Isard's Revenge Page 12

  Direption pulled its nose up and began to make a run deeper into the system. Moonshadow and Swift Liberty both fired full salvos at it and collapsed both the aft and starboard shields. Outgunned and already weakened, Direption didn’t stand a chance of escaping. Despite its troubles, it could still inflict a great deal of damage, so Freedom maneuvered into position to slag it if necessary.

  Direption’s running lights blinked on and off four times in rapid succession, then stayed off. “Control, this is Rogue Leader. What is the status up there?”

  “Standing by, Rogue Leader. Looks like Direption’s commander may be reasonable. New orders just flashed for you, Rogue Lead. Freedom is deploying troop carriers and assault shuttles. Head to your assigned ground targets. May the Force be with you.”

  Corran nodded and punched up his target zone. “Three Flight copies, Lead. We’re on blue sector.” He switched over to the flight’s tactical frequency. “We’re clear to blue sector. Think you can stay with us, this time, Eleven?”

  Asyr answered in a voice that wasn’t quite as subdued as Corran wanted to hear. “I copy, Nine. I’ll work on it.”

  “Stay sharp down there. We don’t know what they have, but it could be decidedly nasty.” Corran rolled out to port and started the atmospheric insertion. He felt a slight bump as they entered Liinade III’s atmosphere and he had to keep his hand steady on the controls. Despite the more difficult flying, he felt a bit of tension flow from him. At least we can breathe this atmosphere, which makes survival here more likely than out in space.

  As the X-wing broke through cloud cover he saw a lush green planet spread out before him. Three Flight was coming in over the southern continent, which featured a prominent spine of mountains dusted with snow running up the west side. The target for Three Flight was a hydroelectric powerplant that supplied most of the electricity for the large city on the plains to the east of the mountains. The mission goal was for the X-wings to eliminate any fighter cover around the powerplant and suppress opposition as a shuttle full of commandos came in and secured the place.

  Corran caught the flash of sunlight off a slender ribbon of water running through a canyon and dropped down toward it. “This should be the outflow from the dam, right, Whistler?” White water churned through the canyon and a small flotilla of boats made its way down through the perilous watercourse.

  They have to be freezing down there—there’s snow on the ground. What some folks think of as fun I just don’t understand. He shook his head, then keyed his comm unit. “Target is two klicks out. Ten, with me. Eleven and Twelve, fly high cover.”

  Corran brought his fighter down on the deck and Ooryl’s X-wing came in behind him. Corran kicked the X-wing up on its starboard S-foil and tugged back on the stick to curve to the right, then rolled back to port and sailed around to the left. The inertial compensator’s adjustment allowed him to feel the twists and turns he put the fighter through and just for a second he felt the absolute joy and freedom flying had always given him.

  Then he came around a bend and saw the dam.

  In the simulations they’d run on this mission the dam had always been tall, but seeing the solid edifice of ferrocrete, with spots where moss had grown along seep lines, and seeing the great rush of water pouring from the sluice-gates, that he’d not expected. Evergreen trees and bushes grew thickly through the riparian area along the riverbanks, but thinned a bit up on the hillsides in the canyon. Everything, save the twin Atgar 1.4 FD P-tower units built atop the dam, looked peaceful and sedate.

  The antivehicular artillery units, with a laser cannon centered in a round dish, looked decidedly hostile, but they came as no surprise. A single stormtrooper crewed each weapon and the Rogues had known about them going in. Corran tugged back on his stick a bit and ran his throttle down as he dropped the aiming reticle over the outline of the leftmost weapon. “I’ve got port. Ten, you take starboard.”

  “As ordered, Nine.”

  With the flick of a thumb Corran shunted power from his rear shields to his forward ones. Staggered red bolts from the P-tower hissed as they splashed harmlessly over his reinforced shields. Corran stroked his trigger once, sending a quad burst of laserfire to burn through the P-tower, but even before it exploded, an overwhelming sense of dread pounded him.

  Unthinking, he jerked the X-wing stick to the left and saw a small projectile sizzle past him from behind at an angle in from the right. It flew on and impacted to the left of the dam. The warhead exploded, spraying dirty snow and launching a tall evergreen into the air. Other trees sagged and fell on the forested hillside.

  “Abort, they’ve got missiles. Ten, pull out.”

  Before Corran could punch the throttle forward, something hit his low port stabilizer and detonated. Whistler’s high-pitched shrilling matched the warning buzzers in the cockpit. Corran saw a whole bank of red lights start to burn amid curls of smoke. Power level indicators showed a quarter of the X-wing’s power lost immediately, and the fighter’s nose began to swing around to the right.

  Corran stomped on the left rudder to stop the flat spin, then dove toward the river to pick up some airspeed. Pulling back on the stick, he started a climb, then inverted and flew toward the small fire the other missile had started. Rolling again, he righted his craft and carried it over the canyon’s ridge.

  “Ten, I’ve been hit. I’ve lost port-two engine.”

  “Nine, that S-foil is gone.”

  “What was it?”

  “Ooryl doesn’t know. Ground-launched and didn’t scan.”

  Corran nodded. “Probably stormies with Merr-Sonn PLX-2Ms.”

  “A chip shouldn’t have taken off an S-foil. Shouldn’t have gotten through your shields.”

  “I shifted power forward and they caught me in an engine.” Another warning light started to burn on his command console. “Ten, I’m losing engine coolant and will lose my other engines if I don’t do something soon. I’ve got to set down. You’ve got the flight. Warn Control about the chips here. There must be something else of value here, too, otherwise they wouldn’t have guarded it that way.”

  “I copy. We’ll fly cover for you until they pull you out.”

  “No, get out of here, all of you. They might have other weapons to take an X-wing down. Leave, but promise me you’ll be back with help.”

  “As fast as Ooryl is able.” The faint clicking of the Gand’s mandibles came through the comm channel. “May the Force be with you.”

  “Thanks, I’m going to need it. Nine out.”

  Corran rolled the X-wing once to give himself a quick look at the terrain below, then pushed his fighter over another ridge about three kilometers away from the dam. He would have liked to have gotten further away, but the heat indicators on his engines were spiking enough that the computer reported the numbers in blinking red numbers.

  Gotta get down now. “Hang on, Whistler, this isn’t going to be much fun.”

  He picked a spot uphill of a rocky outcropping and clipped off a series of laser shots at it. The red bolts scythed through the underbrush, melted snow, and exploded venerable evergreens. Smoke from a small fire obscured the landing zone, but he nosed the craft toward it nonetheless. He shifted power into his repulsorlift coils, lowered the landing gear, and slowly, awkwardly settled the fighter into place. The aft port landing gear ended up planted on the stump of a tree, making the craft list heavily to starboard, but Corran shut down the engines rather than risk a total meltdown to shift the X-wing to another position.

  A chill settled over Corran as he hit the release on his restraining straps. “Think it’s over for this fighter, Whistler? We’ve seen a lot of action together.”

  The droid mewed weakly.

  Corran cracked the cockpit canopy, then swung himself out and under the cockpit lip. He moved up to the fuselage and crouched on the back end of the canopy. The chip missile’s blast had peppered the left side of the fighter with engine shrapnel and Whistler had caught a chunk in his left shoulder joint. Corra
n reached out to touch it, but Whistler squawked sharply at him.

  “Okay, okay, I won’t touch it. No, I don’t want to do more damage.” He shook his head slowly and felt his stomach begin to knot up. “I’ll get you out of here somehow, Whistler. Not a problem.”

  The R2 unit piped bravely.

  “Thanks.” Corran returned to the cockpit and pulled the small survival kit from the compartment beneath his seat. He opened it and transferred a couple of spare powerpacks for his blaster to the gunbelt pouch over his right hip. He stuffed some survival ration bars into his green flight suit’s pockets, though he thought of them as fairly lethal weapons. If only I could get stormies to eat them.

  He looked up and was going to share that thought with Whistler, but he saw the little droid’s lights blinking painfully slowly. His throat immediately thickened.

  “I will get you out of here, my friend.” Corran brandished the lightsaber he pulled from the survival kit. “We’ll teach these Imp-wannabes that by grounding me they haven’t made me switch from hunter to hunted, just switched the direction I’ll be coming at them from.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  General Wedge Antilles leveled his X-wing out and glanced at the range indicator to his target. Fifty kilometers, we’ll be on it in no time. I wonder what they’ve got waiting for us there.

  He punched up the flight’s tactical channel. “Okay, Rogues, Three Flight ran into trouble in blue sector. Ground fire damaged one. They think it was from chip missiles, so keep your shields strong and eyes open.”

  The rest of the flight acknowledged his message, then followed Wedge down onto the deck for the final run at the Valleyport spaceport facility. Located in a river valley to the east of the mountains where Corran had gone down, Valleyport was by no means the largest city on the continent. In fact, it was relatively small, but it sat astride the main ground transportation route through the mountains and likewise was a communications nexus. The spaceport facility, while underutilized by local traffic, was more than sufficient for bringing in ground troops who would take the planet.

  Below him the landscape changed. Forests gave way to vast tracts of treeless land covered by a thin blanket of snow that let the stubble of harvested grain stalks poke up through it. Houses dotted the landscape and, since it was midmorning, some people were out and about in the fields, directing the droids tending to livestock. Wedge knew that any of them could use a comlink to alert Valleyport officials that fighters were incoming, but by the time the report got through, the Rogues would be over their target.

  The city of Valleyport came into view, obscured by a brown haze. A few tall buildings rose above the haze, but most sprawled within it. The haze covered both sides of the river and spread out onto the plains above. The spaceport’s towers showed up clearly on the northern side of the river, against a mountain backdrop toward the west. Wedge let his X-wing sideslip to port, then flashed across the river and set his lasers for single fire.

  Already E-webs and a couple of P-towers started filling the early morning air with sizzling bolts of coherent light, but tracking an X-wing running in at full throttle proved more difficult than the gunners would have liked. A stray bolt hissed against Wedge’s shields and in return he clipped off a cycle of four shots—one from each of the X-wing’s laser cannons—then pulled his fighter’s nose off onto another target.

  His laserfire tracked bolts across icy ferrocrete decking and up the sides of buildings. Misses left little black stains centered on a guttering flame. Hits blew chunks out of the enemy’s mounted blasters and antivehicular weapons. One bolt caught a stormtrooper in the chest, ablating his armor away in an eyeblink and continuing on unabated. The man’s burning corpse slammed into a wall, then rebounded and pitched forward over the balcony railing he had tried to take cover behind.

  “Lead, I’m getting fire from the west, coming from within those hangars.”

  “On it, Hobbie.” Wedge hit some right rudder and chopped back his throttle, shortening a turn to port. A line of large hangars formed the western perimeter of the spaceport and the red-gold bolts from a pair of heavy laser cannons sprayed out at the X-wings. Seeing a line of fire begin to track his fighter, Wedge goosed the throttle back to full and began a port spiral to get some altitude.

  Out of the hangars trotted a quartet of AT-ATs, the Imperial walker units that had wrought so much havoc at Hoth. They moved quickly, not looking as cumbersome and slow in the light snow as they had on Hoth’s icefields. Back then we were in airspeeders—undergunned and overmatched. A smile slowly twisted his lips. Not the case this time.

  “On them, Rogues. The groundpounders are incoming and we need to get rid of the walkers. Be careful.”

  “Starting a run on the first one.” Lyyr Zatoq, the Quarren, rolled her X-wing out to port, then let it swoop down in a glide that brought it in on a diagonal slashing course on the last of the walkers. The machine’s head slowly swung to the left to try to track her fighter, but she blasted away at it with her lasers at point-blank range, then climbed hard and pulled out to the left, too fast and too tight for the walker to target her.

  Hobbie, her wingman, came in on a crossing path that gave him a clean shot at the tail. Lyyr’s shots had slagged armor on the mechanical beast’s flank, but hadn’t done any serious damage. Hobbie’s attack ran from below the AT-AT’s body on up the back, and at least one shot holed the fuel tank. Flaming fluid streamed down like a tail, then an explosion ripped the walker’s back end open. The blast pitched the walker up into the air and through a somersault that landed it on its back. The massive legs telescoped down into the body, then tore free. The walker’s armored head slammed into the snow-covered ground, cracking armor plates, and started leaking smoke.

  Tycho growled over the comm channel. “Running on the next one. Decap shot.”

  Wedge nodded. “On your tail.”

  Tycho brought his X-wing down in a dive, then leveled out ten meters. Coming in at shoulder height on the walker, Tycho banked right to run from tail toward the head, then snaprolled his ship level and hit right rudder. The X-wing’s tail skidded toward the left, bringing its nose in line with the walker. Tycho’s first cycle of shots vaporized armor on the walker’s body, but the second quartet blasted away at the joint of the flexible neck and the body itself.

  Wedge marveled at Tycho’s soft hand on the X-wing’s stick. He followed him into the dive, but rolled out right and cut his throttle back. The walker had begun to turn to its right, so Wedge’s roll put him on a direct line with the AT-AT’s head. He nudged the aiming reticle over the walker’s head and pulled the trigger.

  A stuttered quartet of bolts hit the walker. Two glanced off, leaving long scars on its forehead, but the other two pierced the transparisteel viewports on the pilot’s compartment. Fire exploded back out, and the walker slowly started to sag forward. Its chin slammed into the ground, then the body’s weight snapped its neck.

  “Easier ways to decap it, Wedge.”

  Wedge throttled up and banked starboard into a climb. “Sorry, didn’t have time to consult with Ewoks to find out how they’d handle the situation.” He glanced down at his chronometer. “No time to be fancy on the other two, just swarm them.”

  Coming back in and down, Wedge kept his X-wing very low, cruising in at a sharp angle. Tipping his fighter up onto its port S-foil, he banked in toward the walker and switched over to dual fire. One double burst missed, but the second caught the walker in the hip. Tycho’s shots on the same one hit the body above the drive motor, then the two of them climbed out, pulled a half-loop, inverted, and dove back down at their target.

  “Port rear leg is scraping the ferrocrete, Two.”

  “I caught that, Lead.” Tycho swooped his fighter through a run that pumped more hot light into the walker’s hip. Black smoke began to issue from the joint. Wedge’s attack followed Tycho’s line and drilled four more bolts into the leg.

  Superheated metal sprayed out, and the walker began to list badly to t
he left. The AT-AT’s leg bent, then snapped off at the hip. The forward feet shuffled as the rear leg fell away, but the walker had already been seriously overbalanced. The rear end started to fall to the left, spinning the AT-AT around and pulling the front legs from the ground. The walker’s body pounded the ferrocrete, pulverizing both it and the armor plates on which it landed. Black smoke started to issue from the walker’s body, and escape hatches opened up and stormtroopers began to run, walk, or limp their way away from the broken machine.

  Lyyr and Hobbie made short work of the remaining walker. Several runs on it had left the armor in ruins, and Hobbie cruised up along its spine and triggered a quad burst at the head from point-blank range. The red bolts burned through the neck and dropped the head to the ground. The body, leaking smoke, froze in place, leaving the soldiers contained inside stranded ten meters from the ferrocrete.

  “Nice shot, Hobbie.”

  “Thanks, Lead.” Hobbie sighed. “We could have taken them with four proton torps. Would have been easier, you know.”

  “Sure, but what if Krennel showed up with ships and we had to go hunting in the void again.” Wedge shrugged. “Doing it the hard way worked.”

  Wedge brought his X-wing down and routed power to the repulsorlift coils. He hovered a couple of meters above the ground and guided the ship over to position it between the burning walkers and the landing zone for the assault shuttles coming in. The stormtroopers on the snowy ferrocrete slowed and raised their hands. Those who had escaped with weapons dropped them and a few of the more injured individuals just collapsed.

  “Lead, I have a question for you.”

  Wedge glanced over at where Tycho hovered his X-wing. “Go ahead, Two.”

  “Wouldn’t the AT-AT assault been more effective if they’d waited to launch it until the shuttles landed? Walkers are death on ground troops.”