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

I go down out there, I'm dead anyway, so it doesn't much matter.
He cut in the repulsor-lift generators, retracted the land-ing gear, and
feathered the throttle forward. The X-wing headed toward the retracting metal
doorway built into the mouth of the cavern. Beyond it, Gavin saw a translucent
glowing wall of white that he realized was snow that had drifted in against the
door. He thumbed his fire-control to lasers and linked them for dual fire, then
hit the trigger. The snow barrier evaporated, so Gavin kicked his throttle
for-ward and shot out into the Halanit sky.
Keeping the X-wing low enough to skim the drifts, he headed out in a long loop
through a valley that curved around to the north. Three kilometers out from the
cavern he rolled up on the starboard S-foil and began to climb. As his sensors
began to pick up Imp fighters, he reached up and flipped the switch that brought
his S-foils into attack position and locked them.
A glance at his fuel indicator told him he had ten minutes for fighting before
he made his run out of the system. Halanit itself created a fairly insignificant
gravity shadow in hyper-space-he needed to get away from the gas giant around
which it orbited. No problem-ten minutes is more than enough time to make the
Imps angry enough to chase me.
Jawaswag beeped at him and Gavin smiled. "You're right, the Imps are flying in
formation. They want to make this easy. Acquire One, Two, and Three." With the
sensor signature of each locked into his fire-control computer, Gavin kept his
fighter on the deck and closed to proton torpedo range. That course had him
flying directly at the rising col-umn of smoke and steam coming from the holed
canopy.
"Jawaswag get me a sensor record of all this, visual and everything."
The droid hooted his assent.
back out of the way of a green laser bolt. More of them played out in a line
across the walkway, chasing down and burning the legs from a running man. The
man's screams were swallowed by the whine of a TIE Interceptor as it streaked
past and he rolled from the walkway to fall to obliv-ion.
"Now, go!" Gavin's shout carried above the screeching of the other Interceptors
strafing the chasm. Gavin started running, letting his long legs devour the
distance. He let every ounce of panic he felt fuel his run, and he knew he was
run-ning faster than he ever had before. His lungs burned and his breath
steamed, but the echoed whines of Interceptor engines wouldn't let him stop
until he reached the far side and the safety of the tunneled corridor.
Cort arrived two steps after he did, adrenaline having lent him speed enough to
almost match the taller man's pace. Cort moved into the lead, cutting and
weaving through corri-dors and down ramps until they came out into a huge
subter-ranean cavern with a huge steaming lake, two bacta-storage cylinders, a
variety of old Zenomach and other tunneling de-vices, and Gavin's X-wing.
His fighter had been painted gold, with light red-orange crescents creating a
scalelike pattern. Near the front of the fighter, a mouth had been painted with
large, white, dagger-like teeth; the proton torpedo launching ports had become
the pupils of eyes. When asked how he wanted his X-wing decorated, he'd chosen
to make it over in the image of a krayt dragon, the most fearsome predator on
all of Tatooine.
He turned back to Cort. "Look, this is my fault. They're here after me. I'll
take off and lead them in a chase away from here. Get your people into
defensible positions and hold out. These tunnels will make it tough on