Star Wars: Choices of One

by Timothy Zahn

  “We get out of here,” he told her, pushing off the wall and through the cockpit door. He dropped into the pilot’s seat and grabbed the straps, glowering at the controls and their softly lit alien-script labels. He’d hoped to have at least one more chance to study the translation before he tried this.

  But he didn’t, and he would just have to make do. “Strap in,” he ordered as Leia tumbled into the seat beside him. The starter sequencer … there. He keyed the switch, and a soft rumble began to build from somewhere behind them.

  “You’re sure you know what you’re doing?” Leia asked, leaning forward to peer out the side of the crosshatch canopy.

  “I always know what I’m doing,” Han assured her. A row of glowing markers shifted abruptly from red to blue. Standby? Probably, since that hadn’t been long enough for repulsorlifts to warm up all the way. The drive activation was over here—he probably wouldn’t need it, but it wouldn’t hurt to have it ready. He keyed it on, glancing over at the red-lit weapons section of the board and wondering if he should bother trying to activate the laser cannons, as well.

  Abruptly, the whole ship shook as something slammed violently against the outer hatch. “You forgot to raise the ramp!” Leia snapped.

  “No, I didn’t,” Han said. The blue repulsorlift markers winked, then changed again, this time into a deep purple.

  “What are you talking about?” Leia demanded, jabbing a finger. “I can see the end of it from here.”

  “I mean I didn’t forget,” Han said as whoever was out there again slammed himself against the hatch. “Hang on.” Getting a grip on the steering yoke, he gave the throttle palm wheel a quick spin.

  The ship leapt like a scalded mynock, heading straight for the ceiling, and Han heard a faint scrabbling sound as whoever had been on the ramp slid unceremoniously off of it again. Hastily, he spun the wheel half a turn back, and his stomach lurched as the ship ended its upward bounce and started back down again. Leia gurgled something as Han tried it again, turning the wheel a quarter turn this time.

  The ship wobbled a bit and then stabilized, hovering a few meters off the ground. “See? Nothing to it,” Han said, taking a moment to look out the canopy. From their new vantage point above the rest of the missile ships he could see across the cavern to the big conveyance tunnel at the far end. The two sets of quad lasers Ranquiv had installed over there were starting to swivel around on their mounts, shifting from the task of guarding the cavern’s approach to the more immediate job of swatting down this unexpected hijack attempt. Between the quads, half a dozen other men were wrestling with one of the concussion launchers, also turning it to face into the cavern, while another group of aliens was hurrying to the entrance with heavy blaster rifles in their hands. Clearly, no one was getting out that way.

  Just as well that wasn’t the direction Han was planning to go.

  Leia had seen the assembled firepower, too. “Han?” she warned, pointing.

  “Don’t look,” Han advised, returning his attention to the control board. The banking controls … there? No; there. Shifting one hand from the yoke to the sliders, he gave them a turn. The ship leaned to portside, then began drifting sluggishly in that direction as the angled position unbalanced the repulsorlifts. Han gave the slider another push, glanced out the side of the canopy and twitched the control yoke. Blasterfire was hitting the ship now, the bolts thudding into the hull and splashing off the canopy as the ship’s sideways skid picked up speed.

  Across the cavern, he could see that the quad lasers were almost ready. He gave the slider one final nudge, remembering just in time that he also wanted the landing gear retracted. He found the right switch on the second try, then grabbed the throttle wheel and braced himself.

  With a violent crash, the ship slammed into the side of the cavern right above the tunnel where he and Leia and the others had arrived. Spinning the throttle wheel all the way back, he dropped the ship to the ground.

  And with the landing gear retracted and its hull on the ground, the ship was now completely blocking off the tunnel.

  “Out,” Han ordered Leia, pulling out his blaster and thrusting it into her hands. “Get to the speeder bus—see if you can start it. If you can’t—”

  “Open the access panel so that you can hotwire it,” Leia called back over her shoulder as she disappeared through the cockpit door.

  “Open the access panel so I can hotwire it,” Han finished under his breath. He keyed off all the systems, then unstrapped and headed out after her.

  With all the firepower at the other end of the cavern, he’d expected Ranquiv to have at least posted a guard or two at this equally obvious escape point. But there was no sound of blasterfire as he picked his way down the now slightly battered ramp, and he saw no bodies as he sprinted to the bus. Even insect-eyed aliens who could pull Caldorf missiles out of thin air, he reflected, sometimes made mistakes.

  He found Leia inside the bus, the access panel already open. “It’s frozen,” she told him as she stepped back out of his way.

  “Yeah, no problem,” he grunted, kneeling down and giving the wiring a quick look. Something this old and decrepit ought to be a snap. “Thirty seconds,” he promised. “Time me.”

  “Just hurry,” Leia bit out. “They could be here any minute.”

  “Relax,” Han said, poking at the wires. “They’re not moving that ship anytime soon.”

  “Maybe they already have people out here,” she countered, looking over her shoulder at the darkened tunnel stretching out behind them. “Where are we going?”

  “Away,” Han said. There was the starter line. A little tweaking …

  “That’s not an answer,” Leia said. “We need to get back to Cracken and the others. Or at least close enough to one of the inhabited areas that our comlinks will work.”

  There was a click, and a low rumble suddenly filled the bus as the repulsorlifts came to life. “There you go,” Han said, straightening up and turning to the driver’s seat.

  Leia was faster, slipping past him and dropping into the seat. “You’re better with this,” she said, handing him back his blaster. “I’ll drive.”

  “How are you at driving backward?” he countered. “Because there’s no room in here to turn arou—”

  He grabbed for the seat back as she keyed in the repulsorlifts, sending the bus lurching up off the ground. A second later, as he was still trying to regain his balance, she shifted into reverse and they took off, backing full speed down the tunnel. “Get to the back,” she ordered. “Let me know when we hit the next cross-tunnel so I can turn this thing around.”

  “So you’ve figured out where we’re going?” Han asked as the bus once again settled into its periodic lurching side dips.

  In the faint light from the control console readouts, he saw her lips tighten. “Like you said, the first thing we need to do is get away,” she said reluctantly. “I don’t suppose you were keeping track of the turns on our trip here.”

  “I thought that was your job,” Han said. The bus made another of its dips, this one accompanied by a faint crunch of rock. “You’re the one who said we were only about a hundred kilometers from the Anyat-en caverns, right?”

  “I was only watching the first part of the trip,” Leia said. “I fell asleep at the end.”

  “You should have woken me up.”

  “I didn’t realize I’d dozed off until I woke up,” Leia countered. “You didn’t happen to see how the driver was navigating, did you? I don’t see any map readouts anywhere on the control board.”

  “He had a datapad propped up on the console,” Han told her. “Ranquiv took it with him when we all left.”

  “I was afraid of that,” Leia said. “I guess we’ll just have to poke around until we find something we recognize.”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” Han agreed. The bits of light coming from around the missile ship he’d crashed were fading into the distance, and he turned around to look out at the even darker tunnel behind th
em. “You might want to switch on some lights,” he added. “It could be handy to see where we’re going.”

  “If you can figure out a way to turn on the rear glow panels without turning on the front ones, go ahead,” Leia said. “Otherwise, get the glow rod out of the emergency kit under the seat there and go shine it out the back. I don’t want to have the headlights showing Ranquiv where we are. What is that noise?”

  Han frowned, playing back the last couple of seconds through his memory. It had just been one of the bus’s dips, along with another of the skittering-stone accompaniments he’d heard earlier. “The regulator squid’s got a feedback problem,” he told her. “It pops the repulsorlifts on one side—”

  “I know that,” she growled. “I’m asking—oh.”

  Abruptly she kicked in the brakes, forcing Han to again grab for a handhold as she brought the bus’s speed down to a crawl. “What are you doing?” he demanded. There was another dip, and another soft crunch, and Han lurched again as she brought the vehicle to a complete halt.

  He winced away as she turned on the headlights, blowing away the night vision he’d built up over the past couple of minutes. “Look,” she said.

  “At what?” he growled.

  “At that,” she said impatiently. “Right there, in front of us on the left side. That little circle. You see it?”

  Reluctantly, Han opened his eyes to slits, giving them a moment to adjust to the glare. There was a faint circle there, all right, a slightly clearer spot in the layer of gravel covering the tunnel floor.

  And suddenly he got it. “It’s the backfeed sputter,” he said, opening his eyes all the way as he studied the circle. “The stones get an extra kick when the repulsorlifts shunt back in.”

  “Leaving us a trail to follow,” Leia said, cautious hope in her voice.

  “Going to be tricky, though,” Han said doubtfully. “A sputter every couple of seconds at a hundred kilometers an hour only gives us one marker every fifty meters or so. And that assumes there’s gravel at all those spots for the sputter to make a circle in.”

  “It still beats wandering aimlessly around Poln Minor,” Leia said. She shut off the lights, and in the sudden darkness Han heard her climb out of the driver’s seat. “Think you can drive backward?”

  “At least as good as you can drive forward,” Han told her. “You planning to take a nap?”

  “I’m planning to open the rear hatchway and watch for our trail of grapes with this,” she said, and as Han’s eyes again readjusted to the dim radiance from the console he saw her pull the glow rod from the bus’s emergency pack. “At least until we find a place to turn around.”

  “Okay,” Han said, sitting down behind the wheel. “You do remember how that story ends, don’t you? The birds ate all the grapes the kid had dropped and he ended up dying lost in the woods.”

  “Is that the way they told it on Corellia?” she called back as she headed down the aisle. “On Alderaan, it turned out that the sun had fermented the grapes, and the birds who ate them got drunk, so the boy just followed the line of sleeping birds back home.”

  Han rolled his eyes. Leave it to the Alderaanians to slap a cheery end on a nice little grisly children’s morality tale.

  Of course, he’d always thought the kid in the story was an idiot anyway. “You ready back there? Okay. Here we go.”

  The hyperspace sky cleared, the starlines flashed back into stars, and the Chimaera arrived at a blue-green world spinning lazily through space.

  Right at the edge of a massive battle.

  “Full alert!” Drusan was bellowing as Pellaeon stepped hurriedly from the turbolift into the aft bridge. “Deflector shields activate; turbolasers to full power. Senior Commander Grondarle?”

  “I read forty-two ships in the engagement sphere,” the first officer called from the tactics station in the portside crew pit. “We have an Imperial heavy attack line: one Star Destroyer—the Admonitor—two Strike-class medium cruisers, and four Carrack-class light cruisers. Opposing are eight ships of Dreadnought size and twenty-seven escort vessels of system patrol craft size, all of unknown configuration and weaponry.”

  “Line array?”

  “Unknowns are using a modified drinking-cup with center-focus fire,” Grondarle reported. “The Imperials … I’m not sure, Captain. It looks almost like a standard engagement line, except that the Admonitor isn’t hanging back out of enemy range like it should. And the Carracks are doing a sort of sweep pattern around and in front of it.”

  “Take us into combat range,” Drusan ordered, frowning out the viewport as Pellaeon came up beside him. “That Carrack maneuver makes no sense,” he added, lowering his voice. “The Admonitor has far more armor and shielding than any light cruiser. Putting the Carracks in front like that is practically begging for them to be blown out of the sky.”

  “It does look that way,” Pellaeon agreed, gazing out the viewport at the distant battle.

  “Obviously someone incompetent running the show,” Drusan said darkly. “I suppose we’d better go and fix it for him.”

  “Sir, the Admonitor is hailing,” the comm officer called.

  “Put them through,” Drusan said. “Admonitor, this is Captain Calo Drusan of the Chimaera.”

  “Welcome to Teptixii, Captain Drusan,” a voice came from the bridge speakers. “Captain Voss Parck, currently commanding Task Force Admonitor. I don’t know what you’re doing this far out, but your timing couldn’t have been better. I have the enemy ships nearly pinned, but my closest reinforcements are still nearly twenty minutes away. I need your help to finish this.”

  “We’re on our way,” Drusan said. “In the meantime, you’re putting your Carracks at severe risk. I suggest you pull them back.”

  “He’s not risking his Carracks, Captain,” Lord Odo said from behind them. Pellaeon turned to see the masked figure striding along the walkway, his cape rippling behind him.

  “Excuse me, Lord Odo, but he is risking them,” Drusan said stiffly.

  “Forgive me; I misspoke,” Odo said, coming to a halt beside Drusan. “He is risking his Carracks, but he’s doing so in order to gain victory. Observe how each time the Carracks block fire from the enemy cruisers the Admonitor is freed to lower its shields long enough to send a volley at one of the enemy’s other ships.”

  The words were barely out of his mouth when there was a multiple flicker of turbolaser fire from the distant Star Destroyer and one of the enemy patrol ships flared and then exploded in a blue-white fireball.

  “That’s all well and good,” Drusan grunted. “But having the Carracks block the larger ships means Parck’s only available targets are the patrol craft. That leaves the larger ones intact, and he’s risking his own screening ships to do it.”

  “He has little choice,” Odo said. “The larger ships, the Firekilns, are more powerful than you realize. Laser to laser, five of them are an even match for his Star Destroyer, and Nuso Esva currently has eight of them in place.”

  “That’s Nuso Esva out there?” Drusan asked, leaning forward as if that would give him a better view of the battle.

  “Those are his ships, at any rate,” Odo said. “Captain Parck would know better whether or not the warlord himself is on the scene. The point is that while the Firekilns are heavily armed, their shields are inferior to those of the Imperials. They rely on the screening ships to block the Admonitor’s attacks.”

  Pellaeon looked over at the tac display. “Except that the screening ships aren’t just running defense, but are also armed,” he said. “If they can take down the cruisers while the Admonitor is picking at them, he’ll be left all alone.”

  “Not while we’re here he won’t,” Drusan said grimly. “Let’s see if Nuso Esva has the stomach for a fight when he hasn’t got the odds on his side. Helm, increase to flank and take us across the edge of the enemy formation.”

  “Not to the edge,” Odo said. “Angle thirty degrees to portside and set our vector to cut behind the formation.”


  “That’ll take too long,” Drusan objected. “We’re still a good eight minutes from firing range.”

  “It’ll also put us inside the planet’s gravity-well anchor point,” Pellaeon warned. “If we get in trouble, we won’t be able to make a quick escape.”

  “Never mind our escape,” Drusan growled. “The point is that any delay on our part will give Nuso Esva the time he needs to take out Parck’s cruisers.”

  “Fortunately, I don’t think Nuso Esva is interested in destroying cruisers today,” Odo said. “The Firekilns could have done that long ago. I suspect he’s hoping to disable or destroy the Admonitor and capture the smaller ships intact as additions to his fleet. If, on the other hand, we come around behind him as I suggested …” He paused expectantly, like a teacher waiting for his students to come up with the correct answer.

  Pellaeon got there first. Or at least, he spoke up first. “We’ll force him to split his screening ships into two distinct and non-overlapping groups,” he said. “Which I’m guessing he can’t afford to do.”

  “Can’t, and won’t,” Odo agreed. “He’ll instead break off and make his escape as soon as he recognizes our intention.” His mask turned toward Drusan. “There’s no need for the Chimaera to reach actual firing range in order to drive them off, Captain. Nuso Esva will do the driving for us.”

  “Yes, I understand,” Drusan said sourly. “Helm: thirty degrees to portside.”

  Odo’s prediction proved to be correct. Less than a minute after the Chimaera altered its course, the Firekilns broke their formation, wheeling about in all directions, the smaller escort ships scrambling to draw in close to the larger cruisers. As the Admonitor intensified its fire the alien ships flickered with the pseudomotion of a hyperspace jump and vanished.

  “And that,” Odo said, “is that. Senior Captain Parck, are you still there?”

  “I am,” Parck said. “Thanks to you. One correction: I’m merely Captain Parck. My superior, Senior Captain Thrawn, is currently away from the ship.”