Shatterpoint

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 ca

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 ca

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 gu

"Yes indeed! Come and get it!" One of the missiles intersected a stream of ca

"Not bad," Mace said. "Try not to shoot our tail off." "Some people are never satisfied-" "Nick. The other five." "Yeah, yeah. If you wa

The first impact-burst drew the next missile, and the next, expanding into an immense fireball fed by all nine.

"Shee," Nick snorted disgustedly. "That was hardly any fun at all." "It's not supposed to be fun. Save those missiles." "What for?" "Depa!" Mace called, shouting over the wind shriek. "Are you ready?" She appeared in the doorway, leaning on it for support as though the gunship's artificial gravity were too strong for her. "Ready enough," she said. "I can fight. I can always fight. Take your blade." Mace shook his head. "You'll need it," he said, and cut all power to the gunship's engines.

Its momentum kept it climbing, but slowing now with a lazy twisting barrel-roll as the pursuing ships shot past. It hung poised at its apex for a stretching instant.

The pursuers peeled away from each other in matching ellipses, two of them curving down to dive toward them once again while the third held back for high cover.

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 ca

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 ca