[Legacy Of The Force] - 01(149)

And hesitated.

This was Wedge’s little girl. He couldn’t kill her.

If he didn’t, the mission would be a failure, and the GA wouldn’t leave, and war might break out.

He heard a howling, and realized, as if his mind were functioning at a distance, that it was no cockpit alarm, but his own voice, an inarticulate roar of anger and frustration, filling his cars.

There was no time to find the perfect solution. His thumb settled on the firing button.

No perfect solution-but the fraction of a second’s delay let him find a possible answer. He pushed the weapons control forward. The targeting brackets clicked off the Aleph and dropped to the ground several meters beneath the hovering starfighter. The brackets skittered around, trying to identify anything on the ground that might constitute a target.

Han fired. His concussion missile flashed forward to hit the duracrete beneath the Aleph.

Syal watched impassively as Zueb targeted the building just above the huge hole in the ground that the Aleph and the two bombers had emerged through. He seemed to be moving in slow motion. Everything seemed to be in slow motion.

The astromech beeped an alarm-a targeting lock on the Aleph. Syal frowned. She kept her hands steady on the controls. A sideways jerk might cause Zueb to miss his target, and she couldn’t afford for that to happen. Besides, the incoming fire was probably a laser barrage by an opportunistic X-wing pilot, and she could survive a few seconds of that

The world exploded around her. The Aleph was kicked as if by a rancor the size of a skyscraper. She felt her backbone compress, like one of the Aleph’s vent-based upward jumps but worse, like ejecting from a doomed starfighter but worse. Redness filled her vision and she clearly saw the control yoke of her starfighter. Her hand was not on it. She tried to reach for it but couldn’t seem to make her body move.

Outside the viewports, banks of buildings spun, sometimes above, sometimes below, intermixed with enemy starfighters and the sky and the ground.

The Aleph disappeared in the dust-and-debris cloud of Han’s concussion missile, and for a moment Han thought the starfighter had gone to confetti from the force of the blast. But the Aleph leapt up out of the cloud, spinning, out of control, on a ballistic arc that would carry it within seconds back to the ground and its final destruction.

Han’s curved flight path carried him past the dust cloud. His Shriek and Wedge’s crossed each other, heading in opposite directions. He could hear Wedge’s voice, chiding: “Han, you missed.” The words weren’t making sense; he ignored them.

All his attention was on the tumbling Aleph. Fly, blast it, fly, he told it, reaching out for it and its pilot as though he had Force powers, as if he could help Syal-He couldn’t, of course. He watched the doomed Aleph reach the top of its arc and begin descending toward the ground.

Its tumbling roll-was it changing? As it spun, did it seem to linger for a moment with its nose pointed to the sky?

On its next spin he was sure. The pilot was attempting to regain control. The thrusters, as they began to be pointed toward the ground, fired and continued firing until they were horizontal. They cut off again. But the spinning was slowed, and the next time the thrusters oriented downward they fired again and held, propelling the Aleph upward. The explosion-blackened starfighter wobbled as it resumed powered flight, but it was under control.

And turning back toward the Terkury building, its mission not yet accomplished.

Han stared in disbelief. Was he going to have to blow her up again?

No. A cloud of what looked like flaming insects roiled up from the crater at the foot of the Terkury building-missiles, in their hundreds.

Most headed skyward. Their flight plan would have them turn just under the dome of the outer shield and dive toward the inner, hitting two or three spots, overwhelming them with explosive power, allowing the subsequent missiles to rain down on the Center for the Performing Arts. Others would target the starfighters overhead, and the larger ships still on the ground..

Han saw two turn toward the Aleph. The Aleph, in response, banked straight toward Han’s Shriek, flying underneath and past it. As soon as the Aleph and Shriek were so close to each other that their signals would he mixed on the missiles’ sensors, the missiles turned away, hunting new targets. The Aleph dropped to ground level and skidded to a stop among several parked speeders, making it an unlikely target for continued missile targeting.

Han grinned. The girl was in good enough shape to try to kill him again-her tactic, leading pursuit missiles across his path, would have worked had he not already been designated a nontarget by the droids. All was right with the world. He could have cheered.

At least, all was right until his datapad beeped again at him. Its screen read,