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

pilot, leaving the ship to fly on with no intelligence at the controls.
Unfortunately for him, the Die-wing's wingman failed to realize his partner had
died. Flying in perfect formation, he began to level out, too. Ooryl's sideslip
dropped him square
on that fighter's aft. Before the pilot could begin to maneuver, Ooryl fired two
laser bursts at him. The first shredded the port nacelle, lacing it with fire
before ripping it apart. The second shot weakened the link between the remaining
nacelle and the cockpit. The engine ripped free, rocketing off toward Chorax's
sun, while the ball flew on out of control.
A small explosion wreathed the top of the cockpit with fire. A round plug shot
upward; then the pilot followed, rid-ing a command couch backed by a rocket
booster. It carried the pilot clear of the doomed ship and out into space. The
command couch gave the pilot marginal control over his fate-he was no longer
bound for deep space in a runaway fighter-but without a pickup in a ship within
a half hour, he'd suffocate or freeze to death.
Corran keyed his comm unit. "We have one bad guy EV."
Whistler's urgent hooting overrode any reply. "Got it, Whistler-TIEs inbound.
Ten, you're my wing again."
"Ten complying with your order."
Corran shook his head as he brought the X-wing up on its port stabilizer and
pulled back on the stick. Any other pilot in the unit who had picked off the
Die-wings would have been ecstatic, or at least would have had his excitement
show up in his voice, but not Ooryl. The only way to tell if he was excited or
ashamed about something was to listen to how he referred to himself. Gands felt
it the height of arrogance to refer to themselves with a personal pronoun unless
it was felt by Gand leadership that the Gand in question had done something so
great that every Gand would be aware of who was being referred to. As a result,
when Ooryl was happy he referred to himself as Ooryl, when he was chagrined as
Qrygg, and when he was really mortified as Gand, allowing himself to sink in
anonymity as his shame grew greater.
Ms ego is fust as strong as any of the rest of us-he fust has a better grip on
it.
Corran inverted his X-wing and leveled out for a head-to-head pass with the
TIEs. The lead TIE broke off, but the following one began a corkscrew maneuver
that jumped him around enough to make him hard to target. Corran snapped a
shot at him, then climbed up and off after the fleeing TIE. He's the lesser of
two evils.
The TIE jinked high and low, but did very little side to side maneuvering. He's
a rookie and has been training in at-mosphere. The TIE's octagonal solar panels
caused a lot of problems with maneuvering in atmosphere because of the
re-sistance they offered, though climbing and diving were no problem at all in a
TIE. In space there was no atmosphere to limit the TIE's maneuverability, but
the pilot he was chasing had not yet had a chance to learn that lesson.
And the lesson he's going to learn here is one of an en-tirely different nature.
Corran snap-rolled the X-wing up on the port S-foil. Whereas the up and down
juking had made the TIE difficult to hit before, Corran's roll left it trapped
between the X-wing's lasers. Corran's finger tightened up on the trigger,
spitting laser fire at his quarry.
The quad burst evaporated the port solar cell wing, let-ting the TIE trail
threadlike tendrils of congealing metal on its left side. Corran pushed his