Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor - Matthew Woodring Stover [56]
“Hey, sorry. You feel safer here?”
“You and me, we’re just never gonna get along.”
“Stop it, you’ll make me cry. Get the TIEs in a tail chase so—”
“—they’ll be in the gunships’ line of fire, and the gunships in theirs.” Han was already doing so, swinging high to place the Falcon squarely between the enemies behind and those in front. The TIEs’ cannons would do even less to the distant gunships than they were doing to the Falcon, but the gunships had to hold fire on their missiles, and Han was starting to let himself believe that he just might get the Falcon clear. “This isn’t exactly my first scrape, y’know.”
“Could’ve fooled me. How we doin’ up there?”
“Not bad,” Han admitted—then changed his mind as another salvo from the TIEs rocked the ship. Hard. “But they’re gaining on us—pretty soon they’ll be close enough that those cannons will start doing real damage. And the gunships are wheeling to join up on the tail chase when we pass them in about five seconds, at which point we’re pretty well f—”
“Pull up!”
“What?”
“Climb, dammit! Full power!”
“You can’t even see out there!”
“I know this planet like your rear knows your pants, flyboy. Climb or die.”
“You want to come up here and drive? No, forget I asked.”
Han gritted his teeth and hauled back on the control yoke. The Falcon lurched and bucked and whipped for the sky fast enough to overload its inertial compensators; acceleration squashed him into the pilot’s couch and pinned him there, and he caught himself indulging an uncharitable fantasy that one particular Mindorese had failed to secure herself and had fallen and broken something.
Preferably her mouth.
The pursuing TIEs climbed with them, spreading wide to open a window for the gunships, which obliged by launching a spray of concussion missiles. The Falcon’s missile-lock alert blared. Han cursed under his breath as he forced the yoke forward and twisted it to yank the ship into a looping spiral. Just then the whole sky flashed scarlet and the whole ship thoommed with magnetic resonance harmonics that sounded, to Han’s all-too-experienced ear, like a near-miss by a really, really big turbolaser blast. “Where the hell did that come from?”
Leia’s voice, from the ventral turret: “Quarter-roll to your left and you’ll see it.”
Han kicked the ship through the quarter roll, got a look at what Leia was talking about, and started swearing. He kept on swearing for some considerable time, even while wrenching the ship through ridiculously violent evasive maneuvers as the whole sky kept flaring around them and the ship rang with a near-continuous whang-ng-ng-ng like a Ruurian beating a dinner gong with all fourteen hands.
The sudden climb he’d undertaken on the redhead’s advice had cleared them over the horizon of a vast rounded mountain that bulged up into the orange sky, like some kind of young volcanic dome that hadn’t yet blown its crater, and the whole blasted place was studded with rings of huge turbolaser towers, which were powerful enough that the interference from Mindor’s atmosphere had no effect except to spread the blasts wide enough to vaporize his entire ship, instead of just blowing holes in it.
“Oh, brilliant. Oh, this is just great,” Han shouted into the intercom. “You sent us straight for their main base!”
“Quit whining. Those turbo batteries’ll keep the TIEs off our tail, and probably dust some of the missiles, too.”
She was right, which only made Han hate her even more. No one that annoying had any business being right about anything.
“There should be three parallel box canyons about five klicks off your left front. See them?”
“Yeah.” Three long gouges in Mindor’s crust, shallow at this end and deepening as they extended off to planetary east until they came to sudden ends—looked like maybe three pretty good-sized chunks of meteorite had come in at the same time