Aftermath: Star Wars Read Free Page A

pulls her comm. “Tothwin. Our pilot is in the ducts. I’ll bet all my credits you’ll find an open vent—”
    “We have a problem.”
    The problem is that you interrupted me,
she thinks but does not say. “What is it?”
    “We have a blockade-runner.”
    “Another terrorist?”
    “Could be. Looks like a bog-standard smuggler, though. Flying a small Corellian freighter—an, ahh, let’s see, an MK-4.”
    “Dispatch the TIEs. Let them deal with it.”
    “Of course, Admiral.”
    —
    Everything feels like it’s in slow motion. Norra sits, frozen in the navigator’s chair next to Owerto Naiucho, the scar-faced smuggler—flashes of light on his face, green light from the incoming lasers, orange light blooming from a TIE fighter meeting its untimely end. Outside, ahead of them, a swarm of TIEs like a cloud of insects—the horrible scream as they pass, vibrating the chair beneath her and the console gripped in her white-knuckled hands. In the moments when she blinks, she doesn’t see darkness. She sees another battle unfolding—
    “It’s a trap!” comes Ackbar’s voice over the comm. The dread feeling as Imperial TIEs descend upon them like redjacket wasps from a rock-struck nest. The dark of space lighting up with a crackling beam of viridian light—that coming from the half-constructed Death Star, just one more shovelful of dirt on the Alliance’s grave as one of their own capital ships is gone, erased in a pulse of light, lightning, and fire—
    The freighter dives toward the planet’s surface. Turning like a screw. The ship shuddering as laserfire scores its side. The shields won’t hold forever. Owerto’s yelling at her: “You need to handle the guns! Norra!
The guns.
” But she can’t get up out of that chair. Her bloodless hands won’t even leave the console. Her mouth is dry. Her underarms wet. Her heart is beating like a pulsar star before it goes dark.
    “We want you to fly with us,” Captain Antilles says. She objects, of course—she’s been working for the rebels for years now, since before the destruction of the first Death Star, but as a freighter pilot. Carrying message droids, or smuggling weapons, or just shuttling people from planet to planet and base to base. “And that doesn’t change the kind of pilot you are,” he says. “You outran a Star Destroyer. You forced two TIE interceptors to crash into each other. You’ve always been a great pilot. And we need you now for when General Solo gets those shield generators down.” He asks her again: Is she in? Will she fly with the red and the gold? Yes. She says yes. Because of course she does—how could she say otherwise?
    Everything, gone dizzy. Lights inside the cabin flashing. A rain of sparks from somewhere behind their chairs. Here in the
Moth,
everything feels balanced on the head of a pin. Through the glass, the planet. The clouds, coming closer. TIE fighters punching holes through them, vapor swirling behind them. She stands up, hands shaking.
    Inside the bowels of the beast. Pipes and hissing steam. Skeletal beams and bundles of cord and conduit. The guts of the resurrected Death Star. The shields are down. This is their one chance. But the TIE fighters are everywhere. Coming up behind them, hawks nipping at their tail feathers. She knows where this goes: It means she’s going to die. But that’s how things get done. Gold Leader comms in—Lando’s voice in her ear, and his Sullustan copilot’s just behind it. They tell her what to do. And again she thinks:
This is it, this is how I die.
She accelerates her fighter. The heat signature of the core goes left. She pulls her Y-wing right—and a handful of the TIEs break off and follow her deeper. Away from the
Millennium Falcon.
Away from the X-wings. Laserfire frying her engines. Popping the top off her astromech. Smoke filling the cabin. The smell of ozone—
    “I’m not a gunner,” she says. “I’m a pilot.”
    Then she pulls Owerto out of his pilot’s chair.