Star Wars_ X-Wing 05_ Wraith Squadron - Aaron Allston [96]
“No … of course not. Very well, Nutcracker. I’m clearing you to land on Berth Two. We’ll dine, we’ll talk. Follow the signal in.”
“Excellent. Night Caller out.” Face disconnected both the microphone and the Darillian voice simulator.
Immediately the comm unit indicated a single strong signal coming from the moon that must house Blood Nest. “Captain Hrakness, this should be your homing beacon.”
“It is, Face. We’ve got it, thanks.”
Night Caller’s TIE fighters were mounted outside the corvette’s artificial gravity field. Wedge, waiting in his cockpit, didn’t care to spend time in zero gravity, but he decided it was marginally better than being shot at.
His right hand twitched. He tightened it into a fist and tried to ignore it. In one of his few protracted zero-gravity experiences, he’d had to keep two components of the external triggering mechanism of a self-destruct device from coming together. He’d done so the simplest way possible: exiting his X-wing into hard vacuum, relying only on his flight suit’s magcon field and a life-support tether to keep him alive, and jamming his hand in between the closing components.
In the long minutes he’d waited, he’d been battered by conflicting thoughts. He’d resigned himself to dying, yet hoped rescue would come. His flight suit inadequate to the task of retaining his body heat, he’d begun to freeze, yet he’d waited there, marveling at the beauty of the starfields above the sanctuary moon of Endor.
When rescue, in the form of Luke Skywalker, had come for him, he’d torn himself free of the mechanism and almost lost fingers doing it … and now those fingers became a bit twitchy whenever he found himself in zero gee for any length of time. The emotions returned, too. He could even taste the bacta they’d dunked him in to heal him after the ordeal. He tried to will the taste away and concentrate on his surroundings.
Just as at Endor, there was beauty here. The gas giant was an extraordinary pattern of warm colors, a mesmerizing painter’s palette.
Eventually the moon of Blood Nest came into view, a large but dismal brown thing. Night Caller descended into its thin, unwholesome-looking atmosphere. Wedge felt himself settling into the cockpit restraints as gravity began to pull at the corvette. There were no seas below, only pockmarked brown and red desert; the corvette passed above it, heading toward high mountains in the distance.
As they approached the first set of foothills, Wedge saw a curved portion of ground below and to the side of Night Caller’s course curl up and retract.
For a moment it made no sense. Then the picture fit itself together into elements he could recognize.
A crater, concealed from above by some sort of colored or dust-covered fabric. Beneath it, a laser artillery cannon, its barrel elevating straight toward the unshielded keel of Night Caller—
Wedge powered up and hit the crude escape-pod ejection switch Cubber had wired to his control board. His TIE fighter dropped. He oriented immediately toward the laser rig. “Bridge, bring up all shields! Gray Two, launch! Follow my lead. Fire at will.” He suited action to words, firing as soon as his laser cannons oriented on the artillery unit below.
His first shot creased and blackened the unit’s barrel housing. “Wraiths, launch. We’re under attack.” He fired again, not yet bothering to arrest his plummet, and saw the TIE fighter’s green lasers penetrate the cannon housing halfway between the barrel end and the control pod at its base.
The cannon operator fired his compromised weapon. Wedge saw the upper half of its barrel glow red, then yellow, then white from heat as it melted from within.
Gray Two sideslipped into position and fired. Her shot penetrated the phototropically darkened