Project Boussh: Far From Home By Josh Cochran "Why are we here, Twelve?" I demanded of my wingmate. I could almost see Inyri's patient smile as she responded. "You know why, Six. Just because you think you have something better to do back home..." "Think!" I exclaimed. "I *know* I have something better to do back home! Besides, I've been in this cockpit for something like thirty- six hours straight. I need a warm bed and a hot shower." I pulled my flight suit up to my nose and sniffed. "Twelve, I *stink*." Inyri's instrument panel gave off enough light for me to see her head bobbing in laughter. Mission accomplished, I smiled to myself. It always made both of us feel better if I could make Inyri laugh before a combat mission. As many years as I'd been a Rogue, my stomach still got tied in knots before we went into a fight. Lightening things up a little always helped ease the fear. When I was very young and still new to the squadron, I thought sometimes that the fear would overwhelm me and I would run from a fight. Imagine the disgrace. A Rogue running from a battle. But that was when I was still young, as I said, and I managed never to do it. In those days I feared only for my own life. On this night, thousands of feet above the ocean of an unfamiliar world, I had new reasons to fear death. Back home on Coruscant, my wife, Sera, would be putting our newborn daughter to bed for the night. I desperately wanted to live to see them again. I couldn't imagine my daughter or my sons growing up without me. Or rather, I could imagine it only too well. There'd been quite a few Rogues killed over the years. We tried to care for their families as much as we could, but nothing could ever replace the father, the mother, husband, or wife who'd been lost. I hoped my own children would never have the hollow look in their eyes that those other children did on Republic Day when the politicians talked about fallen heroes. Inyri's voice came through my helmet like a Jedi mind reading. "Don't worry, Six. You'll see them again." I smiled, warmed by having someone so close by who knew me so well. "Thanks, Twelve." Inyri had become my closest friend in the squadron over the years. I greatly admired Tycho and Corran, and had spent most of my adult life practically worshipping Wedge. Although I considered all of them my friends too, they still always seemed a step above me in some way I couldn't quantify. Even though Inyri was a few years older than me, I had always felt as if we were on the same level. Well, almost always. Many years ago I had a crush on Inyri. It was a stupid little schoolboy crush, really. It was a few years after Asyr's death, right when I was starting to feel like a whole sentient again. Inyri had been so kind and caring towards me during those dark times. I thought about it for quite a long time before I decided to say or do anything about it. When I'd convinced myself that she shared those same feelings, I worked up the nerve to kiss her. The best thing I can say about that was that at least she didn't laugh at me. She sat me down and we had a long talk that was so painful I almost wish she had just laughed. She made it very clear that although she and I were very good friends it would never be more than that. She said we were just too different to ever be more. I was hurt, assuming that it was all about my age. A few weeks later, though, I realized she was right. I went back to her and apologized and this time she did laugh. I laughed with her, and we became better friends for it. I shook off the dark and gloomy feeling those thoughts brought over me. Going into combat depressed was not a great way to increase your chances of survival. I glanced down at the holo of Sera and our adopted sons I carried in the cockpit. For the last couple of years it had reminded me of what I was fighting for. I smiled, thinking that now I needed to get a new one taken with our daughter, Caitlin, in it. "Rogue Two to group. We've just heard from Wraith Five that we have a considerable friendly force in the air above the target zone. I'll transmit a list of callsigns to your astromechs, but be aware that we do have friendly TIEs in the area. Be sure you check your targets before firing." Catch put the list up on one of my cockpit displays as soon as he received it. Tycho was right, this was a pretty impressive list. Three more X-wings, five TIEs, and the Pulsar Skate. Eight more fighters to add to the eight we already had, plus the Skate's cannons. This was really starting to look good. "The new fighters will mostly be handling air support for the ground forces, but we may well see them higher up, too," Tycho continued. "Good luck, and may the Force be with us all." My sensors pinged, showing me a large swarm of enemy fighters out ahead. They were well below us, so we'd have the altitude advantage in the initial pass. Hopefully we could take a lot of them out in that first pass and have that many less to face when we broke up into individual dogfights. As it looked now they outnumbered us at least three to one. Having been a Rogue since I was sixteen, though, I had a near- Corellian disdain for odds. We'd beaten five to one odds several times. Three to one was just a boring day at the office. When we were almost directly above the TIE formation we locked our S- foils in attack position and dove straight at them. The TIEs scattered as best they could, but it was difficult to quickly abandon a tight formation. I imagined we must look like death angels to the TIE pilots, screaming at them from above like giants birds of prey. I had time to get off one good missile shot with a near solid lock before switching to lasers and blasting away at the TIEs. Then we were through the enemy formation and began our turn to engage in pairs. Catch told me we destroyed a dozen fighters in that first pass, and two of those kills had been mine. I'd seen one TIE come apart under my laser barrage, and the other must have been the one I'd fired the missile at. I broke into a wide sweeping turn, Inyri sticking right with me. I turned my acceleration compensator down to ninety percent and relished the feeling of being pushed back into my seat. I'd learned to fly as a child on Tatooine in my cousin Biggs' T-16 Skyhopper, which didn't have any of this fancy fighter equipment. That's when I first fell in love with flying. I missed the feeling of true flight. It never seemed right to see the universe twisting and spinning outside my windscreen if I couldn't feel it in my body. Inyri and I made a head to head pass on a pair of TIEs, both of us firing on the lead fighter. Its port solar wing sheared off and the TIE dropped from the sky. That would go down as a shared kill, or half for each of us. With our combat experience and years in service, Inyri or I, or Corran, Wes, or Hobbie could easily command another fighter squadron if we wanted to. It's not like the New Republic hadn't been trying to get us to do it for years. Why settle for anything less than the very best, though? If I couldn't train another squadron up to the level of Rogue Squadron, I didn't want anything to do with it. Another pair of TIEs dropped in right in front of us, heading the same direction as we were. I quad-linked my lasers and squeezed the trigger, blasting one of the TIEs to atoms without so much as twitching the control stick. Damn, some of these guys were *really* bad. I'd read in the reports that the Imperials had been training the Mendellians to fly TIEs and fight as stormtroopers. If these pilots were any indication, they needed more training. Inyri made short work of her TIE and we throttled up, racing through a gauntlet of slow-moving TIEs directly in our path. We damaged every one of them, but didn't shoot any down. They were moving so slowly that we didn't have a chance for more than one shot at each before we blasted on by. It reminded me of watching podracing on Tatooine when I was a kid. The podracers would go flying by large rocks and through caves so fast that it was almost nauseating for me to watch. I guess that's why all podracers are aliens. There was a local legend on Tatooine of one young human who'd won a big podrace years before, but mysteriously nobody could remember his name. Unless he'd been some kind of superhuman, I didn't believe it was possible. We screamed by the last of the slow TIEs and pulled up to pick our next targets. An X-wing and an A-wing, apparently Bror Jace and Pash Cracken, dropped into the slot behind us and destroyed half the TIEs before they finally throttled up and tried to get back into the fight. As I was choosing a target from the dozens of starfighters nearby, a green turbolaser blast almost blew me right out of the sky. I thought for a moment that the Admonitor had opened up on us when another blast grazed my shields and I realized the shots were coming from the ground. "Six, Twelve, take out that gun!" Tycho ordered. "Copy that, Two. On our way." I affirmed. We dropped to just above sea level and made a wide turn to sight in on the weapon. It was a mobile emplacement on a wheeled vehicle, apparently dropped here by the Admonitor for just such an occasion. I got a firm lock on it and fired two missiles. Just as I'd feared, the turbolaser swung around and blew both missiles out of the sky before they'd gotten anywhere near it. "We're going to have to do this the old fashioned way, Twelve." "As ordered, Six." Inyri sounded no happier about that decision than I was. In this case, the old fashioned way meant racing directly at the gun at full speed, avoiding fire until you were close enough to take a good shot at it. The trick was that you had to hold a fairly steady course all the way in to the target, which gave the gun crew plenty of time to get a lucky shot at you. And I wasn't anxious to become the last to get here and the first to die. As we made our attack run on the gun, I wondered if Wedge was angry about how late we'd been in arriving. We'd been in combat almost constantly since arriving on planet, so I hadn't yet had a chance to explain to him what happened. Sera hadn't been due to have the baby for more than a month after we left Coruscant to visit my parents on Tatooine, so the vacation had seemed like a safe idea. Then Sera had gone into labor prematurely with some severe complications. Two days later, after what had to be one of the roughest labors in human history, our daughter was born in the so-called Mos Eisley Hospital. The baby had been seriously ill, though, and needed much more care than what was available on Tatooine. We took the first transport headed for a more civilized system. Halfway there, though, the ship was attacked and boarded by pirates. They were looking for something in particular. I still didn't know what exactly. When they didn't find it, they took to terrorizing the passengers to blow off steam. I couldn't do too much to fight them, though, until Inyri showed up in her X-wing and blew their ship out of the sky. With their backup gone, the pirates left on board quickly fell to the crew and the lone Rogue on the ship. Inyri's appearance hadn't been random, of course. Wedge had sent her to find me when they couldn't contact me for the Terran mission. We rushed Sera and Caitlin to the nearest hospital. Although I knew Inyri was in a hurry to join up with the rest of the squadron, we waited until the doctors allowed me to take Sera back to Coruscant. The last time I saw them, Sera was propped up in our bed at home with our daughter sleeping soundly on her shoulder. The look of peace on both their faces told me it was okay to go. Now I had to survive the attack on this turbolaser before I could get home to them again. That thought made me push my throttle just a little bit further forward. Already verdant blasts were streaking past my cockpit so close that the turbulence from their passing was bouncing my fighter around the sky. I tried to jink as much as I could without losing track of the target. Finally Catch alerted me that we were within gun range of the target. I fired one paired missile salvo, with an accompanying pair from Inyri. We fired quad laser blasts as quickly as our weapons could cycle. The gun crew tried their best, but they only managed to knock two of the missiles out of the air. The other two slammed home, joined an instant later by several laser blasts. The turbolaser emplacement exploded in an enormous mushroom-shaped fireball, throwing pieces of itself hundreds of meters in to the air. I barely managed not to scream in joy as I pulled up to head back into the battle. That was the toughest target I'd faced in months, and probably the closest to death I'd been in a very long time. I smiled smugly to myself. I might have grown up a know-nothing moisture farmer on Tatooine, but I'd certainly learned to overcome it. "Great shot, Six!" Inyri called. "You too, Twelve!" We reentered the air battle feeling very good about ourselves. I noticed that the numbers of enemy fighters had been greatly reduced while were at low level. Of course, that meant that the poor pilots were dead and now we faced nothing but the best. One of those pilots was suddenly behind me from out of nowhere, trying to take a good sized chunk out of my tail. I spun and dove, trying to lose him and gain myself some time to reinforce my rear shields. The enemy pilot was good, though, and he stuck right to my tail. I amended my opinion to good, but not experienced, though, when the enemy pilot let Inyri slip out of his sight. The next thing he knew of her was when she turned him and his starfighter into molten slag heading for the sea. "Better watch out, Six," Inyri teased. "Next time you could be crispy krayt." I chuckled to myself. "You know, Twelve, you can't make those things anything but salty and chewy, no matter how you cook 'em." And no matter what snobby Uncle Huff said, they taste like bantha poodoo, I added to myself. People just convince themselves they like the taste of krayt meat to try to prove they're more refined than all the other poor fools living on that sunblasted ball of rock. I sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly. It drained some of the adrenaline from my body and left me feeling suddenly exhausted. I hoped this battle would be over soon so I could get some rest. A day and a half in the cockpit of an X-wing wasn't really conducive to combat alertness. I was tired. Tired of war, tired of fighting and killing and watching people die. At the moment all I wanted to do was sleep, and dream of my family. Or go home and fall fast asleep in their arms. Unfortunately, there was still a battle raging around me. Sighing once more, I dropped in behind another TIE and squeezed my trigger yet again.