Ambush at Corellia

by Roger MacBride Allen

  But Kalenda had more immediate concerns than what sort of space-time continuum she was in. She had to keep the ship from breaking up or blowing up. She needed to get the tumble under some sort of control. It wasn’t easy with half the altitude control system destroyed, but she managed to get rid of about ninety-five percent of the tumble, leaving the ship in a sort of slow, off-kilter barrel roll. She checked her system displays and confirmed what she had already suspected—the hyperdrive system wasn’t there anymore. It looked as if the number-one engine was out for good as well. That left her the number-two engine, with a very large question mark behind it. The cockpit displays said it was still there, and Kalenda devoutly hoped they were telling the truth.

  At last she had time to look around and figure out where she was—and found that she had finally drawn at least one piece of good luck. There, hanging round and lovely in the firmament, was Corellia, the planet half in daytime and half in night from this angle. At a guess, she had managed to travel all of a few hundred thousand kilometers in hyperspace, and in something roughly like the right direction. At an eyeball estimate, she was on the opposite side of the planet than she had started out from, and perhaps twice as far away from it. She could just as easily have been thrown completely out of the galaxy, or into the dark between the stars.

  In theory at least, she ought to be able to get down to Corellia from here. If that one engine really was still in one piece, she still might get out of this thing alive.

  If she were really lucky, the Corellians would think she was dead. Maybe the PPB pilot would get it wrong and report her ship had blown up instead of jumping into hyperspace. Or maybe everyone would—quite properly—assume the odds against surviving an uncontrolled hyperspace jump were too high to worry about her surviving.

  In any event, even on the odd chance that they thought she was alive, they certainly did not know where she was. She hoped to keep it that way.

  * * *

  Part of knowing how to survive was knowing when to rush, and when to take things slowly. Kalenda gave herself a good three hours for the next step. She did a careful checkout of the freighter—or as much of it as she could manage from the cockpit. The only pressure suit on the ship was in its rack, in vacuum, on the other side of the sealed cockpit hatch. A triumph of planning and design, that, but there was no help for it now.

  Even on this ship, the cockpit data displays could tell her an awful lot. She concentrated on the surviving main engine, and confirmed, by every means she could, that it was still operational. Not that she was going to trust it at anything like full power, of course. She would have to assume that it was about to fail, and treat it very gently. The cockpit’s life support was in moderately good shape, though there seemed to be a few slow microleaks in the hull, and the cooling system was showing signs of failing. She wouldn’t want to stay in the cockpit more than a day or two. Not that she could, anyway. There were no food or water or sanitary facilities in the cockpit. The ship’s survival pack was stowed in a rack right next to the pressure suit.

  Obviously, the only way out of this mess—and, incidentally, the only way she could complete her mission—was to get down to one of the planets in the Corellian star system. Corellia itself was the obvious target, but not the only one.

  For a moment she toyed with the idea of trying for another of the habitable planets in the Corellian System. There were certainly enough of them. Besides Corellia, there were Selonia, Drall, and the Double Worlds, Talus and Tralus, two planets that orbited about each other. If there were to be a search for her, it would almost certainly take place on Corellia, making it a good place to avoid.

  But there were strong arguments against that line of reasoning. They probably did think she was dead.

  Therefore, there probably would not be a search. Besides, a planet was a rather largish place. Even if they were on the lookout for her, she was a trained operative, after all. She ought to be able to stay one step ahead of them.

  Them. Who were the “them” in this case? And what were “they” up to that merited the taking of such risks? One didn’t attack New Republic operatives lightly. Kalenda realized she had no idea who she was up against. She had not spent any time at all wondering why the Corellians—or some group of Corellians—was so intent on killing NRI agents, or on how they knew her arrival plans. But no time to worry about such things now. They were certainly important points, but they really didn’t matter, one way or the other, unless she stayed alive. Best to focus on that small matter first.

  She decided not to try for any of the other worlds. Corellia was closest. She had the best odds of reaching it. The risk of detection was only marginally greater there than on the other worlds. Besides, Corellia itself was where the action was. Whatever was going on, was going on there.

  The question then became one of how to get there. It was all very well to look out the port and see the planet, but she couldn’t simply point the freighter at Corellia and switch on the engine. She needed to do a great deal more navigation work first. One bit of good luck was that she seemed to have retained more or less the same initial velocity as she had started out with before her abortive jump to light speed. The only difference was that she was on the other side of the planet, moving away rather than toward it. The planet’s gravity was slowing her, of course, and sooner or later would start pulling her back.

  In plain point of fact, she was going to fall straight in on the planet and land about as lightly and gently as a meteorite unless she did something.

  And, of course, she did not dare make anything like a normal landing. A daylight landing of any kind was out of the question. The risk of detection was too great.

  A few minutes’ careful work with the navicomputer let Kalenda work out a slow and careful approach to the planet that met the conditions she had chosen: a water landing, at night. She managed to find a trajectory that would allow her to come in just off the east coast of the main continent.

  Not that she was especially pleased to find it was possible to do that sort of landing, but the risks of touching down on land at night were just too great. Kalenda did not know the lay of the land well enough to look out the window in the dark and judge whether she was coming down in a nice, empty glade or a village square, a soft canopy of trees or a patch of low scrubby bushes that hid solid rock just below. Water was water no matter how you landed on it, and was more likely to be private. The odds on being heard or seen were much lower over water. Of course the odds on drowning were nil over land, but that could not be helped.

  Kalenda laid in her course and powered up that one remaining main engine as slowly and gently as she could, taking a good ten minutes to bring it up to one-quarter power, to the accompaniment of a number of disturbing bumps and thuds and bangs as the ship’s structural members strained against the unbalanced thrust and bits of debris knocked themselves loose and clattered around in the compartments behind the cockpit door.

  Kalenda watched her displays carefully, and it did not take long for her to be inspired to curse a blue streak. Even at one-quarter power, she was getting a whole series of rather alarming readouts. The engine seemed to want to overheat. Its cooling system must have been damaged. She backed off to one-eighth power and tried to divert cooling power from the dead engines, to little or no effect. More than likely she was sending commands to systems that weren’t even there anymore. Lowered thrust required a longer engine burn, of course, but that beat having her last engine melt down. She adjusted her course to compensate and watched Corellia grow bigger in the viewport.

  Now she did have the leisure to worry over how they had known to jump her, and over what the devil was going on down there on the planet. The Corellians seemed to be zeroing right in on NRI’s objectives, such as herself, without any need to bother searching through civilians to find them. There had to be some sort of leak back at HQ.

  Kalenda had a hunch that the higher-ups in NRI were starting to figure that out for themselves. That meant they were workin
g on some more carefully compartmentalized operations against Corellia, wherein the left hand would not have the least idea what the right was doing. She had suspicions that there were a few NRI agents placed among the trade delegations.

  For all she knew, the attempt to insert her was at least in part meant as a diversion, to get the opposition looking the other way from someone else’s arrival. It occurred to her that she should have been bothered at the thought of being someone else’s diversion, but that was the way of the world—at least the espionage world. If you did not wish to risk the chance of being a piece on someone else’s game board, it was best not to volunteer for the service.

  But there was at least the hope that, even if she did not get through, did not find out what was going on in this madhouse of a system, someone would. Maybe that was why the thought of being a diversion did not upset her. If she was a diversion, and she did die, and managed to get the Corellians looking in the wrong direction at the proper moment, then at least her death would not be in vain.

  Not much of a comfort, but with the Corellians gunning for her, and her life staked on an engine that wanted to give up and a night water landing, Lieutenant Kalenda needed all the comforts she could imagine.

  * * *

  Kalenda woke with a start as the alert buzzer blatted in her ear. She blinked, looked around, remembered where she was, and wished she hadn’t. But what had set off the alert? Had something else given out on this old tub? She checked her boards, and her eyes lit on the chronometer. Good. No malfunction. The alert was from the plain old alarm-clock function. Time to wake up and get ready for reentry. She pushed a button and shifted in the pilot’s seat and stretched as best she could in a vain attempt to work the kinks out.

  Now would come the time for some real piloting. Flying a freighter in on a manual, unpowered reentry was no easy job in the best of times. Coming in at night, over hostile territory, with no guidance, in a badly damaged ship was going to take everything she had—and maybe more.

  Hold on. No sense going into this thing with such a negative attitude. Think good thoughts, about how the freighter was a solid old ship to hold together as long as it already had. About all her training, and her painstaking memorization of every map of Corellia. About how it was very unlikely that anyone was looking for her, and how she would be damned hard to find even so.

  Yes, that was the tone to take. Good thoughts. Good thoughts. She checked over all her systems one last time, and wished that they were looking better, even as she gave thanks that they were not looking worse. She looked out the port to the huge bulk of Corellia, looming lovely and dark, so close she thought she could reach out and touch it. She was square over the night side of the planet, but by no means was Corellia in absolute blackness. The lights of cities shone here and there, and starlight gleamed off gray cloud tops and dark blue sky and black land, making it all seem to glow as if from within, knots and whorls and points of light shining out from the sleeping world below.

  A lovely world, and one full of danger. She would have to be careful down there. If she lived. She checked her countdown clock. It was almost time to cut the engine.

  The normal procedure, of course, was for a powered descent, going in with the engines throttled up, decelerating from orbital speed to flying speed with the brute force of the ship’s engines. But her freighter’s sole remaining engine did not have anything like the power to manage that. She would have to do it the old-fashioned way, bashing her way through the atmosphere, using air friction instead of engine power to slow her craft. In theory, her freighter was built to survive just that sort of emergency entry, but she would have been just as happy not to test the theory. Not that she had any choice in the matter. The countdown clock clicked off the seconds to engine stop, arriving at zero far too quickly. Her one surviving main engine cut off, and Kalenda reoriented the ship, pointing it in the right direction for an aero-braking reentry.

  Any moment now she would start to feel the first slight stirrings of atmosphere on the freighter’s hull—

  Almost before she had finished the thought, the freighter bucked and quivered, and the controls tried to leap out of her hands. Kalenda grabbed the flight stick in a death grip and forced the ship back to an even keel. She had flown plenty of reentries, and on nearly all of them initial contact with the atmosphere had been smooth and subtle. This was more like hitting a brick wall. The exterior of the freighter must have gotten more torn up than she thought. This was going to be interesting.

  There was another series of shudders and thuds, and then, with a long-drawn-out shrieking noise, something tore off the aft end of the ship and broke clear. The freighter tried to flip itself over, and it was all Kalenda could do to force it back to a level flight path. On the bright side, it seemed as if the ship were flying a bit more steadily with the whatever-it-was gone.

  She checked her actual flight path against her planned course. She found she was running a bit fast, and a bit high. She made what adjustments she could, and started watching her hull temperatures climb steadily upward. The freighter began to shudder again, with a new, deeper noise, a sort of rhythmic banging, thrown into the mix as well. Something else back there wanted to tear itself off, and no mistake.

  The freighter plunged deeper and deeper into Corellia’s atmosphere, bucking and swaying and banging and shrieking its way down. The nose of the ship started to glow a cherry red, something Kalenda had never seen before. She was used to gentle, fully powered descents, not this sort of primitive aero-braking approach.

  The g forces were starting to build up, and Kalenda felt as if she were being shaken to death and crushed to death at the same time. A new alarm went off, barely audible in the cacophony that filled the ship’s cockpit. Kalenda was being shaken around so badly that she could focus her eyes only clearly enough to see what the visual displays were telling her. A temperature alarm. It had to be a temp alarm.

  Well, that was just too bad. She didn’t dare take either hand off the flight stick long enough to make any adjustments, and besides, there was precious little she could do to cool things off. She couldn’t even abort the landing attempt anymore. At one-eighth power, her one remaining engine didn’t have anything like enough thrust to push her back into orbit.

  Not that orbit was a good place to be on a ship that was probably losing air, on a ship with no accessible food or water.

  Wham! The noise was loud and sudden enough to make Kalenda jump clear out of her seat if she hadn’t been belted in. Something had just broken loose back in the ship’s interior. A second, smaller crash announced that whatever-it-was had just slammed into the opposite bulkhead.

  The vibration reached a crescendo, and just when it seemed that it would tear the freighter apart, it began to taper off, fading away more quickly than it had come on.

  Now Kalenda had some faint hope that she was through the worst of it. The freighter was still jouncing around quite impressively, but it had at least survived the reentry phase proper. It had become a badly damaged aircraft, not a half-wrecked spacecraft. Not that it was handling any better, or that she would be any less dead if she lost control of it and the freighter succumbed to its obvious desire to crash.

  Kalenda heard a loud whistling from behind the cockpit door. It began at a high pitch and gradually worked its way down through the scale to a low rumble. It was the sound of air leaking back into the aft compartments of the ship. Kalenda did not dare take her eyes off the viewport and the main displays for even a moment to check the environment display, but air in the aft compartment had to be good news. She would be able to get back there and grab the survival gear.

  She checked her rates, forward and down. Still a bit fast and high, but now it was a question of energy management, of controlling her descent, trading altitude and speed for distance, rather than any question of burning up in the atmosphere. She set the freighter into a series of wide, gentle S-turns to shed a bit more speed.

  Well, at least they were meant to be wide and g
entle. If the freighter had handled like a live bantha in convulsion during reentry, in normal aerodynamic flight it handled like a dead one. The ship barely responded to the controls at all, and she had to fight it through every moment of every turn. Something in the control system started hammering and banging, protesting the strain. She gave it up and got back on her ground-track course, and never mind if she was a bit fast and high.

  The ship glided downward into the velvet darkness of Corellia’s night sky, biting into thicker air now—and suddenly all of Kalenda’s concerns about being fast and high vanished. The ship’s performance in the lower atmosphere was atrocious. She should have expected that, with half the aerodynamic surfaces shot to glory, but she had been concentrating so hard on staying alive long enough to get into deep air that she had never thought of how the ship would fly once she got there.

  Suddenly it was not a question of overshooting her target point by a few kilometers, but a question of not undershooting by several hundred kilometers. She had planned to put down just offshore, not in the middle of deep ocean. She had no choice but to relight her main engine and try to stretch out her glide as much as she could. She had hoped to avoid doing so. She didn’t trust that engine, and she wasn’t sure about the ship holding together while it was taking stress from both the aerodynamic surfaces and the engines. With the stress on the stabilizers and the off-center thrust of one engine, things could go very wrong very fast. However, it was not as if she had a choice at this point. It was relight the engine or drown.

  Kalenda looked out the port. It was a lovely view, and even in the midst of her struggle for survival, she felt privileged to see it. She granted herself a second, two seconds, to drink it all in, so that she might die with some recent memory of beauty, if die she must. The clear and cloudless sky was blue black, pocked with jewel-bright stars, white, red, blue; diamonds and rubies and sapphires shining down on the blue-black sea and its gray whitecaps far below.