Star Wars_ Legacy of the Force 01_ Betrayal - Aaron Allston [168]
Zueb ducked his oversized Sullustan head as far as he could. “Yes. Feet. Silvery feet. One pair on either side.”
“What the blazes—”
Those feet, and the humanoid bodies they were attached to, suddenly plummeted from the bomber. Syal had a glimpse of two flailing bodies, like dull-silver protocol droids with oddly shaped rifles, as they dropped into her path and hurtled toward her bow.
Syal couldn’t help it—her hand twitched on the control yoke, an instinctive attempt to avoid the collision. Then came the impact, one droid hitting each of the Aleph’s forward viewports.
The one hitting the starboard viewport shattered. In her peripheral vision, Syal had a momentary impression of arms and legs flying in all directions.
The one hitting the port viewport, directly in front of her, didn’t shatter. It held on, its face right there in the center of the transparisteel, and it offered Syal what seemed to her like a reproachful expression. In that moment she recognized it as a type of standard spotter droid.
Then Syal’s involuntary sideslip carried the Aleph far enough that its starboard laser turret began scraping along the building fronts there, tearing marquees and signs off edifices. She jerked the yoke to port, trying to free herself from that deadly friction before it spun her right into a building, and felt the shuddering end as she broke free.
No time to think, now she was traversing toward the buildings to port, and the droid was still looking at her. Gently she corrected her course, noting absently that the bomber had gained scores of meters on her.
“Great flying, Gray Four.” The voice was male, unknown to her, the accent Coruscanti.
Syal couldn’t risk taking her attention from the avenue ahead long enough to consult her comm board. “Who’s that?”
“You’ve got Ax Three as your wing.”
“Ax, you tear him up while I get my life in order here.”
“Will do. Be advised, I’m picking up a huge pursuit squadron on our tail, and it’s not ours.”
Zueb unbuckled and leaned forward. With his fist, he pounded on the inside of Syal’s viewport. The droid outside turned its head to look at him, and this change in its aerodynamics was apparently enough—the Aleph lurched and the droid was suddenly gone, whipped away by the altered air flow across its surface.
“Thanks,” Syal said.
“No problem.” The Sullustan eased back into his gunner’s seat and rebuckled. “Right turret is jammed. Ax Three correct, huge cloud of incoming vehicles on our tail.”
Syal gave the control yoke a tentative adjustment. The Aleph moved back to the center of the avenue, responding correctly. Only then did she check her sensor board.
It showed the E-wing high overhead, and in her peripheral vision she could see red lasers from the fast-moving starfighter hammering the bomber ahead of her. Far behind was an immense cloud of vessels moving up at tremendous speed—it would be on her in thirty seconds or less, and the sensor board still couldn’t tell her what the individual vehicles in it were.
And up ahead, beyond the first of the bombers but too close, was the end of the avenue, a huge, newly constructed housing building.
Syal looked up and her eyes widened. If she pulled up into a climb right now she might—might—be able to clear the tops of the surrounding buildings. But the foremost bomber was so close to the building there was no way it could avoid a collision—
She saw that bomber fire missiles ahead and downward. The street just before the big building erupted in smoke and dust. And in the split second before it was swallowed by the dust cloud, she would have sworn she saw the bomber dive toward the street.
The second bomber, the one she’d been harassing, lost altitude. Its pilot had no distractions—Ax Three was now climbing away from the engagement, ascending to safety.
Syal became aware that Zueb was screaming at her, something about climbing, about continuing to live. She ignored him and glanced at her sensors. The zone where