While the result was not entirely graceful—he landed on his rear end with a thump—it was close enough for his purposes, so that when Leia sprinted up to him he was able to shove himself to his feet. “Go on!” he gasped. “I’m right behind you!”
“Any landing you can walk away from, eh, Slick?” she said as she passed him and disappeared up the boarding ramp.
“Got that right.” He staggered up the ramp and hit the autocycle to close it behind him. “Leia! Bottom turret! Chewie, take top! I’m driving!”
He scrambled forward. Chewbacca’s feet were just disappearing up the upper turret access; Wookiees could climb faster than most species could run. Leia paused before clambering down into the lower turret. “You okay? Really?”
“Mostly,” Han said. “Considering I landed on my brain.”
“As long as there’s no permanent damage.” Leia flashed a grin and gave his injured anatomy a quick pat as he squeezed by. “It’s your best feature—and that’s saying a lot.”
“You’re adorable,” he said. “Now let’s go shoot some bad guys, huh?”
The ship rocked with more cannon blasts, which were answered by an ear-shattering Wookiee war cry and the deep-throated thoom-thoom-thoom-thoom of the topside quad turret. Han finally reached the cockpit and threw himself into the pilot’s couch. While he stabbed buttons and flicked switches, he whispered a quick “Thankyouverymuch!” to whatever part of the Force might be looking after fools, scoundrels, and reformed smugglers, grateful that the Empire had never thought to arm their TIE interceptors with missiles or torps, especially since—as a searing red FAILURE indicator informed him when he tried to fire up the active defenses—the atmosphere seemed to have a similar effect on deflectors and particle shields.
Which meant, on balance, that the most effective weapons in this particular engagement just happened to be loaded in the Falcon’s forward missile array. Han muttered, “That works for me,” yanked back on the control yoke, and punched the sublights. The Falcon leapt straight up as if it had been drop-kicked by the entire planet.
The ship spun skyward through a hailstorm of cannon fire. Inboard comm crackled. “I can’t hurt them,” Leia said, her voice tight and calm with concentration. “My shots glance off the collector panels. Is something wrong with the guns?”
“No, something’s wrong with the atmosphere! Don’t complain, it’s keeping us alive right now!” Han shouted back. “Their forward viewports aren’t armored—aim for the eyeball and shoot ’em in the face when they swing in on attack runs!”
He twisted the ship through a half loop that sent it straight for a new line of TIEs as they dropped through the cloud deck in that follow-the-leader formation they favored for air-to-ground work. “Speaking of eyeballs,” he muttered under his breath, and thumbed the missile release without bothering to engage the targeting computer; at this range he didn’t need a missile lock. Twin contrails painted parallel lines from the Falcon to the lead TIE in less than a heartbeat. In the next heartbeat, the TIE had blossomed into an expanding sphere of flame and debris—which touched off the following TIE, and the one after that, while the rest of the flight broke formation and spiraled into strafing runs.
“Hey, they’re going after the Mindorese!” Han crowed as he spun the ship into an escape vector. “Blow ’em a kiss for luck, kids—we’re out of here!”
“Han,” Leia began, and he clenched his teeth. He recognized the tone, and he knew what was coming next.
“Don’t tell me,” he said. “We have to go back.”
“They’ll be slaughtered!” she said. “And Han—they know something about Luke!”
“Oh, sure,” he muttered through his teeth. She would bring Luke into this. “But when your bleeding heart gets us all killed, don’t come crying to me…”
He pulled the Falcon into a looping evasion curve, and this time he did engage the targeting computer—which promptly informed him, in no uncertain terms, that the Falcon was out of missiles. “Now you tell me.”
Han keyed the comm. “Rogue Leader, Rogue Leader. Wedge, you out there? If you’re in the area, we could use a little cover right about now!”
The speakers crackled. Faintly, through the bursts of static: “Negative on the cover, Falcon. Do you read? Negative cover! We are buried—there’s more TIEs than rocks out here! Do you read?”
“Loud and too damn clear,” Han muttered. “Can you pry open a window for us?”
“No joy starside, Falcon. Do not attempt! Hostiles have you under the blanket. Find a hole and pull it in after you. We’ll be back as soon as we round up some friendlies.”
“Negative that. Stick to Leia’s plan; we’ll make our own way. We’ll find Luke and meet you on the far side of the jump point.”
“Copy that. Clear skies, Falcon.”
“See you soon, Wedge.”
“Copy, Han. Take care of the pretty lady.”
“I always do,” Han said, and only after a second or two did it strike him that Wedge had been talking about Leia, not the Falcon. “Uh, yeah, her too,” he muttered, and keyed the inboard comm. “All right, kids, we have to do this the hard way. Belt up—this ride’s about to get bumpy!”
The targeting computer shrilled an alert: MISSILE LOCK DETECTED.
“Missile lock? They don’t even have—” But even as he was arguing with the computer, Han had kicked the Falcon into a high-g sideslip, and before he could finish the sentence a pair of concussion missiles screamed past so close the cockpit rattled. “Who’s shooting at us now?”
“Incoming!” Leia sang out over the sudden thunder of the quad turrets.
“I saw them alrea—oh.” Han stared out through the forward viewport at a swarm of missiles that looped toward them from the general direction of a giant wall of billowing dust, which had been kicked up by a skirmish line of four or five dozen heavy assault gunships that skimmed the hills a few kilometers away, angling for envelopment. “You have got to be kidding me!”
“Arroowerrhowoo!”
“Sure, laugh it up,” Han snarled as he yanked the Falcon back into an intercept course with the strafing TIEs. Trust a Wookiee to find this funny. “Chewie, target the fighters! We need to break their formation. Princess—hey, wait…”
From down among the rocks at the crater’s rim, at every impact point of every laser bolt from every one of the strafing TIEs, rose a billow of reddish-black cloud: dust and smoke, thick enough to completely shroud the ground beneath.
Han found himself grinning. “Princess! Aim for the ground!”
“What?”
“Just do it! Angle the turret forward and hold down the triggers!”
“You’re the captain, Captain.” He could hear in her voice her skeptical shrug, but an instant later she opened up the belly quad and hosed the lava ahead with a nonstop stream of laserfire.
And even as Han kicked the Falcon into a dive that speared straight into the billowing wall of red-black dust kicked up by Leia’s laser blasts, he was contemplating, with mild astonishment, that for very possibly the first time in her life, Leia had just done as she was told without a word of argument. Must be the captain thing. Why hadn’t he thought of that before? His mouth quirked upward in a slight, lopsided smile.
He was still smiling when the Falcon roared up from the cloud into open sky and was instantly clipped across its starboard mandible by the collector panel of a TIE interceptor whose astonished pilot never even had a chance to blink before his starfighter was transformed by the impact into a flaming ball of wreckage tumbling toward the all-too-close lava below.
The glancing impact knocked the Falcon into a flipping whirl like a cred chip spinning on a sabacc table that sprayed the surrounding area with molten chunks of titanium from the gash in its armor plating. The TIE fighter collector’s leading edge missed the front viewpanel of the Falcon’s cockpit by roughly the diameter of a Wookiee’s nose hair. Han was too busy saying Whoa! and being generally astonished to find himself still alive while tr
ying to wrestle the Falcon back under control to even distantly worry about the other TIEs streaking toward him, not to mention the concussion missiles that looped toward them indiscriminately, having lost their targeting locks when the Falcon had disappeared into the cloud of metallic fog.
The Falcon’s spin, though, brought the intersecting contrails of the oncoming missiles through Han’s visual arc just in time for him to wrench the yoke and stand the Falcon on its tail, side-on to the missiles, for one flash of a ghost of a second… just long enough for the lead missiles to whip past so close that he would later swear he could smell them before they continued down into the murk in pursuit of the largest energy signature their targeting sensors had found to relock on: the exploding TIE interceptor. The following missiles had already located the ion signatures of the other TIEs, since the atmosphere apparently also presented enough EM interference to screw up the missiles’ reception of IFF transponder signals. While the TIE pilots struggled with that problem, Han was able to bring the Falcon back under control and angle it toward the folds of lava where the Mindorese had taken cover.
Over their position, he kicked the Falcon onto its side and circled them at high speed, while both Chewie and Leia fired their quads at full power into the ground, raising a huge cylindrical cloud of blasted-up rock and metal that Han figured would cloak them from the oncoming gunships for at least a minute or so; then he set down in the clear middle and dropped the Falcon’s boarding ramp as he activated the exterior loudspeakers. “Okay, let’s go! Mount up—we’re at B minus thirty, and B stands for Bagload of Bad Guys!”
The Mindorese scrambled for the boarding ramp, some of them limping, some carrying or dragging wounded comrades. The redhead paused just long enough to send a sardonic grin toward the cockpit and follow it with a blown kiss that somehow managed to look grateful and sarcastic at the same time.
Han canceled the loudspeakers and keyed the turret comm. “Chewie. Leia.” Even though the Mindorese couldn’t possibly overhear, he kept his voice low, just above a whisper. “Secure the turret access bulkheads, and don’t come out till I tell you.”
Those bulkheads would stand up to anything short of a mining charge.
Chewie growled assent, but Leia said, “Han—these aren’t enemies. I can feel—”
“I believe you,” Han said. “Do it anyway.”
“Han—”
“Leia!”
“All right. I’ll stay put.”
“And get ready to shoot, huh?” Without waiting for her answer, Han keyed the comm channel for the Falcon’s cargo hold. “Hey down there! You people inside? We’re out of time!”
“We’re in! Are we taking off sometime today?” Had to be the redhead. “Is this a ship or an artillery target?”
“Little bit of both,” Han muttered as he kicked power into the thrusters and swung the mandibles toward vertical.
The Falcon broke clear of the dust and smoke cloud. “Here they come!”
The interceptors hadn’t gone anywhere in the meantime; immediately the battered freighter bounced and shuddered under the impact of multiple cannon hits, and Han spotted the flight of heavy assault gunships circling into formation for a new attack run. “I hope somebody’s got a good idea, here!”
“Hrowwwroor!”
“Of course keep shooting!” Han replied. “I said a good idea!”
The intercom crackled with the redhead’s voice again. “Seventy-seven points off true north, and punch it!”
Han scanned the horizon from north to east: desert, featureless but for low rolling hills. “There’s nothing there!”
“If you want, we can argue about it while the Imps blast your ship to scrap.”
“Or maybe we could mount you on the hull and use your nerve for armor plate,” Han muttered, but he kicked the underjets and fired the thrusters. Six interceptors hurtled past, and Han pumped the missile trigger by instinct, snarling to himself That’s it, knucklehead, waste your time firing dry tubes. The TIEs weren’t his main problem anyway; the big issue was the flight of heavy assault gunships skimming the ground straight toward them… from east by northeast. “Do you know you’re sending us straight for them?”
“Hey, sorry. You feel safer here?”
“You and me, we’re just never gonna get along.”
“Stop it, you’ll make me cry. Get the TIEs in a tail chase so—”
“—they’ll be in the gunships’ line of fire, and the gunships in theirs.” Han was already doing so, swinging high to place the Falcon squarely between the enemies behind and those in front. The TIEs’ cannons would do even less to the distant gunships than they were doing to the Falcon, but the gunships had to hold fire on their missiles, and Han was starting to let himself believe that he just might get the Falcon clear. “This isn’t exactly my first scrape, y’know.”
“Could’ve fooled me. How we doin’ up there?”
“Not bad,” Han admitted—then changed his mind as another salvo from the TIEs rocked the ship. Hard. “But they’re gaining on us—pretty soon they’ll be close enough that those cannons will start doing real damage. And the gunships are wheeling to join up on the tail chase when we pass them in about five seconds, at which point we’re pretty well f—”
“Pull up!”
“What?”
“Climb, dammit! Full power!”
“You can’t even see out there!”
“I know this planet like your rear knows your pants, flyboy. Climb or die.”
“You want to come up here and drive? No, forget I asked.”
Han gritted his teeth and hauled back on the control yoke. The Falcon lurched and bucked and whipped for the sky fast enough to overload its inertial compensators; acceleration squashed him into the pilot’s couch and pinned him there, and he caught himself indulging an uncharitable fantasy that one particular Mindorese had failed to secure herself and had fallen and broken something.
Preferably her mouth.
The pursuing TIEs climbed with them, spreading wide to open a window for the gunships, which obliged by launching a spray of concussion missiles. The Falcon’s missile-lock alert blared. Han cursed under his breath as he forced the yoke forward and twisted it to yank the ship into a looping spiral. Just then the whole sky flashed scarlet and the whole ship thoommed with magnetic resonance harmonics that sounded, to Han’s all-too-experienced ear, like a near-miss by a really, really big turbolaser blast. “Where the hell did that come from?”
Leia’s voice, from the ventral turret: “Quarter-roll to your left and you’ll see it.”
Han kicked the ship through the quarter roll, got a look at what Leia was talking about, and started swearing. He kept on swearing for some considerable time, even while wrenching the ship through ridiculously violent evasive maneuvers as the whole sky kept flaring around them and the ship rang with a near-continuous whang-ng-ng-ng like a Ruurian beating a dinner gong with all fourteen hands.
The sudden climb he’d undertaken on the redhead’s advice had cleared them over the horizon of a vast rounded mountain that bulged up into the orange sky, like some kind of young volcanic dome that hadn’t yet blown its crater, and the whole blasted place was studded with rings of huge turbolaser towers, which were powerful enough that the interference from Mindor’s atmosphere had no effect except to spread the blasts wide enough to vaporize his entire ship, instead of just blowing holes in it.
“Oh, brilliant. Oh, this is just great,” Han shouted into the intercom. “You sent us straight for their main base!”
“Quit whining. Those turbo batteries’ll keep the TIEs off our tail, and probably dust some of the missiles, too.”
She was right, which only made Han hate her even more. No one that annoying had any business being right about anything.
“There should be three parallel box canyons about five klicks off your left front. See them?”
“Yeah.” Three long gouges in Mindor’s crust, shallow at this end and deepening as they extended off to planetar
y east until they came to sudden ends—looked like maybe three pretty good-sized chunks of meteorite had come in at the same time a few years back. “Now what?”
“Hug the deck straight in to the right-hand canyon. Once we’re below ground level, there are side canyons and caverns and all kinds of places to hide. Blast some rocks, kick up some dust, and you won’t have any trouble losing these guys. There’s too many places to look, and they’ve got bigger problems than us.”
Han gave a slow nod as he nosed the Falcon into a screaming dive toward the canyons through the storm of intersecting cannon and turbolaser fire. “Not bad,” he admitted grudgingly. “You do seem to know your way around.”
“What do you think kept us all alive out here? Good looks?”
“Nah,” Han said. “I figured it was your winning personality.”
A hundred-some planetary diameters from Mindor, the Slash-Es were moving.
Asteroid clusters had been drifting toward them, accelerating as they came, following lines of gravitic interaction between the Slash-Es’ gravity-well projectors and the thousands of gravity stations scattered through the asteroids. This effect had been clearly visible on the heads-up displays of the Lancer’s starfighter pickets, which was what had sparked the idea in Captain Tirossk, who, as the senior commander still active in the theater, was now unexpectedly in command of the entire RRTF.
As he explained it to Wedge and Tycho in encrypted transmissions, the combined effects of the inbound asteroid clusters and the gravity wells would produce semicoherent planetoids. With seat-of-the-pants reckoning, Wedge and Tycho had guesstimated that a dozen of these planetoids, moving in the proper orbits, would be enough to clear a brief hyperspace window that might allow some of the task force to escape. The Lancer’s navigational computer had put the minimum number at close to eighteen hours… and the window would open only briefly and unpredictably several times until it finally stabilized, if all went well, in about twenty hours.
Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor Page 13
