“I want my fleet to be led toward whatever trap they have set—with the Watchkeeper well in the lead. I do not want our fighters to be overly aggressive. They should take battle if it is offered, but not seek it out. I want a defensive, not an offensive, posture. I think there is no doubt that we can deal with any number of these PPBs and other light fighters at the proper time. For now, I simply want to preserve our force and probe the enemy’s capabilities.
“So,” Ossilege said in solemn voice as he looked out over the faces of his officers. “Let it begin.” He nodded to the Intruder’s tactical officer.
“All crew to battle stations,” she ordered. “All fighter pilots to their spacecraft. Stand by for fighter-craft launch.”
The briefing was over, and the officers and pilots stood up and began to file out.
“Defensive posture,” Lando muttered to Luke as they followed the others out. “If he really wanted a defensive posture, we could all just stay aboard ship.”
“Hey, come on,” Luke said. “You’re my wingman out there. I don’t want you too defensive.”
“Look, you’ll be lucky if I even remember how to fly my ship,” Lando replied. “What with all the planning meetings, I haven’t even been aboard her since we entered the Corellian system.”
Luke grinned and slapped his friend on the back. “Well, they say once you learn, you never forget. Here’s your big chance to find out if that’s true. Come on. Let’s get to our ships.”
Now, Leia thought. Now they were close enough. At this distance she could reach across and sense her brother’s mind, if he were indeed there. She shut her eyes, and used her power in the Force to reach, to spread her senses outward.
And she felt him, at once, immediately, felt him strong and clear across the darkness and the distance. Leia smiled, reveled in the warmth of the contact, of the pleasure of knowing her brother was near, and coming closer. But that was only half of it. She knew that Luke would sense her in the Force in the same moment, would instantly know where she was.
Even if her ability was not strong enough to allow any meaningful communication, just the simple knowledge that he was there, that he would know she was here, was a tremendous comfort.
Luke was halfway up the access ladder of his X-wing when he felt his sister’s touch through the Force. He froze and looked up, with his mind’s eye, through the bulkheads and decks and durasteel of the Intruder, up and out into the clean darkness of space. He could see her spirit there, shining in the dark, as clearly as he could see Artoo being lowered into his socket on the X-wing. She was here. She was alive. She was all right. What else could matter as much as that?
Luke got an answer almost before he could form the question.
For now that he was reaching out with his Force sense, he realized there was someone else out there as well.
Leia felt the same contact, almost by accident, as her Force sense swept across space. In some ways, a much fainter presence, a being not endowed himself with the slightest ability in the Force. But all living things were present in the Force, and this life shone bright with vigor and determination—and it shone especially bright for Leia.
“Han,” she said, the joy and amazement plain in her voice, turning to Mara. She worked the detector controls and brought the sensors to bear on the right piece of sky. “There!” she said, pointing to a small blip in the detector display. “Han is on that blown-out coneship. Luke is aboard the largest Bakuran ship, but Han is here, too.” She shut her eyes and concentrated again. “Two other beings as well; Selonians, I think. I’m not sure about them, but it is Han. I know it’s Han.”
Leia is here, Luke thought. Leia is here, and Han is here, and there isn’t a thing I can do about it. Things were moving too fast. He buttoned up the canopy of his X-wing and ran his cross-checks with Artoo. He checked the deployment roster.
His X-wing and the Lady Luck were scheduled to launch from the belly of the Intruder in thirty seconds. Barely time to feel thankful that she and Han were all right. In between nav checks, system tests, and bringing the X-wing to hover, there was no time for anything else.
Not even time to use the laser link system to tell Lando the news.
That was perhaps fortunate, as Lando had his own startling news to contend with.
Strictly speaking, there wasn’t really any point to running the automatic com check. Not when all the standard com systems were shut down by the jamming, and there was no way to test the laser link system onboard ship. But Lando tried to be a careful pilot, when he had the chance. And that meant full systems checks if he hadn’t flown the ship in a while. He didn’t expect any surprises, though. Artoo had run systems checks recently, and he was always careful to take care of the Lady.
But what one expected rarely had much to do with what one got. He learned that much when the radionic scanner picked something up—and put it on the cabin speaker.
“Tendra to Lando,” said the voice—Tendra’s voice—from the speaker. “Please respond on preassigned frequency.” A pause, and then it repeated, “Tendra to Lando. Please respond on preassigned frequency.” And repeated, “Tendra to Lando. Please respond on preassigned frequency.…”
Lando was stunned. Absolutely stunned. How had she gotten to Corellia? What in the name of stars and skies was Tendra doing here? Why had she come here? How far away was she?
Lando checked the launch clock. Just under half a minute to go. Barely time to do anything. But he had to do something. He punched up the com system, switched it to the rarely used radionics mode, and set it for repeater transmission. He thought for a minute before he replied. There was so much to say, and so little time. “Lando replying to Tendra. It’s a long story why, but I only arrived in-system very recently, and have just now received your transmission.” He paused for a moment, and then went on, feeling more than a bit awkward. “It, ah, might sound melodramatic, but I’m about to go into battle, and there is no time for anything. There’s a lot I want to say—but all of it will have to wait. The main question is, where are you? I will do my best to monitor your original frequency from here on in. Good luck to you, and to all of us. Lando out. Message repeats.”
Lando just sat there for a moment, thinking of all the ways he should change that message. It said too much, and it said not enough—but there was no time. It would have to do. Ten seconds until launch. Lando hit the continuous transmit-repeat button, brought his sublight engines to standby, and began concentrating on staying alive.
Han Solo was not a happy man. There are few things that make a pilot feel as helpless as being aboard a derelict ship. It was bad enough for a pilot to be a passenger aboard a craft with someone else, anyone else, at the controls. But when no one is at the controls, when the ship is out of control, the sensation was far worse. The nameless coneship might as well have been an asteroid, a lump of spacerock, for all that could be done to maneuver it. All they could do was wait. Sooner or later someone would shoot them down, or they would crash into something, or the food would give out, or the air and water would go bad. With the luck this ship had, it wouldn’t be more than a day or two before two or three of those things happened.
Unless. Unless Han could jury-rig some sort of propulsion system and bring the navicomputer back online. The odds for success weren’t good, of course. But Han had never been one to give up easily. And the first stage of the job was clearly to make a detailed survey of the damage. It was lucky that they had nothing but time on their hands, because that was what this job would take. A lot of time.
Han stared at the ruined initiator link, trying to fix every part of it in his mind, doing his best to memorize it before he touched it. He was going to have exactly one chance to repair this thing, and he had to get it right. He noticed a slender crack in the base of the impeller bracket. If that crack went all the way through, the bracket would be useless. Well, he’d just have to build a new one. Maybe he could find something on the ship that would—
“Honored Solo!”
The voice boomed down from the upper deck, loud enough and suddenly enough that Han nearly jumped out of his skin. “Dracmus, don’t do that!” he shouted back. “Scared me half to death. I could have snapped the impeller bracket clean off, if I had been touching it.”
“My apologies, Honored Solo,” Dracmus called back. “But there is another matter, an urgent one. A ship is about to dock with us.”
“What!” Han forgot all about the impeller and scrambled up the ladder to the upper deck. “What are you talking about?” he demanded. He looked up at the detector screen and saw from the visual-mode display that there was indeed another ship out there, only a half kilometer away and closing fast. He looked up through the cone-apex viewports and spotted the ship easily. “Salculd, why didn’t you spot it until now?”
“She came up from our stern,” Salculd said apologetically. “Our stern detectors were never very good, and the overload must have damaged them in some way the diagnostics couldn’t spot.”
“Great,” Han said. “We’ve been flying blind and we didn’t even know it.”
“But what do we do, Honored Solo?” Dracmus asked.
“Do? What can we do? We have no com system with the jamming, so we can’t talk with them. We have no propulsion system, so we can’t move—unless we all get out and push.” He pointed to the fast-approaching ship and shrugged hopelessly. “All we can do is put out the welcome mat and hope they’re friendly. I’d say I hoped they were on our side if I knew what side that was—” Han stopped talking and looked harder at the incoming ship. “Wait a second,” he said. “I know that ship. I know that ship—”
“What ship is it?” Dracmus demanded. “Are they friend or foe?”
“I’m not sure. Dracmus, Salculd, both of you. Grab sidearms and get to the air lock. Hurry!”
Salculd and Dracmus both froze for a second, not sure whether to obey Han. “Go!” he shouted again. “Now!”
That got them moving. “I have two blasters in my cabin,” Dracmus announced, and rushed to get them, Salculd hard on her heels.
Han scrambled back down the ladder and rushed over to the air lock, wishing for a wrench, a hammer, anything big and heavy. But there wasn’t time. He heard the thud of hull clamps linking to the coneship, heard a high-pitched hum as a force field coming on vibrated through the hull. Standard operating procedure when two ships with nonmatched hatches docked up. One would activate a tubular force field between the two air locks, allowing free transit from one ship to the other.
Assuming all parties cooperated. Han briefly considered disabling the air lock, preventing the boarders from coming over. But there would be very little point to that. Any cutting laser worth its salt would be able to slice through the coneship’s hull metal in a matter of minutes. Better to let them aboard and take it from there. And besides, she might be friendly. She might be … But then he heard the coneship’s outer doors slide open. It was too late to worry about it.
“Solo!” Dracmus shouted as she rushed down the corridor, blaster at the ready. “Solo! What is going on? What ship is that?” She stopped short, and Salculd almost knocked her over. “What is going on?”
“That’s the Jade’s Fire that just latched herself to our hull,” Han said. “Mara Jade’s ship. Your swell friend has just tracked me—or you, or us—halfway across the Corellian system. And I can tell you right now, I am not giving her any more benefit of the doubt. She had better do a damned good job of convincing me she’s on our side or—”
The inner airlock door slid open, and Han stopped talking. He just stood there, openmouthed and in shock, for a full five seconds. And then, somehow, suddenly, they were in each other’s arms, seemingly without either of them crossing the distance between them. “Leia,” he said. “Leia, how did you—”
Leia Organa Solo wrapped her arms around Han and hugged her husband. “Hello, Han,” she said. “I missed you.”
Luke Skywalker kept his X-wing in formation with the Lady Luck, both craft flying escort on the Intruder. The four ships of the Bakuran task force were set in a modified flying-wedge formation, a three-sided pyramid with the Watchkeeper at the leading point and the other three ships forming up in an equilateral triangle directly behind her. The hope was that the opposition would not be able to detect the tractor beams the three other ships were using to hold Watchkeeper in formation. At any rate, the formation looked impressive, and that was most of the point.
“—uke, come in, Lu—”
It was Lando on the line-of-sight laser com system. The best that could be said about the system was that it worked, which was a great deal more than could be said about any other com system available to the fleet. However, it did not work well. It just about sufficed for conversation between a fighter and his wingman. Anything else, and it was hopeless. “Still breaking up a bit, Lando,” Luke said. “What’s up?”
“—emme re-ibrate this -ing again. There we go. I just wanted to know if you had any better idea what we’re looking for out there.”
In other words, Lando wanted to know if Luke had sensed anything through the Force. “Not really,” he said. “I don’t feel anything much from the other side, besides the emotions you might expect before a battle. My guess is that they don’t have any more idea than we do. The brass knows, but the troops don’t.”
“Great,” Lando said. “How about Leia and Han?”
“They’re still out there. I can sense the two of them together now—and someone else, too, now that I know where to focus my awareness. Mara Jade. I think they’re on her ship now, and if I’m matching up my Force sense with the tracking data properly, they are on the shortest, fastest course that will get them clear of the battle zone.”
“Can’t blame them for—at,” Lando said, still breaking up just a trifle. “But I sure wish Mara had decided to join in the fun. Her ship packs some serious firepower. We could use the help.”
“Not really,” said Luke. “Ossilege was right. The enemy formations are all wrong for fighter-to-fighter battle. If that was what this was about, we’d wipe them out in a minute. They have to know that. They aren’t going to offer battle. Not unless they’re suicidal.”
“—o what are they going to offer?” Lando demanded. “Musical entertainment?”
Luke shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “But we’re about to find out. Here they come.”
A wave of Corellian PPBs came in from sunward, trying to stay hidden in Corell’s glare. They went straight for the Watchkeeper, but broke off their attack almost before it had started, only getting off a few token turbolaser shots before shifting course and diving away. A flight of Selonian light attack fighters came in right behind the PPBs and performed almost the identical maneuver, coming in just a trifle closer—and being rewarded by a series of rapid bursts from the Watchkeeper’s main battery. The Watchkeeper scored two direct hits on the LAFs. Luke had to hand it to Ossilege, who was flying the Watchkeeper by remote. That was some pretty fair shooting.
The surviving LAFs moved off on the same heading as the PPBs, on a bearing that would take them just over the limb of Selonia. Luke reminded himself that they were coming up on the planet. It would be downright embarrassing to get preoccupied with the dogfight and crash into it. More PPBs came in from directly above the Bakuran ships, diving straight into the center of the wedge formation to come up behind the Watchkeeper and give her a dose of firepower from the rear. The other big Bakuran ships opened fire on the interlopers, but they were restrained by the fear of firing on their own ship. Shooing them away was a job for the fighters, and several flights of Bakuran fighters took up the task.
Luke decided to join them. “Lando, let’s encourage those PPBs to go on about their business,” he said. “Form on my port wing and follow me in.”
“I’m with you, -uke,” Lando replied.
Luke brought his fighter’s wings to attack position and lit the engines. The X-wing dove into the center of the flying wedge, the Lady Luck off her port wing. Luke s
potted a pair of PPBs below and off to starboard. He swooped in on them, locking his guns—but both PPBs blew up before he could even fire.
“Score two,” Lando announced. “At least I think it was me. Lot of shooting going on. Luke! Coming up from the rear and below!”
Luke had his X-wing in a diving barrel roll before he could see the threat. You had to trust your wingman. And sure enough, there was a PPB and an LAF coming straight for him. Both of the light fighters opened up on him, and the X-wing took a glancing hit to the portside lower wing. Artoo bleeped protestingly but recalibrated the shielding to compensate.
Luke fired two short bursts. The first hit the LAF and blew it sky-high. The second burst only caught a piece of the PPB, sent it tumbling out of control and out of the fight. Luke forgot about it and pulled the X-wing’s nose up, heading back toward the Watchkeeper, coming up under her keel.
“That’s it,” Lando said. “They’ve broken off.”
“Yeah,” Luke said. “And they’re heading for that same piece of sky as all the other flights bugged out toward. That’s where they want us to go.”
Star Wars: The Corellian Trilogy II: Assault at Selonia Page 26
