I fired again.
The shot was pretty good. It sheared the tail boom off the speeder. With its rear end discharging blue electrical arcs, it spun out of control, end over end. It made a mess of a giant fanewood, and vice versa.
The other speeder came out from the cover of the oaks, firing right at us. The shots rent aside the curtains of moss.
I realised someone had had the sense to bring night vision goggles. They could see us.
I tried one shot, missed and then turned tail, kicking in the floods and raising the speed as high as I dared. The proximity alert screen was just an overlapping red blur now, and we were all thrown around by the violent turns I was forced to make.
The pilot of the speeder chasing us was good. Distressingly good. Like the mere foot troops, he was clearly the best of his kind money could buy.
He stuck to my tail like a leech.
Pushing thirty-eight knots, I caroomed through the dense trees, pulling gees sometimes when the turns demanded it. He raced after me, following my lead and enjoying the gain of my turbowash slip stream
The chase was verging on balletic. We snaked and criss-crossed between trees, banked and looped like dancing partners. Several times I stood on a wingtip coming round one side of a big tree and he mirrored the move coming round the other. Fans screaming, I pulled a hard turn to the north, and then rolled, reversing, turning south. He overshot, but was back a moment later, accelerating fast onto my tail. Tracer rounds winked past me.
Two hard jolts came in quick succession, and the instruments confirmed what I suspected. We'd been hit. I was losing power: not much, but enough to suggest a battery had been ruptured or disconnected. He was firing again. Stitching lines of tracer shells spat past the cockpit. Now I had distress runes lighting up on my control panels.
Something drastic was needed, or we'd be his latest cockpit stripe. I thought about cutting the fans and dropping to make him overshoot, but at the speed we were going, we'd crash and burn.
'Hold on!' I yelled.
'Oh shit/ said Eleena Koi.
I killed the thrust and went vertical.
We exploded up through the canopy into the sky, shredding branches around us. The speeder shot by underneath. Astonished, he tried to bank round to re-engage, but my manoeuvre had flummoxed him. Just for a moment, but long enough.
He didn't trim his thrust as he tried to make the turn. A tree took one stabiliser wing clean off and that was the last I saw of him except for the series of impact explosions he made under the trees below us.