Enemy Lines II_ Rebel Stand - Aaron Allston [19]
They were able to get in position well before the coralskippers lined up for an approach. The skips turned again quite a distance out, beyond the kill zone and over the jungle. Now they were aimed in straight at the biotics building. They dropped nearly to the deck and accelerated to something like their full speed, not maneuvering even as Corran and Leth opened fire.
“It’s a suicide run,” Leth said.
“I think you’re right.” Corran looked around. If these three skips were able to hit the shields defending the biotics building, if they were able to crash through them and bring those shields down, there would be a moment when the building was undefended against enemy attacks.
But no other Yuuzhan Vong ships stood ready to make use of this momentary advantage. It didn’t make sense.
Corran drifted to starboard, spraying fire against the skip on that side and in the center. Leth drifted to port and followed suit. Their combined fire was too much for the center skip; some of Corran’s laserfire got past its voids, and nearly all of Leth’s did. That coralskipper nose-dived, smashing into the ground at the outer range of the kill zone. It did not explode; skips, not loaded with fuel, did not always detonate. It just came to pieces, scattering chunks of itself.
That gave each pilot one enemy to concentrate on. Corran kept the pressure on, spraying the oncoming skip with laserfire as if it were water from a hose, and saw his attacks chewing away at the forward portions of the craft.
He could see in his peripheral vision that Leth was having less luck with the other oncoming skip. But he couldn’t deal with that, not with his target spraying plasma at him.
Corran maneuvered his X-wing directly into the path of the oncoming skip. If its pilot’s objective really was the shields, it would have to maneuver around him. If not—well, he’d be taking that opponent out of the battle the hard way.
But it maneuvered, bouncing down to fly under him, and his lasers punched through the skip’s canopy. The vehicle veered, losing control.
Then it exploded, hurling pieces in all directions. Corran veered, was caught in the explosion for a moment, emerged out the other side with diagnostics complaining of no damage worse than a superheated external temperature sensor.
He came around and saw that Leth was also looping. Her target had gotten past her and was now headed in toward the shields.
The skip hit, and for an instant Corran could see the energy of the impact as it made the shield visible, made it ripple like a pond surface suddenly struck by a plummeting landspeeder.
The coralskipper went to pieces, shredded by the impact. Chunks of it sprayed out across the kill zone directly in front of the biotics building. One of the larger chunks hit a dirt hauler that had been pressed into surface as a ground personnel carrier; that vehicle exploded, and flames splashed across surrounding buildings and vehicles. Some chunks of the coralskipper bounced to within meters of the front of the biotics building.
“I’m sorry.” Leth’s voice was pained, full of recognition of her failure.
Too full. Corran snorted, remembering the melodrama that tended to play in new pilots’ minds. “Not much harm done,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. Come on, back to work.”
Corran and Leth wheeled off together to rejoin the squadron.
Damage-control crews spilled out of the biotics building and its associated docking bays, spraying fire-fighting foams on the burning portions of destroyed coralskippers.
A crew chief, a black-haired Corellian woman whose build suggested that there might be a rancor or two in her ancestry, waved frantically at the other members of her unit. “I have a man down here! Bring medics!” She bent and shoved a large piece of coralskipper shell off the victim, a tall human in a drab mechanic’s jumpsuit.
Remarkably, he seemed unburned, and as the woman wrestled the shell from