Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor - Matthew Woodring Stover [53]
While the result was not entirely graceful—he landed on his rear end with a thump—it was close enough for his purposes, so that when Leia sprinted up to him he was able to shove himself to his feet. “Go on!” he gasped. “I’m right behind you!”
“Any landing you can walk away from, eh, Slick?” she said as she passed him and disappeared up the boarding ramp.
“Got that right.” He staggered up the ramp and hit the autocycle to close it behind him. “Leia! Bottom turret! Chewie, take top! I’m driving!”
He scrambled forward. Chewbacca’s feet were just disappearing up the upper turret access; Wookiees could climb faster than most species could run. Leia paused before clambering down into the lower turret. “You okay? Really?”
“Mostly,” Han said. “Considering I landed on my brain.”
“As long as there’s no permanent damage.” Leia flashed a grin and gave his injured anatomy a quick pat as he squeezed by. “It’s your best feature—and that’s saying a lot.”
“You’re adorable,” he said. “Now let’s go shoot some bad guys, huh?”
The ship rocked with more cannon blasts, which were answered by an ear-shattering Wookiee war cry and the deep-throated thoom-thoom-thoom-thoom of the topside quad turret. Han finally reached the cockpit and threw himself into the pilot’s couch. While he stabbed buttons and flicked switches, he whispered a quick “Thankyouverymuch!” to whatever part of the Force might be looking after fools, scoundrels, and reformed smugglers, grateful that the Empire had never thought to arm their TIE interceptors with missiles or torps, especially since—as a searing red FAILURE indicator informed him when he tried to fire up the active defenses—the atmosphere seemed to have a similar effect on deflectors and particle shields.
Which meant, on balance, that the most effective weapons in this particular engagement just happened to be loaded in the Falcon’s forward missile array. Han muttered, “That works for me,” yanked back on the control yoke, and punched the sublights. The Falcon leapt straight up as if it had been drop-kicked by the entire planet.
The ship spun skyward through a hailstorm of cannon fire. Inboard comm crackled. “I can’t hurt them,” Leia said, her voice tight and calm with concentration. “My shots glance off the collector panels. Is something wrong with the guns?”
“No, something’s wrong with the atmosphere! Don’t complain, it’s keeping us alive right now!” Han shouted back. “Their forward viewports aren’t armored—aim for the eyeball and shoot ’em in the face when they swing in on attack runs!”
He twisted the ship through a half loop that sent it straight for a new line of TIEs as they dropped through the cloud deck in that follow-the-leader formation they favored for air-to-ground work. “Speaking of eyeballs,” he muttered under his breath, and thumbed the missile release without bothering to engage the targeting computer; at this range he didn’t need a missile lock. Twin contrails painted parallel lines from the Falcon to the lead TIE in less than a heartbeat. In the next heartbeat, the TIE had blossomed into an expanding sphere of flame and debris—which touched off the following TIE, and the one after that, while the rest of the flight broke formation and spiraled into strafing runs.
“Hey, they’re going after the Mindorese!” Han crowed as he spun the ship into an escape vector. “Blow ’em a kiss for luck, kids—we’re out of here!”
“Han,” Leia began, and he clenched his teeth. He recognized the tone, and he knew what was coming next.
“Don’t tell me,” he said. “We have to go back.”
“They’ll be slaughtered!” she said. “And Han—they know something about Luke!”
“Oh, sure,” he muttered through his teeth. She would