Star Wars_ X-Wing 03_ The Krytos Trap - Michael A. Stackpole [22]
Corran hit the trigger and walked laser fire from stern to nose on the ugly. Two bolts blew the R5’s flowerpot head off, then two more punctured the cockpit, exploding it into a cloud of transparisteel and duraplast fragments. The last bolts hit forward and touched off a proton torpedo’s fuel cells. The fuel’s detonation filled the slender craft with fire and sent the nose spinning wildly off into space.
Pulling back on the yoke, Corran brought his nose up and spitted the DIE-wing on the crosshairs. The ugly began a roll, so Corran matched him and tightened up on the trigger. Green laser-bolts slashed at one of the Y-wings, but the ugly flashed on past beneath him. Corran prepared to invert and loop, but a hail of angry red laser-bolts sliced across his flight path.
“What? Who?” He kicked the squint up on its right wing, wrenched the wheel right, and tugged back on the yoke. The maneuver pulled him sharply out of line with his previous course, but he wasn’t content with just doing that. He broke again, to port and up, then searched his scanner monitor for whomever had shot at him.
The scanners reported two ships, both of them X-wings. “What’s going on here?”
“Nemesis One, we have two hostiles. X-wings. It was an ambush. Engage and terminate.”
Ambush me, will you? Corran translated his outrage into fluid maneuvering. Cutting and jumping, he bounced his Interceptor through a series of jukes that shook the X-wings from his tail and brought him around on the DIE-wing. Without really thinking about it, he pumped laser-fire into the ugly’s ball cockpit, then pulled up and away as the misbegotten fighter exploded.
Two on one—same odds I’ve had all day. Despite that hasty assessment, he knew the odds were actually quite different in this battle. The squint’s speed and maneuverability gave it an edge over the X-wings, but they had shields. They could take more damage than he could, and the ability to survive damage had a very direct relationship with the ability to survive in combat. More importantly, the two X-wing pilots seemed determined to operate together. They flew in tight formation and seemed familiar enough with each other that he wasn’t so much fighting two foes as one meta-foe.
The X-wings came around on a vector that brought them straight at him. Corran knew head-to-head passes were the most deadly in dogfighting, and given the enemy’s superiority of numbers, he had no intention of engaging in such a duel. He cut his throttle back and dove at a slight angle so he would pass beneath their incoming vector. They made a slight adjustment in their courses, apparently content to get a passing deflection shot. Corran then goosed his throttle forward, forcing them to sharpen their dives, yet before they could get a good shot at him, he had passed beneath them and had started up again.
One X-wing inverted and pulled up through a loop to drop on Corran’s tail while the other broke the other way. The second X-wing’s looped out and away from the Interceptor, momentarily splitting the two fighters. Corran knew the second pilot had made a mistake and instantly acted to make the most of it. Cutting his throttle back, he turned hard to starboard and then back again to port.
Corran’s sine-wave maneuver brought him back on course, but the X-wing that had been following him now hung up and out in front of him. The X-wing’s pilot had continued on his course, assuming the Interceptor had been trying to evade him. It wasn’t until he shot past the Interceptor and it dropped into his aft arc that he realized his error.
Corran throttled up and closed with the X-wing. You’re mine now, all because your buddy made a mistake. He pushed the Interceptor in to point-blank range and started to fire—then he saw a blue crest on the X-wing’s S-foils. It appeared to be the Rebel crest with a dozen X-wings flying