"Michael Stackpole "The Bacta War"" - читать интересную книгу автораstormtroopers, so they'll .withdraw when I'm gone."
Cort shook his head. "We have no weapons." The plaintive tone in his voice punched Gavin straight in the heart. "I never should have come here." He drew his blaster and pressed it into Cort's hands. "Take this, do what you can. I'll do something." Gavin ran to his X-wing and clambered up on a mole- miner to boost himself into the cockpit. Cort disconnected the refueling lines, then backed away and tossed Gavin a salute. Gavin returned it, then pulled on his helmet and fastened his restraining straps. He left his life-support gear on the floor of the cockpit, disdainful of the time it would take to pull it on. If 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 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. Gavin waited until he hit the outer fringes of range, then popped his weapons control over to proton torpedoes. He set them for single fire, then acquired the first Interceptor. His head-up display went from yellow to red and the R2's keen-ing wail filled the cockpit. He hit the trigger, shifted to the second target, got a tone, and fired a second torpedo. The first torpedo lanced up from the snowy landscape and smashed full into the Interceptor's cockpit. The subse-quent explosion shredded the Quadanium solar panels, sow-ing chaff and debris in the path of the other two TIEs. The second torpedo blasted into the left wing of its target, snap-ping it off, then exploded right behind the cockpit. The Inter-ceptor just disintegrated, its scattered pieces clipping the last Interceptor. That squint immediately heeled over in a roll and dove for the planet. Gavin tried to get a lock on it, but it fell too quickly. Slight adjustments to its course told him it was still under power, but he doubted the pilot could recover |
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