Star Wars_ X-Wing 05_ Wraith Squadron - Aaron Allston [100]
They skipped over the ridge that was a common border between two such craters and saw them—treaded vehicles peering just over the far rim. Even as large as this crater was, they were already in weapons range, only a couple of seconds away.
“Switching to torps,” he said. “Firing.”
“Firing,” Tyria repeated.
Their proton torpedoes flashed almost instantly across the distance separating firer from target.
Almost instantly. The treaded vehicles also fired, lasers and concussion missiles, aiming at distant targets. Then the torpedoes caught up to them. Kell’s hit the big one on the left, the too-tall construction body atop a military crawler’s treads, while Tyria’s hit the smaller laser-cannon-armed crawler in the middle. All three vehicles were caught up in the dual blast. They dropped out of the bottom of the resulting ball of smoke and fire, tumbling down the crater’s slope, throwing off treads, doors, shreds of weapon components, chunks of armor, all charred and warped almost beyond recognition.
The comm crackled with Jesmin’s pained voice. “I’m hit.”
Kell and Tyria cleared the crater a moment later and vectored in behind Jesmin and Donos.
The Mon Calamari pilot and her temporary wingman were still together, but both were hit, trailing smoke, and drifting apart.
Jesmin seemed to be the one damaged worst. Kell guessed that the blast had been one of a pulse barrage; nothing else was likely to have been able to knock down her shields and penetrate before the shields came back up. A laser blast had hit her on the port side of her cockpit; from the angle and the deepening black score along the cockpit’s flank, Kell gauged that the blast had done the majority of its damage just behind and below the pilot’s chair. Jesmin also could have caught some of the wash of damage.
Her X-wing was also standing on its starboard strike foils and was in an arc heading toward one of the nearest hills. “Jesmin, straighten up. Two, can you hear me?”
“Hear … you … Five …” If anything, her voice sounded worse than before.
“Level off, Two. Right now.”
“Can’t … reach … stick …”
She was too badly hurt to reach the pilot’s yoke? That was bad, but—then he realized the truth. Her words, and the way she was struggling to say them, added up to one thing: her inertial compensator was shot. The device that made pilots immune to the centrifugal effect of fighter maneuvers was no longer working, and she was being crushed back into her seat by the high-speed arc she was performing.
She was seconds from hitting the hillside. He said, “Thirteen, instruct her R2 to cut her fighter’s thrust by half.”
Thirteen’s answer came up immediately: HE CAN’T, HIS LINKS TO COCKPIT CONTROLS ARE GONE. HE SAYS GOOD-BYE.
“No! Jesmin, punch out!”
There was no answer.
There was other comm traffic going on. Kell ignored it. He was aware only of Jesmin’s dying X-wing meters in front of his own. Of the rapidly growing hillside beyond that.
He closed his strike foils into cruise position and goosed his thrusters until he was just to the side of and beneath Jesmin’s X-wing.
Janson’s voice: “What are you doing, Five?”
Wedge’s: “Let him go, Eleven. I see what he’s up to.”
With his port wing a meter beneath Jesmin’s starboard wing, Kell rolled gently to starboard. His wing contacted hers with a scrape, putting a shudder through his snubfighter, checking and reversing her roll. He drifted to starboard and continued his roll until he nearly completed a three-sixty.
Now he stared at the bottom of Jesmin’s fighter, at the damage to her side and at cables trailing out of it. Because the impact of wing against wing had rolled her, her fighter had gone through nearly ninety degrees of a rotation to port. For the moment, her X-wing was angling away from the hillside, but the roll was continuing. As delicately as he could, Kell rose toward the underside of her fighter.
The hillside flashed below him and was gone. Jesmin’s roll brought her port wing