Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order_ Rebel Dreams_ Enemy Lines I - Aaron Allston [5]
Now things were different. The surviving pilots had adjusted their tactics and passed their information along to their fellows. The rules of the game were to overload the dovin basals, striking them from several directions at once to ensure that some damage got through to hit the coralskippers’ surfaces. Starfighter pilots had to avoid taking any hits at all from skip weaponry; any hit could eat through shields and prove fatal.
And there were new tactics all the time, in every battle. Mara surged ahead of Luke and Corran, flying in a pattern that was oddly predictable, and drew fire from both coralskippers. She became suddenly erratic in her flight, as random as only Force skills could make a pilot, and flashed ahead until she was just behind the skips. She sideslipped to port, and as both streams of plasma cannon fire followed her, the fire from the starboard skip crossed the body of the port-side skip; two balls of fire thudded into the skip’s belly before the starboard pilot compensated.
The port skip’s void whipped around to shield the skip’s belly. In that instant, Mara drop-fired a quad-linked burst of laserfire.
The skip detonated, hiding Mara’s X-wing from sight for a moment, and Luke fired a laser stutter-burst at the starboard skip’s underside. He hoped that the pilot’s confusion at having hurt his own wingmate, along with the dovin basal’s effort to shield this skip from the damage from Mara’s attack, would leave it momentarily vulnerable.
He was right. His lasers hit the skip’s underside and chewed through. That skip vectored away, trailing fluids that instantly froze at this near-vacuum altitude.
He checked his sensors. Two skips down. Mara was coming around to rejoin him and Corran. Diagnostics said his X-wing was undamaged.
Farther out, two of his Twin Suns snubfighters were gone. The pilot of one of them was extravehicular; Luke hoped that the flight suit would keep the pilot alive until a rescue shuttle could arrive. “Good tactics, Mara,” he said.
“You always know the sweet thing to say.”
Luke grinned and came around toward a new set of opponents.
Starfighter squadrons held the Yuuzhan Vong response to three points of conflict in orbit. The Twin Suns group took advantage of the opportunity and roared down through the atmosphere in an undefended zone, then banked toward the coralskippers’ launch point, which had been detected on gravitic sensors. It was, not coincidentally, the same map coordinate as Borleias’s New Republic military base. Luke didn’t relish seeing what had become of the base during the Yuuzhan Vong occupation.
As they dropped low over the jungle canopy, Luke could make out the target zone ahead. It didn’t have the same profile as the holocube he’d studied. The main building seemed to be lower, broader.
Small chips of yorik coral were rising above it, angling toward them. His sensors said there were six of them. “Twin Suns, up front,” Luke said. “Engage all those skips. Record Time, it’s your call whether you want to hang back with us or move on to the target without us.”
“Twin Suns One, this is Record Time. We’re here to fight. We’ll see you at the landing zone.”
“Copy.”
Lando Calrissian, in Record Time’s troop bay, stood next to the ramp access and tried not to look concerned.
He was sweating. He didn’t like sweating. It suggested hard work, something he wasn’t fond of, and just didn’t give the impression of someone who was infinitely cool, infinitely in control.
He looked over the units of men and women in the bay. Most were seated in rows of high-backed troop couches, strapped in against the turbulence that was likely to come. Their commanders walked up and down those rows, issuing last-minute instructions,