On March 3rd the first ever novel written from Luke Skywalker's point view
will the stands. Written by Kevin Hearne, and set between Episodes IV and V, Star
Wars: Heir To The Jedi will see the Jedi in training go on a rescue mission.
"Wait, are you suggesting we attack the Interdictor by ourselves?”
Nakari said.
“It’s either that or let them catch us. I don’t think they’ll respond to a
polite request to stand down. And this is one of the old models. We should go
before they have time to get reinforcements here. Right now it’s unescorted
and only has twenty-four TIE fighters.”
“Only twenty-four? We’re one ship with a couple of blasters and a few
missiles!”
“That’s all we need. And the TIE fighter pilots might be on lunch break or
something, so we should be clear for a minute or two. We have speed and surprise
on our side.” I probably sounded more confident than I actually felt, but that
is the only way to engage the enemy—something I picked up from Han. He told me,
“Never go into battle saying, ‘Well, I guess I’ll fight for my life now, if I
really have to.’ Once committed, kid, you have to commit fully, or you won’t
survive.” I pointed the nose down toward the Interdictor and accelerated for
the first time to full attack speed, and it was breathtaking. The Desert Jewel
was definitely faster than my X-wing.
“Luke, they’ve seen us by now! You can’t surprise them.”
“I’m talking about the surprise we picked up from the Chekkoo clan on
Rodia. And the surprise that we would attack them at all, considering their
advantages.”
The Interdictor’s batteries swung up and began spraying green bolts from
quad laser cannons, but most of it was for show, since only a couple of them
had the proper field of fire. The first squadron of TIE fighters, which must
have been on alert or else eating lunch in their cockpits, began to swarm out
from underneath.
“Let’s get out of here!” Nakari insisted. “This is insane!”
I didn’t think so; I wasn’t simply charging in with the hope that things
would work out in my favor. I had a plan, and crazy people rarely had them. “I
prefer to think of it as risky,” I said, and saying that reminded me of the
conversation I had with Leia on the Patience. Surely this wasn’t as dangerous
as going after the Death Star. “Artoo, which gravity projector should I
target?”
ITS PORT SIDE, OUR STARBOARD.
“Both of them?”
YES.
“That complicates things.”
“They weren’t complicated before?” Nakari asked. “That cruiser has to be
shielded.”
“It is, but this is one of the Immobilizer models, and we’ve been studying
them since the Empire has been using them against us on our raids. They have
twelve shield generators—some of them ray shields, some particle shields. We
take out the particle shield generators for the port side first, then go after
the gravity projectors with whatever we have left.”
“While dodging TIE fighters and quad laser fire. Do you hear yourself?”
Both were coming at me now, and I sent the Jewel into a spin away from an
aggressive TIE pilot. Nakari missed seeing it, so focused was she on convincing
me to flee. “I did say it was complicated.”
“Luke, let’s just run to the edge of the interdiction field! The Jewel is
fast enough!” I’d thought of that already, and perhaps it would have worked if
I’d been in the cockpit instead of trying to make the caf machine produce
something drinkable, but we’d lost too much time and space in those ten to
fifteen seconds while I was unable to do anything. “No, they sucked us in too
close. The TIEs are already on us.”
Nakari turned her head, saw the vast assortment of death heading our way,
jerked in her seat, and exclaimed, “Gah!” She didn’t press her point after
that, seeing that it was too late. Situations develop fast when fighters close
on one another so quickly. We wove through the first six TIEs, avoiding their
fire and head-on collisions; I managed to wing one of them with our laser
cannons—we had three now, not just one—and it careened into another, taking
both out. I didn’t bother firing at the cruiser, since there was no way our
lone ship could weaken the shields enough to punch through, but I would gladly
pull the trigger on the TIE fighters whenever opportunity afforded.
The Empire had stopped making these particular Interdictor cruisers because
of their vulnerabilities, but while they weren’t making any new ones, there
were still plenty of them out there. The Alliance kept running into them, so we
had been training recently on how to eliminate them before our raiding parties
got wiped out by their escorts of destroyers and cruisers. The Empire was
putting gravity projectors into Star Destroyers now, much more difficult to
take out for a group and impossible for a single ship to damage. To my
knowledge no one had ever taken out an Immobilizer with a single ship before,
but I’d theorized about the possibility with Wedge…"
Source - Star Wars
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