Suicide crashes.
Even a lightly built TIE fighter generated a titanic amount of kinetic energy when traveling at the high end of its sublight velocity; the particle shields of the capital ships couldn’t dissipate it fast enough. A couple of suiciders were enough to trigger a momentary partial shield failure, and if another TIE timed it just right to slip into the gap, the impact could rip through whole decks.
The Remember Alderaan rocked and shuddered under its third such impact; clouds of gas and crystallized water vapor billowed out from three enormous rents in its hull. Like all battle cruisers, the Alderaan was designed to suck up an astonishing amount of damage and go on fighting, but when Lando got the preliminary damage and casualty report on this latest blast, even his legendary unquenchable optimism was pretty well quenched. Over a thousand crew members wounded or missing; a third of his turbolasers out of commission; and one main engine was overheating and would either shut down or melt down sometime in the next three or four minutes.
Lando leaned on the comm board on the Alderaan’s bridge. “Where the hell is our fighter escort?” he snarled. “Somebody has to stop these guys!”
But he knew the answer: the task force’s fighters were overcommitted in support of the ground action against the STOEs—the surface-to-orbit emplacements. He didn’t even have enough to adequately cover his marines, let alone defend his fleet.
“General Calrissian! General, can someone give me a hand?” C-3PO, knocked off his feet by the impact, had somehow gotten himself wedged under the security console. “Oh, what a terrible dent I’m going to have!”
Lando waved a hand and ordered, “Somebody pick up that droid!” because otherwise the blasted thing would just lie there and complain until somebody snapped and blew his gold-plated head off. He turned to his executive officer, a Glassferran, whose three expressionless eyes were fixed on three different tactical holodisplays. “Close the fleet up, Kartill,” he said. “We need to bring the ships together. As close as possible—seal the gaps in our antifighter coverage.”
“We’re practically kissing each other’s shields as it is,” Kartill replied. “And—begging the general’s pardon—being that close together is about to be a serious problem, once those STOEs swing over the horizon.”
“Don’t remind me.” He turned to the officer at the communications board. “Anything from Shysa?”
“Report coming in now, sir. I’ll put it on speaker.”
The crisp sizzle of blasterfire was the only thing that came clearly over the comm channel; everything else was half-buried in static. Lando leaned over the board and tried to keep smiling. “Shysa! Calrissian. I need good news, Fenn! We’re only eight minutes off that gravity gun’s firing window, and I’ve got a whole lot of ships with their bellies hanging out up here!”
C-3PO had reached his feet and now shuffled toward Lando. “General Calrissian—”
“Later. Fenn, do you read?”
The comm crackled with more blasterfire and a louder burst of static that might have been a proton grenade. “We’re making progress, but it’s room-to-room! These black-armor types are dug in and they don’t seem to believe in runnin’ away.”
“Do they believe in dying?”
“Oh, that they have a talent for. Problem is, they keep tryin’ to take our boys with ’em when they go!”
“Keep on it, Fenn. I’ll see if I can organize some help.”
“Anything you can do will be welcome.”
“General Calrissian, please!” C-3PO hovered at Lando’s shoulder, and he sounded even more agitated than usual. “You might be interested—”
“I said later.” Lando pointed at the communications officer. “Open the dedicated channel to Captain Antilles in Rogue One.”
The officer nodded. “Ten seconds, sir.”
Lando turned to C-3PO. “Okay. Ten seconds. What’s so interesting?”
“Well, you may find it interesting; I can’t know for certain,” the droid replied defensively. “But interesting or not, it’s unquestionably significant. In my opinion, that is.”
“Your opinion?”
“General? Captain Antilles,” the officer said.
“Please, General Calrissian, my opinion, on this matter, is most reliable!”
“Lost your chance.” Lando turned back to the comm board. “Wedge. Change of plans. Pull the Rogues off the turbo towers. The Mandos are having trouble securing the gravity gun. If that dome opens up, I want more ordnance going in than coming out, do you read?”
“Copy that, but I’m down three birds. Got a squadron or two you can spare?”
“Don’t make jokes, Wedge. Just get there. A lot of lives are depending on you.”
“We’re used to it, sir.”
“That’s why I wouldn’t give the job to anybody else. Clear skies, Wedge.”
“See you on the far side, General. Rogue Leader out.”
“But—but General Calrissian—”
“Not now, Threepio!” Lando clenched his jaw. He’d had a feeling all along that it might come to this. “Kartill, alert the fleet. We’re going atmospheric.”
All three of the exec’s eyes blinked at once. “Sir?”
“You heard me. Dirtside. Everybody. It’s the only way. If we’re still in orbit ten minutes from now, those STOEs will cut us to pieces.”
“Land? Land where, sir?”
“We’ll worry about that after we’re out of their fire window, yes?”
“Yes, sir.”
“General—General, please!”
“Keep bothering me, Threepio, and I swear I’ll hit you so hard you’ll think you’re a garbage loader.”
“But, General, I thought you wanted to find Captain Solo!”
“What?” Lando turned and stared at the skinny protocol droid. “You know something about Han?”
“Possibly. In your brief communication with him—”
“Yeah, that was weird, wasn’t it? We can barely reach our own ships once they’re in that atmosphere, but we could pick up Han’s comlink, and he said he was in some kind of cave—”
“Yes, General. Yes, that’s it precisely. During that communication, I detected a subtle modulation in the carrier wave. Sort of a background noise, one might say.”
“What kind of background noise?”
“It appears to be a retrograde ortho-dialect of Surmo-Clarithian electrospeech interspersed with a creole of the Black Dwarf variant of Imperial digital encryption and a Neimoidian trade cipher—fascinating, really, especially in the structural vocabulation—”
“Threepio.”
“Oh, yes. Of course. Essentially, something was speaking on the comm wave. Or rather, the comm signal was picking up something’s speech.”
“Another comm signal?”
“Oh, no no no, nothing so sophisticated. It’s simply a language—electrospeech is a type of direct energy modulation used by a variety of life-forms; to date, I believe the total known to science numbers over—”
“Forget that. This electrospeech—you understand it?”
The droid drew himself up proudly. “I am fluent in over six million forms of—”
“I don’t need a list. What’d it say?”
“Well—translated as best I can, you understand, their accent is perfectly barbarous—they were about to take a pair of humans captive, and will deliver them to the crypt chamber.”
Lando shook his head. “What crypt chamber? And who’s taking who captive?”
“I’m sure I cannot say who the captors might be; the language would be appropriate for any number of energy-based life-forms.”
“Then why are you wasting my time with this?”
“Oh, well, it’s because these two captives were apparently accompanied by a Wookiee.”
“A Wookiee?”
“It does seem an unlikely coincidence. And they also mention a droid—hmm, parsing … half human size, round as a pillar spine, rotating dome—Artoo! Oh, General Calrissian, we must do so
mething! They have Artoo!”
“All right, all right, slow down.” If whoever this was had R2-D2, they might even have Luke—or at least know what happened to him. That’s what Lando told himself, anyway; somehow it made him feel better to have at least a theoretically valid argument of military necessity for the rescue mission he was already pretty sure he was going to order anyway. “How did that signal punch through in the first place?”
“That’s exactly the point, General. I suspect that the natural frequency of this particular energy-based life-form confines it to a certain variety of electromagnetically active rock—this would be this life-form’s natural environment, as it were—and while this rock may very well interfere with an ordinary comm signal, its conductive properties should actually enable it to resonate with and reinforce a properly modulated—”
“I get it. Can you reproduce this modulation? Can you run it through the ship’s comm?”
“Well—in all modesty, perhaps Artoo would be more—”
Lando gritted his teeth against an almost overpowering urge to twist C-3PO’s head off. “Can you do it?”
“I am fluent in over—”
“Don’t tell me.” Lando pointed at the comm board. “Tell the ship.”
LUKE SCRAMBLED THROUGH THE DEEP CINDERS WITH Nick close behind. Taspan had sunk below the horizon; the only light came from the burning wreckage scattered across the floor of the crater, and from the occasional flashes and flares of the battle that raged above.
The cinder crunched and gave way almost like fine sand beneath every step, making the going slow and hard. The crater was also littered with bigger chunks—masses of hardened lava and rocky ejecta, most of which were a featureless, nonreflective black, which made them very hard to see; even Luke only discovered the medium-sized ones by painfully whacking one with his shins. He would have gone more cautiously, but the first time an ion panel blown off a TIE came whistling down and shattered into shrapnel a couple of dozen meters away, he gave up the idea of slow and careful.
They ran hard. At least when Luke caught his foot on a chunk and fell, he could use the Force to flip himself in the air and hit the ground running. Nick didn’t have that option, but somehow he managed to reach the relative shelter beneath the slant of the Falcon’s hull only a few steps behind Luke, even though he was limping, both hands were bleeding, and he had a nasty-looking scrape on his forehead.
The Falcon loomed over them, blacking out the stars. Its attitude thrusters flared and sprayed jets of gas in a seemingly random sequence—trying to rock itself free—and the whine of its repulsorlifts scaled up from merely annoying to a shriek that was making Luke’s teeth ache.
Nick scowled up at the ship’s dark silhouette. “What do we do, knock?”
“No comlink.” Luke held one hand pressed against his ear. “We have to get their attention somehow.”
“Where’s the hatch?”
“Up there.” Luke gestured vaguely overhead; the belly hatch was high up the underside, out of reach. “Maybe we can climb.”
“No problem. I grew up in a jungle. I can climb anything.”
“Not yet. Something’s wrong.”
“Other than their landing? Shee, in the holoshows, Solo’s supposed to be such a hot pilot …”
Luke frowned. “I feel … fear and anger. Aggression. Danger. Han’s my best friend—why would his ship feel hostile?”
“Dunno.” Nick looked around and spotted a slow swing of motion in the darkness above. “Think it might be because that quad turret’s tracking us?”
The Force stabbed Luke with an instant overpowering Move-or-die; in less than an eyeflick his foot lashed out to slam Nick back deeper under the hull and he sprang into the air, back-flipping away. The night ripped open with the choomchoomchoomchoom of high-cyclic cannon fire, burning the air into long streaks of brilliant yellow that lit up the cinder pit like noon on Tatooine, and blowing gouts of white-molten rock in all directions.
The turret tracked Luke, chopping red-hot craters toward him like the footprints of an invisible fire god. He landed and sprang again on a different vector, and by the time the turret followed that leap he was off again on another that took him behind a boulder the size of an adolescent bantha. He pressed his back against it while the turret blasted away at its other side, and from the amount of smoke going up and debris raining down, he was pretty sure that turret’s gunner, whoever he was, figured the easiest way to get him would be to just blast the rock to pieces.
He rolled across to the opposite edge and risked a quick glance. Looked like Nick wasn’t kidding about being able to climb anything; he was clambering up the overhanging slant of the hull faster than a hungry mynock. “Nick! Get off of there!”
Nick reached the gimbal cowling of the quad turret. With Nick hanging half across the transparisteel viewport, the gunner quit blasting; Luke could see him inside, shouting Get your fraggin’ grass off my turret, or something along those lines.
“Nuts to that,” Nick called back. “He can’t shoot me here! Toss me your lightsaber and I’ll shut this ruskakk down with one swipe!”
“No, Nick! Jump! The Falcon’s equipped with a—”
A burst of blue-white energy crackled over the freighter’s hull; the discharge threw Nick tumbling from the turret to the ground, where he landed on his back with an authoritative whump.
“—antipersonnel field projector,” Luke finished belatedly.
The gunner opened up again. Luke extended his hand and summoned the Force; a sharp shove sent Nick skidding, and Luke decided he’d had just about enough of being shot at for one night. He took a deep breath and sent his mind into the Force.
The Falcon loomed large in his perception, as did the thirty or so desperate people he now felt were inside. He shut them out of his consciousness and focused on the ship itself. There—he felt the circuit he was looking for … and he even felt the echo of Leia’s hand upon it! She had touched this only hours earlier. Maybe even less …
But this was a distraction—even more distracting than the shuddering of the boulder as cannon blasts chewed away at its opposite side. The mere awareness of Leia’s recent presence was enough to flood his mind with all manner of fears and hopes that dimmed his perception until he could banish them and focus once more. A few more deep breaths tuned his mind like a targeting laser, and he recovered his hold on the circuit. A slight nudge in the Force, and he felt the circuit trip.
The quad turret went dark, and its guns fell silent. The turret autorotated to face forward between the freighter’s mandibles.
Luke could feel the gunner’s confusion and rising panic; he figured he had at least five seconds before the gunner figured out that the turret drivers had been reset and locked into their forward-fire default position.
Five seconds was more than he needed.
He stood up and raised his hand. High up the underside of the ship’s slant, the belly hatch fell open, spilling light in a stretching rectangle up the night-shadowed hull. One Force-powered leap carried him over the smoking boulder to Nick’s side.
“I’m all right …” Nick wheezed weakly. “Just need a minute to … catch my breath. Or maybe a week. Or two.”
Luke knotted his left fist in the front of Nick’s Shadowspawn robe, gathered the Force around them both, and leapt straight up, over the edge of the freighter’s belly ramp—which, due to the angle at which the ship was stuck, was more like a slide—and skidded down it into the Falcon’s main cargo hold.
Which was full of men and women in curiously constructed armor that looked like it had been made out of lava, nearly all of whom were pointing blaster rifles at him.
For an instant, the only sound was the rattle and snap of rifle stocks being snugged against armored shoulders; in the next instant, the only sound was the lethal hum of a green lightsaber blade held forward at guard.
“Don’t shoot,” Luke said softly. “I’ve killed too many people already today.”
“Weapons down
!” The speaker was a hard-looking woman with red hair, sporting a swelling bruise around her left eye. She stood with her left thumb hooked behind her blaster belt while her right hand dangled free and loose near the butt of a slim blaster in a quick-draw rig. “It’s the Jedi! He’s here to help!”
“Yes,” Luke said. “I am the Jedi. And I hope I can help.” That was true on enough different levels to make his stomach hurt—but on the other hand, this was the second time in a row that someone had decided not to mess with him based on who they assumed he was, which was a trend he hoped to encourage. “Where’s Han?”
“Han who?” Her right hand came up, but it came up empty. “Listen, we need you—we need your help. Shadowspawn’s got my—”
“No he doesn’t,” Nick wheezed from behind Luke.
“Nick?” Her eyes sparked and her voice had gone soft and breathless, and Luke could only wonder how he’d thought she was hard-looking; when she gazed past him at Nick, she looked like a Tatooine teenager on the way to her own star-seventeen dance at the Anchorhead community center. She brushed past Luke as if he weren’t even there and threw her arms around him. “Nick! I can’t believe it!”
“Hey, kid. Did you miss me?”
“Did I miss you?” She pulled his face down to hers and planted a kiss on his lips that would have opened the eyes of a dead man.
Luke cleared his throat. “I take it you two know each other?”
“Nick—” Her eyes were still shining when she came up for air, and her cheeks were wet, too. “You’re all right? How did you escape? What are you doing running around with a Jedi?”
“All right? Mostly.” Nick rubbed at the dried blood that crusted his shaven scalp and grimaced. “The running-with-Jedi business, well, we sort of rescued each other. As for escaping … um, you have noticed that the ship we’re on is stuck nose-first in the ground in the middle of a giant pitched battle, haven’t you?”
“Doesn’t matter,” she said, stroking his face. “We’ve got you—that’s all that matters.”
Nick lifted his own hand to tenderly touch her black eye. “Still haven’t learned to duck, huh?”
Star Wars: Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor Page 23
