Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 06_ Balance Point - Kathy Tyers [118]
Anakin Solo would settle for nothing less.
His present course kept Orr-Om in view. The monstrous creature that coiled around it looked like a space slug, thick-hided for survival in vacuum, with a mouth easily eighty meters wide. A squadron of coralskippers escorted Orr-Om as it drifted lower in orbit. Anakin doubted he could do anything to help anyone still inside that habitat.
But if he could blast that creature off, he might keep it from feeding again, on Bburru, or Rrudobar, or any of the other orbital cities.
On the tactical frequency, he could faintly hear transmissions between some officer on board the Mon Cal Poesy, on Duro’s far side, and an E-wing patrol. They sounded just as frustrated by Admiral Wuht’s stand-down as he was.
They weren’t Jedi. They had to follow orders.
So did he, supposedly—but he was out here, and they weren’t. He had the Force and seven proton torpedoes. If he could neutralize the skips’ dovin basals, he might be able to hit the monster.
On his scanners, he spotted the wrecked hulk of that refugee hauler, dipping down into atmosphere. That gave him an idea.
Gingerly, he pushed his throttle forward. “Fiver, give me a readout on that freighter’s structural integrity.”
Studying the visual display that appeared, he saw that the line of blast scars had elongated, leaving a slash along one side. Barely big enough to fly inside.
“Any life-forms on board?”
Fiver hesitated less than a second.
NEGATIVE.
Anakin’s hands tightened. That was terrible news, but it gave him an enormous bulk to work with, without fear of harming any living bystander.
“How ’bout its main reactor? Did it melt down yet?”
NEGATIVE. REACTOR LIVE.
Even better! Flying by scanner and Solo luck and instinct, he closed down his S-foils and maneuvered through the breach into a cavernous central hold. Something had detonated inside, melting through decks and bulkheads.
“Fiver, set up a slingshot pass. I’m going to put our nose up against an inner bulkhead and try to steer this thing.”
His droid pasted a string of question marks on the visual screen.
“I want to pull g’s around Duro and launch toward Orr-Om.”
More question marks.
“Just do it,” Anakin ordered. Even an R7 could be incredibly dense sometimes.
It took longer than he anticipated, first to calculate his course, then to pull down toward the roiling gas clouds and add every bit of acceleration Fiver could coax out of the X-wing’s engines. He dialed his inertial compensator down to 95 percent, getting the best possible feel for his awkward hauler-shell.
His heads-up chrono finally started ticking off seconds. By this time, the freighter had picked up substantial momentum.
“All right,” he said. “On my mark, decelerate.”
The seconds melted down to zero.
“Now,” he shouted.
He slipped down into the Force, letting it guide his hands on the control yoke, his feet on the etheric rudder. The X-wing’s blunt aft end bumped only once as it slipped out the horrible tear in the freighter’s side.
Obviously, the freighter didn’t have enough momentum to hit Orr-Om in high geosync. Anakin had allowed for that. He armed one of his precious torpedoes, got a lock on the freighter’s still-live reactor, and squeezed his right hand.
The torpedo arced away. Anakin waited for exactly the right moment, then maxed his shields. Facing directly into the inferno, his canopy went black for an instant. The Force guided his hand on the yoke, jinking back and forth, avoiding debris even while he accelerated, chasing a wave of destruction toward the doomed habitat’s coralskipper escorts.
He charged them, still accelerating. Cued by the Force, he dumped a torpedo as his targeting reticle bracketed one skip—then a second. White-hot debris had overloaded their dovin basal shields. Each of them exploded into thousands of coral shards.
He caught a third skip with blasts from his lasers. A fourth with torpedoes. Time blurred. Vision