Showdown at Centerpoint Read Online Free Page A

she’s going to get our nose assembly right up her stern.”
    “Can we back off a little?”
    “Not if we want them to stay in visual contact with us. That stern holocam has no resolution at all. We might be too far back for it to see us as it is—Burning stars, she doesn’t know how to fly!” Mara pulled her joystick violently up and to the right. “She’s doing the pitchover maneuver way too early—and without shutting off her engines. Nearly clipped her.”
    Leia watched as the lumbering bulk of the coneship began its turnover, flipping end over end to direct its sublight engines toward the planet and slow its descent. It was painfully obvious that the pilot was not managing very well. The ship was lurching abruptly from one attitude to the next, pausing at intermediatestages of the maneuver instead of moving smoothly from a nose-to-planet attitude direct to stern-to-planet. It only made it worse—much worse—that the pilot was doing it under power. Leia was a pretty fair pilot, and she would have been very reluctant to try doing it that way.
    Mara was forced to fly two more evasive patterns just to keep the
Fire
from crashing into the other ship. Finally she backed the
Fire
off by five kilometers. “They’re going to be nose-on to us anyway,” Mara said. “They’ll be able to see us reasonably well.”
    “With a little luck,” Leia said, a bit doubtfully. The
Fire
had first-rate detection systems, and could have tracked the coneship halfway across the Corellian system, but all the coneship had was straight visual. Leia peered out the
Fire
’s viewport and managed, with great difficulty, to spot the tiny dot that was the coneship. The bright bulk of the planet’s dayside loomed up behind the ship, rendering it all but invisible. How easy would the
Fire
be to see, a little spot of red against the blackness of space?
    Mara wasn’t even using the main viewscreen anymore, but watching her detector displays.
She
wasn’t relying on visual detection. Oh, well. As long as at least one ship could see the other, things should be all right—
    “Trouble!” Mara announced. “Leia, weapons and shields to standby, fast!”
    Leia ran the power-up routines as quickly as she could. She ran quick checks on the ship’s turbolasers and shields. “All weapon and shield systems functional and on-line,” she announced. “What’s happened?”
    “Power up the defense tracking systems and tell me,” Mara said. “All the nav systems can tell me is that a bunch of blips just showed up out of nowhere.”
    “Light Attack Fighters,” Leia announced as the defense trackers came on. “A double flight of them, twelve in all, coming in from right over our stern. Must have dropped out of a high polar orbit.”
    Mara shook her head as she stared down at the navigation display. “We can handle them, but it won’t be easy. Not with the coneship to cover.”
    “We’re too far off to extend our shields toward the coneship.”
    “And we’re going to stay that way,” Mara said sharply. “I’m not getting any closer to that pilot than I have to—especially in combat. She’s already nearly rammed us twice. Get close enough to provide shield cover, and we’ll all be dead. Covering fire is the best I’m going to be able to do. How soon until the LAFs get here?”
    “Firing range in thirty seconds.”
    “Stand by for combat maneuvers.”
    “No! Wait! We have to blink-code to Han, warn them!”
    “You’ve got twenty-five seconds,” Mara said, steel in her voice. There was no point even trying to argue.
    Leia reached for the landing light controls and flipped them back to blink-code mode. She forced herself to take a full five seconds to compose her message, and then sent it three times, in rapid succession. “Done,” Leia said.
    “Good,” Mara said. “Hang on.”
    *   *   *
    Han was almost too busy trying to keep from being flung out of his chair to notice the flashing lights visible in the overhead