Star Wars_ X-Wing 03_ The Krytos Trap - Michael A. Stackpole [21]
Something about that assumption niggled in the back of his mind. He knew it was not incorrect. He was a good pilot and he knew it, but his assuming superiority seemed wrong. He hadn’t made the assumption on the basis of the fact that uglies seldom had the performance characteristics of the fighters from which they were created. He realized he’d assumed anyone flying uglies would be pirates or smugglers, and had instantly assumed they were his inferiors. While he could find no facts to dispute his assumption about his foes, he knew there was something wrong with his having made it.
A warning klaxon blared in the cockpit, alerting him that one of the uglies had gotten a torpedo lock on him and had launched a proton torpedo. Corran banished thoughts about his enemies’ combat-worthiness, rolled the ship up onto its port wing, then dove. His abrupt maneuver hurled his ship onto a course at right angles to the one he’d been traveling previously. The proton torpedo, which was traveling roughly twice as fast as he was, shot past his starboard wing and started on a long loop to head back at him.
A proton torpedo has thirty seconds of flight time. I can’t outrun it, but I can out-maneuver it. Corran smiled. Or deal with it more directly!
He reversed the squint’s thrust and hit the port rudder pedal. This threw the Interceptor into a flat spin that brought the nose around to face back along his flight path. Where the proton torpedo had been coming straight at his back before, now it was coming straight in at his cockpit. He killed the thrust and glanced at his scanner monitor—750 meters and closing fast.
At 400 meters he flicked the lasers over to dual-fire and tightened his finger down on the trigger. Pairs of laser-bolts burned green through space seeking the torpedo. One bolt hit the torpedo at 250 meters out. It failed to destroy it, but did melt its way into the body and ignite a fuel cell. The subsequent explosion pitched the torpedo off course. When the onboard computer calculated the torpedo would not hit its target, it detonated the warhead, but the Interceptor remained a hundred meters outside the blast radius.
Switching thrust forward again, Corran throttled up to full and punched up profiles of the uglies. One was an X-TIE. It had the body of an X-wing fighter with the hexagonal wings from a TIE starfighter. Corran found the ship hideous to look at and would have dismissed it immediately except it had launched the proton torpedo.
The other ship looked fairly ridiculous. It mated a TIE’s ball cockpit with the engine pods from a Y-wing. This particular hybrid was rare because it combined the TIE’s lack of shields with the Y-wing’s lumbering, slothful handling. Corran knew this type of ugly was often referred to as a TYE-wing, though DIE-wing was a common nickname for it as well.
Corran cut his Interceptor on a course that shot him past the X-TIE, then broke on down into a series of maneuvers, twisting and turning, that left the TYE-wing far behind. The X-TIE hung with him long enough for Corran’s scanners to pick out details. X-wing fighters had two torpedo launching tubes in the nose and four lasers, one mounted on each end of the stabilizers that supplied the ship with its name. Lacking those S-foils, the X-TIE had replaced one proton torpedo launch tube with what Corran guessed would be a laser cannon.
Undergunned and overmatched. Corran rolled his way down through a corkscrew dive that lengthened his lead on the X-TIE and the TYE-wing. The X-TIE’s pilot began to pull the fighter’s nose up, as if he intended to return to his wingman’s side and the safety the TYE-wing would provide him. Corran watched him turn away, then inverted and pulled the Interceptor through a tight turn and shot back up and in at the X-TIE’s exposed aft.
Clearly unaware of Corran’s maneuver, the X-TIE’s pilot inverted and headed back toward the TYE-wing.