"Michael Stackpole "Rogue Squadron"" - читать интересную книгу автора

the turn, Jace managed to stay inside die arc of the X-wing's turn. As the
bomber leveled off. it closed very quickly with the X-wing-too quickly for a
missile lock, but not a laser shot.
The TIE bomber shrieked in at the X-wing. Col-ision warning klaxons wailed.
Corran could feel Jace's excitement as the X-wing loomed larger. He knew the
other pilot would snap off a quick shot, then come around again, angry at having
overshot the X-wing, but happy to smoke Corran before tak-ing the Korolev.
The X-wing pilot hit a switch and shifted all shield power to the aft shields.
The deflector shield materialized as a demisphere approximately twenty meters
behind the X-wing. De-signed to dissipate both energy and kinetic weapons, it
had no trouble protecting the fighter from the bomber's twin laser blasts. Had
the bomber used mis-siles, the shields could even have handled all the dam-age
they could do, though that would have been enough to destroy the shields
themselves.
The TIE bomber, which massed far more than the missiles it carried, should have
punched through die shields and might even have destroyed the fighter, but it
hit at an angle and glanced off. The collision did blast away half the power of
the aft shield and bounced the X-wing around, but other-wise left the
snubfighter undamaged.
The same could not be said of the unshielded bomber. The impact with the shield
was roughly equivalent to a vehicle hitting a ferrocrete wall at
sixty kilometers per hour. While that might not do a land vehicle much damage,
land vehicles are decid-edly less delicate than starfighters. The starboard wing
crumpled inward, wrapping itself around the bomber's cockpit. Both pods of the
ship twisted out of alignment so the engines shot it off into an un-controlled
tumble through the simulator's dataspace.
"Green Three, did you copy that?"
Corran got no response. "Whistler, what hap-pened to Three?"
The R2 unit gave him a mournful tone.
Sithspawn. Corran flipped the shield control to equalize things fore and aft.
"Where is he?"
The image of a lone TIE fighter making a straf-ing run on the Korolev appeared
on Corran's mon-itor. The clumsy little craft skittered along over the
corvette's surface, easily dodging its weak return fire. That's seriously gutsy
for a TIE fighter. Corran smiled. Or arrogant, and time to make him pay for that
arrogance.
The Corellian brought his proton torpedo tar-geting program up and locked on to
the TIE. It tried to break the lock, but turbolaser fire from the Korolev boxed
it in. Corran's HUD went red and he triggered the torpedo. "Scratch one
eyeball."
The missile shot straight in at the fighter, but the pilot broke hard to port
and away, causing the mis-sile to overshoot the target. Nice flying! Corran
brought his X-wing over and started down to loop in behind the TIE, but as he
did so, the TIE vanished from his forward screen and reappeared in his aft arc.
Yanking the stick hard to the right and pulling it back, Corran wrestled the
X-wing up and to star-board, then inverted and rolled out to the left.
A laser shot jolted a tremor through the simula-tor's couch. Lucky thing I had
all shields aft! Corran reinforced them with energy from his lasers, then
evened them out fore and aft. Jinking the tighter right and left, he avoided
laser shots coming in from behind, but they all came in far closer than he