Chapter Two

Disclaimers from Chapter One still apply. Surprised? I didn't think so. Special thanks to Jeff, my beta-tester and nag. Geez, I can only write so many chapters at a time!

Thelea shifted in the cramped cockpit and tried to stretch her legs. As if flying escort runs to the Rim wasn't bad enough, Aldacci the sadist had decreed that they would spend the next hyperspace jump launch-ready. That meant sitting in the cockpit of an Interceptor staring at a face shield for hours on end.

Worse, it meant having to listen to Rurik and Giriad try to come up with ways to break the monotony.

"I spy something...gray."

"Bulkhead," Giriad said immediately.

"Blast. Your turn."

"I spy something....red."

"Fire control switch."

"How did you know that?"

Thelea couldn't contain herself any longer and thumbed her comm on. "Gentlemen, I'm only going to say this once. Stop. Or else."

"Or else what?" Rurik couldn't help himself, either.

"Or else I'm going to blast this open to hyperspace and put us all out of our misery." She resisted the urge to add "so there."

"Fine, be a spoil-sport." For a moment, there was silence on the comm channel. Then, Rurik's voice came through again. "Hey, Giriad."

"What?"

"This protocol droid walks into a bar--"

"RURIK!"

"Some...whatever-you-ares...can be so sensitive."

"I'm your commanding officer, and if you keep it up I'll show you sensitive." She twisted in her seat again winced, this time from a cramp not in her leg. "If they don't let us out of here soon I may go stir-crazy, too."

"Whaddya mean, too?"

Before Rurik received an answer, they jolted slightly in their harnesses and the targeting computers, slaved to the Aris Val's sensors, flared to life ringed in red. "That wasn't right," Thelea muttered as the grid resolved itself. "We're not anywhere near Rhodesh III."

"We're not anywhere much of anything," Rurik noted, keying up a map of the area.

"We didn't come out of hyperspace on our own. Something pulled us." Without thinking, Thelea pulled the air mask of her highly modified TIE helmet over her mouth. "But what? There's no planet or star, or even any debris that could create a gravity well."

"No sign of an Interdictor or anything like one, either," Giriad added.

"Let's take a look. Captain Keivel, this is Gamma Leader. Request permission to launch fighters."

"Permission granted." The Aris Val's captain sounded tense. "Our hyperdrive is still resetting itself after that shutdown. Try and see what happened."

"Gamma wing, stand by to launch." Thelea flipped the engine switch on her control panel and the fighter's twin ion engines flared to life. There was the normal neck-snapping jolt as the ship's computer spun the fighter 180 degrees and released it into the vacuum. The instant her fighter was free of the docking harness Thelea pushed the engines to two-thirds power and began warming up the Interceptor's quad lasers. "Stay sharp," she ordered as Rurik and Giriad pulled in at her flank. "There's something not right here."

"Where's the escort ships?" Giriad asked. "They were following the same hyperspace vector as we were. Whatever grabbed us should have gotten them."

"Unless they weren't following us." Rurik's voice was very quiet.

Thelea shivered, despite her temperature-controlled flight suit. A strange twisting feeling had begun in

the pit of her stomach. "I have a very bad feeling about this."

"I was hoping you weren't going to say that," Rurik muttered. "I'm not reading anything out here."

"Aris Val, are your sensors picking up anything?" Thelea asked.

"Negative, Gamma Leader. There's no sign of anything out there." The controller's voice was taut.

"How long until the hyperdrive is back on line?"

There was a brief pause. "We're resetting the coordinates now. It should only take a moment for the computer to calcu--" The voice dissolved into a high-pitched shriek of static.

"Someone's jamming us!" Giriad snapped.

"But not the squadron frequency. Why...?" Rurik's question trailed off as their computer displays flickered, dissolved into static, then cleared. "What in the worlds. . . ."

Thelea's bad feeling resolved itself into grim certainty. "That would be our problem."

There was a crackling like an electrical storm in a planet's atmosphere, twisting and writhing in deep space. The tendrils of light abruptly coalesced and then flared, and from the center of the burst appeared a ship. From its size and bearing it appeared to be a large warship, but it was neither Imperial nor any sort of Rebel ship they had ever seen. Long and black, instead of having one obvious command deck there were several turrets, all bristling with turbolaser batteries and clusters of smaller objects that looked suspiciously like weapons systems of some kind. The stern where the glowing engine cluster projected behind the ship was defended by what looked like some kind of torpedo cannon.

"What in all the systems is that?" Giriad breathed.

Thelea found that her throat was strangely dry. "I don't know."

Rurik seemed to have better control of his vocal chords, but not by much. "Whoever they are, I'll bet my next month's pay that they're not friendly."

"I'm not touching that, if only because we may not be around to collect our next month's pay," Thelea said. "Aris Val, do you read us?"

There was a brief burst of the static jamming, and then a voice. "--read you, Gamma Leader."

"Get out of here!" Thelea swung her ship in a tight arc. "We're no match for that thing. We'll distract them while you run for hyperspace."

Rurik's blood turned to ice water. "Commander, you realize that if the Aris Val leaves--"

"Our mission is to protect the freighter," Thelea interrupted. "We can't do that sitting in the hold. Aris Val, run for it while you can. We'll catch up." Even in her own ears the words rang hollow. "Gamma wing, we're going in. Hit what you can and watch out for those projections near the lasers--they could be cluster traps."

"Copy that, Lead." Rurik swung his fighter out from hers, and opposite him Giriad mirrored the maneuver. "Weapons charged and ready."

"Accelerate to attack speed. This is going to be strictly hit-and-run." Thelea held her breath a moment, calming the pounding of her heart. Panic would serve no purpose. If they were going to die, and all the odds seemed to point to that, they might as well go out quickly, fighting. The black ship was growing in their viewports, blending eerily with the starscape around it. Some part of Thelea's mind not occupied with flight wondered if that broken outline was intentional camouflage. As they drew closer she could see the short, stubby tubes of the turbolasers turning to track them.

"Why aren't they firing?" Giriad probably hadn't expected an answer, but Thelea provided one anyway.

"Either they haven't seen us coming, don't consider us a threat, or--"

"Or they're after something else," Rurik interrupted.

"I think you're right. Aris Val, the destroyer is--"

Before Thelea could finish, Giriad overrode the comm circuit. "Lead, watch out!"

A nanosecond too late, Thelea twisted the yoke of her fighter and tried to turn. A blast of blue-white

energy exploded from what she'd thought were cluster traps on the destroyer's side and slammed into her fighter.

Inertia as the Interceptor abruptly ceased its forward motion slammed her back into her seat and knocked the breath from her lungs. The force of the explosion blew the fighter back, and the electromagnetic energy had fried her instrumentation, leaving her without fire control, a targeting computer, or any navigational abilities.

"Gamma Two, do you copy?" The silence on the commlink was more unnerving than the jamming had been.

Thelea sighed and settled back in her seat. At least the destroyer seemed to have lost interest in her, and the momentum from the blow was carrying her crippled fighter away from the alien ship. Through the cockpit screen she could see Rurik and Giriad evade and regroup, diving after her fighter. Not me, she thought, willing them to hear her, not me, get to the freighter! As her ship rotated she could see the Aris Val flashing in and out of her line vision. The freighter was turning slowly, painfully slowly, to get out of the destroyer's path. Rurik and Giriad, slowing to flanking speed, had taken up defensive positions along side her, matching the slow tumble of her fighter away from the larger ships.

She realized why they were attending to her--the Aris Val, limping towards the edge of the grav well, was not going to be any match for the alien warship. Already, she could see that the destroyer's forward gun batteries were coming to bear on the freighter. Thelea fought the urge to close her eyes--

And in a brilliant flash of the blue-white lasers, the freighter was reduced to so much space dust.

Thelea felt a wrenching in her chest, a gripping, vise-like pain that surged and then abated as the remains of the Aris Val drifted apart, expanding into a gaseous cloud. Before the particles had even fully dispersed, the destroyer began to turn, and she braced for the explosion she knew was coming.

It didn't. Instead, the ship vanished in the same cloud of energy through which it had arrived, and they were alone. Totally alone, with no hyperdrive, no nav computer, and one of starfighters badly crippled, at the edge of the Outer Rim. For all they knew, they were in what the Empire called the Unknown Regions. Thelea sighed--that would be all she needed, a patrol fleet from homeworld stumbling across them. Rurik and Giriad might make it, but they'd vape her in a standard second.

A faint buzzing in her ear and a flicker of light on the dark control panel alerted her that some systems were coming back on-line. Tentatively, she keyed for the commlink. Almost immediately she was rewarded with the voice of Rurik Caelin shouting in her ear:

"Lead, do you copy? Thelea, are you all right?"

"Rurik, shut up! If her comm's not working shouting won't help."

"Both of you, settle down." There was a lot of background static, but at least things seemed to be working. "I think the computer's starting to repair itself."

"Thelea, thank the stars! I thought--"

She interrupted Rurik quickly, and she wasn't sure why. "I'm fine. That energy pulse shorted the ship's systems, but I think everything should work. I'm going to have to drain the lasers, though, to conserve power." She matched action to words and then asked, "I don't know if I really want an answer, but does anyone know where we are?"

Rurik knew what she meant--was there an inhabited system within sublight distance, or were they going to die slowly as their life support systems were drained? "From what the Aris Val's computer could determine before...well, before, we're in the Dhregan system. It's right on the edge of known space. There're no planets, just a gas giant, but there seems to be some kind of settlement on the outermost moon. That's all the computer gave me, so I don't know if it's friendly or not."

"At best, we could land and wait until someone comes looking for us." Asuming anyone will come looking for us. Thelea kept that part of the thought to herself.

Giriad's voice sounded hollow, although that might have been the damaged comm. "Did you see what happened? Who was that ship?"

Thelea didn't know any more than he did, but she had a few more suspicions. "Whoever they were, they were waiting for us. Right now I'd rather worry about living to report back about it."

"They must have thought we were as good as dead," Rurik thought aloud. "Why else would they leave us alive?"

"Let's just do our best to disappoint them, all right?" Thelea said. "Rurik, give our computers the coordinates for that moon and let's see about getting out of here."

The yellow-green gas giant Dhregan was not as large or impressive as the red gas planet Yavin, but its moons easily outshone that Rimworld's in color and beauty. The two nearest the planet glinted with red and gold hues from minerals on the barren surfaces. The next two moons were as pale as the inner satellites were brilliant, sparkling with the ice and snow of frozen oceans. The fifth and outermost moon looked closer to a habitable world, showing a pale green and blue surface through a thin layer of gray clouds.

"Atmosphere seems breathable," Giriad commented quietly. He hadn't spoken much on the long flight into the system.

"I'm more worried about that satellite there. It looks like a security beacon." Thelea couldn't help the strangely exposed feeling--without its laser cannons the Interceptor was little more than a flying shell, its only defense speed and maneuverability, both of which had suffered with the battle damage. "I hope they don't mind visitors."

"I hope they don't mind Imperial visitors," Rurik said, and that was closer to the point. "Some Rim worlds aren't friendly to us."

"Some Rim worlds aren't friendly to anyone," Thelea noted, "and I don't relish the thought of being blown out of the sky after making it this far." On her scanners, she noted a small satellite in a geostationary orbit above the lights of a city. "That must be the spaceport. That looks like a tracking satellite. Shall we ask to land?"

"Take it away, Commander." Rurik's usual flippant tone couldn't hide the undernote of tension.

"Dhregash control, this is---" and then Thelea paused. She'd been about to give her Imperial rank and designation. Instead, she switched to a more casual tone of voice. "This is Commander Thelea tal Kyrn, leader of renegade squadron alpha. We hear this is a good place not to be found."

There was a squeak on the squadron frequency, probably Giriad bursting a blood vessel. "Um,Commander," Rurik began. "What are you--"

"Rurik, do us all a favor and shut up." Thelea waited for a reply from the port authority. "Control, are you--"

"Imperial fighters, this is Dhregash control," said a strangely lilting alien voice. "You will deviate from your approach and withdraw from Dhregash space. This is your only warning."

"Control, maybe I didn't make myself clear. We're looking for someplace to lie low for a while. We don't want to cause you any problems." Thelea kept her voice modulated and cool, perhaps too cool.

"Thelea, maybe you'd better let me do the talking," Rurik suggested.

"You think we do not know that Interceptors cannot travel alone," the alien voice said. "You must leave this system. Now."

With that, the "tracking station" opened fire.

"Sithspit!" The curse was out before Rurik could think and he was spiraling his fighter into an evasive maneuver. Giriad matched him turn for turn, but Thelea's crippled craft was too damaged to attempted any complex evasions. "Thelea, break right on my mark and run for planetside. We'll cover you."

"Who died and left you in charge?" Even as she snapped at him she was turning her fighter to obey.

"You will, if you don't get out of here!" Rurik snapped, firing a quick burst as the tracking station as Giriad flew a decoy pattern above him.

Thelea didn't need to be told twice. "Stay right behind me," she ordered, "we don't want to get split up." Then, draining what remaining computer power she could spare to the engines, she dove for the planet's atmosphere. This wasn't going to be easy--Interceptors could, when necessary, fly in atmosphere, but they really weren't intended for crash-landings while battle-damaged. Worse, atmospheric insertions weren't easy when both ion engines were functioning at capacity. If she was extremely lucky, she wouldn't bounce off into space, but in all likelihood she'd be burned to a crisp before she hit the ground.

A too-close bolt from the defense satellite rocked her Interceptor and the computer screen flickered ominously. Thelea drew in a slow, steadying breath and pointed the fighter down at one of the greener sections of the continent. Reflected glare off the atmosphere lit the cockpit as the planet's surface grew ever larger, filling her field of view. As the tiny fighter entered the air, the force of the impact made the craft shudder and rock. A shooting pain burned up Thelea's arms as the vibrations of the control yoke made every bone rattle. A dull red glow was beginning around the tips of the Interceptor's wings, and she prayed silently to whatever powers might care that none of the damage had been to the craft's heat paneling. She had to pull out of the dive, but the angle of fall was so steep that the ship couldn't respond. She didn't even know if Rurik and Giriad were behind her--reentry was scrambling their comm frequency.

The view ahead was turning from a green blur into distinct features; low, rolling hills, scattered forests, rivers that appeared from within rock, ran a crooked course and then vanished again, narrow gorges, and in the distance the rounded peaks of ancient mountains. Thelea took this in at a glance and then settled on a relatively flat space near the edge of one of the woods. She drew back on the control yoke, hoping the thickness of the air near the ground had slowed her descent, but the fighter still screamed towards the planet's surface. Fear began to creep up from somewhere within her, and for a moment she surrendered to it, bracing for impact--

And then anger replaced the fear. If I die now, whoever set up the Aris Val wins. Whoever ambushed us wins. Drawing on reserves she didn't know she possessed, she leaned back against the weight of the fighter, eyes shut, visualizing the repulsors, useless in space, that had to function now. Her arms ached with the effort, her teeth ground together, and slowly, the Interceptor's nose came up and the angle eased.

"Nice flying, Lead. Didn't think you were going to make it."

Thelea opened her eyes slowly, in time to see Rurik and Giriad race past above her. "Neither did I." They'd come out of the superheated air of reentry, and the comms seemed to be working again. "That hilltop over there--"

"We see it. Following you in, Lead," Rurik said.

For the first time in quite a while, Giriad spoke. "Hey, Caelin!"

"What?"

Thelea cocked a blue-black eyebrow behind her face shield.

"What do you mean, if Thelea dies, you're in charge?" Giriad sounded almost convincingly belligerent, but more miffed than anything else. "We're both Lieutenants. I could just as easily be in charge as you."

Rurik snorted. "I'm Gamma Two. That means that if anything happens to Lead, I'm next in line."

"That doesn't mean anything. That just means you fly to her right in formations!"

"It is standard procedure that the next lowest number is the next to take command," Thelea offered, hoping they couldn't hear the laugh threatening to break through.

"Besides, Giriad, I could just see you in charge," Rurik added. "Wait a sec while I consult my Academy handbook!" He actually managed a convincing imitation of Giriad's Core world accent.

"Better than, 'Gee, that looks interesting, let's shoot it,' like you, Rimworlder!"

"Boys, boys," Thelea sighed, now biting her lip to keep from laughing. "Let's get these ships on the ground. We can worry about who my hypothetical replacement is later."

"Aye-aye, sir!" Rurik said, and she saw his fighter's solar panels waggle in the pilot's equivalent of a smart-alek salute. She was very glad he couldn't see the smile behind her mask.