Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order_ Dark Tide 02_ Ruin - Michael A. Stackpole [33]
Jaina shivered. Her uncle had tried on one of the cognition hoods and experienced the contact with the alien fighter. She’d not been offered the opportunity to do the same, nor would she have taken it. Her experience as a Jedi built in her a dislike for anything trying to pick up stray thoughts, and having her head enclosed in a gelatinous membrane while that was going on was just not something she wanted to think about.
She looked at her monitors as the Lost Hope deployed from the Bothan Assault Cruiser’s belly bay. “Nine, I have two skips breaking off to go after Hope.”
“I copy, Sticks. You and Twelve are on them.”
Anni hit her comm unit’s talk switch twice, sending a double click through the channel in acknowledgment of the order. Jaina broke to port and pulled back on her stick, coming around in a tight turn. She inverted, then dived and cut to starboard to make her first run at the skips.
“I have lead, Twelve.” Jaina flicked a thumb over her weapon-selection switch and linked her lasers for quad fire. She nudged the stick around and dropped the aiming reticle over the lead skip’s ovoid outline. She hit the fire-control button beneath her middle finger, starting the lasers through a fast cycle that spat out dozens of little red energy darts.
The scarlet bolts flew on target until ten meters from the skip, then they bent inward. The dovin basals that manipulated gravity fields to provide the skip with propulsion likewise shielded it by creating gravitic anomalies. These little voids sucked the light in like a black hole.
Jaina kept her fire steady, but let the targeting point shift up and back. To properly shield the skip, the dovin basil had to move the void, taxing its energy much as absorbing the bolts did. Finally a few stray bolts got past, scoring the black rock hull. Jaina then hit the primary trigger and sent a quartet of full-powered laser bolts into the skip.
A void picked one off, but the other three hit the skip’s aft hard. Yorik coral bubbled and evaporated in some spots, became fluidly molten in others. In the frigid vacuum of space, the mineral shell hardened almost immediately into an icicle trailing behind the Yuuzhan Vong fighter. The hot stone burned dovin basals and scorched neural tissue that allowed for control of the ship, sending the lead skip into a tight spiral that curled it back down toward Garqi.
The second skip proved to be more evasive. It juked and dove, cutting to port and starboard at random. Shots missed entirely instead of being absorbed by a dovin basal. The pilot had clearly learned that agility in space combat was worth as much or more than shielding. He used his skills as a pilot to avoid the X-wings and to draw ever closer to his target.
“Cover me, Sticks.”
“Got it, Twelve.”
Anni Capstan’s X-wing cruised forward and broke hard to port, bringing it in on a slashing attack at the skip’s starboard aft quarter. She sprayed laser darts all over the ship, using her etheric rudder to keep the fire on target, and the Yuuzhan Vong pilot finally had to deploy a void to keep her shots off him. She cut loose with a full quad shot, but the void sucked all four of those bolts in, then the skip bounced up above Anni’s line of flight.
Jaina saw the nose of Anni’s fighter come up and wondered for a second why she hadn’t fired another burst. It occurred to her that Anni’s lasers might be recharging, since she had sprayed a lot of energy around to little effect. The skip boosted forward, pulling away from the X-wing, and Jaina thought Anni would lose him since he could now use the