"What are you waiting for?" Mace's deadpan was flawless. "Flowers and a box of candy?" Depa sprang into the open, blade flashing faster than the eye could follow, making herself a standing target to draw fire that she splashed back at their attackers while the others scrambled to their feet. Nick sprinted past her, assault rifle chattering from the hip. Kar dived under the ankkox and rolled up and ran with Chalk cradled like a child in his massive arms. Fire from the surrounding trees tracked away from Depa, clawing for the bounding lor pelek.
Mace frowned. "That's about enough of that" he muttered as he reached into the Force to flip a bank of switches and key an initiation sequence that ganged the targeting servomotors for the ball turrets through the nav console, and gave him fire control.
Twin Taim & Bak quad laser cannons roared to life, hammering thunder into the jungle.
Trees exploded like bombs, filling the air with a cloud of flying splinters and wood dust that made an impromptu smoke screen to cover Kar and Chalk's run to the gunship with Depa sprinting hard behind them.
Nick appeared in the cockpit door behind Mace. "We're in!" "Good. The gunners?" "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 re-pulsorlifts. 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 gun-ships 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 doori" 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 can-nonfire. 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.
SHIP TO SHIP M
uscle 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.
"Urn. where do I sit?" "Monitor sensors. We should be seeing the HallecKs 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 gun-ship'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 o't'tx 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,'rtf 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. "Onetwothree,'owr!" 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.