"Michael Stackpole "The Bacta War"" - читать интересную книгу автора

precede him up the stairs and had the other one follow, but the precaution
proved unneces-sary as they saw no one and nothing while they climbed up two
floors. They emerged from the stairwell on the hangar level. "Down around the
corner, to the right. Hurry, I hear the engines powering up."
This did not please Vorru, since he had intended to pilot the shuttle
himself-primarily because he was the only pilot he wanted to know his final
destination. The fact that the shuttle had already begun to power up meant
someone else had decided to use his means of escape, which created a huge set of
complications to be dealt with. Vorru's displeasure with the situation bled into
his words, causing his guards to sprint on ahead of him and around the corner to
the hangar.
A volley of scarlet blaster bolts sent the armored guards tumbling back down the
hallway. They slammed into the wall and rebounded, but were hit by a half dozen
more shots be-fore they landed on the floor. One laser carbine came spin-ning
across the floor to trip Vorru up. He crashed down hard, but bit back a curse
and thereby saved his own life.
From the ground he had a narrow view of the hangar and the cloaked forms of two
of Isard's Royal Guards walk-ing from the doorway over toward his shuttle, hard!
She's using my shuttle to escape. How dare she!
Vorru snatched up the blaster that had tripped him, then sprinted into the
hangar. At point-blank range he shot both of the men in scarlet armor in the
back, then dove for cover as the shuttle's laser cannons sprayed the hangar with
bolts. He felt the hot backblast of the shuttle's maneuvering jets as it kited
off, then emptied the blaster's power cell by pumping shot after shot into the
vanishing shuttle's shields.
Vorru tossed the useless blaster aside and rose from the floor. "She probably
thinks I'm stuck here, but I'd have been as stupid as she is if I only had one
bolt hole." He toed one of the Royal Guards, then flipped the body over and
pulled the blaster carbine it had been lying on from the floor. "I will survive
this, Ysanne Isard, if for no other reason than to make you pay for the trouble
you've given me."
As Corran's X-wing raced in on the Lusankya, the Super Star Destroyer began to
roll. "Lead, what do we do?"
"Stay on target. We may not be edge-on anymore, but we can hit the guns from
below. Commence weave, thirty sec-onds to firing position."
Corran rolled his fighter to starboard, opening up some room between himself and
Ooryl. He pulled back on his stick and nudged it to port, throwing the X-wing
into a spiral the pilots referred to as a weave. The fighter's movements were
not wholly regular, making it all but impossible for the Lusankya's gunners to
get a good shot at them. Of course, one good shot with those heavy turbolasers
and all the bacta in the galaxy couldn't help me.
The Lusankya's heavy weapons filled the void with countless bolts of green laser
energy. The shots spiraled out as crews tried in vain to target the incoming
snubfighters. Cor-ran studied the bases of the cones, mentally recording the
location of each battery. Those are what make this mountain of metal dangerous.
Destroy them and it's just a big box in space.
Despite the spiral, getting a target lock on the Lusankya was not hard at all.
Corran shifted his weapon's-control over to proton torpedoes and linked them for
dual-fire. The box at the center of his head-up display went red immediately and
Whistler sounded a constant tone indicating target lock. "Good, Whistler, good."