Star Wars: X-Wing I: Rogue Squadron Read Free

tail.
    Before the bomber could unload a missile or two into his aft, Corran broke the fighter hard to port and carved across the bomber’s line of fire.
Basic maneuver with a basic response
. Without even glancing at his instruments, and paying no attention to Whistler’s squealed warning, Corran cut enginepower back into recharging his shields.
One more second
.
    Jace’s response to Corran’s break had been a reverse-throttle hop. By bringing the nose of the bomber up in a steep climb, then rolling out in the direction of the turn, Jace managed to stay inside the arc of the X-wing’s turn. As the bomber leveled off, it closed very quickly with the X-wing—
too quickly for a missile lock, but not a laser shot
.
    The TIE bomber shrieked in at the X-wing. Collision warning klaxons wailed. Corran could feel Jace’s excitement as the X-wing loomed larger. He knew the other pilot would snap off a quick shot, then come around again, angry at having overshot the X-wing, but happy to smoke Corran
before
taking the
Korolev
.
    The X-wing pilot hit a switch and shifted all shield power to the aft shields.
    The deflector shield materialized as a demisphere approximately twenty meters behind the X-wing. Designed to dissipate both energy and kinetic weapons, it had no trouble protecting the fighter from the bomber’s twin laser blasts. Had the bomber used missiles, the shields could even have handled all the damage they could do, though that would have been enough to destroy the shields themselves.
    The TIE bomber, which massed far more than the missiles it carried, should have punched through the shields and might even have destroyed the fighter, but it hit at an angle and glanced off. The collision did blast away half the power of the aft shield and bounced the X-wing around, but otherwise left the snubfighter undamaged.
    The same could not be said of the unshielded bomber. The impact with the shield was roughly equivalent to a vehicle hitting a ferrocrete wall atsixty kilometers per hour. While that might not do a land vehicle much damage, land vehicles are decidedly less delicate than starfighters. The starboard wing crumpled inward, wrapping itself around the bomber’s cockpit. Both pods of the ship twisted out of alignment so the engines shot it off into an uncontrolled tumble through the simulator’s dataspace.
    “Green Three, did you copy that?”
    Corran got no response. “Whistler, what happened to Three?”
    The R2 unit gave him a mournful tone.
    Sithspawn
. Corran flipped the shield control to equalize things fore and aft. “Where is he?”
    The image of a lone TIE fighter making a strafing run on the
Korolev
appeared on Corran’s monitor. The clumsy little craft skittered along over the corvette’s surface, easily dodging its weak return fire.
That’s seriously gutsy for a TIE fighter
. Corran smiled.
Or arrogant, and time to make him pay for that arrogance
.
    The Corellian brought his proton torpedo targeting program up and locked on to the TIE. It tried to break the lock, but turbolaser fire from the
Korolev
boxed it in. Corran’s HUD went red and he triggered the torpedo. “Scratch one eyeball.”
    The missile shot straight in at the fighter, but the pilot broke hard to port and away, causing the missile to overshoot the target.
Nice flying!
Corran brought his X-wing over and started down to loop in behind the TIE, but as he did so, the TIE vanished from his forward screen and reappeared in his aft arc. Yanking the stick hard to the right and pulling it back, Corran wrestled the X-wing up and to starboard, then inverted and rolled out to the left.
    A laser shot jolted a tremor through the simulator’s couch.
Lucky thing I had all shields aft!
Corran reinforced them with energy from his lasers, thenevened them out fore and aft. Jinking the fighter right and left, he avoided laser shots coming in from behind, but they all came in far closer than he liked.
    He knew Jace had been in the bomber, and Jace was