A few hundred meters from the planet’s surface, he began pulling up, but his rate of descent carried him low enough that he came horizontal slightly below the level of the surrounding buildings. Centering himself along the widest boulevard in the area, he shot off in the general direction of Jaina’s crew, the Hardpoints maintaining formation behind him. “Artoo,” he said, “plot a course to Jaina’s position. Wide streets only, please.”
R2 tweetled a cheerful acknowledgment.
Syal and VibroSword Ten hurtled into the furball at full interceptor speed. Syal’s sensor board crawled with swirling red and blue blips; space outside her forward viewport was similarly crowded with the reflections, glows, and detonation patterns of a growing battle. Using every speed and maneuverability advantage the Eta-5 design gave her, Syal jittered her vehicle around, port, starboard, up, down, making it a maddeningly difficult target to get a lock on or hit with a spray of laserfire.
Ahead, growing in her viewport, was the Nebulon-series frigate. As she approached, it was moving from her port to starboard, from a relative higher to lower position, its forward laser cannon and turbolaser arrays flashing continuously.
“Ten,” Syal said, “we’re going for the deflector shield generator. Concussion missiles for maximum close-range results.” They were now close enough that a schematic of the Nebulon frigates popped up on her sensor board; she tapped the top side of the rear nodule on the wire-frame image and it expanded on the screen, word labels and arrow-tipped lines appearing on the schematic to explain what was what. She tapped the words DEFLECTOR SHIELD GENERATOR to highlight them, dragged a targeting bracket from the corner of the screen over them, dragged an Eta-5 interceptor silhouette from the same corner to the same spot. Now her targeting computer would automatically seek out the shield generators and V-Sword Ten would receive a data transmission pointing to that target.
“Negative, Seven, negative,” Ten said. “Even if we achieve fantastic results, all we do is knock down the shields-and someone else will get the kill before we can get back. I say we try to put our missiles into their squadron bays. The main hatches might still be open. We might get lucky.”
“You can’t plan for luck, Ten.” It was weird to hear those words in her own voice, not her father’s. “Plan smart and let luck land where it will. We’re going for the shield generators.”
“You don’t outrank me, Seven.”
“Yeah, but I’m in front.” Syal diverted a quarter of her shield energy to her thrusters-a risky move. But she couldn’t risk Ten using the same logic on her, overtaking her, screwing up her tactic. Ten did surge forward, briefly gaining on her, but dropped back, unwilling to devote as much shield power as she was using for thrust.
Syal grinned. Lost your nerve, did you?
They were now too close even to attempt a swerve and attack on the squadron hangars, which were in the bow module of the frigate. Syal returned the shield power to her forward shields.
A turbolaser attack flashed just over her, causing the interceptor’s proximity alarms to howl. Syal drove in straight toward the deflector shield generator, as though her intent were to ram it, providing just enough side-to-side and up-and-down movement to throw off some targeting locks.
Her own targeting brackets found the frigate’s shield generators, jittered around them, stabilized. Syal held her breath, held her focus, until the targeting computer indicated maximum efficient range for firing-and beyond, waiting until the computer flashed red for optimal range. At last, she fired. She saw white streaks as two missiles flashed away from her interceptor.
Even then she didn’t change her course. A lot of pilots bank and begin their run to safety the instant they launch missiles, her father had told her. A lot of gunners know this. You see a target coming in, you see him launch missiles, choose one vector for him and fire in that direction. One time in ten you’ll choose right and you’ll vape him. Unless you’re Tycho Celchu, when it’s one time in four.
Syal didn’t bank; she blinked as a red laser barrage suddenly filled space just above and to starboard of her course. As soon as the red streaks flashed by, she dived and banked to starboard, away from the frigate, back toward Dodonna.
The sensor board showed a detonation atop the frigate’s stern nodule. The extent of the damage, if any, couldn’t be displayed yet, but it looked close, closer than if the missiles had detonated against the shields.
Dodonna was free of enemy starfighter assaults as the two Eta-5 interceptors lined up on her, and word came in over the comm boards: V-Sword Leader had bagged the frigate, dropping his entire complement of concussion missiles into the engines, rendering the frigate dead in space, prompting a massive evacuation by escape pods.