Star Wars_ X-Wing 02_ Wedge's Gamble - Michael A. Stackpole [86]
Snarling with frustration, he pointed the speeder bike straight at the building on one corner of the intersection. He aimed at a lit rectangle on one of the lower levels, intending to whip the trailing Starhawk into the illuminated sign there. It would be poetic justice if it were an ad for Starhawks. He expected the impact would batter the bike to bits. If it didn’t, well, there are plenty more walls.
It wasn’t until he got close enough to see people sitting in the room move that he realized it wasn’t an advertising billboard but a window. He wanted to veer off, but blaster bolts on both sides bracketed him. He thought for a second about going straight through and out through the other side, but he knew the transparisteel would rip him apart. Get out of the way!
At the last moment Corran hauled the speeder bike around in a sharp left turn. The Starhawk trailing around after him hit the window. He felt a hard jolt, then his speeder bike shot off across the intersection and parallel to another building’s front. He glanced back and thought for a moment that he was free of the Starhawk, then a slight tremble in the bike’s frame matched sparks on the building wall.
Of all the luck! Instead of the transparisteel severing the cord that bound him to the Starhawk, the sharpness of the turn had snapped the weakened connectors between the sidepod and the Starhawk itself. The pod’s occupant had vanished, but Corran couldn’t see where he’d gone. The pod itself trailed after him like a balloon after a child in a stiff wind, but the advent of a half-dozen more speeder bikes into the intersection gave him no chance to try to shuck it off.
The trailing pod gave him all sorts of trouble because of the potential it had for anchoring him to pillar or post. He tried to keep his turns crisp, but he had to avoid narrow alleys and keep his speed under control. If he went too fast the pod would whip around, bashing into walls and throwing the aft end of his speeder bike around. If he slowed, the pod still shot forward. The elasticity of the line connecting it with his bike meant it shot it toward him unless he broke from his line of flight.
The trailing speeder bikes and swoops kept him hemmed in. He knew he was being herded toward a specific point, and he desperately wanted to avoid going there, but he didn’t have many choices. He did dive and sideslip to smash the pod against walls and break it loose, but it stayed with him. If I survive this perhaps I’ll send the Ikas-Ando people a testimonial on the durability of their sidepods …
Cruising around a corner, Corran saw bikes closing from above and behind, trapping him in a wide alley that ended in a solid wall a hundred and fifty meters on. It had no other outlets save up and what appeared to be a closed loading gate at the base of the wall toward which he sped. This is it, my run ends now. The only choices open to him seemed to be slamming into the wall and dying, or fighting and dying.
He thought about slowing to fight, but the whistling pod behind him reminded him of the folly of that idea. It’ll go through me faster than … hey, that’s an idea! Corran pointed the speeder bike directly at the loading gate and kicked the throttle up to full. Twenty meters out, he cranked the vector-shift back, nosing the speeder bike toward the sky, and reversed thrust. The combination pitched him forward, then brought the front of the bike up to bash him back into his seat. As the bike inverted and the pod sailed through beneath it, Corran grabbed the blaster pistol and dropped a dozen feet to the ground.
The pod hit the loading gate’s roll-up door with enough force to cave in the metal barrier toward the middle and rip it from the tracks on which it hung. The speeder bike, with the suicide-cruise switch engaged, slammed into the falling ribbon of metal, then flew on over the crest of it and on into the building’s interior. It tugged on the pod, but the pod had become trapped by the door, so the cord parted, freeing the speeder bike to careen farther on.
With blaster bolts raining down around