Star Wars_ Fate of the Jedi 07_ Conviction - Aaron Allston [59]
West of Hweg Shul, the morning sun had already caused ground-level dust storms to kick up. At this altitude, they looked like thick, motionless puffs of white or silver-gray plant fibers waiting to be harvested and spun into textiles.
Luke’s feeling of good cheer lasted for twenty minutes. Then the aged shuttle’s sensors picked up a signal, a small craft rising from a mountain range and coming up behind them. The pursuer kept a much lower altitude than the shuttle, two thousand meters, which meant that it was sometimes within the dust storms and sometimes above them. At this distance, it was too small to see anyway; on the sensors it was nothing but a blip.
Luke keyed his intercom. “Possible trouble, you two. Make sure you’re strapped in tight.”
“Understood, Dad.”
The pursuer was faster than the TIE shuttle. It rapidly closed the distance between the two vehicles. Soon enough, even on the shuttle’s ancient sensors, it resolved itself from a blip to a shape—a recognizable one.
It was spherical, with axial projections top and bottom and winglike projections laterally. At a tremendous distance, perhaps, it might be mistaken on sensors for another TIE-based vehicle, but Luke knew better. This was a Sith meditation sphere. This was Ship, the Sith-built, vaguely sentient vehicle now controlled by Abeloth.
“Potential trouble has turned into real trouble, kids. Ship is here.”
“Great, Dad. Should I throw open the top hatch and hurl rocks at it?”
“Just bring up your own sensor board and lend me a second set of eyes.”
“I’m in back—”
Vestara’s voice cut in. “I’ve got it, Master Skywalker.”
Ship closed to within a couple of kilometers behind, eight kilometers below. Its course was straight and true, just pacing them.
“Attack—”
Luke felt it as an electric thrill of danger as Vestara spoke the second syllable, but he was already reacting to the alarm in her voice. He jerked the controls to port.
There was no flash of light, just the sudden appearance of a white smoke trail in the air from the point Ship had been a moment before to where the shuttle would have been had it kept its course. A moment later there was a distant boom from behind and below, a sonic boom.
Ship’s accelerator weapon. An ancient device, it used high-order magnetism to accelerate masses of ferrous metal—usually durasteel spheres—to incredible speeds toward a target.
In space, debris and asteroid detection sensors would pick up those missiles. In atmosphere, those sensors automatically reconfigured themselves for the size of obstacles normally found in the air.
In other words, Luke was blind through the sensors, seeing Ship itself but not its supersonic missiles.
He could hear Ben and Vestara arguing on the intercom: “I know, Ben, I know, I can barely see the balls emerge.”
“Recalibrate the sensors for vacuum!”
“We’ll pick up every crosswind, every cloud and stream of dust. That dust storm will look like a giant mass—”
“Just do it!”
Luke kept his eye on the sensor screen, focusing on the aperture in the center of the spine emerging from the meditation sphere’s top.
There was just a blur of movement—
He veered again, diving and banking to starboard. It was hard going, using pilot skill, muscle, and willpower to maneuver the sluggish shuttle.
The smoke trail, caused by the metal ball smashing through the atmosphere, friction alone igniting oxygen as it went, appeared to Luke’s left. Moments later there was another distant boom.
“Civilian craft XV 119 ‘Vote Snaplaunce,’ this is Koval Station Control. Cease your maneuvering and return to your original course.”
Luke grimaced. He didn’t know these controls that well, wasn’t wearing a TIE pilot’s helmet with a voice-activated mike, and couldn’t take his eyes off the sensors long enough to find the manual trigger for the comm system.
Then he heard his son’s voice. “Koval Station, this is ‘Vote Snaplaunce.’ We—”
There was a crackling noise, as if lightning had