Showdown at Centerpoint Read Online Free PDF

No way to tell with communications jammed.”
    “All right,” Mara said, the doubt plain in her voice. “You can make that—”
    But the first flash of turbolaser fire from the lead LAF shut down the argument. Leia released the safeties on the
Fire
’s follow-fire circuits and started selecting targets, aiming first for the LAF that had opened fire.
    *   *   *
    “Here they come!” Han shouted in Basic, forgetting for a moment to speak in Selonian. Salculd got the message all the same. She looked up through the viewport at the tiny spots of light in the sky, and understood precisely what was going on. She let out a most undignified squawk. The whole slowly spinning coneship lurched to one side and came close to heeling over into a disastrous tumble.
    “Calmness!” Han shouted. “Be calm, alert. Throttle down all engines. End all thrust. Stand by to open outer airlock doors on my command.”
    “Thrott—throttling down all engines,” Salculd said. “Ready on the airlock doors.”
    “Wait for it,” Han said, watching the LAFs come closer. Weight faded away as Salculd powered down the engines. With the inertial dampers off-line, and the engine thrust gone, Han found himself in zero gee for the first time in a long time. Han knew people who had spent half their lives in space without experiencing zero gravity—and with the flip-flops his stomach was doing all of a sudden, he could understand why.
    But there was no time for that now. Not with a sky full of Light Attack Fighters heading in. “Be ready, ready,” he told Salculd.
    The lead LAF fired and caught them with a glancing blow to the starboard side, slamming into the hull like a giant fist. “It’s all right!” Han shouted, having not the least idea if it was or not. “It’s all right. Stand by on the airlock doors. Wait for it. Be ready—”
    *   *   *
    The
Jade’s Fire’s
forward quad turbolaser blazed away, tracking the lead LAF across the sky. The LAF broke off its attack run, trying to fly an evasive pattern and escape. For a moment it managed to break out of the tracking pattern, but the
Jade’s Fire
regained a positive lock and poured in fire again. The LAF’s shields flared and blazed for a moment before giving way altogether. The fighter exploded, a blossom of fire that flared up and was gone.
    Leia fed two new targets to the follow-fire system, and got busy herself with the manual guns, reading the detection screens for herself. But the rest of the LAFs were not going to be such easy pickings. They had their rear shields powered up to maximum, and did a better job of evasive maneuvers, good enough to completely bamboozle the follow-fire systems.
    But not good enough to fool Leia. She settled in with the manual controls and began looking for targets. She concentrated her fire on the toughest shots, the LAFs closest to the coneship. She got a lock on one and fired, holding the guns on target long enough to burn through the shields and blow the fighter to bits.
    Just then the coneship cut its engines, allowing it to drop straight for the planet’s surface. It threw the LAFs off, if only for a moment or two.
    Leia shook her head and sighed. Not much of an evasive maneuver, but probably the best Han could manage with that clunky piece of junk. But suddenly her detector displays showed a cloud of debris blooming out from the coneship in all directions.
    Fear stabbed at her heart. That one hit on the coneship’s hull couldn’t have done that much damage, could it? Could the craft be breaking up before her eyes, with Han aboard? She had no desire to watch the death of her husband—but then something happened to one of the LAFs, and then another, and another. As they swooped in close to the coneship, they bouncedand skittered and wobbled off course. Two of them lost power, and the third was rocked by a small explosion amidships. Leia got a target lock on one of the survivors and fired, catching a piece of him before he managed to