“You mean,” said Ebrihim, “you think that Anakin can run this place for—” He stopped in midsentence.
“Oh, dear,” said Threepio. “He’s done it again. It often happens when he stays up too late.” Anakin was still sitting in the control panel’s chair, but his head was resting on the panel itself, and he was sound asleep. Ebrihim nodded in wonder. Human children. Bizarre creatures. Anakin had been wide awake and busily working not thirty seconds before. “Ah, well,” Ebrihim said. “The rest of us can keep working, but I suppose a child has to get a good night’s sleep if he’s expected to save two or three star systems in the morning.”
* * *
Tendra Risant was asleep when it happened. The first she knew that there was anything going on was when a large booming noise echoed through the hull of the Gentleman Caller. To say she found it a startling way to wake up would be a massive understatement. She nearly jumped out of her skin. She sat up in bed, listening fearfully. What was it? Had a meteor crashed into the ship? Had something in the engine room blown up? Then she heard the whirring noise of doors sliding open and air pumps working. The airlock! Someone had docked with the Gentleman Caller!
She scrambled out of bed and pulled her robe on. Who was it? What did they want? A weapon. She needed a weapon. Was there even a blaster on board the ship? She stepped out into the corridor—and froze in her tracks. There he was, right in front of her, grinning from ear to ear. “I tried to call ahead,” he said, “but there wasn’t any answer.”
“Lando?” she asked. He was the first human being she had seen in a month.
“Tendra.”
And suddenly they were in each other’s arms, holding each other tight. “Oh, Lando. Lando. You shouldn’t have come. You shouldn’t have. There are ships on all sides of us, and sooner or later the shooting is going to start and—”
“Hey, hey,” said Lando. “Shh. Take it easy,” he said. “Take it easy. My ship is plenty fast enough to get us out of here. We’ll be all right.”
“But it’s too dangerous!” she insisted. “It was too risky.”
“Come on,” Lando said, stroking her chin and giving her a big, warm smile. “I had to think of my image. How could I possibly turn down the chance to rescue the damsel in distress?”
* * *
The hours crawled past. The Triad ships moved toward Centerpoint, the Sentinel and the Defender kept up their guard over Centerpoint, and the Intruder’s little fleet of armed trading ships and fighters moved in toward the Triad ships.
Ossilege watched it all on his status boards, hour after weary hour, alone on the flag deck. No one needed to come here. Not until the battle began. Time was the enemy now, and time was the ally. They had to thread this needle carefully, oh, so carefully. Too soon, and they would give the game away, and all of Source A’s efforts would be in vain. Too late, and the other side would jump first, attack the Bakuran ships and be done with it.
And then there was the whole vexed question of the repulsor. Would they have it, or wouldn’t they? Would it work, or wouldn’t it? Were Calrissian’s figures for the timing of Centerpoint’s next shot even accurate? They had checked over the figures a dozen times, and they seemed correct. But what of the error no one saw, the bad assumption that everyone agreed to without even realizing it?
They were the sort of questions that had plagued military commanders from the beginning of time, and they were likely to keep on doing so for quite some time to come.
Time. That was the question. What was the proper time? There was no way of knowing for sure. No way of reading intentions off a display grid, no way of judging enemy morale and fighting prowess from a remote infrared image.
The ships moved closer to each other. Closer. Closer.
At last Admiral Hortel Ossilege stood up, walked over to the main display grid, and inspected it carefully, studying each ship, each status report in turn. Satisfied, or at least as satisfied as he was going to get, he returned to the admiral’s chair, sat down, and pressed the com button. “This is Ossilege. Advise all ships via prearranged signal. Commence Operation Sidestep exactly on the hour, thirty-five minutes from now.” One hour after Sidestep, it would be time for Source A. One hour, five minutes, and fifteen seconds after Sidestep, Centerpoint would fire. Either they would manage to deflect the shot, or they would not.
One hour. They would have to hold for one hour. He let go of the com button, and wondered if he had gotten the timing right.
* * *
“All right, Chewie,” said Han, half an hour later. “Jump off in five minutes. Let’s look sharp. Leia—time for you to get up to the turret and strap in.”
Leia stood up from the observer’s seat and nodded. “I know,” she said. But she didn’t leave. Not immediately. First she stepped forward, pulled Han’s head toward hers, and gave Han a kiss. A warm, lingering kiss that did not so much end as fade gently away. “I love you,” she said.
“I know,” said Han. “And you know I love you.”
Leia smiled. “You’re right,” she said. “I do.” She stood up straight, reached over, and ruffled the fur on top of Chewbacca’s head. “So long, Chewie,” she said. “See you on the other side.” And with that, she turned and left the cockpit.
Han turned and watched her go, then looked over to Chewbacca. “You know, Chewie,” he told the Wookiee, “there’s a lot to be said for this being married business.”
Chewbacca let out a low, rumbling laugh and went back to double-checking the shield settings.
Han checked the time. Four minutes to go.
* * *
Luke Skywalker sat in the cockpit of his X-wing and felt the old tingle of fear and excitement starting to build. He reminded himself that he was a Jedi, that Jedi were calm in battle, that there was no fear. But Luke, better than any human being alive, knew that Jedi did not live in a world of absolutes and abstracts, any more than other people did. It would be just as bad to force all emotion from his life as to wallow endlessly in all his feelings.
It was time to fight. He was ready to do so. His Jedi abilities made him more ready.
That should have been enough. And it was.
Luke glanced at his chronometer. Three minutes.
* * *
Mara Jade sat alone in the command center of her ship. Alone. She had come to this star system with a pilot and a navigator, Tralkpha and Nesdin. They had vanished, along with so many others, in the first days of the war. Mara did not know if they were dead, or captured by one group or another, or hiding under some pile of rubble until it was safe to come out. Mara knew war as well as anyone. She knew full well that it was most likely that they were dead. They had been good at their jobs, and good, honest people, both of them. And now they weren’t there anymore, more than likely executed for the simple crime of getting in the way of someone’s bloody ambition. If nothing else had happened, to inspire her to fight, that would have been enough.
But, of course, plenty more had happened. And she was going to start giving it back in about two minutes’ time.
* * *
“I’m not so sure I did you any favor by rescuing you,” Lando said, strapping himself in. “Where you were, you might have been killed by accident. Now if you get killed, it’ll be because someone did it on purpose.”
Tendra shook her head and smiled. “Trust me, Lando. If there is one thing I learned on board the Gentleman Caller, it’s that I don’t want to die alone. I’ve had enough being alone for a lifetime.”
Lando reached out a hand to Tendra, riding in the copilot’s seat. She took it, and held it tight.
Neither of them said anything more, but the silence in the cabin said more than enough.
But then the countdown alert beeped the one-minute warning, and there was no time.
* * *
Belindi Kalenda was already there, along with the rest of the flag staff, but Gaeriel Captison just got back to the flag deck in time to strap herself in. “I was in my cabin,” she said, though Ossilege h
adn’t asked. “Meditating.” And thinking about my daughter. My daughter, Malinza, who has already lost her father. Is this the day she stops having a mother as well?
“A good time for it,” Ossilege said. “There will not be much leisure for thought, starting in another thirty seconds.”
Gaeriel dug her fingers into the arms of her acceleration seat, and stared out through the flag deck’s main viewport, out over the Intruder’s main bridge level, and through the bridge’s forward viewport. The stars, she thought. The warm and inviting stars. Was one of the ones she saw Bakura? Probably her home’s star was nowhere near bright enough to be visible at this range. Home. She thought of home, and longed to be there.
“Ten seconds,” the main speaker announced. “All hands, prepare for the jump to light speed. Five seconds. Four. Three. Two. One. Zero.”
And the stars lanced out into spikes of fire, starlines that filled the viewport with a blaze of light—and then the starlines flared away, and were gone, and the familiar stars of Corellia’s sky were right back where they had been.
But now there were more than stars in the sky. Ships. Ships of all sizes and descriptions had suddenly popped into existence. The Intruder, the Sentinel, the Defender, and all the lesser ships had made simultaneous, precision minimum-distance hyperspace jumps straight into the thick of the enemy fleet. Ossilege had hoped it would give them the benefit of surprise, and it would appear that it had.
The Intruder’s main laser cannon opened up at once, stabbing out at the ship nearest her, a boxy, ramshackle old troop transport that had no business in the middle of a combat fleet.
The transport exploded in a bloom of fire, but by then the main lasers had already found another target, a modern-looking corvette about the size of the Jade’s Fire. The corvette got her shields up in time, but they were not intended to hold off intense short-range fire from a light cruiser’s gun. Her shields failed and she went up as well, another blaze of hellfire glory.
The Intruder’s fighter screen winked into existence around her, fifteen General Purpose Attack fighters that immediately went over to the attack, blazing away at the smaller, lighter craft in this part of the fleet.
The Intruder’s secondary battery began to speak, blasting away at some target out of Gaeriel’s view. A Triad ship fired and caught a GPA coming out of a loop low over the Intruder’s main bridge. The fighter exploded, a blinding bright flash of light that heaved a torrent of debris at the cruiser. The shields deflected most of it, and slowed the rest of it. Loud crashes echoed throughout the bridge as debris banged into the outer hull, but there did not seem to be any real damage. Except, of course, to the GPA and its pilot. The surviving fighters whirled and dashed about, blasting the X-TIE Uglies and B-wing chop jobs out of the sky.
At last an opponent worthy of the Intruder hove into view, an old, tough-looking ex-Imperial destroyer of a class Gaeriel did not recognize. The ship was smaller than the Intruder, but quite possibly her match in firepower. The Intruder opened up on her, directing all-guns fire directly at the destroyer’s forward laser turret. The destroyer returned fire from her forward and rear turrets, but failed to concentrate her fire with any effectiveness. The destroyer’s forward battery blew up, and the Intruder instantly redirected fire to her rear battery. The destroyer’s overall shields must have been damaged in the first explosion, for they gave way completely after only a few seconds of concentrated fire on the rear turret. The turret went up in a dramatic sheet of flame, and the destroyer was disarmed.
Gaeriel glanced over at Ossilege, and was astonished to see that he was paying no mind at all to the fire and chaos outside. His eyes were glued to the tactical display in front of him as he watched the overall progress of the fight. He was letting the Intruder’s Captain Semmac fight her ship, while he attended to the larger battle.
“It’s going well,” Ossilege announced to no one in particular.
At least, thought Gaeriel, it’s starting well.
* * *
“Hang on, Artoo!” Luke cried out as he flipped his X-wing over onto its back and then pulled its nose up, pursuing the X-TIE Ugly that was making a run in on the Lady Luck up ahead and above. “Lando, break starboard and down, hard, on my mark. Three, two, one, MARK!” Luke broke the X-wing down and to starboard a fraction of a second before the Lady Luck did. The X-TIE Ugly, a monstrosity of a ship slapped together out of the combined wreckage of an X-wing and a TIE fighter, was nowhere as maneuverable as an X-wing. The Ugly fell into the trap, making a longer, shallower dive in pursuit of the Lady Luck—and setting itself up for a perfect shot from Luke. Luke fired, and the starboard TIE wing blew clean off the Ugly, sending it tumbling out of control and out of the fight. It took Luke a moment to find the Lady, and he was not surprised to see her already in trouble again, trying to fight off a pair of what looked like Light Attack Fighters with beefed-up engines and weapons. Heavy Light Attack Fighters.
It was nearly always a mistake to hang overpowered weapons and propulsion on a design that wasn’t meant to support them. That sort of beefed-up compromise was usually nothing more than a collection of weaknesses held together with wrap-wire and optimism. Luke decided to test the theory by experiment. He poured fire into the closest HLAF from extreme range, and caught it in the port-side engine, setting the fighter tumbling out of control before the pilot could kill the starboard engine. The engine flared over and started spewing thick clouds of vapor that enveloped the HLAF. The vapor dissipated instantly in the vacuum of space, and the HLAF was hidden inside a strange, fast-moving cloud tumbling across space. Luke checked Lando, and saw he had dispatched the other HLAF himself. For the moment their little patch of sky was clear. That meant it was time to move elsewhere.
“Lando!” Luke called. “I’m tracking a slow-moving destroyer toward the rear of the formation. You have it?”
“I was just about to call it in to you, Luke,” said Lando. “Let’s go for it. Just what we’re looking for.” The plan was for the attacking craft to move through the Triad formation toward its rear, picking off targets of opportunity and trying to get the Triad ships to reverse course and pursue.
And never mind the obvious flaw in trying to encourage eighty major armed vessels and all their auxiliaries to chase you with all guns blazing. Sometimes you just had to take your chances. “Off we go,” Luke agreed.
* * *
Anakin sat in the control chair, listening intently to Technician Antone as he ran down the checklist. “All right,” said Antone, “that clears out the targeting sequence. We should be locked on to the South Pole of Centerpoint. Ready for the power initiation sequence?”
“Don’t think so,” Anakin said, a little doubtfully. “Something doesn’t feel right.”
Antone shoved his long black hair out of his eyes for about the zillionth time and looked nervously at Anakin. “Feel right?” he asked. “What do you mean it doesn’t feel right?”
“He does it all by feel,” Jacen said. “He knows by instinct and intuition. You’ve got an instruction manual. You’re the one who said you didn’t think he understood what it did.”
“Do so!” Anakin protested angrily, glaring at his brother.
“Do you, Anakin?” Jaina asked. She was plainly getting as fed up as Antone. “Do you really understand or are you just showing off?”
Anakin frowned deeply and crossed his arms. “Stop being mean to me, or I won’t help you anymore.” And with that, he hopped down off the chair and stalked away.
“Oh, boy,” said Jaina.
“I suspect that young Master Anakin is overtired,” Threepio said. “He was up too late last night. He is often rather cranky the next day on such occasions.”
Antone’s eyes bugged out, and his jaw dropped open. It was at least a full five seconds before he was able to speak. “He’s cranky? He’s the—he’s the only one who can—who can—” Antone gestured frantically at the control panel. “The starbuster is going to fire in an hour, and you tell me he’s cranky?”
“Take it easy,” Ebrihim said.
“But he’s gone!” Antone said. “He’s the only one who can run the machine!”
“You’ve been up all night,” Ebrihim said. “You’re overwrought. We’ll get him back.”
“Yeah. Up all night,” said Technician Antone, nodding manically as he paced. “Maybe I’m just cranky too.” He turned and stopped his pacing to face the twins. “Except that’s not quite it. Actually, I think I’m in full-blown panic! I’ve got relatives on Bovo Yagen,” Antone went on, half raving. “If I get her planet incinerated, my aunt is going to kill me.”
“Settle down,” Ebrihim said in a sterner tone of voice. “He can’t have gone far. We need both of you to make this work. Jacen, go and get your brother back. Calm him down. And try to remember that the lives of twelve million people are riding on one cranky seven-year-old saving them in an hour’s time. So please. When he comes back, let’s everyone be nice to him.”
“All right,” Jaina said, her own voice turning a bit sulky. “But only for an hour.”
* * *
“Concentrate volley fire on the forward airlock hatch!” Mara’s voice called out from the ship-to-ship link. “Those welds look nice and sloppy!” Fire poured from the Jade’s Fire into the lumbering, old, much-repaired Mon Calamari frigate that had ended up fighting for the other side.
“Copy that,” said Han. “Leia, hang on. I’m going to pitch over a bit to give you a clean shot.”
“I’m in the clear already,” Leia said. “Commencing fire.”
The quad laser turret started shooting. The outer door of the airlock had gotten jammed open somehow in the fighting. It began to glow red, then orange, then fire-white—and then the inner hatch blew off, the ship’s atmosphere streaming away into space. The airflow cut off suddenly as a hatch slammed shut somewhere on the ship.
Star Wars: The Corellian Trilogy III: Showdown at Centerpoint Page 28
