All characters are mine, but the Star Wars universe and all its toys belong to Lucasfilm. As always, many thanks go out to the awesome people who read this and/or help me out by giving me ideas, critiques, encouragement and an ear when I need to air my frustrations. I couldn’t do this without all of you.

“You’re making me feel real optimistic here, Sarge,” Darin told him.

“Hey, at least we got your window replaced. Oh, yeah, your engine is fixed but only one test has been done on it. Same with your weapons controls. Shouldn’t be a problem, though–they looked fine.”

Darin nodded. “Okay, thanks. I appreciate all you guys got done so quickly.”

“We’ll fix her up good when you get back. Just don’t give us more work, okay, sir?”

Trying to grin a bit, Darin said, “Sure thing. See you then,” and then walked over to where all the Coronas were standing together in the hangar.

“How’s it look?” Mackin asked him when he walked up.

Darin’s half-grin disappeared. “They did as much as they could in the time they had. There are still significant problems that I’m not happy with, but nothing critical. She’ll fly.”

The commander looked agitated and frustrated but quickly blanked his expression. “Looks like yours is still the worst off overall. Scoop’s hyperdrive is still iffy, so we have to watch out for him. The rest of our fighters mainly just lost capacity, not capability, so we should be okay.”

The pilots stood there awkwardly for a minute. Glancing around at the others, Darin realized how odd the situation seemed just then: he and the other four temporary SpecOp’ers were suited up in their flight gear, ready to go, but Chopper, Kalre, Slurry and Quiver wore just their general duty uniforms. Darin couldn’t remember a time when he and Quiver had been suited up differently, since the wingpair was always on the same duty schedule. It was an obvious indication that something wasn’t right, and Thumper hated that. Knowing that fact in his brain was bad enough; he didn’t appreciate his subconscious now finding out as well because that was more difficult to ignore.

“Well, time to go, everyone,” said Mackin, breaking the small silence. He turned to the four staying behind and said, “We’ll be back as soon as we can. Chopper’s in charge until then should worst come to worst. Be good.”

“Yes, sir,” came the chorus of solemn acknowledgments, mixed in with goodbyes and wishes for good luck.

Commander Mackin, Lt. Fyndcap, Lt. Weas and Lt. Pellicer all turned and headed to their fighters, and Darin was just about to say goodbye to Quiver before doing the same thing when he noticed Quiver looking at him silently with an odd look on his face. There was only one other time he had seen his wingman wear that expression: it was when he and Mackin were leaving for that last dogfight on Lokinha. All those emotions came back in full force, and nonexistent parallels between the two situations began to be drawn in Darin’s mind. He couldn’t deal with this again so soon. He suddenly had to get out of there.

Darin spun and walked briskly toward his snubfighter. He was halfway there when suddenly an arm was hooked around his neck from behind and brought him to a stop. He yelped a bit, and then Quiver was there right beside him, his arm still encircling Darin’s neck.

“Uh-uh,” Quiver scolded gently. At least he didn’t seem so angry that morning. Yet. “You don’t think you’re getting out of here without saying goodbye first, do you?”

“Sorry,” Darin replied uncomfortably. “I was going to but then it felt too much like–well, you know.”

Darin’s wingman cocked an eyebrow at him, and the look clearly said that was precisely why Quiver was insisting on this. He let go of Darin’s neck but then grabbed him by the shoulders and spun him to face him, holding Thumper at arm’s length. “You be careful, or there’ll be hell to pay when you get back. Clear?”

Darin offered a half-grin fueled more by nerves than anything else. “Yes, sir, Flight Officer Striker. But I also don’t want to come back to find that you’ve gotten into more trouble, got it?”

“Got it, Niner. Good luck.” Quiver spun Darin around again so he now faced his X-wing and gave him a little shove. His voice sounded a bit strange as he said, “Now get going, you pokey bantha. They’re going to be waiting on you.”

“I’ll bring you a souvenir, Quiv. See you when I get back,” Darin called over his shoulder as he climbed the ladder to his cockpit.

When he sat down, he felt something underneath him on the seat and pulled out a datapad. Darin didn’t remember leaving it there, but maybe it was one of the datapads he’d brought along to catch up on busy-work with during the flight. He stowed the datapad with the others in a small compartment in the cockpit. He’d have plenty of time to work on them all: the different zigzagging legs of the hyperspace jumps to safely get to their destination would take several hours. Darin put on his helmet, gloves and seat restraints, quickly prepped his fighter, closed the lower port laser cannon out of his weapons loop and was ready to go when Mackin ordered the Coronas to launch.

Hanging in the blackness of space before them was a dismal-looking brown planet with prominent polar ice caps and lights speckled on its night side. From the Rebels’ vantage point the planet was in a half-phase, though the lit area increased as they made their way to the day side.

Darin hardly noticed it. Even though he was technically in control of his fighter, he was mentally running on autopilot and had been ever since they left hyperspace and he’d had to put that datapad away. He’d discovered the one left on his seat was a letter to him from Quiver, but since Darin had first taken a nap and then spent most of the time working on other datapads before getting to this one, he’d only gotten partway through the message. Even now, he kept turning the words over in his mind.

“Right now it’s only been about fifteen minutes since lunch oh-so-wonderfully ended,” Quiver wrote at the beginning of the letter. It was typed out text, not a recorded voice message, and for as long as the message was, Darin realized that had to have taken a lot of effort. “I didn’t mean to get so upset then, but damn it, Darin, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Life seems out of control, and I’m getting dragged along behind it. So consider this message to be my donri ball.” Quiver was referring to Darin’s favorite sport, and then Darin had understood the comparison: the author-turned-fighter-pilot was using writing as a means to blow off steam, like Darin released stress by playing donri. Darin had kept reading. “And don’t you dare tell Mack or Snubber about this message. The last thing I need now is an in-depth  psych eval. A lot of these are just jumbled thoughts that won’t make sense, and I know that. I just need to get them out of my system, and I’m letting you read them so you know I’m not acting so mean and horrible on purpose.”

At first Darin didn’t understand why Quiver was doing this, aside from the reason Quiver had stated. As someone who was notorious for keeping his private thoughts private when it came to something traumatic, Thumper just couldn’t figure out why Quiver was not only sharing his thoughts with Darin but was also writing them down, giving the whole galaxy access to them. Quiver had no way of knowing who might read this datapad. Darin would never have the courage to do that.

After a few minutes, Darin had come to the conclusion that it was just a difference in personalities. Quiver was an extrovert, a people person who had never had reason to keep his thoughts bottled up inside. And now, Darin had realized, maybe Quiver’s need to write this message showed he just wasn’t capable of bottling up his thoughts. Not that there was anything wrong with that...in fact, Darin had wished on more than one occasion that he was more like Quiver so it wasn’t so hard for him to open up. After spending so much time with Quiver and CC, he was getting better at it, though he knew he still had a long way to go.

Quiver went on to describe thoughts and emotions that Darin knew all too well. Most of them had been burned into him forever from the aftermath of the Imperial occupation of his homeworld. Sometimes Darin had known exactly what Quiver was saying, and other times the wording was so clumsy and inadequate and jumbled that Darin could only guess at what Quiver was trying to convey. Despite Quiver’s skill with language, there were some things he just didn’t know how to describe, especially if this was his first full-blown experience with those all-too-confusing feelings. Darin wished he was back on Star so he could help Quiver out; if anything, the letter proved Darin had been right to be concerned about his best friend.

Thumper was jolted out of his thoughts and brought back to the present by a short burst of static over the comm system. Mackin’s voice came through his headset an instant later. “Okay, Coronas, we’ll be in range soon. Transponders off and close it up.”

Darin had been dreading that command. Forcing himself to concentrate on the here and now, he chewed his lip in apprehension while he maneuvered his X-wing to come wingtip-to-wingtip with Pellicer, his temporary wingman. In turn, that pair started carefully moving forward toward Mackin and Ikoa, who were likewise side-by-side and close together. For the Coronas, this was supposed to be the hardest part of the mission, and as such it had been the one thing that they’d practiced in the sim over and over again.

Once they were on-planet, the pilots’ role was largely reduced to little more than extra sets of eyes to keep watch and extra people to lend help if things went wrong. Of the five pilots, Darin actually had one of the largest parts to play as his team was the distraction group, but even then he didn’t have to do much. The real work, the hard stuff, was thankfully and understandably being left to the real commandos.

They had all arrived in the Aridus System safely and without incident; even Pellicer’s fighter managed to get there on the first try. They were now heading for the fifth planet of the system, that ugly brown sphere filling up their forward viewports and much larger than it had been when Darin’s mind began to wander. According to their briefings, the planet was populated with many Twi’leks, Rodians and even some Dugs and Gran, but it was predominately human and noticeably Imperial.

Their destination, of course, was ultimately one of those Imperial strongholds. The Rebel Intel operatives on this planet had learned that there were important military plans for the Imperials stored there and that the Imperials were ready to implement them and move the data off-world to their new base of operations. The Rebellion had jumped at the chance to get a copy of the plans before the opportunity was lost.

The only thing it seemed the operatives couldn’t do, in fact, was get them onto the planet with an X-wing fighter escort. Because of the potential large amount of resistance if the Rebels’ mission was blown, Trainneer had insisted on the fighter support, but it took some doing to come up with a way to get them down undetected. They finally settled on a risky course of action that should fool any electronic sensors or radar, though eyewitnesses would ruin their day.

Starsmoke, the Special Forces shuttle, merely had to change its transponder code to come in under the guise of a normal, uninteresting freighter. That was easy. The Coronas, however, had to fly in an extremely tight formation, tight enough to make it appear to sensors that they were actually one large ship. Mackin and Ikoa were side-by-side up front, Darin and Pellicer were settled in together behind them, slightly above the first two but still breathing down their exhaust to form a square of sorts, and Weas flew directly beneath the group to add to the vertical profile so it would better match a freighter’s. Everyone but Mackin turned their IFF transponders off, and he turned on a false one that identified the conglomerate of X-wings as just another boring, normal freighter.

With the transponders off and no short-range sensors besides what Botch could patch through from his own sketchy sensor readings, Darin could really only rely on the view out his window to keep him packed insanely close to the others. He knew they were all good pilots, but every one of the five at one point or another during the sim practices had made a mistake and ended up colliding with everyone else. And that had been with fully operational sensors in the sim, Darin realized. He tried not to think about it and instead concentrated on Mackin’s voice guiding them through the difficult maneuver.

After a few long minutes of nerve-wracking flying like that, Aridus Five’s flight control finally contacted them. Mackin and Trainneer, as respective “captains” of their ships, relayed their information and destination to control. Another unending minute later, clearance was granted to them, and they angled down on their designated flight path to a town called Tannemil.

The flight through the planet’s atmosphere seemed to be even longer than the tight flight through space, though it lasted about the same amount of time. Darin tried to keep a loose hand on the stick, but every bump in the air made him think they were about to collide. Intellectually he knew that the air was affecting them all the same so they would “bump” as one. As long as he didn’t panic and overcorrect they would be fine, but it wasn’t easy to really convince himself of that.

At long last they were flying above the brown, flat, barren wasteland between cities and heading for a warehouse on the outskirts of Tannemil, with Starsmoke positioned between the X-wings and the town to help block them from curious eyes. Before long they entered the dark, crumbling warehouse and were able to spread out and set down. The warehouse was supposedly abandoned, and while it was risky to stay there it was still the best hiding place they had.

Soon after, the two approached the group and Trainneer spoke. “The mission is still a go. This is Gundark. He’ll go over final details with each group and then we’ll head out.”

It took the Rebels a couple of hours to unload and prepare the necessary equipment from Starsmoke and change into their mission-appropriate clothing, but finally they had all gathered together for their briefing from the short operative with thinning brown hair.

Looking around again, Darin noticed how the small group of Coronas had been divided once more by virtue of clothing alone. Mackin and Ikoa both had cold-weather civilian clothes and jackets on to guard against the near-freezing temperatures, and Darin couldn’t help but think that he wasn’t used to seeing Mackin out of uniform, which just made the situation more bizarre and out-of-place. Pellicer and Weas now matched the rest of Group Two, and they all wore general duty Imperial uniforms and jackets. Maybe it was just Darin’s subconscious, but he thought that Pellicer looked fairly normal or at-home in it. With his rigid bearing and Imperial naval background, Pellicer could still easily pass for a member of the Imperial military. Weas had gone to an Imperial Academy for about a year, so he probably was used to the uniform as well. He looked different mainly because he’d had to get a haircut for his role and that made him look as odd as Mackin in civvies. As for Darin, he now blended in with Group Three, and he knew that if he wasn’t nervous about the “mission” aspect of what that entailed, he probably would have felt the most comfortable out of all of them.

Group Three was clad in grey coverall jumpsuits belonging to “Pinnacle Shipping” and had matching jackets on over those. The others, Groups One and Two included, were all bundled up from the cold, but Darin never even fastened the front of his jacket. The weather was uncannily similar to what he was used to back home in the later part of a typical autumn, and the fact that he was also “working” for a shipping company was not lost on him. He was sure that was why he was with Group Three instead of another group: he had worked for a shipping company after finishing school, before he had left home to become a Rebel. The Special Forces teams had certainly taken advantage of his past experience when they were planning Group Three’s part of the mission.

Standing there in those clothes and in those temperatures, Darin felt more like himself, more normal than he had in over a year. The whole situation seemed eerily like some alternate universe comprised solely of what-ifs and could-have-beens; if the occupation hadn’t happened, Darin was certain he would still be working shipping. Though it wasn’t glamorous, it was a job he honestly enjoyed. The cold invigorated him, and his spirits had noticeably picked up when he prepped the landspeeder and helped load the shipping containers in which Group Two would be stowing away. The once-familiar loading and prepping procedures had come back easily, like he had never stopped doing them in the first place.

Soon everyone had been given their final briefings, details and code words and they were ready to start. Group One left in a normal landspeeder for the nearby large city of Bertel, their ultimate destination. Groups Two and Three gave them a thirty-minute head start, and then it came time for them to leave as well. They would also be heading to Bertel but via a different route so they would enter the city from a different direction, one more corresponding to their fictitious origin across the continent.

“Bren...” Drohner said darkly as he climbed into his box, “you mean to tell me that after all the shielding and modifications they added to these things, you forgot to tell them to put in the plush massage pads? That was the only reason I was coming on this mission!”

“Aww, poor computer slicer’s not gonna be comfy,” Stockard teased with a mischievous grin. “Bren, hurry and close that up before we have to listen to him complain the whole way there.”

Lt. Troy just laughed, wished the slicer luck and closed the container, then repeated the procedure with Arrunes.

Meanwhile, Darin just half-grinned nervously at Weas and Pellicer as he got ready to close them in. “I never thought I’d be literally delivering you into the hands of the Imperials,” he said.

“Be a good chauffeur and there might be a tip in it for you,” said Pellicer.

Weas didn’t say much, only, “Good luck, Nine. Be careful.”

“You too, sir.” Darin closed up Weas’s container and began to close Pellicer’s, but Scoop stopped him prematurely.

He motioned Darin closer, and when Darin leaned in, Pellicer whispered, “Really, be very careful. And I’m saying that from the bottom of my selfish heart.” He grinned and put a hand to his chest. “I have a feeling that Quiver won’t let us back onboard if we don’t have you with us alive and intact, and I left my blankie in my quarters on Star. I need to be able to get back onboard for it.”

“Well then, Scoop, just for the sake of you and your blankie, I’ll come back alive. There is no nobler cause than that.” Darin tried to say it with a straight face, but he couldn’t do it entirely, and the two pilots chuckled.

Bertel was a run-down, inhospitable-looking city that matched the dreariness of the planet on which it sat. On their way in, Group Three had passed sections of town that clearly were inhabited by only one kind of species each, and these seemed to be in even worse repair than the human neighborhoods did. The streets twisted around oddly and were hard to navigate; at one point when they were in a Dug section of town, there had been no signs in Basic and Group Three had gotten lost for a short time. Just looking out the window in that area was enough to convince Darin that asking an inhabitant for directions would not be a smart option.

Thumper returned their worker droid to the back of their speeder and once again was just amazed at how surreal this all was. Doing this delivery run took him back, and it felt so familiar and yet so foreign. It was an odd feeling, but when he heard Troy give one of the passenger crates a final, casual pat to signal the completion of the unloading to Group Two, he was disappointed that it was over. He tossed the remainder of their unloading equipment in the back of the speeder and joined the others in climbing into the passenger compartment in the front.

“Everyone ready?” Darin asked as he started the speeder. He glanced at each one in turn, and they all nodded. Troy’s hand casually came down to the edge of the seat, and Darin hoped that this last part of their job, the distraction part, would go as smoothly as the first part had. But blast, he hated acting.

Darin slowly eased the speeder forward and headed toward the exit of the receiving dock. When they were almost there and were a good distance from where they had left Group Two, Troy pressed his fingers under the lip of the seat, and almost instantly their speeder backfired loudly, bucked and stopped dead. The emergency landing struts deployed a split second before they could fall the whole way to the ground, and they landed on them hard. Diagnostics lit up on the control console, but all of them blinked off just as quickly as the computer shut down.

Playing their parts, the members of Group Three looked at each other with startled, then alarmed expressions, and Darin tried restarting the engine. As expected, it didn’t work.

With mumbled curses, they piled out of the speeder and began walking around it, inspecting it. The Imperials in the receiving bay were all looking at them curiously and some, including the one in charge, came up and asked, “What happened?”

“Ah, I’m sure it’s just a little glitch,” Troy said dismissively.

“I can’t believe this,” Stockard muttered. “Why’d this have to happen now? This lousy hunk of scrap metal is gonna put us so far behind schedule!” The big man gave the speeder a good kick, and then he whirled around to glare at Kicktar. “This is all your fault! You were supposed to fix that last time!”

“My fault?!” she retorted loudly. “How is this my fault? You were the one who signed out this speeder. Why’d you take the broken one?”

“It was back on the list of available speeders. Besides, I figured Niylen would check everything out before we left like he was supposed to!” Stockard answered, now pointing his finger at Darin.

“Yeah, maybe it was fine before you decided to take that shortcut on the way over here. You do know that you’re supposed to SLOW DOWN for large rocks and boulders, not go faster, don’t you?” the blue-skinned Mon Cal countered angrily. “If you hadn’t hit that one–”

“Enough!” Troy yelled from where he was lying on his back on the ground and looking at the underside of the back end of the speeder. Darin, Kicktar and Stockard stopped yelling and sullenly glared at each other until Troy continued, “Niylen, take a look at this.”

Darin’s brow immediately furrowed, and he noticed that Stockard and Kicktar caught that line too. That was the first phrase since their distraction started that had not been part of the script: Troy was supposed to tell Stockard to get a spare part and tools out of the back of the speeder, not ask Darin to look at the damage. With an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach, Thumper got down on the ground beside Troy, pulled himself partway under the speeder on his back and looked where the group leader indicated with a glowrod.

One glance told Darin that things were not good. The miniature explosive charge that Troy had activated to break the speeder down and provide the distraction was only supposed to sever two wires to stop the engine. They had the parts and the tools to fix that, and it was an easy enough and quick enough thing to do: a conservative estimate said it would take them fifteen minutes to repair the damage and be gone. This, however, was a different story. The charge had been too powerful or placed incorrectly, and in addition to taking out those two wires it had also blown a hole in the coolant system and damaged one of the lines for their steering controls. Darin had no idea if they could fix it all or not.

“What do you think?” Troy quietly asked. His tone of voice did not exactly radiate confidence, and Darin could tell their lines of thinking paralleled.

Darin chewed on his bottom lip and finally said, “It’ll take a while. And we’ll have to be creative with bypassing and rerouting because we don’t have enough spare parts to do this properly. Even then it might not work.” He quickly pointed out to Troy the different systems he could tell for certain had problems.

“What’s wrong?” Stockard asked.

Darin and Troy pulled themselves out from underneath the speeder and Troy answered, “Engine lines, control lines and coolant lines are all damaged. Get all our tools and spare parts out of the back–we have a lot of work ahead of us.”

Stockard and Kicktar nodded and began pulling things out. The ranking Imperial on duty asked, “Do you need to contact your company and have them send parts out for you?”

Troy smiled with just the right mixture of politeness and distractedness and said, “We’ll call them and let them know what’s going on. We should be able to fix it on our own, though, with what we have in our emergency kit. Sorry for having this happen here in the middle of your receiving bay. We’ll be out of your way as soon as we can.”

The Imperial shrugged a bit. “Not your fault. Let us know if you need anything.”

“All right, thanks.”

As long as they were inside the Imperial base, Group Three was on their own: Group One had no more fake delivery identities from their imaginary company to get themselves onto the base if they could somehow find the needed spare parts somewhere, and they probably couldn’t transfer any credits in time for Group Three to buy the parts because there weren’t enough available funds left in this mission for something of that scale, not after the purchases of the landspeeders and equipment used in the shipping crate modifications. Requesting assistance from the Imperials was not an option, since that would likely lead to more questions than the Rebels could answer and which would in turn make the Imperials discover that Pinnacle Shipping didn’t exist. All Group Three had to do was get out of the Imperial base, and then Group One could come assist much more easily. Getting the speeder started and moved far enough to get out of the base was going to be the hard part.

Troy slid himself beside the pilot a moment later with some tools and spare parts. With some difficulty in the small space, he laid them beside Darin and pulled his comlink from his pocket. “I’m going to call and tell them we’ll be late,” he said in a very low voice so it wouldn’t carry. “You have an estimate for me?”

Darin had no clue. “Give me an hour. If it’s not done by then, I should be able to give a more accurate guess once I sort through this mess.”

The Rebel lieutenant turned on the comlink, fiddled with some of its settings, and then held it close enough to his ear that Darin could only hear Troy’s side of the conversation, and even that was difficult to pick up due to Troy’s low tones. “Dispatch, this is Renniton. We’ll be a little late getting to our next delivery... No, no, just a mechanical glitch. We’re working on it... We should be leaving our most recent stop in an hour. I’ll comm again if we’re delayed beyond that... No, we got the Bertel delivery done with no problems. This happened as we were leaving the place... No, that wouldn’t work... All right. Out.”

Drohner’s fingers flew over the console’s keypad as he tried to slice into the location of the targeted military plans. The computer spikes he had secretly placed on the computer were helping to make the search go faster as well as more securely, but these files were hidden well and it was tricky to find them.

He and Arrunes had been sitting there for about twenty minutes now. Beside the slicer, Arrunes was nonchalantly poking at nonsecure stuff on his terminal, making it look like he was busy while he really kept tabs on their surroundings, which allowed Drohner to focus fully on his task of getting the data. The room had a handful of different computer consoles and was used as a general computer lab on this floor, so getting in the room hadn’t been difficult. Drohner quickly got them logged into the system and then had set about doing his job. Pellicer and Weas were a short distance down the corridor, pretending to organize supplies in a storage closet. They were acting more as an outer defense and were supposed to click the comlink to alert Arrunes if something more threatening than a random, oblivious Imperial seemed to be heading their way.

The slicer finally started getting close and slowed down as he got more cautious. A short time later he gave a hint of a smile as he found the data they were after. After ensuring that his access wouldn’t set off any alarms, he began copying the files onto some datacards.

Arrunes must have noticed Drohner’s faint smile and recognized it as the sign that meant his teammate had gotten what he was looking for, because the youthful-looking man seemed to become even more alert to the happenings around them. The time now while the files were copying was probably the most dangerous time of all if Drohner had missed any flags in the system. So far the two other Imperials in the room were busy with their own work and hadn’t paid them any attention, and Drohner trusted Arrunes to be able to tell if that changed.

Suddenly Drohner’s smile was gone, replaced with a look of puzzlement as he looked at the files being copied. While he didn’t go into the contents of each file now, he was seeing all the file names as they transferred onto the datacards. They were military plans without a doubt, but most of the files listed referred to this area of the galaxy. He hadn’t even noticed that fact until the name “Lokinha” caught his eye, and once he spotted that then he realized that the others were also in the general vicinity. If this was to be believed, then it looked like the Imperials were involving all these worlds in something, or planning to. The Rebels had assumed that Lokinha had been an isolated incident, just a matter of the Imperials finding out about the colony’s manufactured products and wanting to deny that to the Rebels, but now it looked like it was part of something bigger. Lokinha seemed to be simply one puzzle piece related to all these other nearby worlds somehow. His brow furrowed as he wondered what was going on and what was going to happen.

The console indicated that all the selected files had finished copying. Drohner removed the datacards from the computer and casually put them in a pocket, making sure to fasten the pocket securely. Then he began slowly and methodically closing all the electronic doors he had opened and taking great care to erase his tracks. It would have been one thing if the Imperials had found out he was trying to access the files before he got to them; it was something entirely different if they discovered later on that the files had actually been accessed. It would make the plans suspect and they might scrap them entirely, leaving the Rebels with worthless information. Or the Imperials could even use the Rebels’ knowledge of the plans against them and set up an ambush. No, he had to be very careful not to leave any indications that he was ever there, even if people later checked to see if the files had been accessed.

Because of this, it took Drohner longer to get out of the system than it had to get in. He logged out at last, discreetly removed the computer spikes and pocketed them, then turned to Arrunes. “You wanna go get something to eat?” asked Drohner casually.

Arrunes shrugged. “Sure.” He logged out as well, and they pushed their chairs back and walked out.

They were two steps out of the room when Drohner saw Pellicer notice them, though the pilot didn’t react to them. Instead, Pellicer turned back to Weas who was holding two small boxes and continued what he had been saying. “I still say you’re doing it wrong.”

“How can a style of organization be incorrect?” Weas snapped. “All I’m doing is putting the writing utensils together. That’s a perfectly logical approach.”

“Not all writing utensils are equal. We should put the ones most likely to be used in the most accessible location, and the others can go higher up, out of the way of other, more useful supplies like datacards.”

“You’re going to confuse people.”

Ikoa leaned back in her chair and sipped her juice. She truly believed they had lucked out with their assignment, at least while nothing happened to the other groups. As long as the others were fine, Group One got the easy stuff: strolling around and looking at some of the shops in Bertel or sitting here like this in the restaurant having dinner. Ikoa and the others had noticed Trainneer move off and take an incoming comlink call a while ago, but since he didn’t seem too concerned about it and didn’t tell any of them what it was about, she figured it was something like a routine status update from Gundark.

Ikoa and Rayal had hit it off rather well, and the two women chatted easily while they waited for Group Two to show up. Hozke, Mackin and Trainneer seemed determined to talk about “guy stuff” amongst themselves in the presence of the women’s more “girly talk” as Hozke called it, but even as they did so Ikoa could sense a certain amount of tension between Mackin and Trainneer. She kept tabs on it to make sure it didn’t escalate, but it wasn’t more than an uncomfortable nuisance at its present level, so she just tried to enjoy herself a bit and thought of all this as the R&R they’d been denied.

Group One looked up as the door to the restaurant opened, letting in a wave of cold air. The four members of Group Two walked in, spotted them and came over to the table.

“Hi, everyone,” Drohner said as they approached. Friendly greetings were exchanged, and Arrunes took Rayal’s hand and smiled sweetly to her as they played one of the two couples.

Pellicer and Ikoa were playing the second couple. Shaun came to stand behind Ikoa’s chair as she casually rocked back in it, and he smiled down at her. “Hi, sweetie. Ready to go home?”

Ikoa reached up, grabbed the front of his jacket and pulled him down to give him a peck on the cheek. “Not yet,” she said before she let go of him. “I found the most adorable dress today that you just have to get me.”

“That’s all she’s talked about since she saw it,” Mackin said, grinning. “I was almost ready to buy it for her just to get her to stop.”

“Why don’t we come back when it’s just the two of us, and you can show me then,” Pellicer said with a soft smile.

Ikoa jokingly pouted a bit. “Promise?”

“Promise.”

Ikoa put on a facade of reluctant acceptance and didn’t protest beyond that. Group One paid their bill, put their jackets on and then left with Group Two. The worst part of the mission was over; now they’d meet up with Group Three, who should be waiting for them back at the warehouse in Tannemil, and they’d be off this planet before the Imperials ever knew they were there.

“Okay, try starting it now!” Darin yelled from his place under the speeder.

In the driver’s seat, Troy hit the ignition. The speeder sputtered, then screeched painfully and died.

Darin cursed softly in frustration. That last bypass should have worked. He resisted the urge to look at his chrono again and instead fiddled with the makeshift coolant bypass some more. He was getting close to the end of his self-imposed hour for the repair time.

If all had gone according to plan, Group Two should have gotten copies of the plans by now and, being the innocent Imperials that they were, walked right out the front door. Getting in was always a lot harder than getting out in these situations, it seemed, because while going out they didn’t have to go through ID checkpoints or anything. Then they were to meet up with Group One and hop in their speeder to head back to Tannemil and the abandoned warehouse. The warehouse was also where Group Three was supposed to end up with their speeder.

Darin assumed Group Two had been successful, or at least not caught, because there had been no alarms or warnings in the Imperial receiving bay. He was grateful for that much at least.

He tried another adjustment and called, “How about now?”

Troy started the engine once more and this time it sputtered, whined a bit and then hesitantly kept running. Darin watched the repairs for a second to make sure they held, then grinned in relief and pulled out from under the speeder just in time to see an Imperial walk up to Sgt. Kicktar and quickly say something to her. She frowned and then directed him up front to Troy.

Lieutenant Troy looked up from the driver’s seat as the man approached. Darin wiped his hands off on his coveralls and helped Kicktar and Stockard put all of the tools and parts back in the aft speeder compartment and lock it. He wondered what was going on and strained to hear what the Imperial said to Troy, but the distance and the noise from stowing the tools made it hard to listen in. The Imperial looked extremely nervous and rattled. Darin thought he was asking how much it would cost for a ride to the Halon Tapcafé, and the pilot had just enough time to realize that those words had some special meaning before klaxons started blaring in the bay, as if his earlier thoughts had jinxed the mission.

Everyone jumped, but Group Three soon put on expressions of mere confusion and looked around, though Darin suspected the others were better at it than he was. He made himself remember that they were just civilians working for a shipping company, and to immediately react with a guilty conscience toward the alarms would certainly tip off the Imperials that something was amiss. The dock workers started scurrying around once the initial surprise wore off, and the one in charge of the receiving bay checked a computer console, looked around and then pointed and yelled in the speeder’s direction.

The Imperial standing beside Troy suddenly whipped out a blaster and fired at the Imperial in charge, destroying any chance the Rebels might have had of getting out of the situation in a benign manner. He then fired at a couple of the other Imperials in the receiving bay who had sidearms and were likewise drawing them and yelling. When the first Imperial started shooting, most of the others (and all of the unarmed dock workers) dove for cover behind any of the numerous crates and returned fire if they could, and chaos suddenly abounded.

The Special Forces operatives never hesitated. Almost immediately Darin saw Troy tossing a blaster to him from their secret stash in the front of the speeder. Stockard and Kicktar had already each been supplied with a blaster in the same fashion and were beginning to return fire toward the armed Imperials. Kicktar moved in front of Darin to shield him from the largest group of Imperials and began pushing him toward the door to the speeder.

“Everyone in!” Troy yelled as he too shot off some rounds.

The next few seconds were a blur to Darin. He and Kicktar tried to make a fighting retreat the short distance to the speeder’s door along the left side of the speeder. The distance wasn’t that great, but they were exposed and had no cover save for the speeder beside them.

In reality, there were only about two or three Imperials who were firing at the pair, but to Darin it seemed like a whole lot more. The Imperials could instantly tell who the threats were in this situation, and they focused their attention primarily on Kicktar and the other commandos as the Rebel sharpshooters quickly showed they were no mere delivery workers. In a manner of seconds this tactic proved very successful.

Darin never saw what happened to Stockard on the other side of the speeder; he just heard a cry and then silence. Thumper and Kicktar were only a couple steps from the open speeder door when Kicktar went down dead right beside Darin with a massive head wound.

Forgetting about firing back, Darin ran the final two steps and dove into the speeder in the driver’s seat. A few blaster bolts came close enough to singe his jacket. He saw Troy right beside him in the front passenger seat, and the trigger-happy Imperial had climbed into the back seat at some point. Troy leaned back from firing out the open passenger window and yelled to Darin, “Go! Go! Get us out of here!”

The few seconds they saved by the fortune of having the engine already running probably saved their lives as a few more Imperials started to enter the bay in response to the alert and weapons fire. Darin threw the controls into gear and hit the throttle, praying the repairs would hold long enough to get them out. The speeder jumped forward with a jerk, stalled, and then jumped forward again and kept going.

The receiving bay’s gate was structurally weak enough that Darin didn’t think twice before he aimed the speeder at it and crashed through. They tore out of the receiving dock, but when Darin steered toward the Imperial base’s main gate, Troy said, “Forget the gate–it’s too far away in the wrong direction and they’ll be posting more guards there. We need another way out, right now.”

Darin nodded and instead made a beeline for the nearest edge of the base, aiming straight for the wall around the base perimeter.

The Imperial leaned forward from the back seat and shouted, “What are you doing?! That fence is solid duracrete! You can’t bust through that one too!”

“Quiet!” Darin snapped as he tried to concentrate. The wall around the base was about five meters tall, and this kind of speeder was only rated for a three-meter maximum altitude. He hoped he could squeeze another 40% performance out of this machine, and he just might if he could time it right and if everything decided to work. Otherwise, well, they wouldn’t have to worry about escaping anymore.

They were uncomfortably near the wall when he started adjusting the controls. Most speeders, this one included, had two separate propulsion systems: one for the repulsor coils and one for the thrust engine. They ran on the same fuel but had different combustion chambers, which allowed the driver to do some interesting things if he knew how. A former coworker had taught Darin this trick on a slow work day, and he hoped he could remember all the steps in the correct order.

He began by cutting out the thrust engine’s throttle, but he didn’t apply the brakes. Their momentum kept them moving very quickly toward the looming duracrete structure, and they remained three meters above the ground since the repulsors still had full power applied. He turned the mixture to the thrust engine fuel-rich and then flooded the chamber with as much fuel as he dared. A handful of meters before they hit the wall, he yelled, “Hang on!”

Darin hit the emergency control to switch the feedlines so that the repulsors would now be running from the thrust engine’s combustion chamber and vice versa, and he jammed in the corresponding throttle at the same instant. The landspeeder’s repulsor coils screamed in protest from the sudden flood of fuel-rich energy burning, but it did its job and that same flood of energy bucked them another couple meters up; Darin could hear small explosions as the fuel burned in an unstable manner. With a horrible scraping sound, the speeder just barely went over the top of the narrow wall, and suddenly they were on the other side and pitching almost straight down.

More out of habit and reflex than anything else, the pilot yanked back on the stick, then remembered he had to switch the feedlines back. He cut out both throttles, switched the feedlines back to normal and finally punched the repulsor throttle in again just as hard right before they would have crashed. The front of the speeder was caught by the repulsor field and never impacted the ground, though it did stop their descent rather abruptly and threw the Imperial into the front seat between Darin and Troy. The speeder’s aft wasn’t so lucky: it hit the wall and then the ground before righting itself. Thumper tried to level out the stick and stabilize the craft, then he took off down the nearest city street he saw. He ignored the lights flashing on the speeder’s console indicating malfunctions and damage and also ignored the Imperial yelling, “You’re crazy! Are you trying to kill us?! What were you thinking?!” He simply attempted to squeeze every meter out of the landspeeder that he could.

They hadn’t gone more than two blocks into the surrounding city of Bertel when Darin’s steering went completely out and a warning indicated that a combustion chamber was overheating. He cut out the throttles and hit the brakes before they ran into something, and just like that the speeder died again, this time falling all the way to the ground with a bone-jarring impact and a loud crash. A few engine restart attempts proved useless.

“That’s it, this thing is dead,” Darin said breathlessly while wiping sweat out of his eyes. “What do we do now? What’s going on?” He turned to Lt. Troy for answers, and his eyes grew wide when he saw the commando pressing his hand against a considerable blaster wound in the upper part of his chest. “Are you okay?!”

Troy managed to nod, though his brown eyes were dull from pain. “Come on, we have to get out of here.” He fumbled for the latch to the door, but the Imperial quickly reached over and opened it himself. Taking his blaster from Troy who had held it while the pilot drove, Darin jumped out of his own door, threw the safety on the blaster, stuck it in his belt and ran around the front of the speeder to the other side to help Troy get out. The Special Forces commando tried to stand on his own, but his legs immediately buckled and Darin caught him before he could fall. He draped Troy’s arm around his neck and slowly stood up with him. He walked with Troy over to the aft storage compartment of the speeder to get out their emergency medpack.

“Wait, wait, wait, what’s going on? Who are you anyway?” asked Darin as he pocketed the medpack, but the man was already gone. Too much was happening too fast, and he hated getting overwhelmed like this.

Lt. Troy coughed a bit and gasped out, “He’s our other operative. His cover was blown. Follow him.”

Darin hesitated for an instant more but then started after the man in the Imperial uniform, having to support most of Lt. Troy’s weight as they went. By the time the two of them got to the first side street, the man was already turning another corner farther down. He came back into view just long enough to softly call, “Are you coming? Hurry up! Don’t slow me down–they’ll be here soon!”

They finally ducked into a below-ground room. It was dark and dirty and smelled horrible even through the breather mask. The operative turned to Darin and quietly said, “We’ll hide here for a while.”

Darin nodded. He lay Troy down on the cleanest part of the floor he could see and tried to make him comfortable. Troy had stopped vocally responding a couple of minutes ago, and now Darin noticed the commando’s breathing was becoming more shallow and his skin was getting pale. His wound was still bleeding. Thumper was getting more and more nervous about his condition, and he asked the operative, “Can you help him?”

The operative just shook his head and said, “No, sorry.” He paused for a second and changed the subject. “In case you’re captured I won’t tell you my real name, but my cover’s already blown so I can say that I’m a lieutenant with Rebel Intelligence, code name Halon. Who are you?”

“Flight Officer Darin Stanic. I was with Group Three.”

Halon frowned a bit. “‘Flight Officer’? Are you one of those pilots acting as extra bodies on this mission?”

“I wouldn’t put it quite that way, sir, but yes.”

Halon shook his head to himself and began to pace, and Darin could have sworn that the operative muttered something under his breath about incompetence and a wish that a real Special Forces soldier was here instead.

The pilot tried to ignore the grumblings and focused on the medpack and the commando. He cleaned Troy’s wound, put some bacta patches on it and tightly bandaged it, and he felt he did it correctly but wasn’t entirely sure. He wasn’t even sure if that was enough or if there was something more he should be doing since he hadn’t taken a proper course on basic first aid since he was with his training squadron. A first aid refresher class had been one of the crash courses they’d given the Coronas before this mission, but it was scheduled in the afternoon of the last day, and Darin had been too distracted from his fight with Quiver and too tired at the time to retain much. He mentally cursed himself for not paying closer attention to the class while he finished with the bandage, and as soon as he was done he fished his comlink out of his pocket.

Halon was beside him in a heartbeat. “What are you doing?” he hissed before Darin could even turn it on.

Confused, Darin quietly replied, “Calling for help, sir.”

“Give me that.” The operative snatched the comlink out of Darin’s hand. “What are you, stupid? The Imperials will now be monitoring every single comm frequency looking for me. You want to lead them right to us by telling them where we are?” The fairly tall, solidly-built man did not look happy.

The pilot was even more puzzled. “I need to tell Group One what’s happening so they can come find us before the Imperials have a chance to organize, sir. Maybe they can get us out before then.”

Halon shook his head. “We can’t risk the communication or your giving out our location. The Imperials will pick it up and we’ll be found.”

Darin couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Sir, then what was the point of even having Group One? They’re supposed to help us if we got into trouble, and this is certainly what I’d classify as being in trouble.”

“That was under normal mission parameters,” retorted Halon, “which is no longer the case. The Imperials suspect I was spying on them, so everything will have changed.”

“Then that means they might send out a lot of people to look for you. We need to get help now before they have a chance to do that and before it’s too late.”

Shaking his head, Halon replied, “It’s already too late. They’ll be monitoring the comms and searching the city. We need to stay here and be quiet.”

Darin slowly stood up to face the Intel operative. His nerves were wearing thin and he was sick of being trapped and hunted by the Imperials. In the quiet, even tones that resulted from his effort to control his voice, the blond pilot said, “Sir, we can’t just hole up here and wait for the Imperials to show up. We need to call for help. I’ll use a secure line, okay? I have to let my team know what’s happening so they can get us out.”

Halon seemed to be getting just as frustrated and didn’t put in the same amount of effort as Darin did to cover it up. “There’s no such thing as a secure line here. Trust me, I know: my job with the Imperials was to monitor comm lines. You’ll just have to quietly wait here for this to blow over and hope your team doesn’t write you off in the meantime.”

Darin stared at him in horror. Remembering how Trainneer had already shown on Lokinha that he was willing to cut some losses, Darin said, “You can’t be serious. I’m not going to just passively wait here! He needs medical treatment! If you won’t let me call, then stay here with him while I go find help on my own. Just tell me where we are or where to go.”

“We can’t leave this room until it’s safer to move around in the city. Then we’ll head to the rendezvous point. Until then, though, we need to ride this out.”

The pilot’s control was quickly disappearing. “How is it going to get safer? Our best chance is to find help now before the Imperials can organize however many search parties to come after us and scour this place. We’re not that far from the speeder. This will be the first area where they look!”

At the same time, Darin’s protests just seemed to fuel Halon’s own agitation. “It’ll get safer after they come through and move on to somewhere else, forgetting about this place at that point because they’ve already looked here. Besides, they’ll probably think we’re farther away by now, like we would have been if you hadn’t slowed me down. They won’t find us if we stay quiet–there are too many cellars and alleys and nooks and crannies in this run-down old neighborhood for them to search all of them, and they won’t. They won’t know where we are unless you broadcast our location!”

Darin wasn’t buying this, and it showed. In a low voice he asked, “We’re going to wait here until they all decide to pass by and hope they don’t find us? That’s your plan? Besides that being completely ridiculous, we can’t do that because he’s hurt too badly. He can’t wait that long for help.”

“I’m sure he’ll be fine, Flight Officer,” the operative said pointedly.

“He won’t be! Have you even looked at his injury? We need to get help!” Darin stepped around Halon and started walking toward the basement’s exit, but before he could take two steps Halon blocked him again and wouldn’t let him past.

For a few seconds Halon moved around to actively block Darin’s way, but then he got completely fed up with the pilot and pulled out his blaster as he quickly stepped back to block the basement’s doorway, the only exit. He changed the blaster’s power settings with a flick of his thumb and within a moment had leveled it at Darin.

Darin reflexively took a couple surprised steps back before he stopped. “You wouldn’t.”

“I know how to use this stun setting if I have to.” Halon stared hard at him down the barrel of the blaster and continued in a cold voice, “Listen, if we both don’t hole up and disappear for a while, they’ll find us. They know what you look like and they know we left together, so if you leave they’ll find you and that will lead them to me. That can’t happen. You’re what, a pilot? He’s a soldier? You two are expendable to the Rebellion–I’m not. So that means hiding and staying quiet take priority over his life at this point. I won’t allow you to jeopardize things by leaving on some idealistic crusade that has no basis in the reality of the situation! His life isn’t worth that.”

Darin’s voice got even quieter as he got angrier. “I can’t believe you can just stand there and tell me that your life is worth more than his.”

“Why not?” demanded Halon. “You’re doing the same thing, only in reverse. By trying to leave or call you’re saying that his is worth more than mine. I’m saying you’re wrong, and I’m also saying the Rebellion agrees with me: Intel operatives are valuable assets compared to you. And as soon as we get back and I tell them what you’re doing right now, I’ll make sure they banish you to the farthest, most worthless place they can find to get you out of everyone’s way!”

That suddenly reminded Darin of the Coronas’ probation and the mandate to cooperate and behave perfectly, something he was very decidedly not doing right now. He almost panicked and was about to desperately try to figure out how to reconcile all of the loyalty conflicts inside, but his frantic thoughts were interrupted when, without so much as a pause, the operative continued, “And you know why? Because you’ve been nothing but trouble since I met you! You almost killed us back there at the perimeter, and now you’re trying to kill us with this too! You’re completely unreasonable, and you refuse to see the situation for what it is because you don’t like what it implies. Face it–in the grand scheme of things, you’re not important. Neither is he. And if he ends up dying because of this, I’m sorry, but that’s the danger we all face by virtue of being here. He’d understand–he wouldn’t be here if he wasn’t willing to give his life for the Rebellion.”

The Coronas’ probation was forgotten just as quickly as it was remembered. Darin crossed his arms and argued hotly, “No, he’s here, right here bleeding, because he was trying to protect you and protect us from whatever it was that happened back there!”

“‘What happened’ was that my cover was blown and I had to escape. You think I wanted that? I’m not happy about this situation either!”

Darin sarcastically rolled his eyes. “Great. You’re not happy, but he’s the one who’s dying. You know, just because he’s willing to give his life for the Rebellion doesn’t mean that he should. He’s not dead yet–he can live if we get him some help! Or do you think that since it was his duty to protect you and he was wounded in fulfilling that duty, that makes it okay for you to ignore him and just let him die? That you’re not responsible or you don’t owe him anything because he was just doing what he was supposed to do? Is that your excuse for not even trying to help him? Forget your damned lofty status for a minute! Forget that the two of us are apparently more worthless than dirt! Just realize that he’s a fellow Rebel, seriously injured while trying to help you. If you refuse to help people like him, then who are you helping by being here in the Rebellion? Hell, I guess we don’t need the Imperials to wipe us all out. Let’s leave that to our own people!”

The operative lowered his blaster and swiftly advanced so he could get right in Darin’s face. “You’re out of line, mister,” he hissed in an icy voice, leaning in so close that their breather masks nearly hit together. “This discussion is ending right now. Look, I’m the one who knows what’s going on. I’m in charge here. You’ll do as I say, and that means keeping comm silence and staying put. Anything else without my permission will get you a faceful of stun bolt. I’m sick of trying to reason with you, especially when I don’t need to be explaining myself to you anyway!”

Thumper glared back at him, hating all the words the man just said. He didn’t know where in the city they were and needed Halon to lead the way out, but even with Troy’s condition it was obvious Halon wouldn’t leave yet and wouldn’t allow them to leave either or even call for help. As Darin stood there, frozen, he tried to resolve the war within himself about what to do or at least call a temporary truce.

Finally Darin decided that if Halon wasn’t bluffing about his threat to stun him, Troy would be even worse off if Darin was knocked out since Halon obviously didn’t care about either of them, and then Troy would have no one to watch over him. Darin couldn’t protect either himself or Troy if he was unconscious.

After he came to that conclusion, the pilot took a couple of deliberate, reluctant steps back and sat down beside Troy, even though he couldn’t shake the feeling that doing so and giving in was still betraying Troy and condemning him to die, and Darin hated himself for it. The commando was starting to shiver, so Darin took off his own jacket and wrapped it around him. Darin glared up at Halon and made one more effort to get his point across, biting out in a low voice, “He needs a doctor.”

“He’ll be okay for now,” was the steely response. Halon shoved his blaster back in his holster and resumed his pacing.

Darin sighed in frustration and turned his attention to Troy, trying to remember anything else he could do for him. Anything he should avoid doing.

“Hey, you. How’s it going?” Flight Officer Jenna Deltond of Quake Squadron asked as she walked up.

Quiver looked over his shoulder at her. “Hi, Jenna.” He turned back to his task.

Jenna stopped beside him and watched him work for a few seconds. “What’re you doing?”

“Commander Unirt told me to inventory and organize all the repair tools in this box,” he answered. “I can hardly restrain myself from all the fun and excitement.”

“Hey, that’s something we’ve needed done for months,” she said with a smile and a nudge in his side, hoping to cheer him up. “Sometimes I think it takes those techs longer to find the tool than it does to use it and fix the hardware.”

When he didn’t respond, she asked, “Any word from the others yet?”

“No, but they’re not supposed to call in unless something happens.”

Jenna nodded. “It sure is quiet without everyone around.”

“Yeah.”

The Y-wing pilot had never seen Quiver act so dull and lifeless before; now she understood why Darin had asked her to keep an eye on him while he was gone. “What time you get off duty today, hotshot?”

Quiver shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m probably off-duty already.”

“Well, go get cleaned up. At 2000 hours, you round up the rest of your X-wing buddies, civvies only, and come down to the Tank, okay?”

Quiver finally turned to her. “What for?”

Jenna’s reply was a secretive grin. “You’ll see. Just do it.” Then she sobered and dropped her voice a bit. “And if you need anything, hotshot, anything at all, I’m just a few snubfighters down.”