Star Wars_ Shadows Of The Empire Part 9

A mistake and they might both die.

He focused himself. Cut hard to port, then starboard, gave his engines full power, pulled up and into an inside loop, circled down and behind Wes, almost blacking out from the G-force...

Help me, Obi-Wan.

Luke fired... "

The beam splashed against the runaway X-wing's main engine precisely, cut through and killed it.

Rogue Six's thrusters flamed out.

Luke was close enough to see the R2 unit on Wes's s.h.i.+p try to effect repairs as he flew by, but it surely wasn't going to fix that. Rogue Six couldn't fly very well, but it could still shoot. It did shoot, tracking him and lancing out with powerful beams. Like a wounded firecat, it was still dangerous to approach.

Luke dodged, abandoned himself to the Force again, let the X-wing become an extension of his body. The little s.h.i.+p danced, hopped, slowed, sped up, and managed to avoid being speared.

Luke felt the sigh slip from him.

Steady...

Luke made another pa.s.s.

Wes's R2 blasted at him. Luke imagined he felt the heat of the beam.

Maybe it wasn't his imagination.

Come on...

"More of those TIEs coming back, Luke," somebody said.

"Not now!" Once again he let the Force direct hisaim, gave himself to it.

Pinpointed the targeting sensors in the nose cone. Felt the Tightness of it-Fired again...

A hit!

Now Wes's guns were dead and he-or his crazed droid-couldn't fire the lasers or the torpedoes.

Luke sighed again. Thank goodness.

What in the galaxy could have caused it to malfunction that way?

"Wedge, see if you can get a magnetic line on Wes and let's get out of here, fast!"

"That's affirmative, Luke." Bad enough when it was the enemy shooting at you; much worse when it was your own men.

"Hey, I'm sorry, Luke, I don't know what happened!" Wes said.

"Don't worry about it. We'll sort it out later. Right now, we'd better go before the Empire decides we might be worth chasing after all."

"Copy that, Luke."

But now that the heat-and sweaty cold-of the incident had pa.s.sed, the fear oozed back, the taste of it sour in him.

He could have been blown apart.

If not for the Force warning him, he would have been fried, would have winked out like an overloaded glowbulb, never knowing what had hit him.

Dead, gone, no more.

"Those TIE fighters are coming back, Luke."

"Let's move it!"

Until now, that had never seemed a real possibility to him. Luke had always thought that somehow all the lasers would miss, all the missiles would sail past harmlessly, that he would live forever. It hadn't seemed real that he could actually cease being.

Now it seemed real.

Leia fired, and the quad-barrels of the Falcon's dor-sal guns pistoned, spat its hard energies at the incoming TIE fighter.

The Imperial craft flew right into the beams. Exploded.

That was three she'd gotten, and Chewie had hit some of them, too, but there were more of them swarming in.

Too many more.

"We can't land," Lando said over the comm. "If we put it down on the deck, we'll get blasted!"

"What are we going to do?" Leia said.

"I don't know; we can't keep flying around-uhoh."

" 'Uh-oh' what?"

"Boba Fett's s.h.i.+p-it's taking off."

"Follow it!"

"How? There's a wall of Imperial fighters between it and us!"

"Go around them!" She was too close to lose Han now.

"I'll try."

The Falcon lurched, fell in a belly-twisting dive. Because they were in a gravity well and they needed the power for the s.h.i.+elds, the artificial gravity was turned off. Leia felt herself go weightless; only the safety straps kept her from floating out of the seat. Abruptly she grew heavier as the power dive bottomed out and Lando hit the throttles hard in a climbing turn.

Another TIE fighter came into view. Leia started the guns working, but the fighter zipped past, too fast. Missed it.

She felt the Falcon rock as the s.h.i.+elds were hit by enemy fire.

"I sure hope that bootleg s.h.i.+eld generator Han installed holds up," Lando said.

Leia didn't answer; she was too busy trying to shoot down the next pair of TIE fighters coming at her.

Her gun beams lanced out and pierced one of the fighters, sent it spinning away, control surfaces riddled with holes.

She missed the other one. She heard Chewie yelling something, and she wished she could understand him other than from context. "I hate to be the one to say it," Lando said, "but I have a bad feeling about this."

Dack at Rogue Squadron's secret moonbase, Luke and Wedge hurried from their fighters to where Wes's X-wing had been towed. Wes stood there staring at his ruined s.h.i.+p.

Wedge said, "You all right?"

"Yeah, I'm fine. I'd sure like to know what my Artoo unit ate for breakfast, though. What could have gotten into it?"

Luke hoped he looked better than he felt. He was still rattled, his knees a little rubbery. He took a deep breath, fought to keep his voice calm.

"Why don't we see if we can find out?" he said. He waved at the crew chief. "Get a coupler on this Artoo unit, would you?" As the chief hustled her crew over to do just that, Luke heard a whistle behind him.

Luke turned. "I don't know, Artoo. You ever heard anything like it before?"

Artoo chirped and whistled.

Luke took that for a negative.

The malfunctioning R2 unit settled to the ground. The crew chief stepped in and stuck a restraining bolt on it before it could move.

Artoo moved closer, extruded an interface, and plugged it into the other unit. Somebody plugged a translation screen into the damaged R2 unit.

Artoo whistled frantically.

"Uh-oh," Luke said, looking at the translation screen.

"What?" Wedge said.

"Look. According to this, the droid wasn't malfunctioning. It was programmed to shoot at me."

Wedge whistled, a counterpoint to Artoo's astromechspeak. "Who would do that? Why? How?"

The chief pulled her comlink from her belt and spoke into it, listened.

Luke couldn't hear who was on the other end of the comlink.

"That's Rendar coming in," the chief said.

"What about Leia and Lando?"

The chief shrugged. "He didn't say."

To the chief, Luke said, "Keep an eye on this droid. Don't let anybody touch it." To Wedge, he said, "Let's go-" Luke hurried to the second hangar, where Rendar's s.h.i.+p would arrive shortly.

We can't get through!" Lando said. "They'll pound us to pieces unless we get out of here! We'd better-" His voice shut off.

"Lando? Lando!"

No answer.

"Chewie?"

No answer from there, either.

The Falcon seemed to be flying okay, but the comm, was out. Leia yelled, "Threepio! Where are you?"

"R-R-Right here," came Threepio's nervous voice from above her gun turret.

"Go find out what happened to the comm. Check and see if Lando is all right."

"Yes, Princess Leia." Another TIE shot past. Leia fired at it, missed.

The blasted things were fast. The Falcon swung a hard turn to the left, then the right. Well, somebody was flying it.

Threepio leaned over her turret. "Princess Leia, Master Lando says the comm unit has been damaged; we no longer have internal or external communications. Master Lando says we must leave immediately or we'll be destroyed!" There was a tinge of hysteria in Threepio's voice.

"We can't!" Leia said.

But they were already doing so. The Falcon arced away from the s.h.i.+pyard and dived between two halfconstructed towers, twisted so it flew sideways. The metal support struts of one tower pa.s.sed so close to Leia's guns, she could read the part numbers stamped into them.

"No!" she yelled.

One of the TIE fighters chasing them wasn't so well flown. Leia saw it smash into the tower and shatter into a fireball.

The Falcon twirled and flew parallel to the ground again, but only for a few seconds before Lando took it almost straight up.

Leia looked, saw they were outrunning their pursuers. She unbuckled herself from the turret. Hurried to reach the control c.o.c.kpit. Threepio followed her, prattling on about something she couldn't catch.

Lando was sweating when Leia arrived.

"What are you doing?"

"Saving our lives," he said. "I used every trick in the manual, plus a few I made up, and I couldn't get past those fighters. There were too many of them. It was just a matter of time before they knocked us down."

"What about Boba Fett?"

"I lost sight of him."

"He's probably trying to run to hypers.p.a.ce. Luke and Rogue Squadron..."

she trailed off as she realized the problem. "Yeah," Lando said. "Our comm is dead. We can't call Luke to tell him to chase Boba Fett."

"Maybe we can circle around," she said.