Enemy Lines II_ Rebel Stand - Aaron Allston [113]
It had taken six X-wings and a hidden cache of explosives to kill the last rakamat they’d fought against. This one might be only half as powerful as the last, but Wedge was a third as powerful as the previous force. The odds were bad.
On the other hand, Han Solo had made a generation of people think that Corellians ignored the odds, no matter how long, and Wedge was as Corellian as Solo was.
Then the idea hit him, and Wedge managed another humorless grin.
The coralskipper hot on his tail, Wedge looped around until he was approaching the rakamat and its covering troops from a cross-angle to its path. He fired again, spraying lasers indiscriminately into the grasses to the left of the rakamat, scattering the Yuuzhan Vong warriors and reptoids there. From here, he could see the rakamat’s legs as it moved stolidly toward the freighter, could time them in their steady, docile motions.
Plasma rained toward him from the rakamat, from the coralskipper behind. Wedge sideslipped and continued to fire into the grasses, setting them ablaze, kicking up gouts of dirt and steam. Now his vision was useless, but his sensors still showed the huge mass of the rakamat, distorted by the heat from the fire.
Wedge dropped to grasstop level, heard scrapes and thumps as his lower hull was grazed by foliage—perhaps even by irregularities in the terrain. Ahead, he could see the very top of the rakamat, as its plasma cannons elevated, preparing to catch his underside as he popped up over them.
He flipped an overhead switch and his S-foils closed from the X-shaped firing position to cruise position. And as he entered the zone where the grasses were blazing, he twitched his yoke down, then up.
He had the barest flash of rakamat legs to his left and right, a looming shadow over him, and then he was rising.
For a bare moment, no plasma came streaking after him. In going under the rakamat, in emerging low from the wrong side, he’d thrown the creature into confusion. He switched his S-foils back into firing position as he climbed.
In that moment, the pursuing coralskipper roared through the fire and saw the rakamat immediately before it. The pilot must have panicked. Over his shoulder, Wedge saw the bow of the coralskipper wobble as the pilot was torn between following Wedge under or bouncing over, and that moment of hesitation doomed him. The skip’s bow rose and, at several hundred kilometers per hour, the skip plowed into the flank of the rakamat.
There was no flash of light, no noise of the impact—Wedge was racing away too fast for the sound to catch him. There was only the grisly image of the coralskipper tearing through the creature, emerging in a different, narrower shape, the rakamat being flung in two pieces away from the point of impact, the remains of the coralskipper arching up in a ballistic course and then gradually down toward the ground.
Wedge looped around to mop up. There was unaccustomed tension in his arm, and he realized that he was gripping the yoke too hard.
“I’m not going to say it,” he told himself. “I’m not.”
I’m getting too old for this.
Lusankya was visible to the naked eye now, a tiny needle pointed straight for Domain Hul.
Czulkang Lah squinted up at it, irritable, his diminished eyesight insufficient to provide him with any details of what he was seeing. He gestured at an aide, who correctly interpreted the nonspecific motion and stroked the enormous circular lens in the center of the command chamber’s ceiling. It distorted, stretching details at its periphery into blurriness, magnifying the enemy ship’s image until it dominated the scene.
The ship had already sustained tremendous damage. The deckplating everywhere was torn, rough, like a road that had once been smooth and then had been traveled over by herds of rakamats with spike weapons on their feet. Flame jetted out from its hull in dozens of places. Its guns were mostly silent; Czulkang Lah saw only two batteries