Star Wars_ Shatterpoint - Matthew Woodring Stover [137]
Mace caught the barest flashing glimpse of the identically outraged looks on their faces as the repulsorlift pods on their ejection chairs shot them spinning out over the jungle. One of them howled something obscene.
The other just howled.
Mace kicked off from the rim of the roof and dropped into the empty cockpit. A gesture toward the nav console deactivated the belly-mounted Sunfire flame projector. A similar gesture toward the pilot's console engaged the soft-touchdown failsafe on the autopilot, then he opened the cockpit door and walked calmly into the troop bay.
The bay was littered with leaves and mud and food wrappers, as well as bits and pieces of miscellaneous equipment forgotten or discarded by departed militia regulars. The access hatches to the port and starboard ball turrets were directly across from each other in front of the turbine mounts, two thirds of the way aft.
Mace passed between them, then turned and folded his arms.
He could hear, faintly through the sealed hatches, the honking of the ejection-alert klaxon, and he didn't need to touch the Force to mentally see the gunners in either turret frantically unbuckling the safety straps that secured them to the turrets' fighting chairs. The manual dogs on the hatches clacked sharply, but the desperate gunners found both hatches unaccountably jammed until they started putting their whole weight behind slamming their shoulders into them.
Which is when Mace's Force-hold went from keeping them shut to yanking them open, so that the two gunners practically flew into the troop bay, collided helmet-to-helmet with a gunshot crack! and collapsed. One of them, tougher than his counterpart, held on to consciousness, struggling dazedly to find his feet until Mace's foot found him.
To be precise: Until the toe of Mace's boot found, crisply, the point of the gunner's chin.
The unconscious man fell on top of the other gunner. Mace took two short lengths of scrap wire from the litter on the floor and bound their hands thumb-to-thumb, then unhurriedly stepped over them and walked back to the cockpit just as the gunship settled on the broad corpse-littered killing zone about ten meters in front of the ankkox.
Outside, the other two gunships from the flight were heeling around, turrets sparking as their laser cannons tracked toward him. Depa and Kar crouched in front of the head of the ankkox, battering away a flood of blaster fire; Chalk and Nick lay flat in the shadow of one of the ankkox's massive side-curved legs, returning fire with chattering assault rifles.
Mace hit the release for the troop bay doors, and as they fell open, he poked his head out the hole left by the missing windscreen. When the others saw him, their mouths fell about as far open as the doors.
"What are you waiting for?" Mace's deadpan was flawless. "Flowers and a box of candy?"
Depa sprang into the open, blade flashing faster than the eye could follow, making herself a standing target to draw fire that she splashed back at their attackers while the others scrambled to their feet. Nick sprinted past her, assault rifle chattering from the hip. Kar dived under the ankkox and rolled up and ran with Chalk cradled like a child in his massive arms. Fire from the surrounding trees tracked away from Depa, clawing for the bounding lor pelek.
Mace frowned. "That's about enough of that" he muttered as he reached into the Force to flip a bank of switches and key an initiation sequence that ganged the targeting servomotors for the ball turrets through the nav console, and gave him fire control.
Twin Taim & Bak quad laser cannons roared to life, hammering thunder into the jungle. Trees exploded like bombs, filling the air with a cloud of flying