Star Wars_ X-Wing 09_ Starfighters of Adumar - Aaron Allston [116]
He heard the trio of acknowledgments, barely registering them, the Blades’ problem already washed from his mental processes. Ahead, another TIE Defender, this one with red paint on its solar wing arrays, was turning into his path and accelerating toward him.
Red paint—that probably meant red horizontal stripes on the solar wings, and that meant it was piloted by a member of the 181st. Not many pilots of any unit, no matter how prestigious, rated a Defender. Turr Phennir was the logical candidate.
Wedge set logic aside. He needed his experience and his instincts now.
The Defender came straight at him, accelerating at full. Wedge bared a carnivore’s grin. If he survived the head-to-head run, he’d have more time to turn about and confront the Defender again—the Defender’s high rate of speed would make him overshoot Wedge and take his time turning around.
As he tried to target the madly maneuvering Defender, his brackets flickered from yellow to green and back again at a rate too quick for him to respond to—by the time he saw green and pulled his trigger, the brackets would have cycled through colors two or three more times. As the Defender came into optimal range, he fired anyway, saw his lasers flash through the gap between his target’s solar wing arrays, felt an impact, and then he was past and looping around toward the Defender once more.
Diagnostics said his forward landing strut actuator was gone and indicated progressive problems with the launch mechanism for his proton torpedoes. He didn’t need the diagnostics to see the black hole that had appeared in his X-wing’s nose. For the laser shot to have pierced the top side of his fuselage and hit both proton torpedo launchers and landing strut, it would have had to have been a hard and accurate hit.
Not his problem now. He got turned around and headed toward the Defender again. He was aware of familiar voices over the comlink, but his call sign was not being used and he ignored them.
This time, he ignored the color changes on his brackets. He settled into his pilot’s couch, felt its familiar contours around him, allowed his senses to spread out through his X-wing and ahead to—and into—the Defender rushing at him.
This wasn’t use of the Force; to Wedge, the Force was as incomprehensible as astronavigation was to a bantha. But his long experience allowed him focus and responses that others sometimes considered mystical. He knew the change in engine pitch that said one of his generators was malfunctioning, the flash of light from his lasers that said one had drifted out of alignment, the subtle variations in acceleration that said his power was surging erratically.
He thought past the armor of the Defender, past the TIE pilot’s suit, to the human beyond. He felt the pilot’s twitch of response when he sent his X-wing swerving out of the pilot’s own targeting brackets.
He felt his laser’s aim rest on the pilot and he fired.
Then he was past, and looping around for another run.
The Defender, in the distance, wasn’t looping back toward him. In fact, it wasn’t quite a TIE Defender, anymore. The top solar wing array was gone, its pylon destroyed where it met the hull, and the Defender was venting atmosphere into space.
But it was still under control. The Defender picked up speed, heading out of the engagement zone at full acceleration. The pilot was supplied breathing air by his flight suit, but the loss of his cockpit atmosphere to space meant he was getting cold, and fast; he had only a few minutes before he’d freeze to death. He was out of the combat.
“Good shot, boss.”
Wedge checked his sensor board, then looked to either side. “When did you get here?”
Red Three flew to his port side, Red Four to his starboard.
“Just now,” Janson said. “You had a couple of opportunistic squints headed toward you. We scraped ’em off.