Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor - Matthew Woodring Stover [96]
Shoulder-to-shoulder, they skidded to a stop and wheeled, triggering a storm of stun blasts back along the cavernway. The front ranks of the rock creatures sagged, and melted …
And the ones behind them stopped.
“Hey … hey, how about that?” Han sagged forward, hands to his bent knees, doubled over and panting. “Maybe they’ve … had enough. You think?”
“I … doubt it.”
“Maybe they’re as tired of chasing us … as we are of running …”
Chewbacca howled something incomprehensible. R2 twittered. Neither of them sounded happy. Leia turned, and the rest of her breath left her in a smothered version of one of Han’s Corellian curses. “Or maybe,” she said, “they stopped because we ran exactly where they wanted us to go.”
The cavern was full of bodies.
Dead bodies.
Dozens, maybe hundreds of bodies, half-sunk into the stone—as though it had been liquid and hardened around them. Up to their waists or chests in the floor, pushed into the walls so that only a face or a back of the head was clear. Some of the bodies—human ones—wore what looked like stormtrooper armor, except that it was black as the stone around them. Some—fresher ones, some human, some Mon Calamari, who looked like they might only be sleeping—wore New Republic flight suits.
“For the record?” Han sounded a little shaky. “This is why I didn’t want you to come along.”
AN ENDLESS SWARM OF TIE FIGHTERS SWIRLED AROUND the Remember Alderaan and the other capital ships of the Republic that were huddled together in Mindor’s radiation-shadow. Republic fire control tracked the fighters desperately to lock in missiles, and gunners poured turbolaser bolts through the vacuum, but the nimble starfighters were almost impossible to hit, and the only TIEs that got close enough to trigger the Remember Alderaan’s antifighter cluster munitions were the ones streaking in for full-speed physical intercepts.
Suicide crashes.
Even a lightly built TIE fighter generated a titanic amount of kinetic energy when traveling at the high end of its sublight velocity; the particle shields of the capital ships couldn’t dissipate it fast enough. A couple of suiciders were enough to trigger a momentary partial shield failure, and if another TIE timed it just right to slip into the gap, the impact could rip through whole decks.
The Remember Alderaan rocked and shuddered under its third such impact; clouds of gas and crystallized water vapor billowed out from three enormous rents in its hull. Like all battle cruisers, the Alderaan was designed to suck up an astonishing amount of damage and go on fighting, but when Lando got the preliminary damage and casualty report on this latest blast, even his legendary unquenchable optimism was pretty well quenched. Over a thousand crew members wounded or missing; a third of his turbolasers out of commission; and one main engine was overheating and would either shut down or melt down sometime in the next three or four minutes.
Lando leaned on the comm board on the Alderaan’s bridge. “Where the hell is our fighter escort?” he snarled. “Somebody has to stop these guys!”
But he knew the answer: the task force’s fighters were overcommitted in support of the ground action against the STOEs—the surface-to-orbit emplacements. He didn’t even have enough to adequately cover his marines, let alone defend his fleet.
“General Calrissian! General, can someone give me a hand?” C-3PO, knocked off his feet by the impact, had somehow gotten himself wedged under the security console. “Oh, what a terrible dent I’m going to have!”
Lando waved a hand and ordered, “Somebody pick up that droid!” because otherwise the blasted thing would just lie there and complain until somebody snapped and blew his gold-plated head off. He turned to his executive officer, a Glassferran,