Star Wars_ X-Wing 04_ The Bacta War - Michael A. Stackpole [161]
Moments later, at two thousand meters Donos angled to starboard, getting clear of the smoke and emerging directly over the gap between volcanoes.
No one was on his tail. He checked the sensor board—didn’t believe what it showed him, checked it again.
He and Talon Twelve were the only New Republic forces remaining on the board. He counted twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five Imperial blips. A dozen were veering toward Twelve, the remainder toward Donos.
In a matter of seconds, Talon Squadron had been all but destroyed. Glittering pieces of X-wings were still streaming down toward the planet’s broken surface. In another few seconds, he and Twelve would be vaped, and the destruction would be complete.
Through the shock of it, he said, “Talon Twelve, dive for the surface. Trench Run Defense. Omega Signal. Acknowledge.”
“Omega Signal understood. Diving.” The sensor register on Talon Twelve showed decreasing altitude. Donos followed suit, standing his X-wing on its nose and blasting toward the ground.
He hadn’t even gotten a shot off at the enemy. Ten pilots dead and he had a full rack of proton torpedoes left, laser batteries charged to full. Time to change that.
The sensors showed an ominous cloud of TIE fighters—eyeballs, in Alliance fighter-jock parlance—pursuing Twelve toward the ground. If she reached the planet’s broken surface, which was pocked with craters and crisscrossed with rifts, she might be able to elude them; there, her piloting skill rather than the relative speeds of the fighters could allow her to lose pursuit, and any pilot who tried to follow her from above would quickly lose sight of her—this was the classic Trench Run Defense used against the first Death Star. But for now, Twelve would remain within the enemy’s weapons range for long, deadly seconds.
Within moments his sensors indicated that he was coming within range of the weapons of the rising cloud of TIE fighters. He switched his lasers over to dual fire, giving him greater recycling speed, and put the rest of his discretionary power on forward shields, then began firing as quickly as his targeting computer gave him the bracket color changes and pure audible tones of good target locks. He put his X-wing into a corkscrew descent, making it harder for him to hit his enemies, but making it much harder for them to hit him.
Most of his shots hit the ground. One missed his intended target but vaped its wingman. Two more shots hit their intended targets, one shearing off a wing and sending the fighter spinning into the nearest volcanic mountainside, the other having no immediate effect Donos could see—but the TIE fighter ceased all evasive maneuvering, its flight path becoming an easy-to-calculate ballistic curve. Donos almost smiled: It had been a surgical strike, the pilot killed by a beautiful shot straight into the cockpit, leaving the rest of the fighter craft unharmed.
His assault had its desired effect. The oncoming cloud of TIEs spread out and he shot through the gap in the center of their formation. They wheeled, an angry insect cloud, to follow, but now the TIEs pursuing Twelve into the rugged terrain below were in sight. Donos continued firing, vaping one starfighter before the others knew he was upon them; that fighter’s wingman, startled by the sudden explosion, reflexively banked rightward, directly into the side of the rift in which they were flying. His fighter also detonated, filling the rift with flame and shrapnel.
Donos dropped into the rift, pulling out of his dive just before he could scrape his keel on the ground. He had stone formations to either side of him—black rock so blurry from his speed that he could make out no details. “Leader to Twelve, report condition,” he said.
“Minor damage to lower port strike foil,” she answered. “It’s giving me a little vibration, which should go away if we can get out of atmosphere. Some starring on the canopy. Pursuit is