Ambush at Corellia

by Roger MacBride Allen

  Lovely. Lovely. But if she was going to live to deserve further such privileges, she was going to have to tear her eyes away and get back to the job at hand. As gently, as delicately as possible, she powered up her single engine and brought it up to one-sixteenth power. The freighter slewed over a bit to port, but she managed to compensate without too much trouble. There was a low groan from the hull as the stresses on the ship rearranged themselves, but that was to be expected.

  She checked her displays again, and saw that she was still losing more speed and altitude than she could afford, even if the loss rate had decreased. She was still going to fall short of her intended landing zone, and that was not good. If need be, she could swim three kilometers to reach the shore—but she could not swim fifty.

  She bit her lower lip and throttled up toward one-eighth power, as slowly as she could. The hull began to groan again, but this time the sound did not fade out but grew louder. The damaged ship was not likely to take much more strain. The freighter’s nose started to drift to port, and she pulled it back to starboard—and then had to heel back over to port as it started to heel over to starboard. Almost before she knew it, the ship was in a dangerous oscillation, its nose wobbling back and forth, unable to hold a stable attitude. If that oscillation got much worse at all, the freighter would heel over all the way and go spiraling into the drink.

  Kalenda throttled down until the oscillation faded out again, and the groaning of the hull members receded. She checked her displays and swore. Not enough. Not enough. She was still going to land short of her intended ditch point.

  One last card to play. She brought the nose of the ship up just a bit, in hopes of tempting just a bit more lift out of the wings. For a wonder, it seemed to work. Her rate of loss of altitude faded away, and she actually achieved level flight.

  But Kalenda knew better than to relax her guard. Something else was bound to go wrong.

  It started as a low hum, almost below the range of hearing, but it did not stay hard to hear for long. Bi-bi-bi-be-bee-bee-bee-bang-bang-bang-Bang-Bang-BANG BANG BANG BANG! BANG! BANG! It grew louder and louder, and shook the ship harder and harder. Some bit of the stabilizer, or a torn-up piece of rudder, was slamming itself against the hull with incredible violence. Kalenda set her teeth and hung on. As best she could see with the ship bucking and bouncing like a mad thing, she was still flying level, and every second she did that was another few hundred meters toward shore. So long as it got her in toward shore, the freighter could tear itself to pieces as much as it liked.

  Getting closer now. Kalenda scanned the horizon, watching for land. There! A strip of motionless, darker darkness off in the distance. Stars and sky, she was going to make it.

  BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! Long past the time when it seemed impossible, the banging was getting worse. What in the name of space was trying to tear itself loose back there? BANG! BANG! BANG! BAN—

  There was a sudden silence, and then, a heartbeat later, the gut-wrenching shriek of metal on metal and a final shudder that spasmed through the whole ship. Kalenda felt the freighter’s tail pull up and heel over to starboard. Well, whatever it was that had just pulled itself loose must have been part of the horizontal stabilizers. She corrected back toward port, but not too far. Let the ship hang at an odd angle of attack, as long as it was flying straight, more or less.

  How far to shore now? She checked her navigation displays. Not more than twenty kilometers to go. If she could just hold this thing together that much longer—

  Ping-PING! Ping-PING! Ping-PING! Kalenda hit the alarm reset and checked her displays. Damn! The engine overheat alarm. The thing was going to hit meltdown if she kept pushing it, and no mistake. She knew what she had to do, but she didn’t like it. What good was it in getting this far if the engine blew up and she crashed into the sea here and now? With infinite reluctance, she throttled the engine back down to one-sixteenth power, and grimaced as the freighter promptly set back to work losing speed and altitude.

  Ping-PING! Ping-PING! Ping-PING! She hit the alarm reset and swore under her breath with a fair amount of creativity. The engine was still overheating. Some last cooling connection must have failed altogether. With all cooling systems out completely, the engine would explode in short order, no matter how little power she ran through it.

  For one mad moment she toyed with the idea of letting it blow, taking the explosion in trade for whatever last driblets of thrust she could get from the engine. But if there was one thing this ship was not going to take, it was yet another explosion.

  She braced herself, and then cut all power to the engine. The freighter lurched violently, and tried to pull its nose up into a stall, but she forced it back into something like a level glide.

  And that was that. No power left, no tricks left to try, all options explored. She was left with a deadstick glide into a nighttime open-ocean ditch. It didn’t get much worse than that. Kalenda tried not to tell herself that at least she had the blessing of fair weather, for fear of the universe conjuring up a storm for her out of sheer perversity.

  Flying is divided into two sorts of time—the steady, careful stretches where the idea is to keep things more or less as they are, and the sudden, rushing, fast-moving moments where the idea is to get from one state to another as quickly as possible while not getting killed. Pilots should not be rushed or hurried during cruise operations, but they must move fast for the takeoffs and landings.

  As Kalenda was in the process of learning, all that was true in spades for a deadstick water landing. That water down below was coming up on her awfully fast. Best to get ready. She was going to have to get out of here in a hurry, once she put down. Keeping one hand on the flying stick, she reached up with the other and pulled down on the safety cover for the overhead escape hatch. She risked a glance up to spot the safety releases, then got her eyes forward again. Getting closer. Much closer. She reached up without looking and flipped the releases, then yanked down hard on the hatch eject lever.

  Blam! The bolts blew and the hatch flew clear. Suddenly the wind was roaring past, and the stale, burned-insulation-flavored atmosphere of the cockpit was swept away by the cool, tangy salt air of the Corellian ocean by night.

  Much, much closer. Kalenda struggled to flatten out her glide angle and braced herself for impact. Water might seem softer than land, but it still packed a hell of a wallop if you hit it at speed.

  And here it came. Kalenda resisted the temptation to shut her eyes, and got both hands back on the flight stick, hanging on for dear life.

  Coming in closer, lower, faster—faster—faster! The water so close now it was a blur, all the nice neat waves she could see so clearly from higher up nothing more than a smear of blue gray she could not focus on. The wind roared through the hatchway, and her hair got loose and blew wildly into her face. She ignored it. Better to go in half-blind than to take her hands off the stick. Closer faster can’t get closer must be there but we’re not closer faster faster—

  With a shuddering, roaring crash the ruined freighter slammed into the waves, bounced clear, and slammed down again with renewed vigor. Kalenda held on for dear life as the ship slammed head-on into wave after wave after wave, the water splashing up over the viewports, then clearing away before the next wave blinded her again. The shuddering, terrifying ride seemed to go on forever, with always the next wave lunging into view just as the last one washed away.

  But at last the freighter slowed, rode lower in the water, eased itself to a halt, and the stupefying, crashing roar of the landing was quite suddenly replaced by the absurdly prosaic, hollow, echoing sounds of water sloshing about under a hull, of waves crashing on a nearby shore. She had made it. At least, made it this far.

  Kalenda allowed herself a moment to resume breathing. She peeled her hands off the flight stick, released her crash belts, and stood up, more than a little weak in the knees. She wanted to give herself time to recover, but there was no time. The nose was already creeping up into the sky as the freight
er’s aft end took on water.

  She went to the cockpit hatch and pulled open the manual release panel. She pulled down the lever and felt the latch disengage. She leaned into the hatch and shoved it open. There. The pressure suit she’d never had the chance to get to—and the standard-issue survival packs. She grabbed both ration packs and the gear case, and noticed her feet were wet. Water. Water already coming in. Hurry. Move. The ration packs had carry straps, and she threw one over each shoulder while carrying the gear case by its handle. She heaved the case out the overhead escape hatch and then scrambled through it herself as fast as she could, for fear of the case sliding off the hull without her. She managed to snatch at it just as it was threatening to slip off into the water.

  In theory, there was a life raft in the case, along with all the other hardware. Kalenda had planned to open the case, get the raft and its paddles, close the case, inflate the raft, load it up with the gear case and the ration packs, climb in herself, and then paddle sedately away. She might as well have planned to compose a few Selonian sonnets as well, for all the good it would do her. The freighter was sinking beneath her feet, and it was, after all, the dead of night, and far too dark for rummaging around in a gear case looking for a life raft.

  Well, if the survival gear designers had had any sense—she heaved the gear case into the water. Sure enough, praise be, it floated, and fairly high in the water at that. She readjusted the straps on the ration packs—which seemed likely to act in the stead of flotation devices in their own right—and stepped sloshingly off into the cool salt water.

  After an anxious moment or two when it seemed the gear case wanted to escape from her altogether, she managed to grab it by the handle, and sort of pull herself on top of it, so that she was lying on her stomach on the case, her feet dangling off the end. She discovered the case had a handle on either side, and took one in each hand. She started paddle-kicking vigorously without worrying too much about which direction she was going. She was eager to get some distance between herself and the sinking ship. A ship, even a small one, produces quite a bit of suction as it goes down, and she had no desire to be pulled under as the freighter went to the bottom.

  Judging that she was far enough away, she turned herself around with a kick or two of her feet and watched as her poor old freighter commenced its final voyage, toward its last resting place, on the bottom of the Corellian sea.

  The nose of the ship continued to angle up out of the water. There was a flash, and a shower of sparks illuminated the cockpit from the inside as some power system or other shorted out. The ship’s interior lights flared, guttered down, flared again, and then died altogether. There was a dull thud and a mass of dirty bubbles belched out of the water from the aft end of the ship. The nose of the ship swung clear over to the vertical. There were a few creaking sounds, and the sound of water rushing in, and the nose of the ship sank straight down, moving with an odd sort of dignity. A final slosh, a gurgle, and the nose of her ill-starred freighter vanished beneath the waves.

  Kalenda stared at the spot where it had been, more emotions than she could rightly name running through her as she watched what might well have been her own watery grave close over itself, as if there had never been any such thing as a freighter that ditched in the sea. It had vanished altogether.

  She looked up at the gleaming stars overhead. Possibly someone had seen the glowing trail of her reentry across the sky, but Corellia’s skies were just as full of junk as most places these days. That was one grim legacy of the Republic-Imperial War: Most star systems were cluttered up with shot-up spacecraft of one sort or another. No one even bothered to report the most spectacular of fireballs anymore. She had come in at night over water precisely to avoid being seen, but if there were any witnesses on the planet, her arrival would have looked just like the entry of dozens of derelict fighters and tenders and space-probe spacecraft that had crashed into the planet these last few years.

  The odds were very good that she had made it, and that the Corellians didn’t know she was here, and would have no way of finding her if they did.

  The question became—what good was that going to do?

  A wave lifted her up a bit, and she levered herself up a bit over the gear case to try to get her bearings. Good. Good. She was already pointed toward land, which looked to be only a few kilometers away.

  She started kicking her feet, propelling herself toward the shore.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Farewell and Hail

  Luke threw his black cloak back over one shoulder and stepped out of the shadows, toward where the Millennium Falcon was sitting on her hard stand, ready for liftoff. It was a scene of organized chaos—or more accurately, two such scenes mixed up with each other.

  On the starboard side of the ship, Han was arguing with one of the spaceport safety inspection services, apparently about some sort of clearance regulation, while at the same time shouting at Chewbacca, who was crouched down over an access panel on the starboard wing of the hull. Well, Han and Chewie had been arguing over how to keep the Falcon patched up ever since Luke had known them. No reason to expect they’d stop now.

  On the port side of the ship, Leia was surrounded by a little knot of governmental types of all sorts and descriptions. Luke looked over the crowd. Clerks, civil-service droids, cabinet officials, senators, and a sprinkling of military officers. No surprises there, either. Even in as democratic and informal a government as Leia was trying to build, it wasn’t possible to let the Chief of State escape for her vacation without at least a few stray details—and egos—to sort out at the last minute.

  A line of household service droids were rolling through, straight between the two groups and up the ship’s ramp, delivering the last of the luggage aboard the Falcon.

  Han and Leia’s three kids were racing around like wild things, beside themselves with excitement at the start of the big adventure—and, no doubt, well aware of the fact that they were about to get out from under Threepio’s nagging and fussing. Luke smiled at that thought. No wonder they had wanted to make their own droid, the way that old bucket of bolts worried and niggled over everything.

  As Leia was attempting to deal with the Bimm ambassador, Han was, by default, on child duty, doing his best to control them. Understandably under the circumstances, his best was none too good. Seeing things might be moving toward a crisis, Luke decided to step in. “Jacen! Jaina! Slow down a minute!” he called out. “Take it easy! Anakin! That landing leg isn’t for climbing on! Come down from there.”

  “But Chewie climbs on the ship,” Anakin protested. He came down off the landing leg, but not willingly.

  “But he’s not playing on the ship,” Luke said, reflecting, not for the first time, on the futility of attempting to reason with a child Anakin’s age. “He’s working on it, trying to make it go better.”

  “I could make it go better,” Anakin said, poking himself in the chest with a very confident thumb. “Lots of ways.”

  “I’ll bet you could,” Luke said, with a laugh. Anakin did seem to have a remarkably precocious way with machinery, but somehow Luke doubted Chewbacca would be eager to take too much help from him. “But why don’t we let your father and Chewie worry about all that?” While Anakin was considering that, Luke took advantage of the moment to change the subject. “Are you all set to go on the trip?” he asked.

  “Uh-huh. I got all my stuff.”

  “Good. You ought to have lots of fun.” Luke looked up and spotted Jaina trying to get into the luggage the droids were carrying about the Falcon. “Come on, Jaina,” he said. “Leave that stuff alone.”

  “But I wanted to get my book chips,” Jaina protested. “I think they’re in this bag.”

  “You’re not going to have any chance to read until after takeoff anyway,” Luke said, hoping that Jaina was in as—relatively—cooperative and reasonable a mood as Anakin. He shooed the droid on its way. “What good is it going to do to get all your stuff dumped out on the landing pad?”r />
  “But I want the chips now!”

  So much for being reasonable. “Well, you should have thought of that before you packed.”

  “I didn’t pack. I would have kept the chips out if I had. The droids packed for me.”

  “I told you that you were letting them do too much for you,” Luke said. “This is the sort of thing that happens. Do things for yourself, and they’ll turn out right. Let others do them, and you’ve got no right to complain. So no sulking, and remember this for next time. All right?”

  “All right,” she replied, quite reluctantly.

  “Good,” Luke said. Maybe, just maybe, the punishment she and Jacen had gotten for the previous droid accident had left some sort of impression. “Now take Anakin with you and find a place to sit quietly until it’s time to go.” Luke looked up and spotted Jacen at his father’s side. He was about to call him over, tell him to quit bothering his father. Then Han put his arm around the boy in an absent-minded sort of way, while still arguing with the ground crew. Jacen seemed most interested in the argument. Leave it be.

  Keeping half an eye on Jaina and Anakin, who were, for a miracle, indeed sitting quietly on an overturned shipping container, Luke went over to see if he could help Leia extricate herself from the crowd of people who seemed intent on keeping her on the landing pad, asking “just one last question,” until night had fallen.

  But he should have listened when Mon Mothma reminded him that he was not the only one of the two siblings with skills the other had not developed. The crowd around her was already melting away, each dignitary and hanger-on leaving with a smile on his, her, or its face, clearly pleased with the results of the conference, each of them plainly feeling that the Chief of State had paid special attention to his, her, or its concerns. Luke had never been that good with people, and he felt the slightest pang of envy to see the apparent effortlessness with which she handled them all. It was the same old story, of course—everything was easy if you practiced the skills required for years on end. He had sold Leia short. He could not make it up to her all at once, with a single gesture—but at least he could make a start.