Star Wars_ Tales From the Mos Eisley Cantina - Kevin J. Anderson [126]
Where had they come from? Tatooine was so far off the beaten track, the Empire hardly ever sent a tax collector, much less a pair of warships. Somebody must have caused some major trouble while he was gone.
And now their trouble was his too, because the Infinity was still running under hot transponder codes. If the Imperials bothered to scan for its engines’ unique emission signature—and they no doubt would—then they would know it was a smuggler’s ship, wanted throughout the galaxy for tariff violation, tax evasion, gun-running, and dozens of other crimes. The fact that BoShek was merely piloting it to Tatooine for someone else wouldn’t save him in a trial. If he ever got a trial.
For that matter, neither the monastery nor the Infinity’s owners would be happy with him if he let the Empire confiscate the ship. His job was to bring it in undetected so the monastery’s technicians could alter its codes and give it a clean record, not to lose it to the first patrol that happened along.
Without hesitation, he aimed straight down and accelerated hard. In space he wouldn’t stand a chance against the destroyers’ short-range TIE fighters, but down in the atmosphere, with the planet to help confuse their sensors, he might be able to lose them.
Tatooine grew from a sphere to a close, mottled wall. The Infinity began rocking gently as it reached the top of the atmosphere, then a bright flash came from the starboard side and the ship suddenly lurched to port. The destroyers had opened fire.
BoShek kept the Infinity aimed straight down, diving deep before he leveled out, knowing that the more air he put between him and the destroyers, the more shielding he would have from their turbolasers. His passage left a glowing, ionized wake behind him, but when he slowed to just a few times the speed of sound he left no trace.
He wasn’t free yet, though. Four TIE fighters from the warships arced into the atmosphere after him, and their closer range made up for the air’s energy absorption. The Infinity once again shuddered under Imperial fire.
Fortunately, they weren’t trying to kill him yet. Confident that he couldn’t get away, they were just trying to disable the ship and force him down. They were probably even trying to contact him by radio, but BoShek left the receiver switched off. Any transmission he could make would only give them his voiceprint; as it was, if he could lose them he might remain anonymous.
He shoved the throttles forward again, at the same time corkscrewing down and underneath the fighters to skim the sand. He was over the vast Dune Sea, far to the west of civilization; the wavelike dunefield erupted into clouds of roiling sand as his shock wave passed over it.
Lining up directly behind him for another salvo, the flat-winged fighters plowed straight through the clouds, the airborne particles etching away their instruments and control surfaces and pitting their windows. They immediately rose up above the billowing sand, but BoShek chose that moment to pull back on the throttles, letting them overshoot him. He banked left, waited until they had committed to a left turn, then banked hard right and shoved the throttles down again, racing for the Jundland Wastes to the east.
The TIE fighters were catching up again by the time the jagged canyonland slid toward him over the horizon. BoShek dodged a few last energy bolts, then dived into the first canyon he reached and wove his way up it at top speed. The Infinity handled like a dream, hugging the ground as if on rails, but the TIE fighters were just as maneuverable. Only the damage they’d taken in the sand cloud kept them from catching him.
Then one of them made a mistake. Closing in for a crippling shot, it crossed into the Infinity’s shock wave, and the turbulence against its wide