Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor - Matthew Woodring Stover [26]
“Hold it together, Lieutenant. I’ve gotten people out of tighter spots than this.” Luke stepped up on the command dais and raised his voice. “All bridge personnel—every one of you—get back to your stations. Secure the wounded and the dead, then strap yourselves in. Except for you,” he said to the pilot. “Strap in somewhere else. I’m taking your station.”
“You?” The pilot blinked in astonishment. “But sir—Mon Calamari control systems are not designed for human operation—”
“That’s my problem.” Luke slid into the pilot’s couch. “Yours is finding a place to secure yourself. This ride’s about to get bumpy.”
“Sir?”
“We have crew aboard who are running out of air. So we’ll go get them some.” Luke pointed to the wide brick-colored curve of Mindor. “There’s a whole planetful, right next door.”
“Sir!” Tubrimi gasped. “We don’t have engines—we don’t even have repulsorlifts. You’re not actually suggesting we take this—this fragment of a ship into atmosphere with nothing but attitude thrusters—”
“That’s right. I’m not suggesting. I’m ordering. And I’m not just taking us into the atmosphere.”
Luke stretched his hands out into the electrostatic control fields above the pilot console and let himself smile, just a bit; for the first time in weeks, he felt like a Jedi again. “I’m going to land this thing.”
NONE OF THE NEW REPUBLIC FORCES SAW THE FRAGMENT of the Justice dip into the atmosphere; even the kilometers-long stream of flame and smoke trailing off its burning hull attracted no attention at all. The Republic forces were wholly engaged with the more immediate problem of staying alive.
Gravity wells had erupted throughout the system, their mass-shadow thresholds spreading in a 3-D version of the ripples from a handful of pebbles tossed into a still pool. With their subspace comm and sensors jammed, the New Republic ships couldn’t even guess how many gravity mines or projectors might be hidden among the trillions of asteroids; the overlapping layers of the interdiction field not only wiped out any hope of hyperspace travel, they also suddenly—and in many cases catastrophically—altered the already-unstable orbits of every object in the system smaller than a medium-sized moon, turning what had been a dangerously crowded system into a nightmare of intersecting storms of rock.
And the hail that streamed from these storms was squadron after squadron of TIE interceptors.
The interceptor was not so dominating a weapon as its successor, the defender. With less armor, less weaponry, and no shields or hyperdrive, they were nonetheless incredibly swift and maneuverable, and could be exceedingly difficult opponents, especially when appearing en masse. Here at Mindor—as the desperately scrambling Republic X- and B-wing pilots discovered, to their dismay—en masse translated to (in the words of one flight leader) “thousands of the beggars, comin’ from everywhere all at frappin’ once!”
In the swirling chaos of randomly hurtling asteroids, the interceptors’ lack of shields was actually an advantage, as deflectors don’t affect material objects; the deflectorless interceptors had proportionally more engine power for acceleration and to recharge the capacitors for their laser cannons, and there were so many of them that they could swarm the Republic fighters like Pervian blood crows mobbing a wonderhawk and still have plenty left over to strafe the capital ships, which was why nobody was keeping an eye on the optical sensors or monitoring the Justice’s EM channel, on which was playing a loop of Luke Skywalker’s low, preternaturally calm voice broadcast by an emergency signal buoy orbiting the planet.
“This is New Republic cruiser Justice, Luke Skywalker commanding. Admiral Kalback is dead. The ship has broken up, and there are no escape pods remaining. I have taken the helm and will attempt to set down behind the dawn terminator above the north tropic. Begin the search for survivors at the coordinates on the