Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 20_ The Final Prophecy - J. Gregory Keyes [101]
She gave his hand a squeeze. “I know. I’ll put Meewalh in the other.”
She stood to go, but before she could leave the cockpit, he pulled her down for a kiss. “Be careful up there, huh?” he said.
“I always am.”
He watched her go, wishing suddenly that they could just leave, go find Pellaeon, go watch a sunset …
But Jaina was here, and despite the fact that the odds were—
“Oh, great,” he murmured. “I’m turning into Threepio.”
“What was that, sir?” C-3PO asked.
“I said, I’m glad you’re up here, Threepio.”
“Why—thank you, sir. I’m really quite touched.”
“Right,” Han said. He opened the channel again.
“Okay, TIEs, we’re going in—just hang back until they start throwing skips at us.”
The interdictor was two spicular cones with their bases touching, and it was nearly the size of a Star Destroyer. Usually they were covered with skips, but this time the skips were elsewhere—either in battle or between the interdictor and the battle, guarding against a push in its direction.
Han dived the Falcon toward the thickest part of the vessel, knowing he would get only one good run before they were aware of his presence and set about a thousand skips on him. The TIEs dropped into formation on his port and starboard.
“Watch the gravity well, fellows,” he warned them. “We want to mess up their paint job, but not by splatting all over ’em.”
“I hear you,” Devis replied. “Correcting.”
Han tilted the ship to put the seam where the two cones met in the Money Lane and started in with the quad lasers. An instant later, the turret guns joined him. Voids appeared in spidery clusters, sucking the blasts into nothingness. Han launched a concussion missile to either side of the fire lane, and had the satisfaction of seeing both plow into the craggy yorik coral surface, rupturing it and sending shock waves crawling out toward the thin ends of the ship.
Then he was curving around the interdictor, his course bent by gravity. But instead of using the force to sling him away, he settled into a tight orbit, firing constantly, trying to dig a trench into the thing deep enough to do real damage.
The interdictor’s plasma cannons began to fire, but one reason Han had picked the centerline as his target was that the ship angled away from it in every direction, making it tough to fire at him at all and impossible to put him in a cross fire. Nevertheless, a near miss roared by the cockpit, an eight-meter-wide explosion of superheated matter that grazed his shields and sent an ion jolt through the ship’s protective circuitry.
Meanwhile, less than one in ten of his laser shots were getting through, and he had only a few concussion missiles left. His trench wasn’t getting deep very fast.
“Skips coming in,” Devis reported. “Six in the first wave.”
“Can you keep them off us for another pass or so?” Han asked.
“Copy that, Captain Solo.”
Han fired another pair of concussion missiles—one got through, the other exploded when it was about to be sucked in by a void. That happened near enough to the Falcon that the shock wave bounced him from his orbit and sent him away from the centerline. Suddenly he was no longer outside the interdictor’s line of direct fire, but squarely in it. He stood the Falcon on her thin side relative to the interdictor to minimize his target surface, weaving through withering fire, dropping lower to keep the blasts from converging on him. When he was practically skating on the ship’s surface, he turned abruptly up and out.
“Wow,” he heard Devis say. Han’s jaw nearly dropped—the two TIEs had stayed with him the whole way. Behind them were only three skips of the original six. Han didn’t have to wonder what had happened to the other three—not with pilots like that.
Even as he watched, the TIEs broke and came around, putting the skips between them and the big guns