"Michael Stackpole "The Bacta War"" - читать интересную книгу автораI 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." 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 |
|
|