Star Wars_ I, Jedi - Michael A. Stackpole [3]
I keyed my comm. “Rogue Lead, three flight has contact. One cruiser and eighteen uglies heading in on the Glitterstar.”
Tycho’s voice came back cool and calm. “I copy, Nine. Engage the fighters with two flight. One has the cruiser.”
I flicked over to three flight’s tactical channel. “Light them up, Rogues, we have the fighters.”
I started the engines, then shunted power to the repulsorlift coils. The X-wing rose like a ghost from a grave and came about to point its nose toward the liner. As Ooryl’s X-wing pulled up on my left and my other two pilots, Vurrulf and Ghufran, arrived on the right, I punched the throttle full forward and launched myself into the fight.
A smile blossomed on my face. Any sapient creature making a claim to sanity would find hurtling along in a fragile craft of metal and ferro-ceramics to be stupid or suicidal. Pushing that same craft into battle merely compounded the situation, and I knew it. By the same token, very few experiences in life can compare to flying in combat—or engaging any enemy in a fight—because doing that is the one point where civilization demands us to harness our animal nature and employ it against a most dangerous prey. Without being physically and mentally and even mechanically at my best, I would die and my friends might even die with me.
But I had no intention of letting that happen.
With a flick of my thumb I switched from lasers over to proton torpedoes and allowed for single fire. I selected an initial target and eased the crosshairs on my heads-up display onto its outline. Whistler beeped steadily as he worked for a target lock, then the box surrounding the fighter went red and his tone became a constant.
I hit the trigger and launched my first proton torpedo. It streaked away hot and pinkish-white, trailed by others lancing out from my flight. While employing proton torpedoes against fighters is seen as overkill by some pilots, within Rogue Squadron using such a tactic was always seen as an expedient way of lowering the odds against us—odds that were usually longer than a Hutt and decidedly more ugly.
The Invids used a form of custom-designed fighter called a Tri-fighter. It started with the ball cockpit and ion engine assembly of Seinar System’s basic TIE fighter—a commodity which, after hydrogen and stupidity, was the most plentiful in the galaxy—and married it to a trio of angular blades set 120 degrees apart. The bottom two served as landing gear, while the third came up over the top of the cockpit. The fighter still had the TIE’s twin lasers mounted beneath the cockpit, while the third tine sprouted an ion cannon. The ships also had some basic shields, which explained why they were more successful than your basic eyeball, and side viewports cut into the hull gave the pilot more visibility. Because the trio of tines looked as if they were grasping at the cockpit, we’d nicknamed the design “clutch.”
The shields and extra visibility didn’t help the clutch I’d targeted. The proton torpedo jammed itself right up the left engine’s exhaust port and actually punched out through the cockpit before detonating. The fighter flew into the roiling, golden ball of fire and just vanished. Three more clutches exploded nearby, then another three exploded off to starboard, where two flight was coming in.
“Pick targets carefully, three flight. Ooryl, we’re on the pair to port.”
“Ten copies, Nine.”
I kicked my X-wing up on the port stabilizer foils and hauled back on the stick. Chopping power to the engine, I tightened the circle, then rolled out to the right as the pirates started a long serpentine turn. I switched over from missiles to dual lasers and immediately got a yellow box around the lead fighter. I goosed the throttle back to full to close range