Strategy

Commander X’Radd

Commander X’radd couldn’t help but grin as he zeroed in on another B-wing. As if panicked, the rebel pilot attempted erratic evasive maneuvers. X’radd’s smile intensified as he fell in behind him and blew out the starfighter’s quad engine system with a single shot. He didn’t even bother looking at the snub fighter disintegrate as he sped past. There was no question in X’radd’s mind that rebel pilots were mostly inferior, if not just outright incompetent. He’d heard a lot of talk about the B-wing before this battle�"about how they posed an unprecedented danger to Star Destroyers if they could get enough maneuvering room to deploy their weaponry. But X’radd had no intention of giving them that room. Not that it would matter anyway; regardless of B-wing specifics, X’radd had always placed far more faith in the man than the machine. Though he would have been the first to admit that maxim was double-edged; it chafed him to no end that the most famous pilot in the galaxy was a twenty something-year-old farmboy who had somehow managed to blow up the first Death Star. But sometimes luck was a fickle mistress. Unfortunately, X’radd’s secret hopes of cutting Skywalker’s legend down to size in a glorious ship-to-ship encounter had been dashed when he heard that the Emperor himself had sent Darth Vader to bring the boy to him alive. X’radd would just have to make up for the lost opportunity by killing as many rebel pilots as he could. He could tell that whoever was running the rebel wing of pilots had some combat experience. That was going to make the kill all the more satisfying. He checked his scanner, searching for the fighter receiving the most comm traffic; it was an old trick he used to find the enemy wing leader. The tactic didn’t fail him: the leader’s B-wing lit up and X’radd locked him into his targeting computer.