Renegade Squadron: Chapter 24

[sharpiefan]

Title: Renegade Squadron
Fandom/Canon: Star Wars
Author: sharpiefan
Word count: ~ 2115
Rating: U
Spoilers:
Pairing/Characters: Wedge Antilles, Hobbie Klivian, original characters
Disclaimer: I don't own Star Wars or any of the canon characters who may show up in the course of this book.
Author's Note:
Summary: Commander Wedge Antilles won his Wraith Squadron bet. Now he has to take a shattered unit and forge them into something new and stronger than they were before, in preparation for taking on the command of his own snubfighter wing.

I apologise to anyone following this fic journal as well as my AO3: This was posted ages ago on AO3 and I completely forgot to crosspost it here.

<-- Chapter 23

"There are three questions we need to consider," Wedge said to Hobbie, passing him a cup of questionable caf and sitting down behind his desk with a cup of his own and leaning back in his seat. "Why ore - what’s being done with it? It takes a massive amount of work to transform ore into usable material, after all."

"I suppose it is raw ore that’s been going missing," Hobbie returned. "Not, say, hfredium pellets or something? That gets shipped in freighters in the same way, after all. It’d make more sense for it to be the processed materials rather than having to waste the time and energy in refining it, after all.

Wedge blinked. That obviously hadn’t occurred to him. "Which makes my second question more relevant. How does whoever is behind all this know when those convoys are going to be in any one place? I know they’re hardly going to give them the same kind of communications silence as a military operation but they’re not operating to a timetable like a civilian passenger ship, either."

"Are these ships actually disappearing?" Hobbie asked, a thoughtful look on his lugubrious face.

"What do you mean?"

"Remember the Battle of Sluis Van, when Thrawn used those mole miner things so he could steal a bunch of warships that he was probably going to turn right back round and point straight back at us?"

"Yes – rather hard to forget having a friendly ship suddenly open fire on you," Wedge replied. "What about them?"

"Well. Are these bulk haulers staying missing, or are they reappearing under a new name, perhaps registered to a different company, to run a supposedly legitimate cargo for whoever is behind this? Less risky for it to appear legitimate than to keep going out to hijack more and more bulk haulers, after all."

Wedge blinked. "That… is a very good question."

"You said you had three questions. What’s the third one?"

"What are these materials being used for?" Wedge pulled a datapad over and noted down the questions and the points raised. "And, does this have anything to do with Krennel or is it a completely separate pirate scheme – I can’t see our favourite Prince-Admiral stooping to hijacking ore haulers, after all."

"So far as I can tell, all the materials taken are the kind of thing used in starship manufacture. Hfredium. Vanadium, lanthanide and duralium – common enough materials, as we’ve mentioned before, but vital for starship manufacture."

"They’re also metals used in various other things, too. All sorts of military vehicles need duralium, for instance." Wedge tapped the case of his datapad, thinking. "What about other things – tibanna gas, for example? Bespin might not be part of the New Republic, but the current baron-administrator of Cloud City is sympathetic, despite being pragmatic enough to still be dealing with both sides."

"Bespin’s also right across the galaxy from here. I don’t suppose there’s a tibanna gas mine any closer to the Ciutric Hegemony that Krennel might have access to?"

"If it is Krennel, and I don’t want to assume that it is. Not yet, not without some kind of proof one way or the other. If it is, we’ll have something more to go on. If it isn’t, we don’t want to get distracted from our main goal of ousting him. There was also that attack on the mining colony on Vandyne that Intelligence has confirmed was Krennel’s doing – not that it took all that much confirmation; there aren’t that many Star Destroyers in this part of the galaxy."

"Is that the only planet that he’s hit like that?"

"Seems to be. Whether it was a preliminary strike or made in retribution for some slight or other has yet to be determined. What is clear is that the colony was wiped out." Wedge couldn’t help thinking back to Rogue Squadron’s own fight against Ysanne Isard and the attack she had ordered on the colony of Halanit, an attack that had happened while Gavin Darklighter was there and able to render a paltry bit of assistance. There had been no such aid for the Vandyne colonists.

"Or was it a cover for something?" Hobbie asked, slowly. That wouldn’t be unknown either. "Too many questions, not enough answers. Anyone would think we’re Intelligence agents, not starfighter pilots."

"I’ve had my fair share of pilots thinking like Intelligence agents," Wedge said. "So much so that Cracken went and poached them, though I think he might have had a bit of a shock when he realised pilots actually need hangar space and a maintenance crew. You know, it wouldn’t surprise me if he ended up returning them one of these days just because of all that. Intelligence notably keeps a low profile and pilots aren’t exactly that."

Especially Gamorrean pilots, he thought, remembering Piggy, the Wraiths’ mathematical genius.

"If they’re as feral as we were on Hoth, the requirements for hangar space won’t be the only thing that gave him a shock," Hobbie said. "I heard all about them from Wes – and don’t give me that look, Wedge, you know perfectly well he redacted all the classified bits."

"Yes, I know that, but he’s not here to glare at."

"And I wasn’t involved in any of the stuff that you want to glare at him for."

Despite himself, Wedge started laughing. "True. And I don’t blame people for the things they didn’t do – unless they didn’t do something they were supposed to."

"Generous to a fault, that’s you. Anyway. These are raw materials that are being taken. Where are they ending up – find that and we either get proof it’s Krennel or there’s a whole different mystery, one we can pass to someone else to investigate."

The base might consist primarily of temporary structures but it had a decent security fence and covered a decent amount of flattish terrain. Selcaron was mostly a grassland plain – or at least, the area of the Renegades’ base was grassland plain; there were mountains in the far distance. It was a good place to be able to run out of doors, for once; Vika disliked treadmills even when they had screens to give the illusion of running outside – and running the corridors of a starship, or the streets of somewhere like Coruscant, was nearly as bad. She was an outdoors sort of person so it was rather ironic that she’d found her way into Starfighter Command where units were generally based on capital ships or planets such as Coruscant. She was taking full advantage of their current posting and was out for a run around the inside perimeter of the camp’s security fence, enjoying the sunshine and the wind.

She generally ran on her own, occasionally with Tyan or even, these days, with Tafasia. Today, both Tyan and Tafasia were scheduled for other duties while Vika had a couple of free hours in the morning for her run. She wasn’t expecting anyone else, so it was a bit of a surprise when a male voice enquired over her shoulder, "Mind if I join you?"

She stiffened, recognising the voice as that of Captain Klivian.

The man himself jogged up to join her and she had to fight not to roll her eyes. He was wearing an old undershirt with a faded starbird on it, and a pair of tiny red running shorts that left a good deal of thigh exposed. He had ridiculously good legs, she noted, before resolutely pulling her eyes away from him to concentrate on the dirt path that skirted the circumference of the base.

She was strongly tempted to tell him where he could take himself – presumptuous Third! – but Third or not, he was her commanding officer, and still a Klivian despite the fact they were nowhere near Ralltiir. She was trying to get used to the idea that other people didn’t care about birth order, that other places didn’t use the same basis for their culture and to mark status. None of those mental reminders helped much when actually faced with Klivian himself, though.

"I can’t stop you, sir," she managed, striving for distantly polite and feeling she’d missed by lightyears.

"Sure you can. 'Sorry, Captain Klivian, I prefer to keep myself to myself’ would work, although I’d frown at ‘Go pound sand, sir.'"

He sounded frustratingly cheerful, although his face seemed as lugubrious as ever when she glanced at him.

"I don’t know why you’d want to, with me. Sir," she managed.

"Because I’ve tried to catch you alone for a chat and you’ve been frustratingly elusive so far."

"A chat." Breathe in, two, three, four, out, two, three, four…

"When did you leave Ralltiir?"

That brought her up short. She stopped dead, staring at him. "I don’t see what that has to do with anything."

"Because whether it was six months ago or six years ago, you can’t treat people the way you would on Ralltiir." A half-smile tugged one side of his mouth upwards. "Even Ralltiiri Thirds."

"It’s not that. Sir," she managed, barely able to keep from gritting her teeth. She’d been doing so well in not treating other people according to their birth order – it helped immensely that off Ralltiir, she didn’t have the same visual cues in their dress and their behaviour. And then she’d come face to face with Derek Klivian, Diane Klivian’s Thirdborn son, who’d been packed off to the Imperial Academy. There had been all sorts of rumours about that, though Vika had been too young to really pay them any mind at the time.

"What, then? I’d never seen you before you walked into Wedge’s office, I’d like to know what it is I’ve done that’s antagonised you so much you can barely look at me without glaring."

"I… What?" He hadn’t antagonised her; he made her nervous.

"I would have thought the question was simple enough to understand."

If he thought sarcasm would solve anything, he was dead wrong. "If you’re going to throw me out of the squadron, sir, I wish you’d just do it and not drag it out like this."

It seemed to be his turn to be flabbergasted, judging by the look on his face, although why he should be anything of the sort was a question Vika had no answer for. She turned away to start running again, trying to squelch her emotions.

There was a moment before footsteps sounded behind her and he caught her back up, falling easily into step with her again. "Why do you think I want to throw you out of the unit?" he asked, sounding flatly astonished. "You haven’t done anything even vaguely approaching that bad."

"I keep messing up, you’re just waiting for me to do something that bad," she said, and blinked as her vision blurred suddenly.

"I’m not, and even if I were, Wedge would have one or two things to say about it. Where in the galaxy have you got the idea I’m waiting to jump you like that?"

"You… you aren’t? But you’re a Klivian – your mother – I -"

The language that Diane Klivian’s Thirdborn son uttered would make the First Among Equals blanch, Vika was certain of it.

"My mother and I haven’t spoken in years. Whatever she did to you, I had nothing to do with it."

Vika felt as if someone had switched gravity off, leaving her in freefall, flailing to grasp hold of something that had been as certain as needing oxygen to breathe. "I—she—"

She stopped speaking, using the rhythm of feet pounding the dirt track to regulate her breathing and try to organise her thoughts into something logical. "She set out to ruin my family, deliberately, because we got in her way without knowing it. My father committed suicide because of the disgrace. I thought… I thought you were looking for a reason to—to finish what she started. So I couldn’t rebuild and—everything."

She deliberately kept her eyes forwards, not wanting to see what effect her words might or might not be having on the captain.

There was another pause before Hobbie spoke again. "I didn’t know any of that. I’m sorry my family did that to you. And no, I haven’t been waiting for you to screw up. I’ve been looking at where you’ve been struggling and honestly, it’s understandable. Renegade Squadron has gone through a lot, even in just the last year, you struggle with the possibility of losing more. You could do worse than study Commander Antilles and how he responds to loss. We’re going to lose pilots in this fight, Lieutenant, it’s inevitable. Figure out how you’re going to respond before that happens."