Enemy Lines II_ Rebel Stand - Aaron Allston [117]
The missile, mostly solid-state, not disadvantaged by the physical limitations of a living pilot, could survive much tighter turns and more strenuous g-forces than the pursuing coralskippers. On the last pass the missile made past one specific mine, the two closest pursuers had followed the missile’s path exactly, had been caught by the mine’s gravity, had been torn to pieces by their own daring.
Plasma projectiles flashed past the bubble viewport of the B-wing’s crew compartment. Fascinated with his deadly toy, Sharr ignored them, relying on Beelyath to keep him alive.
The squadrons protecting Lusankya broke toward different incoming squadrons. Jaina, still masquerading as Twin Suns Nine, kept her silence as Kyp Durron scattered her shield trios in the path of incoming coralskippers.
As the distant skips came within maximum laser-effective range, she reached for Kyp in the Force, found him there, found him waiting for a better shot. She reached for Jag as well, detected him, could even faintly feel the intensity of his focus, his state of alert relaxation. But she could not interact with him as she could with Kyp, could not afford to be distracted, so she withdrew from that contact.
Then Kyp was firing and her hand was automatically squeezing her lasers’ trigger, firing a quad-linked blast at one incoming skip. Both her shot and Kyp’s were intercepted by voids, but Jag’s, a fraction of a second later, plowed into the enemy starfighter’s nose, destroying the dovin basal there, depriving the craft of its capabilities of flight and defense. Kyp and Jaina each poured another salvo of laser energy into the craft; it burst, exploding as the lasers superheated internal moisture to the state of gas, and vented atmosphere into space.
“One Flight, Twin Suns Five.” That was Piggy. “Suggest you come to zero-one-zero ecliptic, hold that course for ten seconds, take targets of opportunity.”
“Twin Suns Two, copy.” Kyp led Jag and Jaina around in the indicated direction. Ahead, Jaina could see where Four Flight—Beelyath and Tilath—had gotten on the tails of two skips and were chasing them directly across One Flight’s path. Jaina gauged Beelyath’s and Tilath’s firing patterns, timed them, felt Kyp doing the same … and, as the enemy skips crossed before them, as Beelyath and Tilath sent stutterfire laser against the sterns of the skips one last time, Kyp, Jaina, and Jag fired from the skips’ port quarter, their quad-linked lasers hitting yorik coral instead of voids. Both skips detonated, sending a cloud of gases and yorik coral chunks hurtling along their course.
But now the wingmate of the first skip they’d hit was behind them, closing, firing. Jaina didn’t listen to the good-shooting congratulations coming across the comm board; she followed Kyp as he made a tight loop up and to starboard, trying to elude their pursuit.
Jag looped tighter, forcing the pursuer to divide his attention between his clawcraft and the two X-wings, and managed to come around behind the coralskipper even as it managed to maintain its position behind the X-wings. He poured laserfire into its stern and top hull, but all of it was dragged into the skip’s defensive voids.
Jaina felt a sort of mental shrug from Kyp. “Break,” she said, aloud and through the Force but not over the comm frequencies, and she broke to port as Kyp broke to starboard.
She gritted her teeth against the g-forces her tight turn exerted on her, but got oriented around toward that skip—just in time to see an X-wing flash over and past it at a right angle to its course, in time to see plasma projectiles tracking that X-wing strike the coralskipper instead. They chewed through its hull and the skip suddenly turned away, no longer anxious to fight.
Piggy’s distinctive, mechanical laugh sounded over the comm board.
Jaina grinned. “Nice fleeing, Piggy.”
Wedge’s X-wing reached low Borleias orbit as the Ammuud Swooper lumbered along