Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order_ Dark Tide 01_ Onslaught - Michael A. Stackpole [55]
The proton torpedo rode an azure flame to the target, and the coralskipper made no attempt to evade it. Instead, nearly ten meters away from the target, the torpedo shrank from a dot of light to something smaller, like a distant star, and the supernova of light Gavin had expected to see never showed up.
A quick glance at his secondary monitor did show a gravitic anomaly, which confirmed that the coralskipper had somehow created a small black hole, which it used to swallow the missile. The energy from the explosion couldn’t escape the void; hence the coralskipper remained undamaged. Being able to generate black holes wasn’t the same as having shields, but in some cases could be even more effective.
“Lead, the black-hole idea seems to be right. Do we tip our hand?”
“Yes, Deuce. Rogues, new combat programming now.” Gavin hit a switch on his combat console. “Catch, start allocating the power.”
The droid dutifully tootled as Gavin rolled out to the right, then came around for another run at the coralskippers. He flicked his weapons over to laser fire and quadded them up, so all four would fire at once. As he came in at one of the rocky pods, he hit the trigger once and pulsed a red-gold burst of energy at the fighter, but another black hole blossomed and swallowed the laserlight.
Smiling, Gavin tightened down on the auxiliary trigger button beneath his middle finger on the stick. The X-wing’s lasers began cycling very fast—faster than they would have in single-fire mode. Each bolt burned with a scarlet intensity, yet was shorter and decidedly less powerful that those in the first burst he’d fired. As long as he held the auxiliary trigger down in quad mode, the lasers would produce a cloud of shots that wouldn’t do much damage, but were next to impossible to distinguish from the heavier bolts.
His target positioned a void to pick off the scattered shots from his fighter, then another to absorb the damage Nevil was pumping out. The coralskipper began some evasive maneuvers, rolling to port and climbing back against the angle of their attack, but it didn’t fly as gracefully as the coralskippers had in simulation. Gavin let his own fighter flash past, then pulled back on the stick and came over in a loop, before he rolled out to port and came back around on that same ship.
He came in on its tail and triggered off a long burst of flickers. The coralskipper positioned a black hole above its tail, but Gavin noticed that, this time, the hole was closer to the coralskipper and had a smaller focal point. Some of the splinter shots that were headed long, past the craft’s nose, were bent down by the force of the black hole, but not trapped by it. They struck the coralskipper’s nose, burning tiny pits in it.
The coralskipper shifted to port and started to roll as more flickers scored it. Gavin rolled to port, as well, and chopped back his throttle, matching his speed to that of the coralskipper. He dropped his crosshairs on its tail, then hit his main trigger and delivered a full-powered quad volley at point-blank range.
The quartet of bolts converged on the coralskipper, and only one of them got sucked into the diminishing black hole. The other three burned into the cockpit assembly. They reduced the crystalline canopy to molten stone that melted through the pilot. Their energy unabated, the bolts superheated the coralskipper’s mineral flesh, producing a geyser of rock vapor that jetted back out of the cockpit and propelled the dead fighter deeper into space.
Gavin rolled to starboard and away from the dying ship, then felt a jolt run through his fighter. Another gravitic anomaly had hit him and tugged at his shields. That’s how they strip shields off ships. He punched a button on the