“Unidentified starfighter.” The harsh voice was starting to get angry. “I repeat, transmit your identification code or prepare to be detained.”
“Should have brought one of Han’s false ID codes with me,” Luke muttered to himself. “Artoo? Where’s that edge estimate?”
The droid beeped, and a diagram appeared on the computer scope. “That far, huh?” Luke murmured. “Well, nothing to do but go for it. Hang on.”
“Unidentified starfighter—”
The rest of the harangue was drowned out by the roar of the drive as Luke abruptly kicked the ship to full power. Almost lost in the noise was Artoo’s questioning trilling. “No, I want the deflector shields down,” Luke shouted back. “We need the extra speed.”
He didn’t add that if the Star Destroyer was really serious about vaporizing them, the presence or absence of shields wouldn’t matter much at this range, anyway. But Artoo probably already knew that.
But if the Imperials didn’t seem interested in vaporizing him out of hand, neither were they willing to just let him go. On the rear scope, he could see the Star Destroyer moving up and over the damaged freighter, trying to get clear of its interference.
Luke threw a quick look at the proximity indicator. He was still within tractor beam range, and at their current relative speeds would remain so for the next couple of minutes. What he needed was some way to distract or blind them …
“Artoo, I need a fast reprogramming on one of the proton torpedoes,” he called. “I want to drop it at zero delta-v, then have it turn around and head straight aft. No sensors or homing codes, either—I want it to go out cold. Can you do that?” There was an affirmative beep. “Good. As soon as it’s ready, give me a warning and then let it go.”
He turned his attention back to the rear scope, gave the X-wing’s course a slight readjustment. With its guidance sensors in their normal active state, the torpedo would be subject to the Star Destroyer’s impressive array of jamming equipment; going out cold like this would limit the Imperials’ response to trying to shoot it down with laser fire. The flip side of that, of course, was that if it wasn’t aimed very accurately, it would shoot right past its intended target without even a twitch.
Artoo beeped; and with a slight lurch, the torpedo was away. Luke watched it go, reaching out with the Force to give it a slight realignment tap—
And a second later, with a spectacular multiple flash of sympathetic detonations, the freighter blew up.
Luke looked at the proximity indicator, mentally crossing his fingers. Almost out of range now. If the debris from the freighter could screen off the tractor beam for a few more seconds, they should make it.
Artoo warbled a warning. Luke glanced at the translation, then at the long-range scope, and felt his stomach tighten. Artoo warbled again, more insistently this time. “I see it, Artoo,” Luke growled. It was, of course, the obvious tactic for the Imperials to employ. With the freighter no longer of any interest whatsoever, the Interdictor was changing position, swinging around to try to bring its huge gravity field projectors more fully to bear on the escaping X-wing. Luke watched as the cone-shaped field area angled across the scope …
“Hang on, Artoo,” he called; and, again too abruptly for the compensators to totally negate, he swung the X-wing into a right-angle turn, blasting laterally to their original course.
From behind him came a shocked screech. “Quiet, Artoo, I know what I’m doing,” he told the droid. Off to starboard now, the Star Destroyer was belatedly trying to shift its massive bulk, pivoting to track Luke’s maneuver … and for the first time since the beginning of the encounter, flashes of laser fire began lancing out.
Luke made a quick decision. Speed alone wasn’t going to save him now, and a near miss could end the contest right here and now. “Deflectors up, Artoo,” he instructed the droid, giving his full attention to his best evasive maneuvering. “Give me a balance between shield power and speed.”
Artoo beeped a response, and there was a slight drop in engine noise as the shields began drawing power. They were going slower, but so far the gamble seemed to be working. Caught off balance by Luke’s right-angle maneuver, the Interdictor was now rotating in the wrong direction, its gravity beam sweeping across Luke’s previous course instead of tracking the current one. Its commander was obviously trying to correct that mistake, but the sheer inertia of the ship’s massive gravity generators was on Luke’s side. If he could stay out of the Star Destroyer’s range for another few seconds, he’d be out of the beam and free to escape to hyperspace. “Stand by for lightspeed,” he told Artoo. “Don’t worry about direction—we can do a short hop and set things up more carefully once we’re clear.”
Artoo acknowledged—
And without warning, Luke was slammed hard against his harness.
The Star Destroyer’s tractor beam had them.
Artoo shrilled in dismay; but Luke had no time to comfort the droid now. His straight-line course had suddenly become an arc, a sort of pseudoorbit with the Star Destroyer playing the role of planet at its center. Unlike a true orbit, though, this one wasn’t stable, and as soon as the Imperials got another beam focused on him, the circle would quickly degenerate into a tight inward spiral. A spiral whose end point would be inside the Star Destroyer’s hangar bay.
He dropped the shields, throwing full power once again to the drive, knowing full well it was most likely a futile gesture. And he was right—for a second the beam seemed to falter, but it quickly caught back up with him. Such a relatively minor change in speed was too small to foul up the beam’s tracking equipment.
But if he could find a way to arrange a more major change in speed …
“Unidentified starfighter.” The harsh voice was back, unmistakably gloating this time. “You have no chance of escape; further efforts will merely damage your vehicle. You are ordered to power down and prepare to dock.”
Luke clenched his teeth. This was going to be dangerous, but he’d run out of choices. And he had heard stories of this working at least once before. Somewhere. “Artoo, we’re going to try something tricky,” he called to the droid. “On my signal, I want you to reverse-trigger the acceleration compensator—full power, and bypass the cutoffs if you have to.” Something warbled from the control panel, and he risked a quick look at the scope. His curving arc had brought him right to the edge of the Interdictor’s gravity projection. “Artoo: now.”
And with a scream of horribly stressed electronics, the X-wing came to a sudden dead stop.
There wasn’t even enough time for Luke to wonder what aboard his ship could possibly have made a scream like that before he was again thrown, even harder this time, against his harness. His thumbs, ready on the firing buttons, jabbed down hard, sending a pair of proton torpedoes lancing forward; simultaneously, he pulled the X-wing upward. The Star Destroyer’s tractor beam, tracking him along his path, had momentarily gotten lost by his sudden maneuver. If the computers guiding that lock would now be considerate enough to latch on to the proton torpedoes instead of him—
And suddenly the torpedoes were gone, leaving behind only a wisp of their exhaust trail to show that they’d been snatched off their original course. The gamble had succeeded; the Star Destroyer was now steadily pulling in the wrong target.
“We’re free!” he snapped to Artoo, throwing full power to the drive. “Get ready for lightspeed.”
The droid trilled something, but Luke had no time to look down at the computer scope for the translation. Realizing their error, and recognizing there was insufficient time to reestablish a tractor lock, the Imperials had apparently decided to go for a straight kill. All the Star Destroyer’s batteries seemed to open up at once, and Luke suddenly found himself trying to dodge a virtual sandstorm of laser fire. Forcing himself to relax, he let the Force flow through him, allowing it to guide his hands on the controls the way it did his lightsaber. The ship jumped once as a shot got through; in his peripheral vision he saw the tip of his dorsal/starboard laser cannon flash and disappear into a cloud of superheated plasma. A near miss burned past overhead; another, closer, scorched a line across the transparisteel canopy.