Star Wars_ X-Wing 08_ Isard's Revenge - Michael A. Stackpole [52]
Below him the landscape changed. Forests gave way to vast tracts of treeless land covered by a thin blanket of snow that let the stubble of harvested grain stalks poke up through it. Houses dotted the landscape and, since it was midmorning, some people were out and about in the fields, directing the droids tending to livestock. Wedge knew that any of them could use a comlink to alert Valleyport officials that fighters were incoming, but by the time the report got through, the Rogues would be over their target.
The city of Valleyport came into view, obscured by a brown haze. A few tall buildings rose above the haze, but most sprawled within it. The haze covered both sides of the river and spread out onto the plains above. The spaceport’s towers showed up clearly on the northern side of the river, against a mountain backdrop toward the west. Wedge let his X-wing sideslip to port, then flashed across the river and set his lasers for single fire.
Already E-webs and a couple of P-towers started filling the early morning air with sizzling bolts of coherent light, but tracking an X-wing running in at full throttle proved more difficult than the gunners would have liked. A stray bolt hissed against Wedge’s shields and in return he clipped off a cycle of four shots—one from each of the X-wing’s laser cannons—then pulled his fighter’s nose off onto another target.
His laserfire tracked bolts across icy ferrocrete decking and up the sides of buildings. Misses left little black stains centered on a guttering flame. Hits blew chunks out of the enemy’s mounted blasters and antivehicular weapons. One bolt caught a stormtrooper in the chest, ablating his armor away in an eyeblink and continuing on unabated. The man’s burning corpse slammed into a wall, then rebounded and pitched forward over the balcony railing he had tried to take cover behind.
“Lead, I’m getting fire from the west, coming from within those hangars.”
“On it, Hobbie.” Wedge hit some right rudder and chopped back his throttle, shortening a turn to port. A line of large hangars formed the western perimeter of the spaceport and the red-gold bolts from a pair of heavy laser cannons sprayed out at the X-wings. Seeing a line of fire begin to track his fighter, Wedge goosed the throttle back to full and began a port spiral to get some altitude.
Out of the hangars trotted a quartet of AT-ATs, the Imperial walker units that had wrought so much havoc at Hoth. They moved quickly, not looking as cumbersome and slow in the light snow as they had on Hoth’s icefields. Back then we were in airspeeders—undergunned and overmatched. A smile slowly twisted his lips. Not the case this time.
“On them, Rogues. The groundpounders are incoming and we need to get rid of the walkers. Be careful.”
“Starting a run on the first one.” Lyyr Zatoq, the Quarren, rolled her X-wing out to port, then let it swoop down in a glide that brought it in on a diagonal slashing course on the last of the walkers. The machine’s head slowly swung to the left to try to track her fighter, but she blasted away at it with her lasers at point-blank range, then climbed hard and pulled out to the left, too fast and too tight for the walker to target her.
Hobbie, her wingman, came in on a crossing path that gave him a clean shot at the tail. Lyyr’s shots had slagged armor on the mechanical beast’s flank, but hadn’t done any serious damage. Hobbie’s attack ran from below the AT-AT’s body on up the back, and at least one shot holed the fuel tank. Flaming fluid streamed down like a tail, then an explosion ripped the walker’s back end open. The blast pitched the walker up into