Chapter 10: Nightmares

[Fel]

"Abort mission! ABORT MISSION!" Fel was screaming in his starfighter. The Interdictor Red Claw-II remained steadfast in its position. From his X-Wing cockpit, Fel could see the fires burning inside the hull of the cruiser.

Inside the Interdictor, His Majesty's finest were risking their lives to put out the fires, to strengthen the shields, to keep the gravity wells functioning. Troops passed fire suppressant canisters, rewired panels, were sucked into the blackness of space when a hull plate failed...

And inside a Rebel starfighter, under the banner of the New Republic, Fel was destroying Grand Admiral Daemon's sole interdictor...

Another salvo of rockets hits the cruiser, resulting in a long black streak of damage, and more hull breaches.

Fel screams again... But the rule is known to all starfighter pilots... In space...

Another salvo, this time more serious. The Interdictor buckles. Its gravity wells fail. The ship's reactor overloads...

Fel woke up, sweating, gasping for breath. On board the Calamari Cruiser Pike. It was a nightmare. But it was real.

The Pike's starfighters had destroyed Grand Admiral Daemon's one and only Interdictor Cruiser. They were so extremely rare in the galaxy that replacing one was a monumental effort. Few craft are harder to find...

Fel got out of bed. He knew he could sleep no further. Some four hours later, he had to report for ground duty. Something about escorting that whiny Jedi brat around a planet. The datapad hardly seemed worth reading.

Awaiting him upon his return to the Empire was surely a court martial, a guilty verdict, and a death sentence.

Still, his other option had been to NOT destroy the Interdictor and face execution by the Rebellion as a spy, or to flee back to Imperial territory... And face at least a penal sentence for failure of his infiltration mission. The Imperial Security Bureau or Imperial Intelligence would make sure that he quietly disappeared... No matter what he told himself, however, he just could not feel better about the decision he made.

It was the ultimate no-win scenario.

He hoped only that he could make this mission a success, and he hoped that whatever it was, it was worth the death sentence. At least then, he could die in the service of the greater glory of the Empire...

==========
TIE: Fiction
XvT: Fiction
XWA: Fiction
GB: ERS-223
EaW: ERS-224