Ossilege stabbed a button on the flag deck’s main console.
“Putney here,” said a slightly high-pitched and nasal voice.
“Commander Putney, this is Ossilege. It looks like everyone has cleared out of the repulsor. Both ships have taken off.”
“Why?” Putney asked.
“We’re not sure, but one ship seems to be pursuing the other. We need to take advantage of the situation. They may or may not have left troops behind, but even if they have, some of their troopers and most of their firepower just headed off toward orbit. We are going to seize this chance with both hands. I don’t care if your assault boat is only half loaded and your troops don’t have their pants on. I want them headed toward an assault-speed landing in the repulsor now.”
“Yes, sir!” Putney replied. “Our heavy weapons aren’t aboard, but if we’re lucky, we won’t need them. We can launch in five minutes.”
“Do it in four,” Ossilege said, and cut the connection. He turned and gestured toward Kalenda. “Get me visual and tactical on the two ships now,” he ordered.
Kalenda worked the controls with lightning speed and brought up the imagery from the long-range visual scanner and the tactical. The images of two ships appeared. Both were clawing for altitude, the one in the lead flying erratically—and upside down. “That’s the Falcon,” Lando said. “That’s the Millennium Falcon, Han Solo’s personal ship. It’s flying upside down, and I think the pilot must be drunk, but I’d know that ship anywhere.”
“That’s the assault boat behind it,” Ossilege said eagerly. “And it looks to have taken some damage.”
“Who the devil is flying the Falcon?” Kalenda asked.
“It’s not Chewbacca, I can tell you that much,” said Lando. “He could fly her better than that blindfolded and with one arm in a sling—and I’m not speaking poetically.”
“Then who is it?”
“I have an idea, but none of you would believe me anyway,” said Lando. “You didn’t last time.”
Ossilege looked at him sharply. “You’re saying one of the children is flying that ship?”
“You said it, I didn’t,” Lando replied.
“The assault boat is firing again!” Kalenda cried out.
“Direct hit—but they’re still flying,” Lando said. “They must have gotten the shields up, somehow.”
Ossilege peered intently at the tactical screen, trying to make sense out of the course projection, but the Falcon was flying so wildly all over the map it was impossible to know for sure. “Where are they going?” he demanded. “Where are they headed? Whatever course they’re trying to keep doesn’t lead even remotely toward anything. Where do they think they’re going?”
“Nowhere,” Lando said. “Away. Out.”
“Do they know we’re here?” Ossilege demanded.
Lando shook his head. “If they did, they’d be heading toward us, or hailing us, or something. They’re just flying in whatever direction they happened to be heading in when the pilot managed to get control of the ship.”
Ossilege was plainly excited, agitated—and just as plainly trying not to show it. “Can we get a tractor beam on either ship? Or both?”
Kalenda checked. “Not quite. But even if they are not moving straight toward us, they’re moving in our general direction. We ought to have the Falcon within tractor range in twenty seconds, and the assault boat in range ten seconds after that.”
“Wait until they’re both in range, and then get tractor beams on both of them. Pull the Falcon in, but just hold the assault boat where it is, at least for the moment.”
“Yes, sir,” Kalenda said, and set to work relaying the orders.
“If we work this right,” said Ossilege, “we can grab the repulsor and Thrackan Sal-Solo, all at the same time.” He looked up to the main screen, still showing the Triad fleet forming up, getting ready to do whatever it was here for. “Except for the trifling fact of an enemy fleet massing for the attack, I think we might be in very good shape indeed.”
* * *
The Falcon lurched wildly to one side as the assault boat managed another hit. “Shields didn’t like that one,” Anakin said, watching the defense display.
“That’s it,” said Jaina. “I’ve had it. Let’s give them some of their own back. Powering up ventral laser cannon and setting for aft-aim.”
“What?!” Jacen cried. “Are you out of your mind?”
“I think you’re all out of your minds,” Q9 said.
“Quiet, Q9. Jacen, he’s already shooting at us! How could shooting back make things any worse?”
“I don’t know,” said Jacen, “but I bet we find a way.”
“Ventral laser on auto target seek. I’ve got a target lock!” Jaina squeezed the trigger and the laser cannon blazed away. “Hit him!” she said. “Shields absorbed the shot, but I made him back off a little.”
* * *
“Shields down five percent!” Thrag said. “A nice clean shot, and no mistake. If that had had any power behind it, we’d be a hulk in space right now.”
“Shoot at me?” Thrackan said. “Those miserable whelps have the gall to shoot at me? Activating main armament!”
“But you’ll blow them out of the sky!” Thrag protested. “You need them alive!”
“But I want them dead,” said Thrackan Sal-Solo. “Main armament powered up and ready to fire.”
* * *
Jacen risked a peek at the detector screen. “Jaina, he’s not backing off, he’s bringing his main turret cannon to bear! We’ve got to get out of here. Hang on!”
Jacen pulled back up on the stick, pulling the nose of the Falcon up. The Falcon climbed over its nose, into an inside loop, up and over before pulling out of the loop, right on Thrackan’s tail.
“Anakin! Forward shields to full!” Jacen shouted, and his little brother scrambled to reset the switches, just in time to deflect a near miss from the assault boat’s turret gun. The Falcon bucked and shuddered, but her shields held.
“We’re in behind their shields! I have a shot! Hang on!” Jaina called. She fired twice. The first caught the turret gun right at the join with the assault boat’s upper hull, blowing the gun clean off the hull. The second caught the sublight engine array, smashing the sublight emitters down to nothing.
The assault boat was dead in space.
Jacen had to stop cheering long enough to keep from ramming the Falcon right into her stern.
And then a giant, invisible hand reached out and yanked the Millennium Falcon by the scruff of the neck.
* * *
“Assault boat has lost main propulsion. Tractor beam on!” Kalenda announced. “Positive lock on assault boat. Provisional lock on Falcon. Falcon attempting to break free. We can’t hold Falcon for too long without damage to her.”
Lando went to the flag deck com panel and punched in a comm access code he had not used in a while. “Let’s hope Han didn’t go and change codes on me,” he muttered, then pushed the transmit key. “Lando Calrissian to Millennium Falcon. This is Lando Calrissian calling Millennium Falcon. Shut down your engines and do not resist the tractor beam. We are taking you aboard a Bakuran vessel, allied with the New Republic. Do you copy?”
“Lando?” came a young, eager voice over the com line. “Is that you? Is that you?”
“That you, Jaina?” Lando asked.
“No, I’m Jacen,” came the rather irritated reply. “But Jaina and Anakin are here too. And so is 09.”
“Who or what is Q9?” Admiral Ossilege asked irritably.
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” said Lando. “But it looks like we’ll get the chance to find out.” He pressed the transmit key again. “Where are Chewbacca and the Drall?”
“Still in the repulsor chamber on the planet,” Jacen answered. “We’ll have to send someone to get them.”
Lando glanced at the flag deck’s hangar status board. “We’ve just launched our own assault boat to them,” Lando said. “They’ll be all right.
”
“Good,” said Jacen. “We’ll be really glad to see you, Lando.”
“And I’ll be glad to see you too,” he said. “Oh—and one more thing. Nice flying—and nice shooting. Your father will be proud.”
“Thanks, Lando!”
“Don’t mention it,” Lando said, and cut the connection. He looked up at the main tactical display, where the fleet of the Sacorrian Triad was moving in, slowly and carefully in toward Centerpoint Station, and the two lonely destroyers that stood guard on it. From there, his eye shifted to a countdown clock, showing the eighty-two hours remaining until Centerpoint would fire at Bovo Yagen. “At least,” said Lando to the dead microphone, “he’ll be proud of you if we all live long enough for him to hear about it.”
And it occurred to Lando that he ought to make it his business to tell Han. Now. Before it was too late.
* * *
Captain Thrag sat in the smoky control cabin of his assault boat, and laughed, but there was little joy or happiness in the angry sound. “How have the mighty fallen, O mighty Diktat,” he said. “They have beaten you, beaten you completely. Shot down by children. Children so young they probably had trouble seeing over the control panel.”
“Shut up, Thrag,” said Thrackan. “Shut up or I’ll kill you on the spot.”
Thrag let out one last chuckle and looked out through the assault boat’s viewport. The enemy ship’s tractor beam was pulling them in. They would be aboard in a few seconds’ time. “The horrible thing is that you might even do it,” he said. “And why not? If there has ever been a man with nothing left to lose, you are that man now. They have you, Diktat Sal-Solo.” He nodded to the ship in the viewport, the ship that was getting closer with every second. “Now they have you, body and spirit.”
* * *
The Millennium Falcon set down in the hangar deck of the Intruder, the tractor-beam operator setting the ship neatly down. The three children powered down the ship’s systems as best they could, and made their way to the access ramp. Anakin worked the controls, and the ramp came down. The three of them filed down the ramp—and stopped dead at the foot of it. They had brought the assault boat in first, and already the Bakurans were taking the Human League troopers into custody. One by one, they were led out of the boat, hands on their heads, and hustled out toward the detention block.
The next-to-last man out was a short, grubby-looking man, dressed only in his underwear and a thin undershirt. All the other prisoners had looked scared or angry, but this man was laughing. Laughing out loud.
But the last man out, the last one of all, was not laughing. Thrackan Sal-Solo came out of the assault boat, walking straight and tall, hands at his side. He paused for a moment as he stepped down onto the hangar deck, and looked around himself.
He spotted the three children by the Millennium Falcon, and the smooth, arrogant look on his face melted away. A look of pure hatred, pure anger and malice, took its place. The three children backed away a step or two, and Thrackan actually took a step or two toward them before the guards grabbed him by the arms and led him away.
Anakin stood between his brother and his sister, holding each of them by the hand. He stared, wide-eyed and solemn, as they led Thrackan Sal-Solo, Diktat of Corellia, away. “Our cousin is a very bad man,” he said.
Neither of the other children could think of anything more to say.
* * *
“This is doing no good, Dracmus,” Han said. “You come. You tell us there might be progress. You go away. You come back. You say it again. Around and around. There are people at war out there. A whole star system could die while you go back and forth.”
“I am knowing, I am knowing, I am knowing,” said Dracmus. “But believe me, there is nothing more we can be doing. We Hunchuzuc know the deadline. We are trying. But it is a very delicate situation. Push the Sacorrians of the nameless clan too hard, and they might commit suicide. Or die of shame. And die of shame not expression, like with you people.” Dracmus seemed ready to offer an explanation of that statement, but then she caught Han’s eye and got back to the point. “The best thing you humans can do to hurry us along is just to be here, looking impatient, checking the time, reminding us to hurry. I go tell negotiators you impatient, time growing short, and they work faster.”
Just then, there was an odd, muted sort of beeping noise coming from Mara’s pocket. At exactly the same moment Artoo suddenly kicked up a fuss, whistling and chirping and spinning his view dome back and forth.
Mara looked confused for a minute, and then seemed to remember something. She stood up, shoved her hand in the pocket of her coveralls, and pulled out a comlink. “It’s been so long since these things worked I forgot it was there,” she said. She pressed a stud on the side of the comlink, and the beeping stopped. “That’s a call from the ship’s monitoring systems. A high priority message just came in.”
“Artoo,” asked Luke, “are you getting it too? The same message?”
Artoo let off an affirmative-sounding trill.
“Gotta be the same one,” Mara said. “I’ve got to go over to the Jade’s Fire to read my copy. Anyone care to tag along and see what it is?”
* * *
Artoo confirmed it was the same message the moment he plugged into the dataport on the cockpit of the Jade’s Fire. That saved having to decode it twice. The decryption system on board the Jade’s Fire was good, very good. It unbuttoned the message in only a few seconds—a job that would have taken Artoo a good many minutes. Mara, sitting at the ship’s command station, hit the play button, and a hologram shimmered into life a meter or so above the floor.
It was a full-length view of Lando, shown at about half life size. “Hello,” he said in a very solemn voice. “I don’t know exactly what your situation is, so I will send duplicate copies of this to all of you. A lot has happened. The bad news is that the real enemy has finally shown up. It’s the fleet from the Sacorrian Triad. Luke knows about it. They are the real enemy. Everything else—all the rebellions—are not much more than diversions. The fleet has a total of about eighty ships of all sizes, and they are closing—very slowly—on Centerpoint. They seem to be timing it so they will get to Centerpoint just as the Bovo Yagen shot goes off. We haven’t interfered with them—yet—and they haven’t made any hostile gesture toward our ships. I doubt that’s going to last long, though.
“That’s the bad news, and it’s bad.” The image of Lando paused for a moment, and then broke into a broad smile. “The good news is very good indeed. Don’t ask me how, because we haven’t had time to sort it all out yet, but the children have escaped from Thrackan—and they did it aboard the Millennium Falcon. They flew the ship. And before you can turn blue, Han, the Falcon doesn’t have so much as a scratch on her. But the punch line is—they captured Thrackan. Han, you should have seen it. The kids flew a classic inside loop and put two disabling shots right into Thrackan’s stern. The Bakurans have taken Thrackan prisoner. Anyway, I know you won’t believe it, but the kids did it all—”
“I don’t believe it,” Han said.
“Sssh!” said Leia.
“—and they are all safe and sound aboard the Intruder. Chewbacca and two Drall who got mixed up in all this are being picked up from the repulsor right now. They’re okay too, as best we can tell.
“But the real reason I sent this message is to ask you to come here. Gaeriel Captison has called a council of war for eighteen hours from now. We need you all there. Madame Captison wants a Selonian representative as well. Please arrange that if you possibly can. Also, to be blunt about it, the odds are good we’re going to need every scrap of firepower we can get before the end of this. We need all of you, we need the Jade’s Fire, and we need Luke’s X-wing. Send a return message as soon as possible, reporting your intentions. But whatever you do, please hurry. We are almost out of time.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Last Good-bye
Leia Organa Solo, Chief of State of the New Republic, ran full-tilt down
the access ramp of the mm Jade’s Fire, onto the hangar deck of the Intruder, and nearly knocked over two of the honor guard as she rushed forward to her children, flinging her arms around the twins. Anakin escaped her first swooping hug simply because he was hopping too fast and too high with excitement to be an easy target. But Han Solo was hard on the heels of his wife, and he scooped Anakin clear up off the ground. Luke joined the happy little knot of chaos, hugging the children, greeting them, tousling Jacen’s hair, tickling Jaina, lifting Anakin out of Han’s arms to hold him in his own. Threepio tottered around, offering his own greetings—and generally getting in the way.
“Anakin! Jacen! Jaina!” said Leia. “Oh, let me look at you all.” But then she threw her arms around all three of them, and held them so tight it didn’t seem likely she could see much of anything at all.
Lando Calrissian joined the tangle of welcome, throwing his arm around Han, shouting a friendly insult in his ear, pounding him on the back, giving Leia a kiss, teasing the children. The other new arrivals, Mara Jade and the Selonian representative, Dracmus, followed.
Admiral Ossilege allowed himself a thin, wintry smile as he watched the proceedings. “Not the most dignified of entrances, eh, Madame Prime Minister? I would have expected more poise from the Chief of State.”
Gaeriel probably could have managed some commonplace comment about ceremony giving way to family, or that there were other considerations besides dignity in the universe, but somehow she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She thought of her own little daughter, Malinza, back home on Bakura. She looked to Luke Skywalker, lifting his niece up onto his shoulders, and thought of how good he was with children, and of all the things that might have been, but never could be now. But still, the admiral seemed to be expecting some kind of reply. So she decided to speak, and somehow, the truth slipped out. “I think it’s beautiful,” she said.
Star Wars: The Corellian Trilogy III: Showdown at Centerpoint Page 25
