Star Wars_ Tales From the Mos Eisley Cantina - Kevin J. Anderson [31]
“Not a chance,” Shada said through gritted teeth, getting halfway to her feet and heading at a crouch toward the bushes where her speeder bike was hidden. “We’re heading in. Get moving.” The approaching stormtroopers, finally presented with a target, opened fire—
Just as the grenade hit the ground ten meters in front of them, exploding into a billowing cloud of green smoke.
“We’re going in?” Karoly echoed in disbelief. “Shada—”
“I’m clear.” Shada cut her off, slinging the rifle over her shoulder and kicking the speeder bike to life. Over the roar of the engine she could hear the thuds of her erstwhile attackers falling out of the sky as the specially formulated smoke burned into the speeder bikes’ power connectors. “Call Cai and Sileen—tell them to bring the ships in for backup.”
“But where are we going?”
Shada swung the speeder bike around. Manda and Pav were gone, and she knew that eventually the pain of that loss would catch up with her. But for right now, she had only enough room for a single emotion.
Rage.
“We’re going to teach the Imperials a lesson,” she told Karoly. Kicking the throttle to full power, she jumped the fence, curved around the edge of the green cloud, and headed in.
It was a little over ten kilometers from the outer fence to the main base area, and for the first eight of them Shada flew low over the rolling hills and wondered where in blazes the vaunted Imperial defenses were. Either they hadn’t thrown this ambush together until Kellering’s ground car pulled up at the gate, or else they’d assumed their quarry would run for it and had concentrated their forces out beyond the fence.
Or else they were concentrating on Karoly. Blinking against the wind pounding against her face, trying not to think about what she might have gotten her teammate into, Shada kept going.
She was two kilometers out when the Imperials seemed to finally wake up to the fact they had an intruder in their midst … and those two kilometers more than made up for the preceding eight. Three Mekuun hoverscouts rose from nowhere to meet her, bolstered by two more squads of speeder-bike stormtroopers. Off to the side, sections of two hills opened up, revealing a pair of what looked like Comar antiatmospheric guns. The air around her was suddenly thick with blaster and laser bolts, some missing, the rest deflected by shields that hadn’t really been designed with this kind of all-out attack in mind. Clenching her teeth hard enough to hurt, Shada kept going, maneuvering and returning fire on pure reflex. Off to her left, she could see another whirlwind of Imperial activity near where Karoly should be coming in—
And then, suddenly, the hoverscouts and speeder bikes seemed to scramble out of her path. The Comar guns shifted their aim away from her—
And with a screaming roar the Skyclaw shot past overhead, spitting a withering fire of laser blasts at the Imperials.
“Kan si manis per tam, Sha,” Sileen’s voice blared from the Skyclaw’s belly loudspeaker. “Mi nazh ko.”
“Sha kae,” Shada shouted back, shifting fifteen degrees to her left as per Sileen’s instructions and permitting herself a flash of cold satisfaction. The Imperials might be able to jam comlinks and slice sophisticated encrypts, but she would bet starships to groundworms they wouldn’t have the faintest idea what to do with Mistryl battle language. To her left, she could see Cai and the Mirage now, running cover for Karoly, and she made a quick estimate of their intersect point. Just over the next row of hills, she decided. Dropping a little lower to the ground, she braced herself for whatever Sileen had sent her toward.
She topped the hills; and there, nestled in a wide valley, was a complex of perhaps twenty buildings, ranging in size from flat office blocks to a single windowless structure the size of a capital ship maintenance hangar. The Hammertong base, without a doubt.
And lying in the middle of it all, dominating the scene by