Star Wars_ The Dark Lord Trilogy - James Luceno [129]
For merely human pilots, this would be suicide. By the time you can see your partner’s starfighter streaking toward you at a respectable fraction of lightspeed, it’s already too late for your merely human reflexes to react.
But these particular pilots were far from merely human.
The Force nudged hands on control yokes and the Jedi starfighters twisted and flashed past each other belly-to-belly, close enough to scorch each other’s paint. Tri-fighters were the Trade Federation’s latest space-superiority droid. But even the electronic reflexes of the tri-fighters’ droid brains were too slow for this: one of his pursuers met one of Anakin’s head-on. Both vanished in a blossom of flame.
The shock wave of debris and expanding gas rocked Obi-Wan; he fought the control yoke, barely keeping his starfighter out of a tumble that would have smeared him across the cruiser’s ventral hull. Before he could straighten out, his threat display chimed again.
“Oh, marvelous,” he muttered under his breath. Anakin’s surviving pursuer had switched targets. “Why is it always me?”
“Perfect.” Through the cockpit speakers, Anakin’s voice carried grim satisfaction. “Both of them are on your tail.”
“Perfect is not the word I’d use.” Obi-Wan twisted his yoke, juking madly as space around him flared scarlet. “We have to split them up!”
“Break left.” Anakin sounded calm as a stone. “The turbolaser tower off your port bow: thread its guns. I’ll take things from there.”
“Easy for you to say.” Obi-Wan whipped sideways along the cruiser’s superstructure. Fire from the pursuing tri-fighters blasted burning chunks from the cruiser’s armor. “Why am I always the bait?”
“I’m right behind you. Artoo, lock on.”
Obi-Wan spun his starfighter between the recoiling turbo-cannons close enough that energy-scatter made his cockpit clang like a gong, but still cannonfire flashed past him from the tri-fighters behind. “Anakin, they’re all over me!”
“Dead ahead. Move right to clear my shot. Now!”
Obi-Wan flared his port jets and the starfighter kicked to the right. One of the tri-fighters behind him decided it couldn’t follow and went for a ventral slip that took it directly into the blasts from Anakin’s cannons.
It vanished in a boil of superheated gas.
“Good shooting, Artoo.” Anakin’s dry chuckle in the cockpit’s speakers vanished behind the clang of lasers blasting ablative shielding off Obi-Wan’s left wing.
“I’m running out of tricks here—”
Clearing the vast Republic cruiser put him on course for the curving hull of one of the Trade Federation’s battleships; space between the two capital ships blazed with turbolaser exchanges. Some of those flashing energy blasts were as big around as his entire ship; the merest graze would blow him to atoms.
Obi-Wan dived right in.
He had the Force to guide him through, and the tri-fighter had only its electronic reflexes—but those electronic reflexes operated at roughly the speed of light. It stayed on his tail as if he were dragging it by a tow cable.
When Obi-Wan went left and Anakin right, the tri-fighter would swing halfway through the difference. The same with up and down. It was averaging his movements with Anakin’s; somehow its droid brain had realized that as long as it stayed between the two Jedi, Anakin couldn’t fire on it without hitting his partner. The tri-fighter was under no similiar restraint: Obi-Wan flew through a storm of scarlet needles.
“No wonder we’re losing the war,” he muttered. “They’re getting smarter.”
“What was that, Master? I didn’t copy.”
Obi-Wan kicked his starfighter into a tight spiral toward the Federation cruiser. “I’m taking the deck!”
“Good idea. I need some room to maneuver.”
Cannonfire tracked closer. Obi-Wan’s cockpit speakers buzzed. “Cut right, Obi-Wan! Hard right! Don’t let him get a handle on you! Artoo, lock on!”
Obi-Wan’s starfighter streaked along the curve of the Separatist cruiser’s dorsal