"Michael Stackpole "The Bacta War"" - читать интересную книгу автораquickly to starboard and dove, clearing the exploding TIE's blast radius.
"You still with me, Eight?" Nawara Yen's voice came back a little less calm than Tycho would have wanted. "With you, Seven, just barely." "New flight, Eight, then our second run on the Lusankya. You take lead." "As ordered, Seven." Tycho throttled back a bit to let Nawara Ven pass him, then he sideslipped to the left and took up a position in Nawara's port aft arc. Coming back off the first run on the Super Star Destroyer, the X-wings had boiled into the fourth TIE flight. Between them and the Twi'lek Chir'daki, the TIEs never had a chance. As they closed on the fifth flight, it lost unit cohesion as four of the pilots pulled away and headed back toward the incoming Interceptors. "Only eight out there, Nawara. Choose your target care-fully." "Got one in mind, Seven." Nawara's X-wing remained straight and level as it raced in toward the TIEs. Tycho began to wince. Head-to-head is usually a winner for us, but it burns some shields. In this environment, I'm not so sure that's wise. Nawara's X-wing snap-rolled up onto the starboard sta-bilizer foils, then fired four dual bursts of lasers at its target. The first two missed wide, as did the TIE's return fire, but the last two hit the TIE dead on. Two of the bolts sheered the starboard solar panel in half while the other two peeled back the flesh of the cockpit. The TIE started a crazy tumble through space, and suddenly Tycho found himself through the line of TIEs and clear to run on the Lusankya. "Lead, Seven and Eight are going in." "I copy, Seven." Coming in at the Lusankya from the front, he dropped his aiming reticle on the blackened portion of the ship's bow. Guttering flames indicated places where the ship was leaking atmosphere. Tycho picked a particularly bright torch as his aim point. He shifted over to missiles and imme-diately got a keening target lock tone from his astromech. Seconds later he got a red light from his telemetry transpon-der. "Double-lock for Seven. Two away." He pulled the trig-ger, sending two proton torpedoes streaking on jets of blue flame at the Lusankya. From all around the larger ship other blue lights suddenly ignited and began to cruise in toward the point Tycho had targeted. From the very beginning of their operations, Wedge and Tycho had agreed that the only way they could defeat the Lusankya was to overwhelm it with proton torpedoes and concussion missiles. The problem they had was that to do the job correctly they would require twelve or more X-wing squadrons-squadrons they didn't have. Taking a lesson from the conquest of Coruscant, they decided that freighters equipped with launchers and missiles would give them the launching platforms they needed. By slaving the freighters' missiles to the X-wing telemetry, they eliminated the need for target acquisition sensors on the freighters-the use of which would have immediately designated the freighters as targets for the Lusankya. To prevent anyone from figuring out their strategy, Wedge had Booster buy launchers, munitions, and sensor units from Talon Karrde. Reluctant to buy something and not use it, Booster hooked the sensors up to the station, noting that just lighting them up would be enough to make even the Lusankya think twice |
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