Star Wars_ The Adventures of Lando Calrissia - L. Neil Smith [192]
The hangar doors above him ponderously ground aside.
“Five and Eighteen out!” a voice said in his helmet. Two fighters filled the hangar with exhaust mist as they lifted and roared out into space. The vapor cleared quickly. “Fourteen and Nine out!” “Six and Seventeen!”
In pairs his men took to the void, as eager for a fight as he was. His onboard computer held a three-dimensional map of the ThonBoka with probable locations for the Millennium Falcon marked therein. It was known that there were three small blue-white stars, and some artificial structure, much larger than the freighter, at their center. That would be the prime area for the search.
The “destroy” part would follow immediately.
“Two and Twenty-one!” another voice shouted, then Shanga himself felt a severe jolt and the blood stress of acceleration as the hangar catapult-pressor latched onto his command ship and flung it into space among his men. Others continued to pour from the Wennis in the same manner, in an order tactically determined by the motley mixture of ship types and models available to them. “Nineteen and Four!”
They assumed a complicated formation, hovering until all of the squadron was free of the hangar bay. In the center of the group lay Pinnace Number Five, the very auxiliary Bern Nuladeg had been apprehended trying to steal. Her after section glowed and pulsed with pent-up energy. They were still a relatively long way from the nebula, at least where the small fighters’ capabilities were concerned. Even once they got there, it was six light-years to the center—approximately twenty-five times their own maximum flying range.
The pinnace, capable of faster-than-light travel, had been fitted with a tractor field. Unmanned, controlled remotely by Klyn Shanga, it would tow them into the heat of battle, returning parsimoniously on its own to the Wennis. He and his best computer doctor had checked the lend-lease auxiliary carefully from bow to stern for ugly practical jokes and delayed-action booby traps. He just couldn’t bring himself to trust Rokur Gepta’s generosity.
That worthy had been unavailable at debarkation time, apparently gone off to meditate or something. Just as well: his orders to release the Renatasian squadron had been there in his place. To the Edge with the sorcerer, Shanga thought. With any luck at all, they’d never see each other again.
He tapped the keyboard, checking the positions of his tiny fleet clustered about the pinnace. “This is Zero Leader,” he announced. “Eleven, tighten up a little on Twelve—that’s it. Twenty-two, you’re idling a little ragged, aren’t you? What’s your toroid temperature?”
The fusion-powered fighters would conserve reaction mass, relying on the cruiser’s auxiliary to do the work, but they must keep their systems up for instant combat readiness. Belt and suspenders, Shanga thought, belt and suspenders. The old saw was wrong about old, bold pilots, but this was the only way it could be done.
“Nominal,” Twenty-two replied. He was a young kid from a continent half a world away from Mathilde, Shanga’s nation-state. There’d been a time when he’d been supposed to hate that accent. “I think the trouble’s in the telemetry, sir.”
“Don’t call me sir, Twenty-two, and watch that temperature. I want the Butcher just as badly as you do, but charging in there with a malfunctioning ship isn’t going to help any of us accomplish that. I don’t trust those maintenance people to clean their own fingernails. You’d better be telling me the truth, son.”
“Well, sir—Klyn—maybe I’m a little in the red, but I think this hop will burn out the hot spots.”
“All right,” Shanga replied grudgingly. “Twenty-three, what the Core’s wrong with your life-support? I’ve got red lights all over the readout!”
“Just lit my cigar, boss. The atmo-analyzer