Star Wars_ X-Wing 05_ Wraith Squadron - Aaron Allston [63]
It hung there, rigidly unmoving in the grip of the shuttle’s tractor beam, as Piggy hooked up his belt power generator to the compartment’s electronic countermeasures, then pulled the compartment door shut.
Wedge breathed out a sigh. Now it was all in Piggy’s hands.
The compartment interior was lit only by the glow from the datapad’s screen. Piggy patted at the gut of his flight suit, assuring himself that his blaster and the one Grinder had given him were still tucked away there, that the datacard containing the program that might force Implacable’s computers to send out a rescue message was still in his pocket, that the suit’s seal was still intact. Then he seized Lunatic’s control datapad. “Status?” he said. His suit comlink was at minimal output power and set to the standard datapad channel.
Gadget’s reply appeared as text on the datapad screen: OPERATIONAL. I CALCULATE A CHANCE THAT I WILL NOT REMAIN OPERATIONAL.
“I’ll get you out alive, Gadget.”
The words MOVEMENT DETECTED appeared. The screen switched from pure text to graphics on top, text at the bottom, and Piggy got a crude, monochrome view of the stars. From the way the starfield was moving, Piggy supposed that the Lunatic was now rotating slowly, and that Gadget was turning his hemispherical head to keep the camera within it aimed at his target.
A tiny white dot moved across the starfield and slowly began to grow.
More text appeared: THEY WILL DETECT THAT I AM OPERATIONAL.
“That’s all right. They won’t consider an astromech droid to be a threat. R2s are built for hard-vacuum repairs, so many of you have survived the ejection of their pilots into space.”
The dot grew until Piggy could make out its shape. It was not the Implacable, nowhere near so formidable a vehicle: it was a Corellian corvette, a long, narrow vessel with a blocky engine housing at one end; at the other end, the bow looked like an ancient war-hammer head turned sideways.
Even at this distance and through the crude imager of the datapad, Piggy could see a bright vertical slit of light appear at the bow as the hold doors there were opened. Two large silhouettes emerged from the light and rapidly grew as they came closer.
They resolved themselves into TIE fighters.
The two starfighters roared past Phanan’s X-wing and its debris cloud, close enough that Piggy imagined he could feel their wake. They looped and came back, then decelerated for a close view of the X-wing.
THEY ARE QUERYING ME.
“Respond truthfully, but only with data you have in your defaults. You don’t know what happened to your pilot, you don’t know how you came to be here.” Piggy magnified the image of the corvette on his datapad screen, focusing in on the open bow hold. “What’s our range to target?”
THREE HUNDRED METERS.
“Can we make that?”
THE VEHICLE IS COMING STRAIGHT AT US ON AN UNVARYING COURSE. IF WE MAKE NO MISTAKES, WE CAN.
Piggy took a deep breath and brought up the crude targeting brackets Grinder had added to his cobbled-together flight program. He set the brackets in the center of the open bow hold and hit the execute button.
He felt faint pressure against his back as one or two of the Lunatic’s top thrusters fired, orienting its “bow,” Gadget, toward the corvette. Then it was as though he were in a turbolift, sudden weight as the thrusters beneath his feet fired off, and the image of the corvette’s open hold began to grow.
He was suddenly banged up, down, and sideways by thruster corrections and could no longer keep his attention on the datapad. Then gravity had him and he was standing on his head.
He heard a wild, musical shriek, Gadget emitting a sound of pure droid terror, and there was an impact. Something gave way under the blow. Piggy was slammed forward, banging his head, then slammed onto his back.
He had heard Gadget screech; they had to be within atmosphere. He popped the seal on his pilot suit and dragged