Enemy Lines II_ Rebel Stand - Aaron Allston [124]
Not that two healthy ones couldn’t kill him. Wedge sideslipped, rotated to change his profile, juked and jinked to keep incoming plasma and grutchin fire off him.
As he approached the coralskipper formation, he drifted to port and squeezed off some stutterfire laser at the healthy skip on that side. He fired for only a fraction of a second, letting the short series of beams drift forward from the target’s cockpit, watching as the skip’s voids moved with the streams of coherent light and swallowed them; then he switched the weapon over to quad-linked fire, flicked his targeting reticle back toward the cockpit, and fired, all in one quick motion.
The voids continued forward for a brief, deadly fraction of a second. Wedge’s lasers slammed in behind them, punching through the pilot’s canopy, punching through the pilot.
Wedge’s X-wing shook as plasma, not completely deflected by his shields, seared through his starboard lower S-foil. His diagnostics lit up with their report. Structural damage, but no interruption of engine power. The S-foil might collapse if flown into atmosphere, especially in firing position, but should hold up to all but the most rigorous of maneuvers in space.
The last healthy coralskipper and its two injured wingmates were on his tail, pouring plasma after him; he heard impact after impact as the superheated projectiles hit his rear shields, watched the alarming drop of his shield power.
His sensor board beeped, alerting him to an object in his path, on collision course, less than a second away. He began to twitch the X-wing yoke, to sideslip him around the obstacle, but instead switched weapons controls back to proton torpedo and fired on it. Only then did he shove the yoke down.
He saw the brilliant flash of the torpedo detonating above him, felt his X-wing rock as the shock wave from the explosion hammered him, but he switched back to lasers and hauled back on the yoke even as he was being battered. He was through the detonation zone in an instant—and there, meters above him, was the last healthy skip, its pilot still recovering from the unexpected detonation. Wedge fired and saw his lasers tear into the skip’s underbelly.
There was another explosion, this one far less severe, as the skip vented gases through the crater Wedge’s lasers punched in the yorik coral. The skip suddenly ceased maneuvering.
A shrill alarm had been wailing in Wedge’s ear since the explosion. Finally he could spare an instant’s attention to his diagnostics board.
He cursed. His shields were down. Whether they had failed from the proton torpedo explosion or been stripped as a last act of the coralskipper’s voids, he did not know, but he suspected the latter; it would explain why his last shot against the skip’s underbelly was not blocked.
Without shields, he was nearly as good as dead. He spared a glance for the two injured skips. They would be closing on him now, predators coming after injured prey.
Instead, they were moving away at high speed.
Wedge laughed. Seeing the last intact skip of the squadron destroyed had caused their nerve to fail; they probably hadn’t even detected that he had lost his shields. He wondered what they thought he was—another supposed godly manifestation, like Jaina?
Then he stopped laughing. His sensors showed the coralskipper squadron from planetside had left the atmosphere and was racing up in the wake of Ammuud Swooper. They might intercept her before she reached a point from which she could launch into hyperspace.
Unless he maneuvered himself in the way. Unless he persuaded a second squadron to duel with him.
But if he did that, his X-wing shieldless and damaged, he would die. He would die alone, and he would die anonymous, flying another pilot’s X-wing with no record left behind of his having been here. Iella and his children would never know what had become of him.
He swung around on an intercept course