Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ankh-Morpork Guard" data-source="post: 3123313" data-attributes="member: 10079">Chapter 403: Straight Shooting“The shields are down!” Rea said a little too loudly in the rather cramped cockpit as they took another hit from pursuing coralskippers.     Jyren gritted his teeth as he continued to weave and maneuver around the six fighters that were after him, “The bloody shields are always down!” he paused a moment to yank the ship hard to starboard and out of the way of a series of shots from a pair of skips that had decided to come at them head on, “Dammit, Loro, shouldn’t you be shooting things?!”    “I’m trying!” the Mon Calamari growled back, “If you’d fly straight I might hit something!”    “If I fly straight they’ll hit something!”    Though Jyren was unable to take his eyes off of the view in front of him, he gave the Jedi woman behind him a nudge through the Force. She responded to it exactly how he’d hoped, but in a much calmer tone than the other three in the small cockpit of the shuttle, “No sign of the New Republic fleet.”    “What?!” Rea spun around, one of her head tails nearly hitting Jyren in the face in the process.    Jyren shot her a quick glare before avoiding the shots of the coralskippers from behind them, “They weren’t going to wait for us. Tell me you’ve got the coordinates in the navcomputer already.”    The blue atmosphere of Obroa-Skai had given away to the blackness of space just a few moments earlier. The usual empty blackness was dotted with a series of rocky objects that could only be the Yuuzhan Vong fleet. It was also easy to tell that at least three of the smaller cruiser-analogs were slowly making their way towards their shuttle’s current course.    “The computer’s ready,” Rea said, finally turning back to face forward to see what was going on in front of them. Hundreds of other objects were turning towards them, also...more coralskippers. And though Jyren was taking a very roundabout and random path to get them out of the planet’s gravity well, he was still going towards the larger mass of oncoming ships. Very quietly, but just loud enough to be heard over the curses of Loro from behind them at the guns, Rea mumble, “...sir...”    “What?” Jyren tried not to snap at her, but considering the current situation, it was hard not to snap at himself, even. It felt like he was flying blind...unable to feel where his enemies would fire and instead having to just...guess. The Force told him nothing about these enemies. This was what everyone else must have felt like...it was amazing that anyone survived a dogfight at all, as Jyren knew that his Force senses were what kept him alive nearly every time.    Rea very carefully pointed forward, and though the ship juked(as much as a shuttle could juke, of course) to the side her finger remained fairly steady towards the same point, “More skips are coming at us.”    This time, Jyren managed to not glare at the Twi’lek. He may not be able to use the Force to detect the Vong, but he wasn’t an idiot. Instead, though, Jyren simply ground out, “I know.”    He sent another Force nudge to Venda behind him, who responded exactly as he had hoped for the second time. She was good.    “One minute at our current speed and we can jump,” she said in the same disturbingly calm voice. It was the one thing that always made Jyren angry about the Jedi that came from Skywalker’s academy. They sounded so damned arrogant. Always calm when it was definitely stupid to be so.    But one minute they could make. From the looks of it, the oncoming skips were far enough off that they wouldn’t get close enough to fire...Jyren glanced to the larger ships, having no idea the range for the cruiser-analog’s weapons and hoping they were just large and very far away instead of simply getting very close. Which just left the skips behind that Jyren was doing fine with keeping their fire off of the ----    Suddenly, a violent explosion rocked the shuttle, deafening all of them for a few seconds. Jyren had been thrown forward, but had managed to catch himself before going face-first into the consoles. Alarms were blaring suddenly, and a quick glance to the viewport showed a dizzying spin that made him feel sick, so instead Jyren quickly looked down at all of the alarms and very red lights.    Shields were out. That he already knew. Sublight drives down...right stabilizer wasn’t functioning...maybe that was the grey blur he had seen for a moment flash past the viewport...the outer hull was breached but the cabin and most other important areas of the ship were still safe...    He looked to the side to see Rea hadn’t caught herself, and was currently face down on the console with a trickle of red from her forehead. Looking back, Loro had managed to grab Rea’s seat but it looked like his wrist had broken from the force of the hit, and Venda had managed to hold herself upright through the Force. Alright...people were alive. Next focus. Quickly. Think.    You can’t fly this thing. No drives. Spinning. Easy target...one minute to hyperspace jump...the Jedi held herself up...    “Venda!” Jyren yelled behind him, noticing his voice sounded muffled and actually noticing he was hearing a ringing in his ears now, too, “Get the ship straight and point us to our jump trajectory!”    “I don’t know if I—"    "Remember what Loro and I were just yelling about?” he cut her off, speaking a lightyear a second, “We’re in a spin, but we’re flying straight. That means someone’s going to get shot very soon and I highly doubt Loro can aim at anything in the spin we’re stuck in. Do you understand that?!”    Venda understand. Immediately, Jyren could feel her drawing on the Force, projecting it outwards as she had done around herself when they’d taken the heavy hit. He risked a glance up to the viewport and watched their spin slowing. He saw two red-orange blasts shoot passed, and managed to trace them back to one of the cruiser-analogs that couldn’t have been more than kilometer away before losing it in the spin. And then it was righted and they were going forward again from their previous moment.    Jyren didn’t wait. He doubted it had even been a minute, and didn’t even know if Venda had managed to get them facing the right direction. It didn’t matter anymore. It was die to a not-so-lucky shot from a Vong or die trying to get the hell out of that system. Jyren chose for all of them, and he picked the latter.    His hand shot to the side, pushing Rea’s unconscious form to the side, and pulled the hyperspace levers as fast as he could.</blockquote>

Verification