[Black Fleet Crisis(104)

“Your incompetence sacrificed the life of a Yevethan pilot! ” the primate bellowed. “How will you repay his family for this dishonor? “

“Sir! I wasn’t told that this infestation was capable of resistance-“

“The scout fighter was under your direction. You did not free him to pursue or evade when the vermin fighter appeared. That is your offense. “

“We were preparing to fire-“

“You are relieved. And there will be a price in blood, I promise. Get out of here. Report to the stockade. “

The primate turned to the tactics master.

“Launch your fighters. I want the skies of Polneye cleared of vermin. “

The fight for Polneye did not last long.

One of the three TIE interceptors that followed Mallar into the air was piloted by a first-form student who had never been aloft. That he got the ship off the ground under control was a credit to the simplicity of Imperial cockpit design. But the first-former’s target melted into the clouds while he was still calling for help unlocking the laser cannon. Not long after, a squadron of Yevethan fighters, tracking his comm signal, fell on him from the clouds. His flight ended in a fiery flat spin and an explosion on the plains east of Twelve North.

The interceptor launched from Eleven South was piloted by

the engineering instructor. Like Mallar, he climbed through the cloud layer to the edge of space and found the cruiserLibertyorbiting above. Unlike Mallar, he did not escape after his discovery. An antifighter turbolaser battery on the cruiser tracked the interceptor and blew it into a thousand pieces, which returned to the surface as a rain of metal.

A veteran combat pilot was at the controls of the interceptor from Nine North, but he barely escaped the destruction of the city, and one of the fighter’s engines was damaged by shrapnel. It faltered as he was swept into a dogfight with three Yevethan fighters, and he and his ship vanished in a brilliant ball of flame.

The fourth interceptor was destroyed on the ground by strafing TIE fighters as a frantic volunteer crew tried to ready it for launch.

The fifth was lost in the first moments of the attack, as Eleven North came under Liberty’s savage cannonade.

Plat Mallar’s success against the TIE/rc was the only victory of the day, and no one was more aware than he how meaningless it was. Because he was afraid to die, he fled to the far side of the planet, hiding in the clouds under the ionization shield the Empire had created for Polneye. Because he was afraid to face the guilt of not dying, he lingered there, circling.

Before long, though, both of those fears paled against the fear that no one would ever know what had happened to his parents and lovers and friends.

After reviewing the images captured by his combat recorder, he realized that he had to have more, and turned back.

Approaching the cities of Polneye, Mallar brought the interceptor up above the clouds just long enough to record the three marauding warships, now orbiting together.

If his little fighter appeared on their defense screens at all, it was as a momentary blip among the static caused by the inversion.

Then he dipped below the clouds, and found the sky free of fighters.

His holocam scanned across the ruins of seven cities, captured seven thin plumes of smoke spaced across the plains. But only seven, for Ten South was still standing, and a giant transport was ground-docked beside it.

The sight brought the first hope to Mallar’s heart since Nine South had disappeared under blaster fire.

There was a chance for more than mere justice-there was a chance he could bring help in time to matter.

Ducking back between the veils, he pushed both the interceptor and his ability to control it to the limit, racing for the receding horizon.

Half an hour later, on the far side of Polneye, a tiny single-seat fighter with a determined young student at the controls flung itself up from the clouds and out toward the stars.

Aboard the flagshipPride of Yevetha , Viceroy Nil Spaar personally supervised the extermination of the Kubaz colony-a particularly repulsive variety of vermin, he thought, with faces so hideously mutated that he actively took pleasure in their destruction.

Then, as Pride continued on to seize the Imperial factory farm at Pirol-5, the viceroy retired to his quarters to receive the attentions of his darna and the reports from the other elements of the fleet.

The news was uniformly good. There had been an unfortunate accident at Polneye that had left a pilot dead and the weapons master a suicide, but that was of no consequence. Everywhere the ships of the Yevetha appeared, the vermin were swept off the faces of the worlds they had soiled.

Calmly, ruthless, efficiently, the Black Fleet drew a curtain of death across the Cluster. One after another the vermin settlements fell beneath it-the Kubaz, the Brigia, the Polneye, the Morath, the Corasgh, the H’kig. The targets included colonies and species whose names and histories were unknown to those who plotted their eradication.