A Reputation to Maintain

[Tannis V'larr]

The raid Klaxons thundered through the Imperial fabrication plant on Bandomeer. It was locally the middle of the night, and the commandant in his complacency had allowed the graveyard shift to dwindle to a third the standard complement. Tannis V'larr took a mental note to deliver a brutal and incisive report of his failings to the appropriate authorities as soon as he left the dismal mining world.

The Sikarran halfbreed seized a passing mid-command officer in an iron grip as they passed in the corridor. "Walk with me, captain," he snapped. "I must know the situation."

The fresh-faced officer gulped and staggered to keep up with V'larr's long, angry strides. "A raid by an insurgent squadron, sir. We think they're X-Wings."

"You think. Has our orbital picket neglected to share their telemetry with you?"

"Yes, sir-- I mean, no, sir. Data is coming in as we speak, and the continental base is already scrambling its wing of TIEs."

Tannis made the sharp turn toward the hangar, dragging the unhappy captain along with him. This installation's defenses were paltry compared to the primary base in the other hemisphere, but the enemies were crossing the skies here on their way to bigger targets to the West. Even under the best of circumstances, the wing of TIE/lns could not prevent a pack of X-Wings from dealing considerable damage before scattering before superior numbers. To say nothing of the dismal kill ratio the standard TIE/ln possessed against the Rebel X-Wing.

"You will order the flight tower to give my fighter emergency clearance to launch."

The officer blanched. "A-alone, sir?"

"As your commandant has seen fit to leave this installation so woefully unguarded, I have no other choice."

"But your fighter is still armed with the experimental--"

"Then this will be an excellent opportunity for a field test."

Tannis released the captain and hurried into the base's hangar, where his TIE Defender sat racked and ready for launch. Flight engineers, mindful of the Sikarran half-breed's disposition, scrambled like so many ants to finish fueling and charging her power cells as he climbed into the eyeball cockpit.

A minute later, he was rocketing through the upper atmosphere toward the insurgent Rogues.

[Lucy Gray]

Standing her X-Wing on her portside struts, Kylie pushed forward on her joystick. Her X-Wing dove down and onto her target. This TIE Fighter wasn’t the best pilot she had encountered. In fact, she would classify him as Vape-Fodder. As Five and Seven engaged their targets, the TIE’s broke away from there. Smart, considering their lack of shields, but then they didn’t try to get on the tail of the slower X-Wings. They broke for planetside and away from each other. Kylie evened out her shields. No sense having the shields up front if the TIE’s backside was to them and being jumped from behind. She wanted to just let loose with a torp and be done with it, but she needed to keep those so that they could fire a barrage upon their target.

Her X-Wing leveled out on the tail of her TIE, which went into a basic corkscrew maneuver. Kylie pulled her joystick to the left and up, going into a longer, slower corkscrew. She throttled back just a bit to keep the TIE in front of her. She knew that she could just cycle lasers, but part of her wanted to prove that she belonged with the Rogues. She didn’t want to waste lasers if she didn’t have to. Steadily, she moved into position. As the TIE came into her sights, she pulled back on the trigger. A quad of laser fire came out, followed a few seconds later by another quad blast. The first one missed the front of the TIE by mere meters but it made the novice pilot stop his corkscrew. The TIE pilot then tried to dive down, but the time it took for him to make that decision was all it took for the second blast to converge on the cockpit. All four blasts penetrated the armored shell, drilling through the Ion Engines. The TIE exploded brilliantly and, a couple seconds later, melted into the nothingness of space. That was one more silhouette to paint on her hull… if she survived this mission. Kylie opened her comm. to Razor.

"Get those squints mopped up so we can get on with what we came here to do. Five and Seven: I want you to escort Thirteen on her run when she's clear. Three Flight: break off and catch up with the Valkyries when you can; we've got more eyeballs inbound from the ground. I'm going to go poke the Vicstar, and see if anything falls out."

Kylie groaned. Two words came to her mind… Baby – Sitting. While the rest of the Rogues were off messing it up with some more TIEs, Razor and Spoon would be flying cover for Layla. Still, there was a job to do and this wasn’t the place for her to be selfish.

“Razor, this is Spoon. One Squint destroyed. Not much of a fight. Moving into escort formation for Thirteen.”

[Jamo Jakatta]

“Seems like the whole Imperial Navy lost the will to live,” Jamo shot back at Iyar, gritting his teeth into a grin as he inverted his 'fighter a full one-eighty, just in time to see Flipper rocket through the space-dust and debris of their second kill of the day. At that moment, Jaden Luka's voice crackled across the comm-link.

“You heard the Captain, Three Flight.”

A visual check on Rogues Eleven and Twelve told Jamo that the pair were still chasing their targets. He comm'd them, along with Iyar.

“Once you've vaped those stragglers, fall into finger-four formation.”

[Tera Uolmi]

“Copy, One.”

In a typical display of Imperial tactical prowess, the TIE fighters were doing a fine job of exploding into hundreds of tiny pieces. Either they under-estimated the Rogues as a unit, or over-estimated the capabilities of their fighters. Then again, there had always been rumours that Imperial pilots were brainwashed into fearing nothing, not even death, and the more of them she encountered the more Tera was inclined to believe it.

Her threat indicator flashing, Tera wove left just in time to avoid a charge from her target. The TIE flew a wide arc, as it turned to make another pass, but she caught it on the port-side with a quick burst of fire that bit through its wing braces and detonated its twin ion engines. For a moment, she saw what must have been the pilot, and then he or she was swallowed by the explosion.

“I hear you, Seven.”

Unlike her wingmate, Tera wasn't put out by the idea of protecting the Layla. It was an integral part of their squadron and essential to the missions success.

[Carré Inirial]

"Copy that, Joker." Carré called across the channel, arching a brow as the TIEs she and Sin were chasing went into a steep climb.

Seconds later as they peeled apart, she shook her head and snorted in recognition. If her guess was on target, they'd be arcing back to try and get behind them. "Echo, they're going to split apart and try to circle around us - its a standard maneuver. Take starboard." she said quickly, before ordering Fiver to slide her shields forward.

A wicked grin curled her lips as the TIEs promptly complied, and her barrage of laser fire sliced through the eyeball. It erupted into a shower of flames and debris just as her sensors lit up in alarm. Fiver automatically pulled her shielding tight as she yanked back on the controls, sending her X-wing into a steep climb. She just barely avoided the charge and cursed aloud at the scoring that was likely going to bring Tink's and Chrys' wrath down on her head.

Spinning back, the alarm silenced itself as she caught a visual on her wingman. "Nicely done, Echo...for that, first drink's on me when we get back." Carré grinned, her tone finally warming to its usual level as she punched forward to get into formation.

[Oisin Ocasta]

When you primarily flew recon missions, one of the things you didn't get to do very often was make things explode. Partly, that was because you spend most of the time sat around doing sweet kriff-all, while the sensor modules mounted to the nose of your ship did most of the work. Partly, it was because your primary objective was to gather the recon, and then get the hell out of there without getting yourself blown up, so that the data would make it back to headquarters.

Mostly though, it was because recon missions sucked harder than dehydrated Rodian. He hadn't realised at the time, of course: he was too busy wallowing in the solitude, and finding new and inventive ways to hide the evidence from the ground crew of what he got up to on those fourty-eight hour missions with nothing but a case of emergency rations and "TIE Me Up: Imperial Ensigns Gone Wild!", volumes one through nineteen.

Finally, he remembered that this was what being a fighter pilot was about. And while only this morning he'd been cursing his bad luck for not managing to escape an active combat mission, now he found himself uttering silent prayers that something would go slightly - not catastrophically or anything, but maybe just a little bit - wrong for someone, just so that he'd get the chance to play Rogue Twelve a little bit longer.

"Planning to get me drunk on the first date, Eleven?" he quipped, feeling a grin spreading across his face.

[Jaden Luka]

Eyes focussed intensely on his sensor displays, Jaden had almost momentarily zoned out when the insistant warbling from his astromech drew his attention away. As options for such droids went, the cone-headed R4 that nestled in a socket behind him was hardly the obvious choice; Industrial Automation marketed them as agromech droids, designed on the cheap for rural farm worlds, after all. But apparently, no one had bothered to inform the droid of that particular intended role; nor the person responsible for the extensive remodelling of Katie's internal space, to cram all manner of gadgets and gizmos in there.

Skimming the screen that displayed in text whatever it was the droid was chirping away about, Jaden's brow tugged into a frown. "What do you mean, 'it isn't long enough'?"

More text scrolled across the screen, informing Jaden that a comparative analysis based on their range to target and several known, quantifiable reference points suggested a bow-to-stern length of closer to 600, rather than the 900 that would be expected of a Victory-class Star Destroyer. Worse, the shape was all wrong: the bow too sharply pointed; not wide enough at the stern relative to the overall length.

"Katie," he reassured, with as much conviction as he could muster. "Even if the IFF signal we're picking up was false, we've done passive tonnage scans that register a total mass displacement on a par with a Vicstar. There's no way a ship that small could possibly register as having a mass that -"

His voice trailed off, and his face paled, as slowly but surely his mind put the pieces together. There was away, and it explained a lot; while the falsified IFF made the craft seem less threatening than it truely was, there was no guarentee that the ruse would work. A shrewd commander might hold back half of his fighters, knowing full well that he need only delay the attackers until reinforcements from the surface could be deployed. And beyond that, this was exactly the kind of ship that the Imperials might want to prevent the Rebellion from discovering, given the potential it had for crippling their operations in the area; yet another reason to possibly explain the disguise and subterfuge.

Even as he realised just what he had stumbled into, the commander apparently reached the limit of his patience; twelve swarmed out from within the ship, vectoring on a direct course for him.

"Rogue One to Three Flight," he said into the comm, his tone turned somber. "Disregard my last orders; I need you to form up on me, best possible speed." He swallowed against a rapidly drying throat. "Looks like we have an Interdictor Cruiser to take care of before we can go home."

[Sanis Prent]

"Seven, Five, we're past the shit for now. Hang tight on my flanks and get ready for an attack run!"

I had to shrug off the bad news from Rogue One. Interdictor made our stay here a little dicey, but we did still have a mission to do.

"Cirr, let's lose the rest of our baggage."

"Alrready on jit!"

True to his word, the Cizerack squeezed off another burst of fire, clipping one of the trailing TIE's and sending it spiraling away in a fiery wake. The remaining TIE, not liking his odds against the Corellian ship and a pair of X-Wing escorts, peeled off, presumably to form up with other elements for a second strike.

"Relay platform ahead in two clicks. Stay sharp, we've got inbound from the planet, too."

The relay station's light defensive batteries opened up, but were easily dodged as we opened our formation enough for evasives.

"I'm arming protons, and targeting."

We closed in, accelerating to the kill. Layla's engines thundered to max sublights as I brought up the missile targeting HUD. Cirr was normally point man on the laser batteries, but with the missiles in fixed hard points, I handled that task.

"Locked, and three, two, one, fire!"

Two blue streaks jetted out from the forward hard points as we all banked in unison away from the station, to move clear of the impending blast.

[Tannis V'larr]

A TIE Defender blasted clear of the Bandomeeri atmosphere on an oblique line toward the lead A-Wings. The monster's hungry engines, faster even than the Rebel interceptors, ate up the distance between them with terrifying speed.

Busy with the remnants of the first TIE squadron, the Valkyrie flight was slow to answer the new threat rising like a demon from the seventh hell. Typical Rebel laxity - drunk with their victory over inferior pilots with inferior hardware, they were now sluggish and stupid.

One A-Wing turned to squeeze off several ineffectual potshots at the newcomer. Tannis responded with a blistering hail of plasma from his hex guns. The A-Wing's shields cracked like an egg, and her fuel lines exploded, sending her burning husk tumbling into the planet's atmosphere.

Tannis cut his active thrusters and turned on momentum, spraying the rest of the Valkyrie flight with baleful green cannon fire. He landed a few shots, only enough to drain their shields and force them to regroup before counter-attacking. Then he completed his pirouette and resumed his course toward the Layla and her escorts, intent on taking them down before they could finish off the satellite.

[Carré Inirial]

It was impossible to suppress the laughter that spilled past her lips at Sin's response, and she just barely flicked her mic to mute before he'd have heard much of it. Flicking it back on as she was ready to retort, the words died before she could say them.

"Disregard my last orders; I need you to form up on me, best possible speed...Looks like we have an Interdictor Cruiser to take care of before we can go home."

Emerald eyes widened as they flicked up to where the 'void' rested, before she shook her head and altered her course. "You heard him, Twelve...let's go." she said without betraying a hint of the unease rolling across her senses. Carré locked it away as always and focused herself on the task at hand.

Her X-wing blasted forward to join the others as they formed up with Rogue One at the center. A brief glimpse of an A-wing hurtling neatly towards the Layla stirred the back of her memories for a moment, before she shook it away. It couldn't possibly be him, not all the way out here, no matter how familiar the crisp maneuver seemed.

"When we get back, can we smack someone in Intel upside the head?" Carré muttered to no-one in particular, watching as a second squadron of TIEs finally deployed.

[Jamo Jakatta]

"Rogue One to Three Flight. Disregard my last orders; I need you to form up on me, best possible speed. Looks like we have an Interdictor Cruiser to take care of before we can go home."

“You got it, One. Eleven, Twelve – you two done playing happy families over there?” Throwing the controls of this 'fighter towards Jaden's fighter, the rest of Three Flight strafing effortlessly into place. One of the blips on his targeting computer vanished, as an A-Wing was vaped by the TIE reinforcements. He swore, succinctly, in Corellian.

“What's our plan of attack, One?”

[Iyar Thiled]

"Just a smack? You're getting soft there, Phoenix."

The sentiment that someone at so-called Intelligence really needed to be beaten upside the head no doubt was being shared by pretty much all of Rogue Squadron, probably the other pilots too... except for the poor sap in the A-Wing. Flipper always felt a bit of a pang of sorrow somewhere in his mind whenever a fellow rebel pilot went down.

The Interdictor's presence was only moderately alarming in Flipper's mind. At least it made things more interesting.

"Seems the Empire finally got themselves some folks with more than two braincells to rub together, what a nice surprise."

[Cirrsseeto Quez]

"Contact approaching fast at bearing two-seven-one mark two-nine-two."

MARCUS called the incoming bingo on the scope, and Cirr followed it on targeting sensors.

"Gjive me ventrral gun contrrol!"

The gun control toggled, and Cirr moved to intercept. Already, he could tell something was wrong.

"Hell, thjis thjing's fast. Spoon, Rrazorr, looks ljike a Defenderr on jinbound just cut thrrough Valkyrrjie's ljine and jit's on ourr vectorr. Heads up!"

Cirr punched a stream of quad cannon fire downward towards the rapidly approaching TIE Defender, unlikely to catch a hit but hopefully enough to make it take time to evade and give the X-Wings some response time to jump on it.

[Jaden Luka]

Plan of attack?

Absently, Jaden wondered if plan might be a little too generous for what he had in mind. It broke down to simple numerics: they had five fighters, capable of launching ten proton torpedos in each volley; and each carried six in their payload, making for thirty in total. They'd have to punch through their shields to even land a single hit on the cruiser's hull; and then take out as many of those gravity well generators possible, if they were going to have a hope in hell of escaping from this system alive.

"It's not much of one, Nine," he admitted, activating his targetting computer, and linking in to the comm array to transmit his feed direct to the fighters trailing him. Shifting the controls slightly, he dropped the targetting recticle over the nearest of the four grav generators - the fore-starboard one, as it happened. A tone sounded through the cockpit, and an indicator flashed as his astromech confirmed a target lock on the respective area of the ship.

"Telemetry is inbound," he announced, switching his weapons control over to proton torpedos, and selecting dual fire. "Fox-2's, in twos," he added, passing on instructions for his fellow Rogues to do the same. "Once we're through the shields, and the first generator is down, we'll break off for the rest. Aft-starboard is yours, Joker; fore-port for Phoenix."

He paused briefly, watching the range to target scroll steadily down. "Weapons free in ten -" he advised; his eyes narrowed as the cruiser loomed ahead, and a slow breath drew into his lungs. "- nine..."

[Tannis V'larr]

Pilot chatter from the Interdictor and her fighter squadron buzzed in Tannis's headset. The cruiser was more valuable than the relay satellite, but he'd already chosen his mark to defend, and abandoning the satellite would only ensure its destruction. He would have to settle for attacking the Layla in hopes that she was critical to the Rebels' mission.

The Sikarran halfbreed rolled his Defender to avoid the chain of blaster fire the Corellian freighter was sending his way, and he saw its attendant X-Wings angling in his direction to bring their quad lasers to bear - a total of twelve guns pointed in his direction, bad odds no matter what he was flying. It was time to change the rules of engagement in his favor.

He thumbed the trigger for his secondary missile bank - the entire bank carried only one weapon, a large, unwieldy missile that arced almost lazily toward the trio of Rebels. Its propellant expired several kilometers short of its targets, but that was all the closer it needed to be before it activated and unleashed a hellstorm of electronic warfare.

Short-ranged, but incredibly powerful, it broadcast a destructive signal that knifed its way through comm channels, sensors, and active fire control, rendering all ships in its radius blind, deaf, and dumb. Now the Rogues could only fire by sight.

Tannis was already rebooting his own systems, confident he could regain scanners before his enemies. But he was a steady enough hand on the flightstick to find the appropriate lead length on the Layla and fill her sky with cannon fire.

[Lucy Gray]

“Lead, this is Seven. Looks like we have a Trip to tangle with.”

Kylie felt some dread build up inside her. A Tie Defender was faster and more heavily armed than her X-Wing. Still they had a few things going for them. First they outnumbered the TIE Defender and all they had to do was keep it busy until the Layla had taken care of the station. Then they could jump out.

“Razor, I recommend we stick together and perform a delaying action. If we take off after it, it can maneuver around us and on to the Layla and we won’t be able to catch it. If we trail the Layla just outside of torpedo range, then we can harass the Defender so that it can’t get a lock on the ship.”

Kylie started to bank her fighter around and come about to face the Defender. She cut her speed down so that they would encounter the fighter before the Defender would reach torpedo range, but not much sooner. She then put all discretionary power to her shields. The torpedoes, which were meant for the station, were dual linked and her lasers were dual linked as well.

“Hang on back there Six-EE. We might just get a new tattoo for your ride.”

As the TIE Defender closed, the Layla and the X-wings opened fire on it. Laser fire splashed all around it from the Layla and Kylie had just set up for her run when her target launched on slow missile. At first Kylie thought the missile had malfunctioned and was set to shoot it down when it exploded.

An ear piercing shriek of static burst in her headset and Kylie had to close her eyes against the pain. When it ended, she looked down. All sensor, communications and fire control systems had been overloaded. She couldn't communicate with Razor who was only meters off her starboard wing.

The Defender sat there as well, not doubt affected by his own explosion. He was probably betting that he could get up and running on his systems before they could. He was probably right.

Except for one thing....

Kylie wasn't going to try to bring her systems on line right now. She wanted that Defender dead. If need be, she could still jump back to base or pull close enough to Razor or the Layla to flash a coded message to them.

"SIX-EE, set torps to maximum proximity detonation."

While that would give them less bang in a concentrated area, it would damage a wider area... exactly what was going to need if they couldn't aim. As Kylie closed with the Defender, she fired two torps on the heading of the Defender to the ventral side and two more to the dorsal side. Four streaks shot out, two at a time. Kylie had aimed where she had best guessed the Defender would be at. Then she switched her fire over to single and began lacing the area with laser fire, hoping to hit something.

[Tera Uolmi]

Tera swore as her headset spat static and the computer screens on her 'fighters dash dimmed to darkness. The rapid fire of confirmations and warnings that Rogue Squadron were constantly trading had gone, the silence hammering how suddenly and absolutely she had been cut off from the rest of the Rogues.

With an eyeball check on her wing-mate, Tera saw Archer throttling a head-on charge towards the TIE Defender. Four torpedoes surged towards the TIE and Tera wasted no time rolling away from the trip. Engines pushing her to the Defender's starboard flank, she reigned in the X-Wing's thrusters with a jerk of its control joystick which flipped the fighter end-over-end and let loose a volley of fire at the TIE's unprotected solar array wings.

[Sanis Prent]

"Damn it! We're out! Completely blind!"

Whatever the Defender hit us with, it packed a whallop and completely gouged our sensor suite. Comms, targeting, tactical, active and passive were all flooded.

"MARCUS, I need a full grid reset, how fast can we get back on live?"

"Three minutes to a restore, Sanis. I'm already on it."

The ship rocked, lights dimming as an overhead console sparked slightly. Cirr grumbled a few curses and leapt from his seat, already headed belowdeck.

"Double down whatever we've got to deflectors, Cirr. I'll shake and bake best we can."

But against a nimble killer like that, at best I'm just too slow. I shook the thought from my head. You dealt with what you were given.

The ship shook again and I grit my teeth.

"We're getting cooked over here..." I said to nobody in particular, wishing my comms were active. I could see Spoon and Razor cutting up a lot of space with proximity missile fire. I pushed the ship to put the explosions between myself and the TIE.

[Tannis V'larr]

Tannis made a quick assessment of the two strikes' scattershot attack: the torpedoes fanned out to menace him on every side, and their quad lasers sprayed everywhere else, creating a curtain of fire impossible to avoid. But therein lay the folly of the attack, and he knew then that he'd made the Rogues panic. To leave your enemy no avenue of escape was to let him choose his own losses. A canny pilot would have left him an opening that would lead him away from his target and force him to present his flank.

Instead, he shunted his deflector power to the front and portside shields and stormed through the barrage. A few lasers chipped at his shields, and the more worrisome force of a nearby proton explosion rattled his chassis and nearly torqued him off-course, but the blind firing pattern was too sparse to deal any lasting damage to a Defender's shields. His deflectors held at fifty percent power and were slowly regenerating.

Tannis rebalanced his remaining shield power and swung to starboard on a pursuit vector after the fleeing Layla, putting himself squarely between the freighter and her escorts. He'd also turned the red glow of his twin ion engines directly toward the strikes, an irresistible invitation to pursuit.

[Tera Uolmi]

Although the rational mind told Tera that she was still flying as part of a unit, without the squadron radio-chatter, her reflexes and survival instincts were guiding her as if she were a lone pilot, faced with the options of: kill, or be killed. She gunned after the TIE, determined the batter away the shields with another torpedo blast.