Gavin Versus The Crimson Baron

 

Aboard the Quasar-Fire-class cruiser-carrier Daughter of the Stars, en route to the Colonies Region of space . . .

“Hey guys, would you come over here for a minute?”

The three cadets seated around a sound system in their cabin rose and moved to join Gavin at a mess table in the other end of the compartment. It was quite a relief actually; the only music available were Gavin’s sound slugs, and they were just chock full of all of his favorite sparkle-bop songs. In fact, the bright and catchy tunes made the trio look like they were ready to pierce their eardrums, then march to the nearest airlock and eject themselves out into the void.

Gavin let his eyes rove over his three fellow cadets—friends—remembering just how much they all went through during their four years at Hosnian Prime Flight Academy. Chaloop—“Loopy” being his plebe nickname—was a burly, green-furred Saheelindeeli from the Tion Hegemony, and nearly had been expelled from the Academy on his very first day after an upperclassbeing dangled a piece of exotic fruit in front of the Saheelindeeli’s face and made grunting noises.

Spike Truong—“Spikes” because of his oversized eye teeth—was a slender, golden-furred Nalroni from Celanon. Academy administrators had mistakenly listed him as a “Celanite”, who were the more refined, urbanite natives of the planet, but Spike’s thick rural accent gave him away, and the upperclassbeings—especially those from the Core worlds—took great delight in denigrating and tormenting the “Rimkin”.

Rayf Minzove was a Lantillian from the Mid-Rim world of Uyter, and whose tall, weedy physique earned him the nickname “Shornstalk”. Rayf took his abuse with imperturbability, but any hazing of Loopy, Spikes, or Scrumrat—Gavin’s cadet nickname—would cause him to swing into action in defense of his friends with a frightening rage.

“Listen,” Gavin began as his friends took their seats around the table. “I want to try out these snubfighter tactics I’ve worked on when we get to Folor.”

Folor. A name which inspired dread among the cadets at Hosnian Prime Flight Academy, for it was the site of one of the most feared section of the curriculum: Combat simulation in actual snubfighters, with cadets pitted against Folor’s “Aces”. The Aces were composed of Folor’s training cadre, regular squadrons rotated in from Starfighter Command to serve as aggressors, and retired veterans from the Civil War. Rumor had it that some of those veterans were from the Empire, and had been brought on post-Jakku with no questions asked. And every year, there was the one cadet who swore that they had gone to guns with none other than Luke Skywalker himself.

A top notch rating in the exercises however, went a long way in establishing class rankings, and Gavin was determined to earn the highest possible totals. “Max score at Folor!” went the saying, and if you combined that with an outstanding performance in the final simulation evaluation, a cadet was all but guaranteed their choice of assignment upon graduation. And if that choice were Gavin’s, he wouldn’t ask for much; just a posting to the most elite starfighter squadron in the New Republic!

“New tactics?” Spikes frowned. “Scrumrat, don’t you remember what the professors said the last time you demonstrated your ‘new tactics’?”

“These are going to work out this time,” Gavin answered as he set some toy starfighter models on the table. “Trust me. I’ve perfected them during the trip. That’s why I brought these toy fighters along. What do you think I’ve been up to all this time?”

“Oh. Is that what you were doing?” Spikes asked softly.

“Yeah! What did you think I was doing?”

Gavin’s three classmates cast guilty glances at each other. “We . . . thought you were . . . playing with them,” Loopy confessed apologetically. 

“Yeah!” Shornstalk chimed in. “You were making pew-pew sounds and everything, Scrumrat!”

“What say you,” Loopy offered in response to Gavin’s slack-jawed expression, “show us what you got.”

# * # * #

Folor was a not a planet, but a moon of Commenor, and that system was one of many which chose to remain neutral in the post-Imperial era. Nonetheless, the planetary government allowed the New Republic to utilize Folor and its other moon, Brelor—best known as Jan Dodonna’s home before the general joined the Rebel Alliance—as training sites.

Operational priorities caused Gavin and his classmates to be bumped from their slot at Folor, their position being given to a contingent from Naboo. Instead, the cadets were to conduct their exercises on Brelor, with special emphasis on atmospheric combat.

“Hey Scrumrat, I hope you planned for this contingency,” Spikes muttered nervously. “Your tactics do work planetside, don’t they?”

“Like I said, trust me,” Gavin replied nonchalantly while giving the Nalroni a lopsided grin.

“Look at that!”

Shornstalk was pointing at the sky, at a squadron of chromium and yellow craft that had lifted off the tarmac and were now climbing swiftly  toward the stars.

“Cadet Thayer, identify!” Loopy barked, pointing a long finger at Gavin.

“Theed Palace Engineering Corps N-1 starfighter,” Gavin answered, rattling off the ship’s specifications. “Twin blaster cannon, twin fire-linked proton torpedo launchers. Monarc C-4 hyperdrive, Class 1 rating! And some of the pilots are Gungans. I saw them!”

Flight Academy pilots: Man your ships. Repeat! Flight Academy pilots: Man your ships!

The four cadets joined their hands together. “This is it!”

# * # * #

Pilots: Man your ships! For previous classes, that command elicited some almost universal reactions from the cadets: A suddenly dry mouth; cold, sweaty palms; a rapid pulse; a knot in the digestive organ; vomiting; and in severe cases, unconsciousness. For some cadets, the combat simulation would do more than just establish class rankings; the honor of the family, or the society, maybe even the planetary system would be at stake. Fortunately, there hadn’t been any suicides due to the final results from the exercises.

But it was different for Gavin and his classmates. They had all deployed to Nam Chorios as plebes, flown sorties in various craft, with Gavin among the quarter who engaged in actual combat. Blooded, it was a matter of pride that they were currently the only cadets at the Academy that wore Nam Chorios battle tabs on their uniforms, and their class guidons carried streamers emblazoned with names of their fallen classmates.

Gavin’s combat experience also made him the logical choice to be their quartet’s flight leader. As they went through their final checklists on board their fighters, Gavin contacted each of his friends over the comm: “Loopy; Spikes, Shornstalk; you’re all clear on what you have to do?” All three confirmed with a single click of their comms.

Just then, a tone signal sounded in Gavin’s flight helmet as the ground crew chief gave the young Corellian a thumbs up sign. In response, Gavin touched a lever on his X-Wing’s control panel, and the craft began to move forward. “All right,” he muttered. “Here we go.”

The four X-wings screamed through the skies of Folor, two flying even with each other at high altitude some one and a half kilometers apart, with the others trailing behind, some two kilometers below and ten kilometers behind the leading ships. The snubfighters were of the “B” variant, the type flown during the war against the Empire. Though getting long in the tooth, the X-wings still provided useful service in training the New Republic’s newest generation of starfighter pilots.

To perform this role flight mechanics had stripped the wingtip laser cannons from the fighters, and replaced them with emitters that fired a highly visible but harmless light beam. “Hits” would be recorded by an array of sensors fitted along the ships’ wings and fuselages. Proton torpedoes or concussion missiles were “frangible” types, munitions that broke apart when striking their target, registering a hit with a spray of dye or isotopes. 

Standard combat tactics taught to the cadets dictated that the four snubfighters should be flying in a formation that roughly approximated the four spread out fingers of a human hand. Each pilot had a defined task in the formation in regards to scanning, who was the lead element, and the role of the wingman. The cadre at Hosnian Prime Flight Academy had frowned upon some Gavin’s ideas and experiments, but the cadet was sure the tactics he wanted to try would work.

Even now the young Corellian’s eyes were constantly roving, going from the scanner readouts to the skies, then over to his wingman. Spike was flying with him for this training mission. Even though all the cadets at the academy received flight training, the Nalroni’s natural aptitude leaned a lot more toward the staff/command side.

The same went for Chaloop. The Saheelindeeli was paired with Rayf, who actually had the most flying time of the four cadets, piloting an Income BT-45D—the civilian version of the UT-60D U-wing—for agricultural tasks on his homeward of Utter. Gavin grinned at what seemed to a cliché for the Alliance/New Republic: The frontier farmboy, his natural piloting skills honed by years of flying a crop duster—

Gavin’s musings were interrupted by a series irascible beeps from his X-wing’s astromech ‘droid. “I copy,” Gavin answered the robot, then asked, “Hey, do you have a designation? A nickname you go by?”

If I do, it’s none of your damn business, vape bait, the droid shot back, the response sounding like a blast of electronic venom.

“Sorry,” Gavin muttered, taken aback by the ‘droid’s temperament. He’d heard that the R5 series of astromech ‘droids had a bitter, sometimes downright nasty disposition, but wow!

What kind of frinkin’ formation is this anyway? the ‘droid blatted sourly at the cadet. Not paying attention during instruction? Or is it you just don’t know what the frell you’re doing?

“It’s a new combat tactic I want to try,” Gavin shot back, sounding more than a little defensive. He felt rather foolish, arguing with a ‘droid, and hoped that there weren’t any hidden comm devices in the X-wing’s cockpit. Gavin could just imagine the instructors and flight controllers enjoying a good laugh as they listened in on the conversation.

“Scrumrat!” Spike hissed into his com-unit. “I’ve got a contact!”

“Copy, Spikes,” Gavin answered, eyeing his own readouts. “Fighter group: Rawwks at angel 8. Switch deflector shields to double front, lock S-foils in attack mode.”