the smudged window he was contemplating and faced the saluting Imperial soldier, whose uniform insignia proclaimed him to be part of the communication specialist group. Returning the salute, he said, “Yes, Lieutenant?”

“Sir, we have results back on the numbers that were received over the comlinks we obtained from the dead Rebel commandos. We’ve determined that they’re most likely global coordinates on the planet.”

“Coordinates? Where?”

The lieutenant handed Wendessin a datapad showing a map of the local area and a dot marking the location of the coordinates. “There, sir, near a couple abandoned trilithide mines. One of those mines is where we’re keeping the Rebels’ starfighters. The coordinates, however, are closer to the other mine. We swept it before we moved the Rebels’ fighters into the mine nearby, but it was empty.”

Wendessin quickly glanced over the datapad. “Only Rebels would be using that frequency and encryption. Something is happening at those coordinates, and the Rebels could have moved into that mine after we swept it. I think it’s time to re-sweep that place, don’t you?”

Without waiting for an answer to the rhetorical question, Wendessin turned to the soldiers manning the makeshift C&C stations. “Which squad is on standby? We have something for them.”

If nothing else, Mack reflected, that guy was right about the hiding spot.

The local resistance’s center of operations turned out to be a depleted trilithide mining complex to the south. The river they had flown above earlier flowed very near the complex, and some power-generating or cooling equipment was visible in the water. The mining operations had taken place entirely underground, so the complex was barely visible from above. The mining shafts sloped underneath the surface and were large enough for a repulsor hauler to go through, so the snubfighter fit as well. At the bottom of the shaft was a large, cavernous area from where the trilithide had been extracted, as well as some solid building structures along the side that presumably had housed the operation centers while the mine had been in use. The only light came from the X-wing, the three speeder bikes and the inside of one of the buildings.

The men on the speeder bikes led Mackin to a spot near the structures and motioned for him to land. He did so, not too happy about needing to shut down his X-wing’s landing lights and causing him to lose most of the illumination, but at least the four men were lighting glowrods to help alleviate that problem.

After Mack secured his fighter and told Rudder to keep a lookout, he climbed out and cautiously walked over to where Darin was getting off the back seat of one of the speeder bikes. “You okay?”

“Yes, sir, I’m fine.”

“Good.” Then under his breath, Mackin said to him, “What I wouldn’t have given for a hideout like this earlier.”

One of the men waved them over. “Let’s go.”

The two pilots followed, and the echo of their footsteps told them the cavern was quite large. The air was cold and clammy, and it had an odd smell that Mackin didn’t recognize. He wondered if residual trilithide was the cause of what his nose could only compare to a mixture of cooling system liquid and burnt electronics. Peering into the impenetrable depths around them, Mackin quietly said, “You all are sure taking this ‘underground’ resistance literally.” If anyone heard him, they didn’t answer.

Mackin funneled his energy into absorbing every detail he could see while they walked, like the layout of the structures, the locations of doorways, the place where the speeder bikes were parked, and even roughly how long it would take to get to his fighter from the closest building. If something happened to turn the tables on them down here, he wanted to know exactly where he was going.

The Coronas were taken into the building that housed the light and then into a room where a human man and two Quarren were sitting at a sturdy table. All were wearing clothing similar in style to the first four men’s, and each had a blaster. There was very little else in the dusty room except for a few inoperative control panels along one wall, storage shelves along another and two large windows looking into the cavern. A bowl of fruit, a pitcher of water and some cups were on the center of the table.

“Here are the pilots now, boss,” their guide said to the seated man. He gave the Rebels’ blasters to one of the Quarren, glanced back at the seated man and muttered, “Good luck,” before moving to stand guard in the doorway, the room’s only exit aside from the sealed windows overlooking the vast mining area.

The leader stood up and motioned to two chairs at the table. “Welcome. Please, sit.” He had broad shoulders, a solid build, a weathered face and greying hair. When he spoke, Mackin picked up on an accent like the other men had as well. Although Mack personally would have preferred to remain standing, he sat down uneasily in the nearest chair. Darin followed suit.

The leader scrutinized the two Coronas, and Mackin could only imagine how haggard and dirty they looked. Darin didn’t seem as concerned with their appearance, though, and instead was eyeing the bowl of red fruit. The leader nodded toward the bowl and said, “Help yourselves. There’s fruit and water available for you.” Then he walked to one of the storage shelves and took a small box off of it.

Darin hesitated and looked at Mackin. When Mackin gave a small nod, Darin eagerly reached forward and took a fruit. He studied it and picked at it a bit, apparently trying to figure out the best approach to take and whether it should be peeled or sliced, and finally decided to just bite into it. Within seconds he had swallowed his first mouthful and said to the man, “Thank you, sir,” before attacking the fruit again.

Mack’s stomach growled at the sweet smell, and he also took one and followed Darin’s example, though with more reservations. The fruit was tangy and very juicy, and the days of eating nothing but a few ration bars only enhanced the flavor.

“You’re welcome,” the leader said while he dug around a bit in the container. He finally found what he was looking for and pulled out what looked like a small square piece of flimsi, which he gave to Darin. “Here, put a bacta patch on that gash on your forehead. It looks pretty new, and you’re liable to get an infection without something like this covering it. Do either of you need any other medical supplies or treatments? We don’t have a lot, but we might be able to give you something.”

“No, the bacta patch will be plenty, thank you,” Mack said. He set his fruit down for a moment, leaned over to Darin and put the patch on his cut for him. Now that they had some light, Mackin could get a better look at it. It didn’t seem to be bleeding anymore, which was a plus.        He’d barely gotten the patch on before the leader returned to his own seat and said, “Given our situation and the need for secrecy, I hope you don’t mind if I don’t tell you my name.”

Mackin would have been surprised if he’d gotten one. “Then you won’t mind if we don’t tell you ours,” he replied. It was hard to sound casual or even halfway reasonable when speaking from behind the numerous walls Mack had constructed for protection, walls that would take a lot more than some fruit and bacta patches to knock down after all that had happened on this world. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so guarded and suspicious. Maybe all this was just to get them in a confined space where they couldn’t fight back or try to escape, and the Imperials could be coming down the hallway for them this very minute...He listened, but heard nothing beyond the doorway. Or maybe these locals were really in league with the Imperials and were just pretending to be friendly to gain the Rebels’ trust and easily learn information from them before the Imperials would come. He’d have to be careful.

The man nodded at Mackin’s words. “Fair enough. Now then, we know things have been going very badly for you. To the best of our knowledge, all of your commandos were killed in a firefight with stormtroopers. We didn’t realize quite how bad things were for the rest of you until we found out later on through a trusted source that the Imperials had planned executions of a few pilots they’d caught.” At that, Mackin saw Darin uneasily look down at the table, or perhaps at one of his wrist binders, and slow his chewing considerably. The leader didn’t seem to pick up on it and continued without a pause, “We kept a lookout, but we never saw any prisoners brought into the colony or heard of any taken elsewhere, so we don’t know what happened. We heard essentially nothing more, and if the Imperials weren’t still actively looking for you, we wouldn’t have even been sure you were still on the planet. Then we heard about the landmine explosion and figured that had to mean you were out and about, so we decided to try contacting you again to offer our help.”

Mackin didn’t immediately respond, letting the silence stretch out until the leader broke it by asking, “So...do you need help?”

“Yes, we do,” Mackin said evenly. “All we’re trying to do is get out of here. As your people may have told you, we only have one fighter between the two of us, which means we can’t reach orbit, let alone hyperspace. If you have a hyperspace-capable transport that my pilot here could use to fly out, that would solve all our problems.” He absently bit into his fruit again and watched the leader’s reaction closely.

The man looked regretful. “Sorry. All we have here are a few speeder bikes. There are a few transports in the colony, but it would be nearly impossible for one of us to get one out for you or even to sneak you in. Since they started looking for you, the Imperials are making everyone go in and out of the colony through checkpoints, and they search everything and check all ID’s. The only reason we were able to get out to come here was that we faked some work orders at another mine. We don’t have a way to get you fake ID’s and get you in. Nothing we have in the colony could do that either–the Imperials control that capability now to guard against that very tactic.”

Commander Mackin smothered a hopeless sigh. This was getting harder and harder.

The local paused and thought for a moment. “You just need a way to get your one pilot here out?”

Nodding, Mackin answered, “Yes. It’s just the two of us–the others are dead.”

The man looked regretful again. “I’m sorry to hear that. Unfortunately I can’t get you a transport, but...” His expression lit up slightly. “If you just need something for him to escape in, I know where the Imperials took the X-wings they captured.”

That caught Mackin’s attention. “Where?”

“Another depleted trilithide mine outside of the colony, just like this one. It’s the only type of place big enough to put several fighters and easily keep them under guard, hidden and away from the general population. It’s not far from here.”

The “third pilot” plan was sounding feasible again, and if what this man said about the difficulties in getting into the colony by normal means was true, then it could be their only chance. “How do we get there?”

“The entrance is hard to find. I can send a small team with your pilot to sneak him into the Imperials’ mine. That’s a’ we can do. Then it would be up to him to get in an X-wing and get out of there through one of the mine shafts.”

That made Mackin stop, and some of the initial excitement eroded. Send Darin off alone? Into an Imperial-held facility? With no one except some people whom he still didn’t trust to not betray them?

He worked things through in his mind, looking for another approach. If he went with to assist, he’d either have to leave the fighter behind here and fly out in another captured one, which would increase the difficulty, or fly the X-wing in as support and risk getting the team killed in a few-versus-many battle at the facility when the Imperials detected an X-wing coming and were alerted to their presence. As much as Mack hated the thought of splitting up, though, something else nagged at him: if his fears were realized and the locals were planning on delivering them to the Imperials, at least here within reach of his X-wing, Mack had a fighting chance. It was something he’d realized while following the speeder bikes to this place: if they were split up and something happened to one, the other could still be able to help. If he went on the team with Darin and it was a trap, then he’d be just as defenseless and would certainly be caught too, making him unable to stage any sort of rescue attempt. As selfish as it was, could they afford to put all their credit chits in one wallet?

Unity meant strength, but splitting up gave them more chances to get out of a bind, and there didn’t seem to be a lack of binds for them on this planet.

Mack looked at Darin, hoping to gauge how he felt about the proposal; however, Darin had settled down since the initial surprise meeting with the locals and now had the same damn unreadable, neutral expression on his face as he had earlier in the waterfall cave. No help there.

The squadron’s only chance was for this third-pilot mission to succeed. The mission’s only chance was for Darin to get hold of an X-wing. Darin’s best chance...was to have the smallest team possible sneak in and have Mackin available elsewhere as a backup in case things went sour on any front.

So much for that decision.

“All right,” Mackin said to the locals’ leader. “If you’re willing to do it, that’s our best chance of getting off this planet alive.”

The man nodded. “We can have a team ready to go shortly. Wait here.” He got up and walked out the door, motioning for the other man and one Quarren to follow him. The second Quarren remained sitting and watched the Coronas.

Mackin stood as well. “Nine,” he said softly and beckoned Darin over to a corner. Once there, Mackin locked gazes with him and kept his voice as quiet as he could so it wouldn’t carry. “Listen. I’m not happy about this, but we don’t have a choice.”

“It’s okay, sir,” Darin answered, equally quietly. “I’ll be fine.”

The calmness and simple resolve that Mackin noticed in Darin’s voice and demeanor reminded him yet again of the earlier discussion in the waterfall cave. Although Mackin wondered what was really going on inside Darin’s head to cause it, he also recognized that the pilot in front of him wasn’t the same little “rookie” who had left Crescent Star two days ago and he never would be again. He doubted Quiver or any of the others would be the same either.

“I could go with the team instead, and you could stay and use the X-wing here,” Mack offered. “It would–”

“Sir,” Darin interrupted, “I’ll go. As long as I have any choice in the matter, I’d really prefer to have my own fighter for this. I know all of its quirks and how it performs, and I’d feel a lot better with it. Besides, this X-wing only has three working laser cannons, and trying to swap out fighters after getting out of that other mine will likely be impossible because of Imperial resistance. I know what I signed up for, sir. I’ll do it.”

The commander gave a soft sigh. “All right,” he said at length. “Now, if anything happens whatsoever that makes you feel like you’re in danger, don’t hesitate to call me on your combadge. I’m still not entirely convinced these locals have our best interests in mind. If anything happens, you give me a call and Rudder and I will be right there. Otherwise, call me on the squadron frequency when you get out, and I’ll join up with you then.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Any questions?”

“No, sir.”

“How’s the headache?”

“A little better, sir. The food helped.”

The leader and the Quarren reentered the room at that moment, causing Mack and Darin to break off from their conversation. “They’re getting the speeder bikes ready to go outside,” the leader said. Indicating the Quarren in the doorway, he said to Darin, “He’ll be on the team with you, and he’ll take you out to the bikes now. Oh, and here are your blasters back.” He returned the weapons to the pilots. “Best head out there so you can a’ get going.” Then he turned his attention to Mackin and said, “You can stay in here for now.”

“I was going to monitor the comms from my X-wing and get it ready to go,” Mackin answered. “If your people don’t need help getting out of the Imperial mine afterwards, as soon as Nine here is set, we’ll be leaving.”

The leader shook his head. “Once they leave here, it’ll be at least five minutes before they even reach the entrance to the Imperial mine. You can go out to your fighter then, but in the meantime, we’d really like you to stay inside.”

Mackin had used that tone of voice enough times himself to know that it carried a command, not a suggestion. “Why? I’m not–”

“I don’t think five minutes is an unreasonable request,” the leader interrupted in a firm voice. “I’m sending three of my people into harm’s way inside an Imperial facility for you, and in addition to that, the colony has already been warned that there will be consequences if anyone helps the Rebels. It’s been brought to my attention that we may be a little lax in our security, and I’m just trying to help my people as much as I can. Tell me you wouldn’t do the same for any of your pilots.”

Mack silently cursed. He hated it when people used that “do the same” line on him, and especially when they were right. “Okay,” he relented. “Five minutes.”

“Good.” To the Quarren, the local said, “Head out.”

Mackin turned to Darin and simply said, “Good luck, Nine.”

“You too, sir.” Darin’s tone of voice hadn’t changed.

“See you soon.”

“Counting on it, sir.” He tried to smile and only partially succeeded, saluted and then followed the Quarren out of the room.

The leader turned to walk out after them, but Mackin stopped him with a few hesitant words. “Thank you for your help.” Hopefully this gratitude isn’t premature, Mack thought.

The leader stopped and looked over his shoulder, and his expression softened. “You’re welcome. I’ll be back in a minute. For now, if you’d like you can see your pilot off through that window.” He pointed it out and left.

Mackin walked past the other Quarren still sitting at the table and watching him, and then stopped at the window. It was difficult looking out of the lit room into the darkened cavern, but Mackin could make out enough. Darin was following the first Quarren to where the speeder bikes were parked and where two other men, one of whom they’d met in the woods, were quickly donning backpacks.

In another few seconds, the four of them were climbing on the two speeder bikes and getting ready to leave. The commander focused his attention on Darin and was hit with a wave of weariness. If the squadron was to be saved, then they had to trust this group of strangers, and Mack didn’t like the idea of trusting anyone on this planet, not one bit. But they had no choice, so he was sending one of his pilots off alone into danger.

On some level, he knew it shouldn’t be different than what he had intended to do, which was to send Darin off alone into danger as the “third pilot.” But it was. If he himself had to go into battle, Mack always felt more vulnerable on the ground than in the air, and that’s exactly what he was doing to Darin: sending him out into a situation for which he had limited training, no shields, only a blaster pistol for a weapon and no hyperdrive or even sublight engines to use to escape.

He hoped he never got used to this feeling.

The speeder bikes whirred to life and took off up the mine shaft where they were swallowed by the darkness.