Han looked around, and, for a miracle, spotted a fire extinguisher within reach right where it was supposed to be. He peeled off his shirt and wrapped it around his left hand, then took the extinguisher in his right. He grabbed the manual hatch control with his left hand, and the shirt instantly began to smolder. He pulled the lever and swung the hatch open.
A blast of heat struck him in the face; he checked his grip on the extinguisher. If the renewed supply of oxygen started something burning, he wanted to be ready for it. But he did not want to try doing emergency repairs on equipment that was covered with spray foam if he could possibly avoid it.
Not that spray foam could have made things much worse. Han stood in the hatchway, stared at the compartment, and felt sick. The initiator was just not there anymore. There was no need for the extinguisher. Anything that could have burned already had. Han looked down at the blackened deck plates. The compartment was just under the outer hull. It looked as if the LAF’s turbolaser hadn’t quite burned through the hull, but it had clearly come close. The entire compartment was still hot, but was cooling rapidly now, the metal pinging and clinging as it gave up its heat to space.
But Han wasn’t here to see what happened after an equipment bay fire. Think, Han told himself. Think as fast as you ever have. The coneship had a very awkward engine-start system, and one that had caused plenty of trouble already on this trip. More modern systems worked differently, but on this bucket, the initiators served as massive capacitors, storing up huge amounts of energy and slamming it all out at once to get the sublight engines over the power threshold where their energy reaction was self-sustaining.
With the initiators out, the sublight engines could not restart. And without those engines the coneship was going to drop like a stone, a shooting star aimed straight for the planet. They had to restart those engines. They had to. But there was no other system in the ship with anything like enough power to let the sublights reach their minimum start-up energy. Even if they overloaded every single—
Wait a second. That was it. It was unlikely it would work. But it definitely wouldn’t work if he didn’t give it a try.
And give it a try fast. They were in free fall, heading straight for a spot that was going to have a new crater in a few minutes. Han stepped back out of the initiator compartment and resealed the hatch. Where would the repulsor feedback dispersal system be on this tub? Useless to ask Salculd. She was so close to the edge she probably wouldn’t remember where the pilot’s station was. She had given him a tour of the ship when he had first come aboard—that was it! Just on the other side of the main power room. Perfect. Han rushed back down the circumferential corridor the way he had come and found the right access panel on the wall. He pulled it open and traced the connections. Good. Good. For a wonder, they were all standard hookups. He tripped the breaker by hand. Cable. He needed power cable. Stores room. They had all but cleaned it out to fill the airlocks with junk, but there had to be something left. He charged down the corridor and threw open the hatch to the stores room.
Nothing. Down to the bare walls. Utterly empty. Han started to swear to himself and at himself with impressive fluency, but there was no time for such indulgences. Think. Think. Life support. Main power to life support. No sense keeping it on. They were all going to be dead in about five minutes anyway if he didn’t get some power cable.
Life support. Where could he kill power to life support? Right! Cut it right at main power and yank the cable from there. Han rushed back to the main power room, threw the hatch open, and went inside. Not everything was labeled, and what was labeled was in Selonian, of course. He struggled to sort out what was what. There! If he was reading the labels right, that junction was MAIN DEVICE FOR THE BLOWING OF AIR MEANT FOR BREATHING, and that one was CLEANSING OF AIR FROM POLLUTANTS FOR PLEASANT BREATHING. A little verbose, perhaps, but clear enough. He found the circuit breakers on the junctions and slammed them off. Han could hear the fans and blowers dying all over the ship. He yanked the power cables out of their sockets and pulled them down off their cable guides. He pulled the other ends of the cables, and then found a label reading POWER INPUT HERE FROM THE POWERFUL INITIATORS WHICH ARE IN ANOTHER COMPARTMENT. He pulled the cables running from the destroyed initiators and plugged in his borrowed life-support cables. He snaked the cables out into the corridor, praying they would reach, and gave thanks when they did. He made sure the repulsors were off-line, then yanked the lines running to the repulsor feedback dispersal unit and plugged in his borrowed cables.
He stepped back and double-checked his work. “Okay,” he said to no one at all. “That ought to work. I think.” He turned and ran for the ladder up to the command deck.
* * *
“Something’s wrong,” Leia said, watching her detector screens. “The spin has reversed instead of stopping, and they haven’t restarted their main engines.”
“Maybe they took some bad damage from that hit,” Mara said.
“Can we dock with the ship and get them off?” Leia asked.
“Not before they hit atmosphere,” Mara said. “There’s nowhere near enough time. Besides, that cloud of debris they threw out is still traveling with them. We’d get hit the same way the LAFs were.”
“A tractor beam, then,” Leia said. “We could set that up and—”
“And what? That ship isn’t all that much smaller than this one. The tractor on this ship doesn’t have a tenth the power to hold that ship. If we tried it, more than likely they’d pull us down instead. I’m sorry, Leia. There’s nothing at all we can do.”
Deep in her heart, Leia knew Mara was right. But it felt wrong to give up without a fight. They had to do something. “Stay close,” Leia said. “Get as close as you can without getting into the debris cloud and take up station keeping.”
“Leia, there is nothing we can—”
“Suppose they get temporary control, or slow just enough that they can abandon ship?” Leia asked. “We need to be close enough to get in and help.”
Mara hesitated a moment. “All right. But we won’t be able to hold station keeping long. We’re about five minutes from atmosphere right now, and once we hit it—well that will be the end of things.” Leia knew that. Without shielding, without braking from the engines, the coneship would turn into a meteorite, a streak of fire that burned across the sky before crashing in the planet. “I’ll stay close as long as I can,” Mara said. “But it won’t be long.”
“Do it,” Leia said. But even as she urged Mara onward, she wondered why. What good would it do to watch from closer in as her husband was incinerated?
* * *
“Out!” Han shouted at Salculd as he came up out the hatch to the command deck. “Out of pilot chair now! I take over.”
“But what are you—”
“No time!” he snapped. He sealed the hatch, just in case they lived long enough to worry about air leaks. “I must take over. No time to explain what to do. Out! Move!”
Salculd moved, undoing her seat restraints and bailing out of the pilot’s station.
Han dove into the vacated seat and checked the status board. Good. Good. Repulsors showing full power in reserve. “Switching on repulsors!” he announced. He adjusted them for their tightest beam and maximum range.
“Honored Solo! The repulsors cannot work at this range!” Dracmus said in Basic. “They are only effective within two kilometers of surface!”
“I know that,” Han said. “They need something to work against before they can set up a repulsion effect. But at these speeds, they’ll encounter a fair amount of resistance from the top of the atmosphere. I know, I know, not enough to slow us down—but enough to start large power transfers through the feedback dispersal loop.”
“But what good does that do?”
“I’ve taken the disperser out of the loop and run the cables through the initiator power intake on the engine power system. The feedback energy is just accumulating in the repulsor system. When the power level is high enough,
I’ll reset the feedback power breaker and dump the energy right into the initiator intake on the engine power systems.”
“What?!”
“Jump-start it,” Han said. “I’m going to jump-start it.”
There was a moment of dead silence in the control cabin before Dracmus let out a strangled moan and covered her face with her hands.
“What is going on?” Salculd demanded in Selonian.
“I go to start engines by accumulating repulsor feedback power and dumping through initiator manifold,” Han replied.
“But feedback buildup will destroy repulsors!”
“Get even more destroyed by crashing into Selonia,” Han said in his awkward Selonian. “This not work and you have idea, you try yours. Hang on.”
The idea was crazy. Han knew that. But not doing anything at all would be crazier still. Even a million-to-one shot was better than no chance at all.
He watched the feedback charge accumulator display as the excess energy built up in the repulsor system. The more power, the better the chance of restarting the engines—unless he accumulated so much power the repulsors simply blew out. The closer they got to the planet, the more resistance the repulsors encountered, and the faster the feedback accumulated. But of course, the farther they fell, the less time they would have to put on the brakes, if and when the engines did light.
Han knew that even the maximum power output he could hope for would be borderline minimum to get the sublight engines going—and he was going to get exactly one chance. Whether or not this stunt worked, it was going to blow out the repulsors and the feedback accumulator and half the other systems on the ship.
Han checked his estimated flight path meters. Twenty seconds from the average top of the sensible atmosphere—though the tops of atmospheres had a nasty habit of not being where they were supposed to be, raising and lowering depending on storms and tides and solar heating. But twenty seconds was the outside, the longest he could possibly wait. The repulsors were not likely to provide much more charging of the accumulator if they were being melted off.
It was going to be a tough call, a threading of the needle between competing disasters.
Han checked the altitude and acceleration displays. The coneship was gathering speed, terrifying speed, with every second. Even if he got the engines lit, there might not be time to slow the ship before piling it in.
“Honored Solo! Hull temperature suddenly increasing!” Salculd cried.
“Atmosphere’s here a little early!” Han said. “Hang on! We’re going to jump this thing and see what happens.”
One chance, Han told himself. Exactly one chance. For a fleeting moment he thought of Leia, watching from the Jade’s Fire and unable to do anything. He thought of his three children, off somewhere in the care of Chewbacca and Ebrihim the Drall. No. No. He could not die. Not when they all needed him. One chance. The ship bucked and shuddered as the atmospheric buffering shook it hard enough to get past the inertial dampers. One chance.
Han waited as long as he dared, then one moment longer, then one more. And then—
He slammed down the relay reset switch as hard as he could, dumping all of the feedback energy directly into the engine start manifold. He stabbed down on the engine start button—and felt a horrifying lurch, just as a low, rumbling explosion shook the ship from base to apex. That would have to be the repulsors blowing. For a long, sickening moment, nothing else happened. But then the ENGINES NOW CERTAINLY ARE INITIATED FULLY indicator came on, and Han had three good engines.
Three? Not four? One of them must have been blown out by that LAF fighter. Han had been afraid of that. But even if he had one less engine than he had hoped for, that was three more than he had expected.
Ignoring all his own advice on the subject, he brought the throttle up fast. There wasn’t time to nurse the engines. There was a distant bang and sudden flurry of violent vibrations that faded almost before they started, but the engines were holding. At least for now. At least for now.
Han watched the acceleration meter, the velocity gauge, and the none-too-reliable altitude meter. For a wonder, the displays were all in standard units, and not some obscure Selonian format he had never seen before.
But what he was seeing was by no means reassuring. He had flown enough reentries to know at a glance that they were far from out of trouble. The best they were going to manage was a controlled crash. Han risked a glance out the viewport and saw that the Jade’s Fire was still staying close, somehow. Mara was some kind of pilot.
Now if only he had a view that would show him the direction he was going. Unfortunately, the ship was flying stern-first, and the stern holocam, which might have shown him at least a vague idea of where he was heading, had given up altogether at some point in the proceedings.
On the bright side, air friction was slowing down the ship’s axial spin. Finally it stopped altogether, which at least made piloting the coneship that much easier. It was about time something got easier.
Han watched his velocity and altitude gauges, and knew just how much trouble he was still in. He had to shed some more speed. He had no choice in the matter. There was a way to do it, but it had its own drawbacks. And making it work without maneuvering thrusters was not going to be easier. He would have to do all his steering by playing with the thrust of the main engines—not simple when he was already juggling their thrust vectors to compensate for the missing engine. Still, it was doable. Maybe.
He eased back just a trifle on the thrust to number three engine, and the coneship slowly pitched back, until it was flying at about a forty-five-degree angle of attack. It was still falling straight down, but now its nose was pointed an eighth of a turn away from the vertical. If Han had it figured right, that ought to start the coneship developing a bit of aerodynamic lift, in effect causing it to work like an airfoil. The coneship began to move sideways as well as down, and every millimeter of lateral movement came straight from the energy of their fall.
The ship began to bang and shudder violently, but every crash and rattle was that much more excess energy expended.
“Honored Solo!” Dracmus protested above the racket, “You have put us in lateral flight! Where are you taking us?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Han said. “But we have to go lateral to shed some speed.”
“But suppose we land outside the zone controlled by my Den?!”
“Then we have a problem,” Han shouted back.
Dracmus did not reply to that, but she had a point. Landing completely at random on a planet in the midst of civil war was not exactly prudent.
Han pushed it from his mind. The job of the moment was getting this thing down in one piece. Down where, they could sort out later.
He checked his gauges. They were still falling like a rock—but like a slower rock, a gliding rock. And hull temperatures were actually falling, just a trifle. Maybe, maybe, they were going to make it.
Of course, landing on the sublight engines, rather than on the now-dead repulsors, and landing blind would be challenges in their own right. It would be at least another ninety seconds before he had to worry about such things.
He checked the gauges and shook his head. The lateral flight trick was slowing them down, but nowhere near enough. At this rate, they’d be lucky to drop below the speed of sound before they hit.
There was no way around it. He was going to have to get something more out of the engines. What about that fourth engine, the one that had refused to light? Maybe it was just its initiator link that had been blown off. Maybe the engine itself was still there, if he could just get it to come on. Maybe if he tried a parallel backfeed start. With the other engines up and running, he could borrow part of their energy output and back-flush it through the unlit engine. It might work. Han reset the power flow from the number two engine, routing five percent of it through the initiator lines to engine three. He stabbed down the button marked PRESSING HERE WILL CAUSE ENGINE NUMBER FOUR TO START.
A weird h
igh-pitched squeal cut through the clamoring roar that filled the command deck, and the coneship began to oscillate wildly as the engine lit and died and lit and died. A display indicator came on, announcing ENGINE FOUR NOW OPERATING NICELY, but it went out again, then popped on and faded one more time before coming back on and staying that way.
Four engines. He had four good engines. He might come out of this alive after all. But then he checked his altitude, and found good reason to doubt it. They were only three kilometers up. Han realized that he would have to shed all of his lateral speed immediately if he was going to set this thing down. He pitched the ship around until it was flying flat on its side, the thrust axis parallel to the ground. The planetary horizon swooped into view and kept going right past, until Han was flying exactly upside down, his feet pointed at the sky and his head pointed at the ground.
He throttled all the engines up to maximum, and just a bit beyond, and held it there, until the ground stopped rushing past from side to side and was simply coming straight at him. Zero forward velocity, or close enough.
But plenty of velocity in the direction of down. Han pitched the coneship over again, until he was flat on his back, looking at the sky, and made sure the engines were cranked up to maximum power. There was nothing else he could do. “Hanging on!” he shouted in Selonian. “Be strapped in and braced. We are going to be hitting hard!”
Green lights started to flash all over the propulsion status display. In most ships that would have been a good thing, but not on this crate. To a Selonian, green was the color of danger, disaster. The engines were running full out, at or beyond the point of catastrophe. Han wanted desperately to see if he could bully or tempt just a little bit more out of them, but did not dare. No point in coming this far just to have the ship detonate a half kilometer off the ground.
Maybe, maybe, they had slowed down enough to make this a survivable crash. Han cut power to all systems and diverted it all into the inertial dampers. There was no way the dampers could absorb all the energy of impact, but they would soak up some of it. Maybe if they were running at max power, it would be just enough.
Star Wars: The Corellian Trilogy III: Showdown at Centerpoint Page 4
