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

stabilized, then the distance started to decrease. The rate of change
accelerated, and when the range hit three kilometers, Corran hauled back on his
stick. He tightened his loop considerably, then punched his throttle forward and
headed straight for her.
Her hastily snapped shots splashed harmlessly over his forward shields. Corran
fired back, catching her squint on the port wing. He inverted and dove, then
inverted again and cruised out into a long loop that took him past Thyferra's
cloudy face. "How badly is she hit, Whistler?"
The droid graphed performance statistics on the main monitor. The Interceptor
had suffered a 5 percent reduction in speed, which still left it faster than the
X-wing, but not by that much. There also appeared to be a reduction in
maneu-verability, but not enough to cripple her performance. This is going to
take a while.
"Nine, are you chasing Erisi?"
"Yes, Seven."
"Finish her fast."
"You need help?"
"Ten is handling things, but the shuttle is running. It can clear to lightspeed
if we don't stop it."
"I copy, Seven. I'm on it." He glanced at his monitor. "Whistler, give me range
to the freighters who were tied to my torpedo telemetry."
The droid whistled mournfully. "No, it's okay that they're all out of range. I
didn't want them wasting any torps."
Just to be on the safe side, he hit the switch that turned the telemetry
transponder off, then shifted his weapon's-con-trol over to proton torpedoes.
Coming about, he picked Erisi up and started after her again. He nudged his nose
up and to port, getting a stuttered beeping from Whistler as the droid tried to
get a firing solution for the Interceptor. The tone went constant as the reticle
went red.
Corran hit the trigger and launched both torpedoes at Erisi. His last two proton
torpedoes streaked out at her and she immediately began maneuvering to avoid
them.
/ have thirty seconds to kill her. Corran switched back to lasers, then drained
energy from his aft shield and fed it into his engines. That kicked his speed up
to better them that of an unhurt Interceptor, allowing him to close the gap
between their ships fast.
As the missiles approached her Interceptor, Erisi rolled to port and broke hard
toward Thyferra's largest moon. The missiles overshot where she had been, then
turned and started in pursuit again. She kept her ship pointed straight at the
bone white moon and as the torpedoes closed with her again, she rolled to port
and pulled her fighter into a glide path that followed the rough terrain of the
lunar surface.
One torpedo, unable to fight inertia and lunar gravity both, slammed into the
moon and exploded. The second sailed through the gout of lunar dust and started
closing with the Interceptor. Erisi bounced her squint up and over a ridge-line
and back down again, interposing it between her and the torpedo.
The ridge shielded her from the torpedo's blast.
It also blinded her aft sensors to Corran's presence.
As Erisi pulled her squint up to climb away from the moon's surface, Corran came
up over the ridge and pounced. Pairs of scarlet bolts burned into the squint,