A Reputation to Maintain

[Tannis V'larr]

When flying without instruments, a pilot's only connection to the universe beyond his canopy glass is his eyes. They are drawn to any movement, any source of light, any shape that breaks the infinite darkness of space. In other words, they are vulnerable.

The retreating Defender dropped what looked for a moment like a navigational beacon, which pulsed softly as it tumbled backward toward the pursuing Rogues before erupting in a blinding nova of white-hot light - like staring into the nuclear fury at the heart of a star.

When the light faded, Tannis's Defender had spun around and was coasting backwards on momentum, placing Tera's X-wing in the center of his reticle. He squeezed the trigger and engulfed her in a storm of hex gun fire.

[Carré Inirial]

"...eight...seven...six...five..."

Bleak didn't even begin to cover how badly this looked. But it was what the Rogues lived for - taking impossible odds and making them beg for mercy as they twisted them to suit.

Fingers were steady as ever on the controls as she complied with Jaden's order, sliding the switch over to her torpedos. Fiver trilled and chirped in her ear, but Carré paid him no mind for the moment - she was certain she had the only droid in the Alliance fleet that talked to itself.

"...four...three...two...fire!"

Her gaze narrowed as she pressed the pretty red button to fire, hurling two of her six torpedos towards the target.

[Lucy Gray]

The cockpit went dark, polarizing to accommodate the brightness of the blast. As quickly as the blast subsided, the cockpit cleared up.

Suddenly a comm. signal flared up in Kylie’s helmet. It was weak, but the chatter was faint but distinguishable. 6-EE had bypassed the problem of resetting the fighter’s comm. systems and repaired his own. He was using his own sensor dish on his dome to control all the sensor information. It was faint, but now Kylie had communications, and more importantly, fire control. She brought her X-Wing up on the tail of the Defender and waited the excruciating seconds for it to find a lock. Then she fired her last two torpedoes. Then she began to stitch his rear with dual linked laser fire.

“6-EE inform Razor’s Astromech to use his sensor dish to give her communications and targeting telemetry.”

[Cirrsseeto Quez]

The ship shook nearly hard enough to wrench Cirr free from the ladder. He held on, sliding along the rails the last half floor down so his boots thudded on the deck plating at the lower floor. He didn't waste a beat, bounding into the engine room, which was already a cauldron of heat from the sublights at full workout. They took another hit and a cluster of wiring above hissed sparks down his back. Gritting his teeth, he jumped over to a wall terminal that gave him a hands-on command of power routing. The shields looked like shit.

"jI'm dumpjing non-essentjials jinto the shjields, we can't take too many morre brroadsjides!"

Tongue out a bit as he concentrated, Cirr creatively began to tuck whatever juice he could into keeping the shields solvent. He couldn't bolster one particular angle, because the TIE was all over them.

That done, he spun around to give a once-over to the sublights. They were running hot. Cursing, he climbed halfway into a storage unit to pull a cannister out the size of his leg. Opening a hatch near the subs, he ducked as a cloud of steam gushed out. Waving it off, he wrapped rags over each hand and reached in, gritting his teeth as he unthreaded an identical piping-hot cannister and tossed it aside to change the cartridge.

"jI can gjive jyou a ljittle morre subljight, hang on!"

I'm gonna have to replace the whole damn injector when we get home was his darkly pessimistic thought as he pushed coolant under pressure into the manifold.

[Sanis Prent]

"MARCUS, status!"

The droid module's voice was the only one that wasn't a bit stressed.

"Limited capability restored. Battlespace commdata grid is still down. Local tactical and targeting...now online."

"Finally! Guns on me!"

My hands danced over the piloting controls, punching in a series of maneuvers.

"Run these evasives. We got commo yet?"

"Negative on communications. It is my next priority. Sanis, the evasive maneuvers suggested seem erratic and inefficient. Might I suggest a better pattern?"

I smirked a bit as we took another isolated strafe.

"Stick to the game plan. That asshole doesn't know I've got gunsights back. Make him think I'm still scrambling till we've got a better idea."

Layla thundered onward, banking and pitching to avoid the TIE's pursuing fire,

[Tera Uolmi]

“Rancor sh-”

The transparisteel canopy of Rogue Five burst open, as the power and shield generators imploded along with the fighters astromech droid. As the X-Wing turned end over end, Tera Uolmi tumbled head over heels into the fighters port laser-tip. The impact sent her drifting in another direction, eyes wide inside the bubble of her helmet. What had felt like helplessness before now seemed like a blue milk run.

[Tannis V'larr]

Tannis did not waste time celebrating the kill. He'd seen in the flash of vapors something that looked like an ejected pilot, which was just as well - either the Rebels would have to delay their escape long enough to pick her up, or the Empire would have a prisoner to interrogate. But for him there were more pressing matters at hand, like ensuring his system boot was complete.

He had tuned his fighter's start-up sequence to optimize combat readiness - the requisite systems for tracking and fire control lit up almost instantly, and he quickly acquired all targets in the battlefield -

Only to find his lock warning screaming a banshee song overhead. Two contacts closing at high speed dead ahead: torpedoes from the other X-Wing.

Tannis acted on instinct and wrenched his fighter around, firing his thrusters in hopes of absorbing some of the impact. He left a trail of chaff behind him - his relative speed was too slow, and the detonations would be close if the countermeasures worked at all.

The first torpedo found the chaff and ignited, giving Tannis's Defender a gut-wrenching lurch. The second torpedo, with more lead time, arced after the Defender itself. He had hundredths of a second to shift shield power to the point of impact.

The torpedo hammered away his remaining shields and engulfed his starboard radiator wing. The solar panels burned away like flash paper, leaving a charred skeleton bleeding sparks and coolant. Flashing red warnings flooded Tannis's console, reporting damage to everything from thruster control to life support. He had no choice but to disengage.

As Kylie's fighter closed on the wounded Defender, no doubt eager to avenge her wingmate's ship, Tannis punched in one of the emergency hyperlight routes he'd plotted before entering the engagement. A jump in this condition would do almost as much damage as the torpedo blast, but his fighter could be salvaged and repaired.

Before he jumped, he dropped one last gift for the Rogues. His fighter lurched and winked out of three-dimensional space to appear several light-minutes away. A moment later, the entire contents of his port missile rack exploded in a thundering shockwave.

[Jaden Luka]

Jaden's X-Wing rumbled violently, as the shockwave of displaced shrapnel, vapourised durasteel, and breach-released atmosphere raced upwards from the first destroyed gravity well generator. The Interdictor had scrambled fighters, but many of those unfortunate souls had been caught in the blast; those that remained however were swooping about amongst the fire-filled sky, making life difficult for all of them.

Three Flight was performing well; wingpairs were doing their jobs, and covering each other's respective asses while bringing about more space-shattering explosions. He caught a brief glimpse of one X-Wing - Oisin, he thought - danced about amongst the TIEs, while his wingman dutifully acquired the targetting lock they needed; a deft manoeuvre followed where, after squeezing off a blaster volley that clipped the port wing of the TIE he was pursuing and sent it tumbling away uncontrolled, he snapped his craft rapidly around, and squeezed off his remaining protons along the telemetry that Carré had no doubt transmitted.

Jaden on the other hand had no wingman to cover him, as Katie reminded him with a frantic shriek. Swerving to avoid a volley of viridian from behind him, he dropped low, succoming to the TIE's efforts to drive him closer to the ship, and pin him between blaster fire and the hull. Jaden cursed under his breath, weaving laterally, but the white-painted hull of the Interdictor grew ever closer.

A laser bolt clipped his shields. "Frak it!" he grunted, wrestling the stick into complience as the X-Wing jerked away. His eyes swept the cockpit, briefly. "Shields full aft," he snapped to Katie, ignoring her whistled protests. "Now!"

The droid obliged, and an instant later Jaden's fist slammed into the repulsorlift controls, the mag coils thrusting force out beneath the ship, and bouncing him rapidly starwards. Killing thrust, and haulling back hard on the stick, his fighter performed a graceful backflip, crimson fire bursting fourth from his laser cannons in a trail that chased the TIE that had pursued him, popping the eyeball into a cloud of debris and burning fuel.

His nose continued it's sweep up the Interdictor's hull; a nudge of the controls halted him, nose pointed direct at the final generator. He flipped to torpedos, waited for tone, and squeezed off the quartet of protons that he'd saved. Tumbling about each other as they sped towards their target, light trailing in their wake, Jaden had to imagine what must have been an extremely satisfying sound as they impacted and detonated, tearing through the last bulbous growth on the Interdictor's hull.

Shrapnel peppered his forward shields, a scathing tone fired at him by his astromech for not having instructed her to level his shield power out, augmented with various colourful, ancilliary remarks. Jaden flashed a wry grin. "Sorry, girl," he offered.

Turning his attention to the sight outside, he watched as the Interdictor began to list. The grav generators had been faking mass, attempting to fool the halpess Rogues into believing it was a Vicstar, and not the far smaller - but arguably more dangerous - craft. Without that extra bulk, the attraction of Bandomeer's gravity affected the ship differently; but the gravity shift had not been uniform, leaving the Interdictor to rise unsteadily away from the planet.

"Scratch one Interdictor," he announced with a hint of pride, glancing at his sensor display to get his bearings on the battle at large; eyes casually scanning for the contact labelled Rogue 5 for reference.

They found nothing, and Jaden frowned. Haulling back on his stick, he orientated his craft towards the satellite the other fighters had been attacking, extending his sensors for a more intensive sweep. Still no sign of a craft; but something new resolved, blinking mournfully on his display.

"Rogue Five?" Jaden asked into the comm, a sinking feeling forming in the pit of his stomach, as to the fate of his former wingman. His sensors searched for more telemetry from the pilot rescue beacon.

An ident formed on his screen.

Ice formed in Jaden's chest.

"Razor?"