Star Wars - Darth Plagueis

brought it across the terminator and out of Despayre’s night side, the sunlight struck rays from its hull.
    “There is our target, four kilometers dead ahead. I want a fast flyby so they can see us, and then I want a fountain pattern dispersal and loop, two klicks minimum distance and bracket, one, four, four, and two, you know who you are. I’ll move in close and have a word with whoever they have flying the stolen spacecraft.”
    Benjo: “Aw, Lieutenant, come on, let us have a shot, too.”
    “Negative. If you had a clue about the vessel, I might, but since you’re just as likely to shoot each other as the quarry, you’ll hold the bracket.”
    More acknowledgments, but without much enthusiasm. He couldn’t blame his squad—they hadn’t had any action except drills since they’d been assigned to this project—but his secondary goal was to bring all his men back alive. Theprimary, of course, was to accomplish their mission. He didn’t need a squad for this; any fighter pilot worth his spit should be able to deal with a lumbering shuttle, even one with the new-vehicle smell still in it. The Lambda’s delta vee wasn’t all that efficient, but with constant drive it could get above the solar plane and far enough out of the planet’s gravity well to engage its hyperdrive fairly soon—and once it was in the chute, they’d never find it.
    But that wasn’t going to happen.
    The pyramid-shaped formation zipped past the fleeing shuttle, close enough for Vil to see the pilot sitting in the command seat. He didn’t look surprised, of course—he would have seen them coming on the sensors. But he couldn’t outrun them, couldn’t dodge, and no way could he take out a full squad of TIE fighters even if he was the best gunner who’d ever lived, not in that boat. And anyway, Vil wasn’t going to give him the opportunity to try.
    The squad flowered into the dispersal maneuver as ordered, looping out and away to their assigned positions, angled pressor beams in their arrays providing maneuverability. Vil pulled a high-g tight turn and came around to parallel the shuttle a few hundred meters away, slightly above it. He watched the wing turrets closely. As soon as they started to track him, he jinked to port, then to starboard, slowed, then sped up. They tried to keep up with him, but they were a hair too slow.
    Vil toggled to a wide-band channel. They’d hear this back in the Destroyer, he knew.
    “Attention, shuttle RLH-One. Turn the craft around and proceed immediately to Star Destroyer Steel Talon ’s tractor beam range.”
    There was no answer; nothing but the slight hiss of the carrier.
    “Shuttle craft, do you copy my transmission?”
    Another pause. Then: “Yeah, we hear you, rocketjock. We aren’t of a mind to do that.”
    Vil looked at his control panel. They were two minutes away from Minimum Safe Distance—the point far enough from Despayre where they could safely attempt the jump to lightspeed. Jump too close to a planet’s gravity well and the shift would tear the vessel apart. If the guy he was talking to had enough skill to fly the shuttle, he’d know that. His control panel would tell him when he reached MSD, and then it would be over. Lieutenant Dance would have failed a mission, for the first time.
    Never happen , he thought. “Turn it around, or we will fire,” he said.
    “You’d do that? Just blow us apart? Essentially murder fifteen men—and two women? One of them is old enough to be your granny. You can live with that?”
    He was stalling for time, Vil knew. The beings on that shuttle were bad enough to have been sent to the galaxy’s number one prison planet, and the Imperial courts didn’t bother to do that with petty thieves or traffic violators. His granny hadn’t robbed any banks or killed anybody. Not that he knew of, anyway.
    “Shuttle pilot, I say again—”
    Vil saw the port turret on the shuttle open up. He cut across the craft’s flight path, angling away aft as the starboard gun began firing. He hit his thrusters full, coming up in a half loop and twisting away from the incoming laser-fire.
    Even a good gunner couldn’t have spiked him at this angle, and these guys weren’t anywhere close to good enough. Still, the pulsed incandescent beams came close.
    “Lieutenant—!” That from Benjo.
    “Hold your position, Alpha Squad, there’s no problem here.” Cool and calm. Like discussing what they might be having for dinner.
    He zipped Black-11 out of