Star Wars_ X-Wing 01_ Rogue Squadron - Michael A. Stackpole [87]
There was no missing his target. The Lancer-class frigate—Whistler identified it as the Ravager—swelled into a hard-edged, spiky rectangle with an up-bent prow and a bulbous engine assembly. Green backlight from the quads splashed color over the ship’s Imperial-white exterior. Corran nudged the X-wing in line, more or less, with the ship’s middle deck, then the X-wing whirled out of his control.
In compliance with the instructions he had given Whistler before, the droid rolled the fighter hard to starboard. The stick bashed Corran’s right hand against the side of the cockpit, but before the pain could begin to register, the stick tore itself free of his grasp and smacked him solidly in the chest. With the stick pinning him back in his command chair, Corran could only look up and watch the Ravager’s hull blur as it flashed past.
The torpedoes had been within half a second of catching the X-wing when it snapped up and around the Ravager. While fully capable of making the same maneuver the fighter had, because of their greater speed, the torpedoes needed more space in which to make it. Even as they started to correct their courses to follow Corran, they slammed into the Lancer and detonated.
The first half-dozen explosions produced more energy than the shields could absorb. The shields went down, leaving the frigate open to the rest of the torpedo swarm. Blast shields buckled and transparisteel viewports evaporated as the torpedoes detonated. Titanium hull plates went molten, flowing into globules of metal that would harden as perfect spheres in the frozen darkness of space. Decks ruptured and the growing fireball at the center of the ship consumed atmosphere, equipment, and personnel with a rapacious appetite.
All but two of the torpedoes fed into the roiling plasma storm raging in the heart of the Ravager. In bisecting the ship, the torpedoes cut all power and control links between the bridge, in the prow, and the engines at the stern. Automatic safeguards immediately kicked in and the engines shut down. All laser fire from the Ravager died and the stricken ship keeled over. It began to lose a tug-of-war with the planet below and slowly tumbled down into Rachuk’s gravity well.
Corran, in an X-wing sprinting away from the Imperial frigate, could see none of the damage the torpedoes did to the Ravager. He stared down his sensor monitor and smiled as the sensors reported, line by line, the deaths of twenty-two torpedoes that were following him.
Twenty-two? But there should have been twenty-four. He pried the stick off his chest. “Whistler, where are those last two missiles?”
The sensor array shifted. The torpedoes had shot under the Lancer, reacquiring his beacon when he cleared the frigate’s far side. Almost here. I have to break hard!
The stick twitched and jerked of its own accord. Horror trickled electricity through Corran’s guts. “Whistler, cut it out!”
The stick still bucked and fought against his grip. Corran realized, in one painfully crystal-clear moment, that in having used the indefinite pronoun it in his last command he had made a mistake equal in magnitude to still having all shield energy in his forward arc. He started to rectify both of those errors, but the proximity indicator reporting the location of Warden Three’s torpedoes told him his time had run out.
22
Kirtan Loor’s shuttle came out of hyperspace a second before the spread of proton torpedoes hit the Ravager. Hanging nearly ten kilometers above the distant Lancer, all Kirtan saw was a cone of green laser light stabbing off into space, then a brilliant light dawning at the base of the cone, illuminating the frigate in which it burned. Subsidiary blasts surrounded the ship with fire, then it slowly started to drift away as escape pods shot in all directions away from it.
“What in Sith happened there?”
The shuttle’s pilot shook his head. “I don’t know, but