Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor - Matthew Woodring Stover [44]
Which was a tricky place to go, as the gravity-well projector in the center had perturbed the entire cloud, sending asteroids in unpredictable directions. However, having their prey powered down and weaponless removed a great deal of the danger involved in hunting it. This prey would be in more danger from the asteroids than they were, being a bigger target and unable to maneuver without revealing its position—so a six-TIE flight spread out into a search matrix and began to methodically sweep the entire cloud.
Han, though, had learned as a cadet that even while flying through a large asteroid field crowded with pretty substantial rocks moving in more-or-less random directions, there were a couple of factors he could count on to keep his ship relatively safe. One was that a rock going in a particular direction would continue to go roughly in that same direction, unless it actually ran into something or was acted upon by an external force. Even collisions had a predictable result; postimpact trajectories of colliding objects could be reliably projected by any standard nav program, being a rough resultant of the vectors and respective kinetic energies of the objects in question. As for the TIE pilots, the only external force that concerned them was the grav projector, whose effect on the local rocks was also well within the capacities of their navicomputers to predict.
Which was why it came as a substantial surprise to the flight leader when an asteroid roughly the size of a speeder bike suddenly made a sharp forty-five-degree turn as though it had bounced off an invisible paatchi ball and slammed through his port engine, his hull, and his cockpit before continuing out the other side, taking his head with it.
Another of the flight suffered a similar fate before the remaining TIE pilots made visual contact with the Millennium Falcon, which was zipping in rings around them without, apparently, using its drives at all. Meanwhile, asteroids seemed to actively avoid it, leaping aside from its path—and ending up, with improbable frequency, in new trajectories that proved catastrophic to the TIEs.
The last that was heard from any of these unfortunate pilots was a panicky final transmission: “It’s some kind of bloody Jedi! I swear to you, he’s throwing rocks at us! I don’t know how—with his mind, or some—” The transmission ended in a crash that sounded very like a ton or so of asteroid crushing a titanium hull. Which, in fact, it was.
SO LONG AS IT HAS SUFFICIENT MASS AGAINST WHICH TO push, the repulsorlift is the most efficient transportation device ever devised: it uses virtually no energy, produces no emissions and virtually no radiation signature—not even waste heat—so it is detectable only by gravitic sensor. Repulsorlifts were so widespread that nearly everyone in the galaxy simply took them for granted, using them in everything from Star Destroyers to swoop boards. TIE interceptors, though, were carrier-based craft, designed to operate in space well beyond the kind of planetary masses that made repulsorlifts work. TIEs had no need of repulsorlifts, and Imperial ship designers, with typically unimaginative thrift, simply left them out. For the same reason, the sensors aboard these fighters were calibrated to detect the field signatures of sublight engines and charged weapons arrays, not the gravitic-pulse output of repulsorlifts … which weren’t really useful in starfighter combat anyway; they were just not powerful enough to provide the near-instantaneous accelerations necessary for modern dogfighting.
Republic starfighters, on the other hand, were designed to operate independently of capital ships, and were regularly used for certain atmospheric applications where silent fuel efficiency was more important than raw speed. And one of the two relatively little-known