Yellow Six – The Deep Core
“Take the lead, Six, I’ll cover your tail,” Codey said.
“Copy that, Five,” Camara answered, and pressed the acceleration forward as Codey eased off and fell to her right. On the one hand, Camara didn’t like that her senior officer was covering her, as if she needed protection as the youngest and most vulnerable member of the squadron. It felt like she wasn’t pulling her weight. On the other hand, she’d developed a keen fear of death over the past half-hour.
“Who the hell are these guys?” Codey growled over their wing-comm.
“Pirates, maybe?” Camara offered. The enemy, whoever it was, flew a motley array of ships. A few Sith interceptors, like she’d seen in wartime holovid footage in the academy, a few Aureks just like the one she flew, and a handful of Star Guards. The remainder were more outdated models – Ravens, Pikes, Honor Guards. The fighter she’d shot down was a Chela, a three-hundred-year-old model that was proving itself a battlefield threat even today.
“What kind of pirates go blow-for-blow with the Republic Navy in last-generation starfighters?” Codey asked. It was an unsettling question, and Camara didn’t have an answer.
She was saved from speculation as her IFF systems picked up a hostile target sensor painting her Aurek. The image on her HUD would have given her a rush of adrenaline if her system weren’t already flooded with it. A holographic display of a Mark VI interceptor, projected in light blue tones, hovered above her console. She was being engaged by a Sith fighter. She almost felt the urge to laugh – to think she’d dreamed about gunning down these fighters in her teenage years, before the academy, before Yellow Squadron.
That urge was warded well off by the horror of knowing that her first encounter with one might very well kill her.
As she banked away from the targeting sensor’s lock, she craned her neck, watching as it moved to Codey’s tail and poured green fire into the void. The captain evaded the interceptor’s tracking with a deft bank that mirrored Camara’s, but only barely. She thought she saw him take a glancing shot or two.
“This is Yellow Five, there’s one on my tail,” Codey shouted into the squadron’s comm channel. The interceptor rolled with him. Aureks were great fighters, but the Mark VI had a terrifying nimbleness to it. “Shields at forty percent, I need an assist.”
Camara watched her tac-net as it rendered the positions of the ships, the rendering of the interceptor closing distance with Codey’s Aurek. It was nearly on him, and the rest of Yellow Squadron was nowhere near close enough to help. As soon as it came within a few hundred meters, Codey would have nowhere to go. The VI would outmaneuver him and tear him apart. The Aurek was an incredible ship, but it was older, slower, and just less maneuverable enough that during the early stages of the Great War the ratio of kills to losses had been as low as one to four. But then the Navy’s fighter corps had developed the Tranchi Weave.
“I’ve got you, Five,” Camara answered him, “let’s pull him into the weave.”
Codey’s voice came through the wing-comm now. “We don’t have the distance for that.” He was right. The Tranchi Weave required intersecting flight paths that put enough distance between the two for Camara to get an angle on Codey’s pursuer. They didn’t have time to make the arc they needed for Camara to turn in on the VI. They needed something else.
“Sorry about that,” Camara answered. It wasn’t her fault, really, she knew. He was flying second to her, and should have kept more distance between them, but she could have called it out. Should have called that out. In a training exercise she would have brushed it off, pocketed the slip up as a learning experience to handle better next time. This time, though, might be the last chance she got.
“Not your fault, just need a better idea,” Codey answered. Camara’s mind raced.
“Flip-and-burn,” Camara answered sharply, resting her hand on the acceleration. She wished she’d had another idea, anything else, but that was what she had. “Hold your speed, I’ll make a hard burn to get some distance."
There was a longer moment than usual before Codey answered. Camara’s tac-net blared an alert as the interceptor gained meter after meter on them. “Okay, Six, you got it.”
It took another second to resolve herself to it. Better to do a thing, once you've got your mind made up, than live with the fear of doing it. Camara punched the acceleration, and her tac-net showed her moving away from the pair. She’d seen this in the guncam footage, a rare treat and one of her favorites. It wasn’t a particularly popular one because the g-forces were liable to kill you. Camara thought, somewhere in the back of her mind, that she was young enough that the risk of having a stroke might not be as bad as pilots said. Hoped, maybe.
She put a half klick between herself and Codey before cutting thrust and redirecting power to the microthrusters. They screamed as they capped out at their maximum capacity to flip the ship on its head, fighting against the Aurek’s enormous momentum. The stars and glittering lances of laserfire blurred and lost their colors as she pulled up. Blackness creeped in on her vision. Her breathing was hard and heavy. She thought, distantly, that someone had once told her that whistling was a good way to keep yourself breathing in high-g maneuvers. She wondered who.
She just managed to maintain the presence of mind to hit the thrust again to complete the flip. The positive vertical gs relented and were replaced by the excruciatingly worse negative gs of rapid deceleration as the ship stabilized to level out, and the rapid deceleration as the ship’s engines fought against its velocity. Her vision was clear, if red, as the g-force dampeners overclocked themselves keeping her alive and conscious.
And that was it. She was sliding through space, backwards, decelerating rapidly, nose of her Aurek pointed directly at the oncoming hostile. Codey’s Aurek slipped by her with hardly ten meters between them. Her HUD lit up the transparisteel to highlight the interceptor hurtling towards her. Targeting sensors were painting it clear as day. She squeezed the trigger. A pair of glittering red lances, deepened to a blood crimson by the pressure on her retinas, punched through the cockpit of the Mark VI.
She cut all power and let the ship tumble weightlessly through the void. She would have collapsed if she weren’t already couched snugly in the cockpit. She let out a shuddering exhale as the Aurek’s shielding batted away the debris cloud, and she wiped blood from her nose.
She brought the engines back online and pulled up and away, falling back into her ship’s angle of velocity and bringing her back to Codey's wing.
“Six, you alive out there?” came Codey’s voice through her comms.
“Yeah,” she said weakly. Alive, but in desperate need to empty her stomach into a vac tube.
A whistle came through the comms. “That was a hell of a shot, kid,” Codey said.
“Thanks,” she said with a cough.
The shuttle was a light stock freighter, dressed up in Republic colors, that exited the refueling station hangar with gusto, blue jets emanating from the engine block as it soared into the void. Codey and Camara dropped into a close escort formation, and together the three ships banked toward the fray.
The hyperspace egress point was beyond the hostile capital vessels. Whoever these people were, pirates or otherwise, they’d set up a masterful ambush in a transitory bottleneck, effectively blockading the hyperspace route with just a couple of vessels. Ordinarily these vessels wouldn’t stand a chance against three Republic cruisers, but they’d caught them at their most vulnerable. Two were disabled, engine blocks eviscerated by heavy weapons fire, but the third had managed to disengage from the refueling station and was just then moving into a battle line formation. Granted, it was a battle line of one, but it was her ship.
Some strange emotion clutched at her chest, and she felt a sudden urge to cry as she watched the
Autumn Gold, her ship and home between worlds, badly beaten and battered, taking a stand in the face of what felt like overwhelming odds. Turbolasers splashed harmlessly and dissipated against newly onlined shields, and the
Autumn Gold’s turrets answered shot for shot in an impressive display of Republic firepower.
“Yellow Squadron, this is Yellow Leader, Colonel Tua and Red Squadron are heavily engaged. We’re getting hit hard, and it’s up to us to start hitting back. The
Autumn Gold is damaged but reporting in as fully operational, with shields at thirty percent and steady. Captain Soo is initiating a hard burn into the enemy capital formation. Yellow Five, Six, Seven, and Eight will escort the shuttle to the egress point. The rest of you, arm your proton torpedoes, form up on my wing, and prepare for an attack run on that
Ajuur-class. Understood?”
“Understood!” came a chorus of voices over the comms.
“Understood,” repeated Camara, wiping the rest of the blood from her nose and gritting her teeth.
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