ITOD Home > Hammerfall - XWA > Dented Shield: XWA

When the klaxon first started wailing, I some knew deep down that it wasn't a drill, something real was about to go down. Then sure enough, the order to scramble was immediately followed by that confirmation: "Aurora base is coming under attack. This is not a drill, repeat: this is NOT a drill!" We weren't exactly caught flat-footed, but the timing was not fortuitous. Resurrection squadron had just departed with all of the Y-wings earlier that day so we were extremely short on capital firepower; two wings of X-wings plus one flight of A-wings was certainly enough to cover superiority but it didn't leave us with much more than the Golan to beat back any bigger ships. I and my wingmate Ralis were some of the first to the hanger, grabbed the two of the closest ready X-wings, and got airborne. I had barely enough time to get all my systems adjusted when the Titan force came hurtling out of hyperspace. True to their name, the force was substantial: three fully loaded Impstar deuces with full compliments. I think we all knew we were in for a losing battle, but that didn't change the fact that if we did our job right, we could get most of our forces the hell out of there safely and only lose some hardware instead of lives. I asked Ralis to cover me while I flipped to dual-fire and knowing it would by the platform the most time to bring all of her guns to bear, started driving at the first flight of dupes making for the Golan. I cut through three of them on the first past and managed to get wheeled around and knock out the fourth before they got any torpedoes off. A good start, but by that time it was clear that there were more fighters than Ralis would be able to handle all by himself, so instead of searching for the next flight of bombers, I dialed up to quad-fire and dove into the fray. Ralis and I make an excellent dogfighting team; within minutes we had greatly thinned out the ranks of eyeballs and dupes, racking up at least 20 kills a piece. Though this hadn't taken us very long, by the time we had an opening to reassess the situation things had started to get bad. The Golan's shields were out and clearly wasn't going to last very much longer, so we decided to take a gamble at distracting one of the star destroyers. Settling on the Enmity purely because she was closest, we started taking turns making runs on her shield generators, and sure enough, at just about the same time that the Golan went dark, we knocked out Enmity's shields and she turned to leave the fight as well. But now that the platform was gone, it was time to evacuate the base, and that meant turning our attention back to protecting our people from the smaller imperial ships. Fortunately, all of our remaining fighters were still in miraculously good shape, so we didn't have much of a problem taking out some of the nastier imperial craft that had joined the fray, including an assault transport and several Avengers. At long last, all of our people had been evacuated to the Windstorm and she jumped out to rendezvous with the Redemption, and we shortly followed suit, leaving the base crushed to dust beneath the weight of the Titan's, but with mercifully few bodies left among the rubble.

-1LT 'Crazy' Carl