Star Wars_ The Adventures of Lando Calrissia - L. Neil Smith [164]
It reappeared to one side, a few thousand meters away, just as Yellow Nine Seven passed beneath its transparent wing, which twitched involuntarily as Lehesu struggled to regain his balance. Suddenly Yellow Nine Seven cork-screwed away, a smoking, flaming ball of crumpled metal, its pilot screaming something into his helmet mike about his deflector shields having failed to function properly.
The voice bit off suddenly.
Eleven pilots whipped their ships around savagely. Eleven thumbs mashed down upon their firing studs. Twenty-two eyes widened as eight destructive beams—three had not been maintenanced correctly—converged on empty space. One interceptor, Yellow Nine Four, was caught in the crossfire. He’d failed to make a turn, due to faulty attitude-control, and vanished in a flash of energy and atomized debris.
Lehesu stepped off half a light-year, astounded at the hostile reaction he’d encountered, not at all like his first contact with the Millennium Falcon. And his people thought he was crazy. With the Oswaft equivalent of a shrug, he turned his face toward yet another star whose spectrum showed traces of artificial, highly ordered radiation, and prepared himself for a longer jump this time.
Unaware that a densely cloaked scout vessel was right behind him.
The next system had been much the same, except …
They’d been forewarned, somehow, of this bizarre unidentified craft that had managed to destroy three (Yellow Nine Nine had missed the mouth of its Launch/Reentry tunnel and splashed itself all over a mountainside of frozen nitrogen; little squiggles of liquid helium danced with glee at the sight) first-rate fighter-interceptors. The new group also ignored his frantic, placative signaling and suffered forty-three casualties, some of them on the ground, due to an unfortunate change of shift going on between two double-strength squadrons. Lehesu had given up and gone home.
Eventually the fleet had made its appearance. The ordeal was a little more bearable for Lehesu than for the others. He was the only Oswaft in a hundred generations who had come close to dying by starvation once before. As some human philosopher in a different time and place would observe, that which fails to kill us strengthens us. Lehesu knew his limits; he could tell that the pogrom was going to take rather a longer time than either side realized. To his less adventurous comrades, it was already agony, already an unprecedented emergency. They felt, for the first time in their long, long lives, a relatively mild discomfort, and were afraid. Some actually spoke of attempts to negotiate, to establish upon what terms the enemy would let them live, not knowing that their utter destruction was the only success the fleet’s mission profile recognized.
Lehesu wished his people would get angry, instead.
Thus, he waited.
It was some hours after the last of the energetic nutrient-destroying displays that something unusual happened. Lehesu felt a tight, powerful beam of communications energy coming from the blockaded nebula entrance. While he knew the language, he didn’t know the culture; the gulf between planet-bound species and free-fall dwellers was so enormous that any understanding was a gigantic tribute to the Oswaft’s intellectual capabilities. Whatever they were saying out there, it was frantic, and not at all friendly.
It happened again! Judging from the manner in which this second burst was all bunched up into the higher frequencies, something was headed away from the fleet and toward the ThonBoka, fast. Lehesu maneuvered that way, both by straightforward distance-covering flight to keep an “eye” on the incoming signals, and by nonlinear distance-avoiding hops. Whatever was coming, it ought to have some kind of reception committee.
Suddenly an impossibly solid bar of unbearably bright light lashed