“The tied-up guys?” The younger man shrugged. “They’re out.”
Mace nodded. “Hang on.”
This was the only warning they got before the gunship leaped straight up, rising like a volcano bomb on screaming overdriven repulsorlifts. Cannonfire from the other two gunships blasted the ground where it had been and tracked upward to pound the gunship sideways, dents popping up like boils in the side armor.
Mace slewed the gunship through a rising turn, but the other gunships had him bracketed, closing in from either side. Through the roar of impacts and shrieking near-misses, he heard Nick shouting, “The door! Close the door!”
He twisted to look over his shoulder. He saw Depa on her feet in the middle of the troop bay, swaying, eyes squeezed shut as though the battle had brought on one of her headaches. Nick huddled in the doorway, arms around his head; Kar had Chalk tucked into a corner, and he crouched in front of her, shields raised to catch stray bolts that shot in through the open bay door and zinged in hot splintering ricochets around the compartment.
Mace said, “Depa.”
Her eyes opened.
His lightsaber leaped from its pocket within his vest and shot toward her like a bullet.
Her empty hand met it in midair; her pain-glazed eyes lost focus. He felt her in the Force: a sinking surrender like an exhausted swimmer drowning in a rising tide.
Slipping into Vaapad.
Eyes closed once more, she gave one slight nod.
Mace keyed a sequence on the pilot console. The open door stayed open. The troop door on the opposite side dropped open as well.
Particle beams streaked into the troop bay.
Both blades flashed.
The gunships outside bucked under the impact of their own cannonfire. On one, a turbojet engine blasted loose of its mount and tumbled away, bouncing down the mountainside trailing smoke and white-hot shreds of its cowling, and the gunship spun half out of control. The other gunship took its cannon blasts directly in the cockpit.
The transparisteel windscreen of a Sienar Turbostorm was thick and very durable; most kinds of shrapnel or fragments wouldn’t scratch it. Even heavy-caliber bullets would leave only dents. A quad laser bolt could make a hole. One did.
The next five went through that hole.
The gunship spiralled into the jungle, its cockpit full of shredded flesh.
Depa opened her eyes.
They smoked with darkness.
Chapter 19: Ship to Ship
Muscle bunched along Mace’s jaw as he forced himself to turn away and focus on his flying. A glance at the short-range sensors showed him gunships all over the place: the computer counted fifty-three in the zone of engagement, with more curving toward them over the horizon. He keyed the troop bay doors shut and cut in the turbojets. “Nick. Take nav.”
“Sure. Er—yes, sir.” Nick glanced at the empty sockets left behind by the ejected chairs. “Um… where do I sit?”
“Monitor sensors. We should be seeing the Halleck’s landers any second. Kar! Chalk! The emergency repulsor-packs are next to the turret hatches. You have thirty seconds.”
Nick wedged his feet under the chair-socket struts and gripped the nav console’s split-yoke controls, squinting against the stiffening wind that whistled through the empty gap in front of him. The gunship’s aerodynamics shaped the wind blast past the cockpit instead of into it, but even the minimal back-eddy leakage was enough to stagger him. His eyes lit up as he took in the array of screens on the console—especially the twin screens with targeting reticules displayed at their centers.
“Hey, what’s this do?” He twisted the split-yoke in opposite directions, and the images on the screens spun wildly to match.
“Don’t touch those.”
Nick hit the thumb switches on both controllers. The screens filled with parallel bursts of cannonfire as the quad lasers roared. “Yow! Fire control? For me? Oh, General, you shouldn’t have!”
“I realize that.”
“It’s not even my name-day…”
“Nick.”
“Yeah, I know: sensors.”
“And—”
“—shut up, Nick. Yeah, whatever. Hrr.” The wind whipped wisps of breath-fog from his mouth. “Starting to get cold in here. Out here. Are we inside or outside?”
“We’re approaching seven thousand meters. Check those sensors: red hits are friendlies, blue are hostiles.”
“Well, shee,” Nick said. “What are you so worried about, then? There’s like fifty-some friendlies already here, and another hundred and ninety-two on the way—I mean, they’re like everywhere—and there are only thirteen hostiles, and the friendlies are all over them—whoa. Now there are twelve… oh, wait. I get it. Whoops.”
“Whoops is one word for it.”
“Sorry. I’m a little dopey.”
“Yes.”
“Uh—there’s a flight of our friendlies trying right now to climb our butts—whoa, what’s that?” A lock-on alert flashed; the accompanying buzzer was half-buried in the wind noise. “They lit us up! Missiles incoming! Six count, closing, dead astern!”
“Back-trace the missile lock and feed it to the computers for counter-fire.”
“Great idea! I’ll get right on that first thing as soon as I graduate from gunnery school!”
“Fine then,” Mace said through his teeth. “You said you can shoot. Let’s see it.”
“Woo-hoo! Now you’re talking!” The ball-turrets rotated and the quads blazed to life; the gunship was now climbing straight up, shrieking for space like the starship it once had been. “Yes indeed! Come and get it!” One of the missiles intersected a stream of cannon bolts and detonated in a burst of black smoke and white fire. “How was that?”
“Not bad,” Mace said. “Try not to shoot our tail off.”
“Some people are never satisfied—”
“Nick. The other five.”
“Yeah, yeah. If you wanna be that way about it—” He flipped the arming levers on all four aft missile-tubes. “Onetwothreefour!” he shouted, triggering them in order, and the gunship bucked as a staggered flight of four concussion missiles kicked to life and spun twisting white ropes of rocket-smoke down to meet the five missiles behind.
The first impact-burst drew the next missile, and the next, expanding into an immense fireball fed by all nine.
“Shee,” Nick snorted disgustedly. “That was hardly any fun at all.”
“It’s not supposed to be fun. Save those missiles.”
“What for?”
“Depa!” Mace called, shouting over the wind shriek. “Are you ready?”
She appeared in the doorway, leaning on it for support as though the gunship’s artificial gravity were too strong for her. “Ready enough,” she said. “I can fight. I can always fight. Take your blade.”
Mace shook his head. “You’ll need it,” he said, and cut all power to the gunship’s engines.
Its momentum kept it climbing, but slowing now with a lazy twisting barrel-roll as the pursuing ships shot past. It hung poised at its apex for a stretching instant.
The pursuers peeled away from each other in matching ellipses, two of them curving down to dive toward them once again while the third held back for high cover.
Mace worked the controls grimly to hold the ship nose-up as it slid backward toward the ground. “Right or left?”
Depa said, “Left,” and then she dived straight up into the sky through the cockpit’s open front, tucking into a ball to tumble through the falling gunship’s slipstream turbulence.
“Yow!” Nick said. “Why doesn’t somebody warn me about this stuff?”
“Lock cannons on the right-hand ship. Continuous fire. No missiles.”
“I’m on it.” The right side quad turret tracked briefly, then roared a chain of energy into the clouds.
Mace twisted the control yoke to angle the falling gunship’s nose to the right so that the portside turret could join the fun, then reignited the repulsorlif
ts at full power and kicked on the turbojets’ afterburners. “Hang on.”
“I’m on that too.”
The ship jounced and fought the controls, and the gunship diving toward it suddenly bloomed with fire that pounded them like giant particle-beam fists. Mace got a glimpse of Depa, straightening her tumble into feet-first plummet with both lightsabers flaming at full extension above her head.
Mace slammed the control yoke sideways and the gunship shrieked into a rising corkscrew that lit up stress-warning indicators all over his console; it got them out from under the rain of cannonfire, but their targeting computers couldn’t process the constantly changing vectors, and their own fire went wild as well. Nick looked over the indicators and his eyes went huge. “Hey, is this bucket designed to do this?”
“I hope not,” Mace said through his teeth as he fought the controls. “Put fire back on that ship.”
“Who, me? The computer’s not fast enough—”
“The computer,” said Mace, “can’t use the Force.”
“Uh, yeah. Okay. Sure.”
Just before he overtook them, Mace saw the left-hand gunship spearing downward against the thrust of reversed engines, twisting into a spiral evasive action to avoid colliding with Depa—
And he felt the surge in the Force that drove her directly into its path.
Her blades took it just below the windscreen and drove in to the handgrips, and the rushing airstream around the gunship’s nose flipped her over and whipped her up across the cockpit, dragging her blades through the transparisteel to slice free a huge gaping arc.
“Woo!” Nick shouted from beside him. “Love them easy-openin’ cans!”
“Kar! Chalk! Time to go!”
The Korun girl climbed into the cockpit between Mace and Nick; she looked pale and in pain, but still fierce. The lor pelek shouldered in behind her. They both wore emergency repulsor-packs strapped across their backs. “You know how these work?”
Chalk nodded silently in reply; Vastor slapped the graphic instruction card sewn onto his harness and snarled at him. I can read.
“Um, are we bailing out?” Nick said. “Because, y’know, somebody forgot to get me one of those—”
“Nick.”
“What?”
“Shoot.”
“Right. Right. Sorry. Here, watch this.” Nick let the port turret go silent, while the starboard quad clawed at the militia ship; the battered ship jinked aside to evade the pounding—directly into a stream of fresh fire from the port turret. “See? That’s shooting—”
“With real shooting,” Chalk told him, “wouldn’t be shooting back, him.”
“Shee. What does it take to please you people?”
Mace nodded to Vastor and Chalk. “Ready?”
Without waiting for an answer he cut power to the turbojets and flicked the repulsorlifts into reverse; overstressed metal squealed in the gunship’s every joint as it blasted down toward stall speed. Mace wrenched the yoke and flipped the gunship upside down. Kar Vastor wrapped one arm around Chalk’s shoulders and with the other grabbed the empty rim of the windscreen gap, then pulled them both smoothly out onto the roof. With one explosive kick to clear the gunship’s artificial gravity, he and Chalk fell away, tumbling toward the jungle thousands of meters below.
“On second thought,” Nick said, “I guess I don’t mind staying with the ship…”
Hammers pounded the gunship into a bucking spin as the militia ship that had stayed back on high cover finally joined the dogfight, and the one they had left behind rose beneath them. Mace worked the controls savagely, whirling the gunship through evasive gyrations more suitable for a starfighter than for an antique blastboat; the port turbojet took a pair of cannon-blasts, and Mace’s next whirl proved too much for its damaged mounting. It tore free in a scream of tortured metal. The ship roared through an uncontrolled spin.
“Take it easy!” Nick shouted.
Mace muttered, “I don’t do easy.”
“What?”
“I said, shoot back!”
“How? I can’t even see them!”
“You don’t have to,” Mace said as he pulled the crippled gunship into another corkscrew climb, trailing smoke and shredded durasteel. “Forget about aiming. Just decide.”
“Decide what?”
Mace reached into the Force and sent a wave of calm down his connection with Nick. “Don’t aim,” he said. “Decide what you want to hit. Fire where you know it is about to be.”
Nick frowned thoughtfully. He turned deliberately away from his screens, and looked Mace in the eye. Bemusedly, absently, casually, he nodded, sighed, and triggered the gunship’s cannons.
He was still wearing that same thoughtful frown when his cannon blasts shattered the starboard turret of the gunship below, then penetrated the inner hatch and blew the ship in half.
He said, “Wow.” His calm vanished as quickly as it had come. “I mean, wow! Did you see that?”
Mace kicked the limping gunship out of its climb and into a steep power-dive away from the last one. Slowed by their missing turbojet, they swiftly lost their lead as it dived to pursue them, and cannonfire raked their stern. Mace worked the repulsorlifts madly, making the ship jerk, leap, and spring in random directions like a monkey-lizard on raw thyssel. Fire from above pounded them, but Mace’s wild maneuvers were preventing it from laying in the multiple precision hits needed to blast through the Turbostorm’s heavy armor.
The lock-on alert screamed, and Nick’s voice almost matched it. “Missiles incoming!”
Mace didn’t even bother to look. “Take care of them.”
The perfect confidence in his tone steadied Nick instantly. He flashed his brilliant grin. “Don’t mind if I do…”
As the turrets rotated to the rear and roared back to life, Mace scanned the jungle toward which his limping ship dived. It was hard to get a sense of scale—he might have been only hundreds of meters above it, or as many dozens of kilometers. Then the swarming gunmetal specks of the balance of the militia fleet that swarmed above the canopy snapped the scene into perspective.
There—a thousand meters below, maybe more, the distress strobes flashed on the repulsor-packs that Kar and Chalk wore. A single gunship streaked to intercept them, then slowed. And stopped, hovering.
And the minuscule figures of Chalk and Kar landed lightly on its roof.
A moment later its nose came up, angling straight for him. Mace nodded to himself and let the Force guide his dive into an interception course. He checked his screens. “Missiles?”
“Handled.” Nick’s tone was so like the Jedi Master’s that it might have been deliberate mockery.
Mace didn’t mind. “There won’t be more. He won’t endanger that friend of his coming at us.”
“Um, shouldn’t we endanger that friend of his?”
“No need.”
“How come?”
“That’s not his friend.”
Turret quads on the rising gunship blazed to life, and Mace gave the repulsorlifts a kick that jerked the Turbostorm a dozen meters above the line of dive so that the twin streams of particle-beam packets passed harmlessly beneath him to take the pursuing gunship full in the cockpit.
The explosion was impressive.
The rear two-thirds of the gunship trailed smoke on its way down to the jungle. The front third was the smoke the rear two-thirds trailed.
“That,” said Mace Windu, “was shooting.”
Nick made a face. “Oh, sure. Chalk. I told you she can handle the heavy stuff. But you should see her in a gun fight. Pathetic. Just pathetic.”
“Get Depa’s transponder code off your widescan, then get her on comm. We need to coordinate our next move.”
“I’m just glad to hear you have a next move.”
“How many friendlies do you count?”
“Scan count on the droid starfighters… Woo. Sure you really want to know?”
“Nick.”
“Two hundred twenty-eight.�
�
“Good.”
“Good? Good?”
“To the lower left of your widescan, you’ll find a joystick the size of your thumb. That’s your designator control. Start designating droid starfighters as targets for our missiles. One missile per starfighter, and don’t save any. Do not—repeat: DO NOT—light them up until I give the order. And do not designate anything other than a droid starfighter.”
“Not even, say, one of those sixty-seven gunships in our zone of engagement?” Nick pointed to the swarm of “friendlies” in a different part of the screen. “Because they seem to be taking a little interest in us, if you know what I mean. They are coming at us. In a hurry.”
“Sixty-seven? How many are on intercept vectors?”
“Was I not clear on that? Maybe I should have said: By the way, have I mentioned that we’re about to get our butts shot off?”
“How many?”
Nick gave a weak, half-hysterical giggle. “All of them.”
Mace Windu said, “Perfect.”
The regimental commander was designated CRC-09/571. Haruun Kal was his third action in combat, and his first as regimental commander. At Geonosis, he had taken part as a battalion commander in the airborne infantry; his group had led the frontal assault on the Trade Federation battle globes. He had served, again as battalion commander, at the disastrous skirmish on Teyr. On board the Halleck, as the days awaiting action stretched toward weeks, he had drilled his brother troopers relentlessly, sharpening their considerable skills to the highest perfection that could be achieved, absent blooding his regiment in actual combat.
There had been blooding enough today, as a hornet cloud of droid starfighters swirled around his tiny fleet.
He had watched a third of his regiment die.
Some of the landers had been disabled rather than instantly destroyed, and they had been able to eject survivors: meteor swarms of space-armored troopers floating into low orbit, repulsorpacks sparking as they slowed and angled their minutes-long fall toward Haruun Kal’s atmosphere. The surviving landers had not been able to keep all the droid starfighters engaged; there were plenty of starfighters left over to slaughter the men, as well.
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