[right][h3]Bills Due[/h3][/right][hr]

Sensor links were up and Fiver, his astromech droid, was bleeping along his messages as well -- Intruders added a comm channel for the droids and ran a linked network that the droids generally managed in network. The pilots' chatter was the despair of the communications operators on the Right -- the Intruders spoke the lingua franca of the Outer Rim, Huttese, when they fought. 

They were a dangerous squadron, experienced smugglers, pirates and Outer Rim defense force types, used to clawing for every little advantage they could find, often in obsolescent junk. Commanded by a Twi'lek female, Ma'Vena, callsign "Mom," the Intruders were a fierce squadron, unified in hatred of the Empire. Willing to fight something so powerful and numerous.

The Alliance, so used to never having the best of anything, came through for once and put these beings into something that let them strive and contend on an equal level with the Empire. 

The X-wing was still a new platform, and Shan had come in just as they were phasing out the Z-95's, which were alright, but at a decided disadvantage against TIE fighters. Not so the X-wing, which had the slender lethality that a starfighter should, at least in his mind. In the cockpit of one of these, he felt like he was part of a sleek and dangerous predator, gliding on the solar winds in search of prey.

Many thought of space as empty, but he always felt as if there were currents in that vastness, something that got him weird looks even from his squadron. He could wax poetic about space, the splash of colors in a nebula or the harsh light of a star. It was silence, but it was a thunderous silence.

Clang, Shan's callsign, they said, worked on a different frequency. He was their weirdo, a guy that knew tech but not from an educational standpoint; he'd get into the guts of something and figure it out on intuition and experience. Space never failed to stir him.

The sensation was shattered by the order to initiate their operation. 

They used Orivod, a large asteroid on the verge of being a moon, to shadow their approach; for whatever reason, the rock interfered with sensors and communications, so the approach would be with comms from the fleet totally unable to get througth. It was a risky commitment.

He felt the thrum of the engines as the power system shifted power into those and a lighter-than-usual front shield, while they were out of range. The idea was to build up the thruster momentum while out of range in order to make the approach with the shields shifted forward during the attack approach. S-foils were locked, for the same reason. Lacking jammers, they needed every bit of thrust they could get. Max thrust, the chariot of the heavens.

Because the orders were to make an attack run on a Victory II-class star destroyer. 

As they burst from the cover of the asteroid on their final approach, like a covey of mynocks, spreading out in twos and threes, the X-wing's leading the Y-wings and trying to draw the fire with their superior maneuverability. He was tuned into the comm chatter, and returned some of it, including, "Lock S-foils in attack position," but he could never quite recall what he was saying in the focus of the moment, the sharp edge of awareness that came into play when he was flying.

A Victory-II was not the largest ship in the Imperial inventory, but up close and personal, with the turbolasers thundering away and smaller defenses engaging them, it was big enough to turn Shan's piss cold. He tried to cling to his typical composure, his awareness of the minute and sense of the intangible, as he jinked to avoid the fire.

Others were not so lucky; if the Punisher was the Rebels' pound of flesh, and even despite the surprise of the Cutlass and Intruders' approach, there was still the silence of disintegrating squadron mates and the hum of the engines, the blip of the warning radars, the binary staccato of Fiver's status updates. They were paying the bill for it.

There was a instinctive flow to his motion as he banked to engage a TIE trying to find an angle on a Y-wing, as the TIE broke it's attack to evade, and the two starships danced. But it was the subtle added thrust here, or the turn there, as he took to the outside arc beyond the TIE and played the Imperial against a squadron-mate's cone of fire that allowed him the moment where he had the unshielded Imperial in his fire control reticule when the Imperial tried to evade one cone of fire only to find himself positioned briefly in the sights of another. 

He took the shot with all four cannons, feeling the pulse of their firing, and watched the enemy disintegrate. He swung back into the run, further back from the others as they made their runs. The X-wings fought like brood mother Nexu, scraping for every angle and bit of purchase the rebel pilots, experienced fringe spacers, could find against TIE pilots, who were academy-trained professionals. Theirs was a pitiless ballet in the cold void, shadowed by the huge wedges of the Imperial fleet.

And while they spun to stay out of the sights of the TIEs and put the TIEs into their own sights, the Y-wings unloaded on the Punisher. 

All that was in a single run, with the Cutlass commander ordering his Y-wings clear.

"Finish it and break off!" Mom growled on the comms, along with, "fierfe--" and static as her own ship disintegrated. Moments later, another Intruder finished off her killer, but the damage was already done. 

Intruder squadron lost twenty-five percent of her X-wings...but they could see the Punisher bleeding air and flame from holes in the hull in the rearview mirror that the pilots all used. 

[i]It better be worth it,[/i] the thought bubbled through the concentration that typified Shan's flying, but he left the bubble there, not wanting to process the grief of his squadron leader's death while still in the fight.