Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor - Matthew Woodring Stover [45]
The other little-known feature of the repulsorlift was that it did operate with reassuring respect for the laws of motion. It moved a ship because it was shoving against the gravitational field of the planet; the ship moved because the planet wouldn’t. If, on the other hand, one directed one’s repulsorlift toward a mass significantly smaller than that of one’s ship—like, say, a metric ton of asteroid—it was the mass that moved. Often very, very swiftly indeed. Some pilots had come to refer to this maneuver as the Solo Slide.
Not because Han Solo invented it—the trick was far older than he was—but because no one in the galaxy had ever done it better.
As soon as his mastery of the Solo Slide had bought the Falcon a few seconds’ breather, Han called to Chewie to join him in the cockpit. The Wookiee slid smoothly into the copilot’s chair, strapped himself in, and observed succinctly, “Baroough wonnngar row-oo-wargh.”
“Couldn’t have said it better myself.” Han spun the dial on the comm unit. “Still jamming subspace; going to realspace. Republic frigates, this is the Millennium Falcon. Do you copy? Repeat: do you copy?” he said, louder, as though shouting might help.
The reply came through, crackling with static. “Millennium Falcon, this is the RDFS Lancer. We copy. Confirm receipt of following message.”
Han shot a frown at Chewie, shrugged, and replied, “Go ahead.”
“Message reads: Where’s my eight thousand credits, you thieving pirate?”
Han grinned. “Message confirmed. Reply: Regards to Captain Tirossk. How about I offer one dusted grav projector on account?”
Chewbacca gave him a look. “Hoowerghrff?”
Han shrugged. “Who else do I owe that much money to?”
“Freghrr. Khooherm. Flighwarr—”
“Yeah, yeah, all right, drop it.”
The comm crackled. “Solo—Tirossk here. If we both get out of this alive, my friend, we’ll call it even, yes?”
Han winced. No Bothan would make that kind of offer if he thought there was any chance it might actually happen. “Maybe you better fill me in.”
The situation played out like an extended good-news-bad-news joke. The good news was that Shadowspawn didn’t have enough interceptors to defend all his gravity-well projectors. The bad news was that this was because there were thousands of them, scattered throughout the system-wide debris field. Good news: the projectors, lacking the engines of capital ships to power them, seemed to depend on asteroid-based generators and a system of capacitors that—in the best estimate the Lancer’s computer could make—would be able to power them for only about four Standard days. The bad news: these thousands of new gravity wells had destabilized the entire system, sending vast clouds of asteroids spiraling inward to the star, with the first impacts to begin in less than two Standard days. The good news: most of the asteroids were small enough to simply burn up in the star’s corona. The bad news: that was only most of them; some of the larger asteroids were capable, on impact, of triggering flare-like stellar eruptions that would put out enough hard radiation to sterilize the entire system, including every single ship—Republic, Imperial, and otherwise—and every single life-form of any variety on the surface of Mindor. More bad news: each gravity projector the task force managed to destroy would actually speed up the infall of the asteroids, because the outer gravity wells actually slowed the decay of the inner asteroids’ orbits by partially balancing the star’s gravitation. And to counter that bad news, there was no good news. None at all. Everyone was going to die.
Everyone.
“I don’t buy it,” Han said. “I don’t buy it for a tenth of a Standard second. No Imp commander would throw away all these men and all this equipment just to take out a few Republic ships. They can’t afford to. There’s a way out. There’s gotta be a way out. We’ll cut our way in and link up with the task