Star Wars_ Shatterpoint - Matthew Woodring Stover [138]
Nick appeared in the cockpit door behind Mace. "We're in!"
"Good. The gunners?"
"The tied-up guys?" The younger man shrugged. "They're out."
Mace nodded. "Hang on."
This was the only warning they got before the gunship leaped straight up, rising like a volcano bomb on screaming overdriven re-pulsorlifts.
Cannonfire from the other two gunships blasted the ground where it had been and tracked upward to pound the gunship sideways, dents popping up like boils in the side armor.
Mace slewed the gunship through a rising turn, but the other gun-ships had him bracketed, closing in from either side. Through the roar of impacts and shrieking near-misses, he heard Nick shouting, "The door!
Close the doori"
He twisted to look over his shoulder. He saw Depa on her feet in the middle of the troop bay, swaying, eyes squeezed shut as though the battle had brought on one of her headaches. Nick huddled in the doorway, arms around his head; Kar had Chalk tucked into a corner, and he crouched in front of her, shields raised to catch stray bolts that shot in through the open bay door and zinged in hot splintering ricochets around the compartment.
Mace said, "Depa."
Her eyes opened.
His lightsaber leaped from its pocket within his vest and shot toward her like a bullet.
Her empty hand met it in midair; her pain-glazed eyes lost focus. He felt her in the Force: a sinking surrender like an exhausted swimmer drowning in a rising tide.
Slipping into Vaapad.
Eyes closed once more, she gave one slight nod.
Mace keyed a sequence on the pilot console. The open door stayed open.
The troop door on the opposite side dropped open as well.
Particle beams streaked into the troop bay.
Both blades flashed.
The gunships outside bucked under the impact of their own cannonfire. On one, a turbojet engine blasted loose of its mount and tumbled away, bouncing down the mountainside trailing smoke and white-hot shreds of its cowling, and the gunship spun half out of control. The other gunship took its cannon blasts directly in the cockpit.
The transparisteel windscreen of a Sienar Turbostorm was thick and very durable; most kinds of shrapnel or fragments wouldn't scratch it. Even heavy-caliber bullets would leave only dents. A quad laser bolt could make a hole. One did.
The next five went through that hole.
The gunship spiralled into the jungle, its cockpit full of shredded flesh.
Depa opened her eyes.
They smoked with darkness.
SHIP TO SHIP
Muscle bunched along Mace's jaw as he forced himself to turn away and focus on his flying. A glance at the short-range sensors showed him gunships all over the place: the computer counted fifty-three in the zone of engagement, with more curving toward them over the horizon. He keyed the troop bay doors shut and cut in the turbojets. "Nick. Take nav."
"Sure. Er-yes, sir." Nick glanced at the empty sockets left behind by the ejected chairs. "Urn... where do I sit?"
"Monitor sensors. We should be seeing the HallecKs landers any second.
Kar! Chalk! The emergency repulsor-packs are next to the turret hatches.
You have thirty seconds."
Nick wedged his feet under the chair-socket struts and gripped the nav console's split-yoke controls, squinting against the stiffening wind that whistled through the empty gap in front of him. The gun-ship's aerodynamics shaped the wind blast past the cockpit instead of into it, but even the minimal back-eddy leakage was enough to stagger him. His eyes lit up as he took in the array of screens on the console-especially the twin screens with targeting reticules displayed at their centers.
"Hey, what's this do?" He twisted the split-yoke in opposite directions, and the images on the screens spun wildly to match.
"Don't touch those."
Nick hit the thumb switches on both controllers. The screens filled with parallel bursts of cannonfire as the quad lasers roared. "Yow! Fire