Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor - Matthew Woodring Stover [68]
“I’d say so,” Wedge said.
“But I’m not ready for demolition!”
Wedge went on as if the droid hadn’t spoken. “We call ’em gravity bombs, sir. Point-source grav projectors, going faster than an A-wing on a header into a black hole. They’re ballistic—no drive signature, so you can’t detect them until you’re already inside their radius of effect. Dangerous enough by themselves—something like them was loaded onto the fake shuttle that took out the Justice—but the worst part is that they play merry hell with the gravity stations Shadowspawn scattered throughout the asteroids. There’s not a navicomputer in the fleet that can predict the orbit of practically anything in the whole system—that’s why we’ve got the Slash-Es sweeping the fields; we’re trying to pry open a jump window before the star goes supercritical.”
“I get it.” Lando discovered that he was more interested in the tactical problem this presented than in punishing Rogue Squadron. Especially since it looked like he’d need them. “How’s it going?”
“Could be better,” Wedge said. “We have the planetoids aimed to keep the process self-sustaining, but we’ve still got who knows how many TIEs out there hitting us whenever we make a move. Our best estimate has periodic windows starting to open within eighteen to twenty hours.”
“That’s not too bad.”
“It’d be better if the star wasn’t gonna start massively flaring in less than three—and we can’t tell exactly when, and we don’t know how massively, there’s no way to reliably predict—and those gravity bombs could still screw it all up.”
“Those gravity bombs,” Lando said slowly. “They have to be coming from somewhere. Otherwise they’d have all burned out or crashed into something by now, right?”
Tycho nodded. “General Solo did say he’d spotted a major installation planetside, sir. In the mouth of a volcano, I think; it was just about the last communication we had from him and Princess Leia before we lost contact.”
“Han and Leia are out of contact planetside?” Lando shook his head disbelievingly. “What are they doing there?”
“Um … they went to rescue General Skywalker. Sir.”
“And what is Luke—ahhh, never mind. I don’t want to know.”
“Master Luke is in danger?” C-3PO sounded horrified. “Oh, General Calrissian, you can’t just leave him—what about Artoo?”
“Nobody’s leaving anybody,” Lando said. “We’re getting scan-bounce from the atmosphere: heavy metals and an intense magfield. What do you have on it?”
Wedge shrugged. “It’s breathable enough, if you don’t mind coughing. But it’s so charged that nothing we’ve got will penetrate very well—you want to really see what’s there, the only way is to go down and have a look.”
“If our scans won’t get through it, it’ll block just about any kind of radiation, right?”
“Well, yeah, but—” Wedge’s frown deepened. “General Calrissian, I have to tell you I don’t much like the direction this conversation’s going. We don’t really know their defenses—General, we don’t even know how many troops they have!”
“Good.”
“Good?”
“Like an old friend of mine says sometimes …” Lando grinned fiercely. “Never tell me the odds.”
HAN SOLO HAD NEVER BEEN MUCH IN FAVOR OF STARING into the business end of a blaster’s emitter. Staring into the emitter of his own blaster was no improvement at all. Doing it while he was standing in the cargo hold of his own ship …
He decided not to think about it. Getting crazy wasn’t going to help the situation any.
“Okay,” he said, letting her KYD dangle from his finger through its trigger guard. He threw a Get behind me! glance over his shoulder at Leia, because a whole bunch of the Mindorese in the cargo hold had suddenly produced a whole bunch of hold-out blasters from cavities in their Lava Gear armor. Chewbacca was still on one knee between the two wounded men he’d been treating, but those massive Wookiee hands were becoming massive Wookiee fists, while his massive Wookiee snarl was peeling back around his