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

stormtroopers, 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
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.
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