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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ankh-Morpork Guard" data-source="post: 2382036" data-attributes="member: 10079">Chapter 239: FlightThe small X-Wing easily caught up with the large convoy of boxy transport ships. Jyren didn’t recognize the exact make of them, but they were vaguely familiar at certain points. Maybe it was just that soft blue glow of the sublight drives that reminded him of home...well, no, not home. This was home. But...that wasn’t the point, and he knew what he meant.    [Are you sure about that?] Shadow’s voice cut into his thoughts curiously, sounding oddly like her old self again. Why that was odd, he wasn’t sure.    “No, I’m not,” Jyren grumbled over his shoulder before looking ahead to the group of transports. They were now following the last...four. Shadow had managed to look back towards the Capital city while passing over it and reported what they both had expected. It was still there, yes, but it was burned, scorched, and more dead that it had been from the initial attack. As his weapons locked onto the nearest of the transports, Jyren sighed, “This isn’t going to do anything but annoy him. Its not like taking out a few of these ships full of droids are going to help protect Alraxia.”    Shadow sighed back and nodded, “But its something. Better than just watching them fly off safely without us even doing a single thing.”    “Good point,” he agreed just as he squeezed the trigger. Four red lances of light arced out from the X-Wing’s cannons to the nearest of the transports. The bulky ship didn’t even attempt to maneuver, which made Jyren immediately assume they had strong shields. So he was just about to report this to Shadow and get her to read the...the...five or so proton torpedoes he had left in this thing. But an explosion of light stopped him.    The shots impacted straight into the rear hull of the ship, detonating the plating(which was disturbingly light), and then engulfing the engines for a brief second before the entire transport went up in flames. Old instincts took over his body, and Jyren quickly pulled on the stick to bring the X-Wing out of the way of the mass of falling debris.    “They don’t have shields!” he yelled back, both surprised and excited by this fact.    Shadow didn’t respond. Instead, she watched the flaming metal fall past them and back down to the ground below. Kyren was down there still. As was Nine...and...and something else familiar, but it was too distant to identify as anymore than painful memories.    Deciding this might suddenly be more useful than before, Jyren took another shot of quad lasers at the next of the transports, this time foregoing he hull and aiming straight for the sublight drives. Again, the ship didn’t maneuver, and again, it burst into a fiery chunk of debris as they rocketed out of the atmosphere of the planet and into the space beyond.    Just as Jyren was bringing the targeting reticle over a third of the ships, Shadow cut in quickly, “We’ve got some friends on the way.”    A second later, the sensors beeped a warning and Jyren’s eyes looked over to see small specs of light angling around towards them. Biting his lower lip, he decided that Shadow should probably know an important piece of information, “We don’t have any shields.”    Alright, so he could have been more elegant about it. Much more elegant. This was immediately obvious in Shadow’s reaction, “What?!”    He went red on instinct and put more power to the engines to weave through the mass of landing transports and use them as cover, “I ran into these guys before...they um...knocked out the shield generator with one shot.”    “You were planning to let me know of this when?”    “...now?”    Jyren could feel her roll her eyes. He didn’t even need the Force or their link for that. He didn’t even really need the link to know of the death threats grumbling through her thoughts. Instead of speaking them, though, she brought up a valid complaint, “You didn’t fix them before we left?”    “Not really, no...” was the best answer he could think of while pretending he might have at least looked at the shield generator to confirm it was, in fact, fried and dead. At the same time, he’d been able to visually identify the approaching ships as four of those same Mrrakesh starfighters that had been trouble before.    “Not really?!” Shadow growled, nearly reaching over the seat to hit him across the back of the head. Instead, since he was weaving so close to some of those transports, she just flicked his ear angrily, “How do you ‘not really’ fix something that important?”    Jyren shrugged, trying to ignore the slight stinging sensation in his right ear, “Well, you know me.”    Another loud beeping sound echoed through the cockpit suddenly. At an immediate protest from the now annoyed Shadow, Jyren cut it off and simply reacted by diving down deeper into the formation of transports. He didn’t need to report that the beep meant the starfighter were now in ‘normal’ weapons range. Shadow figured that out when one of those green bursts shot right over them.    “Fly faster!” she yelled anyway, completely believing that saying it and willing it to happen would make it happen.    “I’m trying!” was one of those necessary responses that just burst out of Jyren’s mouth. He was, too. Cutting power from the weapons and diverting them to the engines worked fairly well, but the Mrrakesh ships were so fast it barely did any good.    And they were angry.    Or at least, Jyren figured that when they were firing wildly and hitting(and destroying) their own transport meant they were sufficiently annoyed. Rolling to the side and around a transport just before it detonated in a red-green fire, Jyren yelled, “Your plan worked! We’ve annoyed them!”At his point, Shadow was literally holding on. There was a console and stick in front of her. Both her hands were wrapped around it and claws were about ready to dig in, “If I get sick you’re cleaning it up!”    His only answer to this was a very fast snap roll the other direction before suddenly pulling up and out of the way of another few shots. Now they were nearing the middle of the pack of transports, and while many were being shot down, there were still hundreds of them to hide behind. Jyren found this to be an extremely nice thing, and was becoming very adept and maneuvering right around one to use as a makeshift shield.    “Shadow!” he yelled back, suddenly realizing that there were two of them and a task requiring two people was coming up disturbingly quickly. He didn’t give her a chance to say ‘what’. She might have tried, but a sudden corkscrew dive forced her mouth shut. Pulling out of it and wrapping around another transport with green all around them, Jyren went on, “I need you to plot a hyperspace route out of here! Not to Alraxia! Get us back to the fleet that left here!”    This time, Shadow was able to say, “What?! I don’t even know where they–“ she went silent when a transport exploded far too close to them, and a piece of a war droid dented part of an S-Foil loud enough to make Shadow cringe. She didn’t like being the passenger, “Don’t do that again!”    “I’m trying not too!” he growled back, pushing faster to an edge of the transport formation so they could jump to hyperspace quickly, “Use the Force! Feel! Something! I don’t know just do it! I would but I’m a little busy!”    Shadow grumbled a complaint about not knowing the systems all that well, but went about attempting to plot he course anyway. She closed her eyes...not out of need to for using the Force, but simply so she could cut out having to look around at the insane flying Jyren was currently doing. At least it was keeping them alive.    Something exploded nearby.    Keeping them alive for the moment.    While her hands relinquished their death grip on the control stick and worked their way to the navcomputer in front of her, Shadow’s mind raced in and oddly calm fashion. With the help of the Force, she slowly reached out through the mental Network shared by all of her species. It was the quickest way to find them and...technically, the Empress was supposed to keep it together.    It took her a moment to ignore the sudden chaos she found where the Network ‘was’, but she then quickly asked a few necessary questions. Random answers to ‘where are you?’ flooded through the link, but she did find one that was actually helpful. A pilot responded, and although he was obviously as panicked as the rest of the Alraxians, he was at least calm enough to due his duty.    So she had a location...and a general idea of where it was. Another explosion(this one louder than before) nearly forced her to open her eyes and look, but a laugh from Jyren made her decide against it. Instead, she raced to her next task. Using what she had to actually get them to that location. Exactly how she did it, Shadow wasn’t even sure of. But with the help of the Force, the once blank navcomputer was suddenly programmed with a series of things Shadow didn’t actually understand. Which mean she’d opened her eyes.    “Done!” she said, slumping back in her seat and immediately going back to gripping the control stick. The adrenaline rush also came back in that second, as her eyes opened to at least three ships around them burning in that red-green fire while the X-Wing rolled around and spun towards an opening of blank space. There was he mechanical noise that she identified as the S-Foils closing, with the green shots arcing past them in all directions as the X-Wing continued its tight spin away.    Then she heard a familiar and extremely relieved noise. It was accompanied by the elongating of the stars ahead, and then a sudden blue tunnel that arced around the cockpit. Both of them let out a long sigh of relief. After a few seconds, Jyren tilted his head to look around the seat and to Shadow. He was grinning that maniacal grin of an idiot who’d lived through what should have been certain death, “Want to go again?”    “Not with you flying,” Shadow said with a mild glare, through it slowly formed into a smile.</blockquote>

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