Star Wars_ X-Wing 03_ The Krytos Trap - Michael A. Stackpole [25]
“Lead, I have a dozen Interceptors and eight starfighters.”
“I copy, Twelve.” That should be everything they have, unless they’re holding something back. Keeping ships in reserve made little or no sense to Wedge, but he’d long since learned that warfare and tactics seldom make a lot of sense to the opposition. I just hope our run away from the station looks believable.
Aril Nunb led the Rogues and Y-wings up and away from the station. The squints and eyeballs came on in pursuit, hot to thin the ranks of the Y-wings. The Interceptors opened a lead on the TIE starfighters and started to close fast with the Y-wings. Aril brought her X-wing over, and the rest of the Rogues followed her through a loop that.took them back toward the Interceptors while the Y-wings continued heading away from their pursuers.
As the X-wing and Interceptor formations began to spread out into clouds, the B-wings burst into realspace and shot straight into the gap between the squints and the eyeballs from the station. Wedge marveled at how each cruciform ship flew with its wings and fuselage whirling around to keep the cockpit stable despite a wild series of maneuvers and course corrections. Having flown a B-wing a few times, he could appreciate the ship’s firepower, but the way it moved and flew made him feel less like a pilot than a driver.
The B-wings slashed in at the Interceptors. Half of them seemed content to attack using lasers or blasters, while the other half employed ion cannons to take the squints out of the fight without killing them. Blue ion-bolts caught Interceptors in full flight, sending electricity skitter-jagging over the hulls. Laser and blaster fire ripped into other Interceptors, burning holes through solar panels and cockpits.
The B-wing ambush scattered the Interceptors, but the X-wings coming in at them did not break off in pursuit. They left that to the B-wings. The Rogues pushed on through the crumbling Interceptor formation, shot past the B-wings and, as One Flight reunited with the squadron, sailed on in at the eyeball formation.
The first pass came head to head. Static hissed through the X-wing cockpit as TIE lasers stung his forward shields repeatedly. Wave after wave of green light washed over the shields, but Wedge ignored it. He concentrated instead on his monitor and shifted the X-wing a bit to starboard, trapping a TIE fighter in the center of his targeting crosshairs. He tightened down on the trigger, pulsing kilojoules of scarlet energy into an eyeball’s cockpit.
A roiling explosion shredded that ship. Wedge kicked the X-wing up onto the starboard S-foil, then climbed up and away from the expanding ball of gas. Letting his roll continue over the top, he dropped the X-wing into a dive, then rolled out to port and came around on an arc between the cloud of fighters and the station. He glanced off to starboard and saw Asyr still with him, which prompted him to toss her a salute. “Glad you stayed with me.”
“That’s my job.”
From his vantage point at the periphery of the battle he could see a number of things that impressed him. The Rogues had hit the eyeballs very hard, but Zsinj’s people regrouped in good order instead of scattering. Without shields, the TIE starfighters were really no match for the X-wings, but remaining together made them far more dangerous than individual ships fleeing. Whoever the leader of that squadron was, he was sharp enough to keep his people together and head them out and away from the fray.
“Rogue flights Two and Three, leave the flight of eyeballs alone and join the Y-wings. One flight, we’re watching the eyeballs.” Wedge hit two buttons on his flight console. “Mynock, see if you can get me a frequency for the comm unit communications between the eyeballs.”
The droid hooted his understanding of the order.