Star Wars_ X-Wing 01_ Rogue Squadron - Michael A. Stackpole [53]
What he wanted to hear was the return of the engine thrum, but what he got was nothing. Ignition circuits must be fried. There has to be something else I can do. Without the engines, he had no power. The primary power cells and the reserve power cells for the lasers probably had enough energy in them to at least give him communications, attitude control jets, and limited sensors, but getting at it from inside the cockpit presented him a problem. It’s not like I can just land this monster and do some manual cross-wiring.
Corran laughed aloud. “No, but I can manually land this thing.”
He brought his left leg up and hooked a small tab on the cockpit wall with his heel. It flipped out a small bar that sat in a groove. Corran centered his foot on the bar and pumped it down. It came back up beneath his foot and he pushed it down again and again.
From the nose of the fighter he heard metallic pops and clicks. The bar was connected to a small generator that put out enough current to deploy the fighter’s landing gear. Extending them did nothing to affect the spin, but the payoff Corran hoped for wouldn’t come until the gear locked into place.
With a shudder he felt throughout the ship, the landing gear snapped into their fully deployed positions. The monitor in the cockpit lit up again and the stick began to feel alive in his left hand. Laughing aloud, Corran took the stick in his right hand and tugged it over to the starboard side of the cockpit. The spin began to slow.
He fingered the medallion with his left hand. Because no-power landings would be seriously harmful to most lifeforms, extending the landing gear on the fighter opened a circuit that allowed the primary and reserve power cells to drive the S-foil impeller jets for simple maneuvering and to kick in the repulsorlift drives. The power cell tap tended to be used primarily by techs for moving the ships around in repair and maintenance facilities, because running the fusion engines up for full maneuvering power in enclosed places is generally considered harmful to most living creatures.
Corran tried his restart again, with the same results as before. Diagnostics told him he’d lost one of the starboard Incom phi-inverted lateral stabilizers and the engine just wouldn’t start with power levels fluctuating all over the place. No engines, but maybe I have sensors and communication.
He brought those systems on-line but got nothing from sensors and a lot of static covering voices on the comm. “This is Rogue Nine. I could use some help here.”
Waiting for a reply, he flipped on the proton torpedo launch circuits. Without sensors, his ability to hit anything was nil, but at least he could get a shot or two off. And I’m probably going to need it.
Above and to starboard he saw the Black Asp. Rogue Squadron had regrouped to form a screen between the Interdictor and the smuggler. He couldn’t tell how many Rogues were left, and the occasional glint of sunlight off TIE Interceptors’ Quadanium solar panels told him a few of the squints still existed, but there seemed to be far more Rogues than there were TIEs, and that was a good sign.
The Interdictor ventured in close to the fight, its lasers and ion cannons blazing away with green and blue bolts. The energy streams filled space with tangles and knots as the gunners tried to target the elusive X-wings. Though he had been hit fairly easily, he knew his collision-avoidance maneuver had kept him in one place long enough for the gunners to hit him, and that only because he’d ventured far closer to the Interdictor than he should have.
He half heard a command crackle in over the comm, but he couldn’t make sense of it. Out beyond his ship’s nose he saw a series of proton torpedo launches from the X-wings. They came in at the large ship from a multitude of angles. While the power