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 re-ignited the repulsorlifts 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 naming 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 cannon-fire, 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 lorpelek shouldered in behind her. They both wore emergency repulsor-packs strapped across their backs. 'You know how these work?' Chalk nodded silently in reply; Vaster slapped the graphic instruction card sewn onto his harness and snarled at him.,' can read.
'Urn, 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 Vaster 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 Vaster 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, wowl 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 gun-metal 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 gun-ship 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.' 'Urn, 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.
