Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor - Matthew Woodring Stover [121]
Two of the ion-turbos had been successfully spiked by Republic marines; the other three opened up full-bore with counterbattery fire back along the vectors of the incoming blasts. Silent explosions lit up the flanks of the three Corellian ships; soon they were firing through clouds of their own vaporized hull armor. Then the central dome, over the gravity gun, dilated like the pupil of a vast, pale eye.
“Everybody hang on to something!” Captain Tirossk shouted over the comm, rather unnecessarily. “Here it comes!”
The gravity gun opened fire.
A sharp-eyed observer, looking in precisely the right place at precisely the right time, would have been able to actually see the flight of the gravity bombs. As they hurtled through the plasma storm created by the synchronized turbolaser blasts, their tiny event horizons swallowed all manner of highly charged particles that released a continuous stream of hard radiation as they fell out of the universe forever. That radiation in turn charged the plasma around it, creating instant blue-white flash-streaks straight as a laser.
The gravity gun unleashed such a blast every three seconds, spraying them all through a narrowly spiraling arc without any attempt to target specific ships. It didn’t have to: even a near-miss could literally tear a ship apart.
Which was exactly what the spray of gravity bombs did to the Unsung.
The bridge crews of the Lancer and the Paleo could only watch helplessly as the Unsung was twisted and wrenched and finally ripped apart; though hundreds of kilometers separated each of these ships, the other two were also jolted by wave after wave of gravity shocks.
The breakup of the Unsung left a brief gap in the suppression fire. Alarms screamed as hostile target locks acquired the two remaining ships. “Prepare to increase fire rate fifty percent,” Tirossk rasped. “Resynchronize with Paleo.” When the fire-control coordinator protested that this risked burning out the turbolasers, Tirossk only shrugged. “They’ll be burned out for sure when the ship blows up. Execute.”
The spray of gravity bombs streaked on, and more came in their wake. They hurtled toward the cluster of capital ships still huddled helplessly in Mindor’s shadow: ships without shields, with no armor or weapon that could protect them.
Ships whose only defense was the ingenuity of General Lando Calrissian.
The lead ship in the array of Slash-Es was the Wait a Minute, under the command of Captain Jav Patrell, a grizzled veteran who had been serving on, later commanding, interdiction ships for thirty-five Standard years. When his navigation officer announced detection of the first oncoming gravity wave, Patrell didn’t hesitate. “All ships,” he said. “Execute.”
As his bridge crew turned crisply to their tasks, Patrell’s XO leaned close and half whispered, “You really think this can work?”
“Of course it’ll work!” Patrell snapped, which was an impressive display of confidence, given that he was, at that precise moment, entirely certain that there was no way in any Corellian hell that anyone could actually pull this off. His certainty was the product of long experience; in all his years of service aboard Corellian-made inderdictors, he’d never seen any indication that the artificial gravity wells they projected could be tuned or timed with the precision this sort of stunt required.
However, none of his thirty-five years’ experience included an operation controlled by the main processor array of a Mon Calamari battle cruiser.
As the first of the stream of gravity bombs passed Lancer and Paleo, the gravity-well projectors of Wait a Minute began to pulse. The interaction of the two powerful gravity sources dragged each bomb a few degrees off-course, at which point the next Slash-E pulsed its own projector in a similar sequence,