Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor - Matthew Woodring Stover [109]
“Target the torps.”
“Way ahead of you,” he said through his teeth as his line of laser bolts intersected the flight path of the nearer torpedo, but the other one shot through the blast and kept on coming. Nick, cursing the turret’s glacial traverse—“I’d be better off throwing rocks!”—finally brought the guns into line and intercepted the torpedo only a couple of dozen meters short of the Falcon’s sublights. “That was too close! Can you route control of the other turret through this one?”
“The other turret’s busy right now,” Skywalker said, as the ventral quad opened up and cannon bolts shot through the darkness to blast a narrow opening ahead.
The Falcon hit the not-quite-big-enough gap with the velocity of a point-blank bowcaster bolt. With a grinding whannng! and an impact that just about bounced Nick’s head through the transparisteel, the ship crashed through. “That was a little tight. I think we lost something.”
“Looks like the sensor dish,” Nick said, watching it tumble past him and vanish into the darkness behind.
“Oh, great. Han’s still teasing Lando about losing his last dish inside the second Death Star. I’ll never hear the end of this.”
“You’ll never hear the start of it if we don’t get out of here!” Nick said as four more hurtling blue stars swung into view, far back but coming on so fast they swelled from pinpricks to borgleballs in no more time than it took him to mutter, “Four? How am I supposed to take out four?”
He trained the quad cannons on the roof of the cavern just behind the ship and held down the triggers, filling the tunnel behind with clouds of smoke and dust—which weren’t any impediment for the oncoming torpedoes—as well as a whole lot of chunks of falling rock. Which were.
The first torpedo clipped a falling boulder and glanced upward into the ceiling; its explosion brought down a curtain of cave-in that caught the other three torps in quick succession, close enough behind that the ship’s exterior floodlamps clearly illuminated the wall of tumbled and jumped stone that sealed the tunnel from top to bottom.
“Good luck finding a way to get bombers around that,” he muttered, feeling really pretty pleased with himself, until he realized he could still see the cave-in. That it wasn’t getting any farther away. “Hey, why are we stopped?”
“Look forward.”
Nick swiveled the turret. He said, “Oh.”
They’d run out of tunnel. Ahead was only a blank wall of stone. And behind, he’d just managed take the only way out and seal it up tighter than a Hrthgingian firegem vault.
“Um …” he said slowly. “Don’t back up.”
In the cockpit, Luke stared at the stone ahead in grim frustration. He’d been sure they were going the right way. Sure in the way he felt sure when the Force was telling him just how sure he should really feel. “I don’t get it,” he said, shaking his head. He turned to Aeona, who was strapped into the copilot couch. “This is wrong. This shouldn’t be here.”
“Don’t waste time worrying about what should be. Worry about what is.”
Luke decided not to tell her she sounded like Yoda.
She looked drawn, and there was a haunted edge in her voice. “Worry about finding a way out of here.”
He gave her a sympathetic look. “Claustrophobic?”
“Just a little,” she said with a reluctant nod. “But enough.”
“Me, too. Especially today. Don’t worry. The first thing you do when you’re lost is stop somewhere and ask for directions.” He keyed the comm system and entered Leia’s comlink code. “Leia? Leia, please respond. It’s Luke.”
No response. Not even static. “Leia, come in.”
“You can forget about that,” Aeona said. She waved a hand at the rock wall outside. “See the opalescence in that black stone, how it kind of shimmers? Looks like this whole cavern runs through a vein of meltmassif—that’s a kind of rock that—”
“I know what it is.” Luke flexed his hands; he could feel that shadowy