Showdown at Centerpoint (22 page)

But, speaking of taking chances, he faced a repulsor precisely like the one that had smashed the
Watchkeeper
down to nothing at all. He had to assume this repulsor would be just as powerful within a short period of time—if it was not so already. After all,
someone
had turned it on. More than likely, that someone knew how to aim it and fire it as well.

And, it occurred to him, more than likely that someone was an ally of the Human League. If that was so, then the assault boat hadn’t been taking chances, but had flown in to take possession of a planetary repulsor that had been located and activated by Human League agents.

And yet. And yet. That was a fast, hard assault landing, not a slower, safer arrival at a secured base. Almost
as if the other side had been as surprised as Ossilege himself. Almost as if they had been trying to do what he had been trying to do—take advantage of an unexpected opportunity. Ossilege had the feeling the story was not over. Something
else
was going to happen here, something more was going to change. And change could usually be exploited.

Besides, it was just one small assault boat. There could not be more than twenty or thirty people aboard it, at most. Surely the
Intruder
ought to be able to take on a force that small, no matter how powerful the weapon they controlled. Ossilege had always been a great believer in the idea that weapons mattered far less than the people who used them. The
Intruder
carried a small force of assault troops, and she carried her own assault boats. Perhaps the
Intruder
would not be able to attack the repulsor in a frontal assault, but there were other forms of attack. Forms that took a bit more time, and a bit more finesse, but could work just as well, if one was audacious.

Ossilege turned to the ensign at his side. “My compliments to Captain Semmac. The
Intruder
will move into an orbit synchronous with the planet’s rotation, well out of line-of-sight from the repulsor site. We will await developments here while we commence preparations for a ground assault.”

The ensign saluted and scurried away. Ossilege stared at the image of the planetary repulsor in the scanner screen. He raised his hand and offered up a small, mocking salute to the commander of the assault boat. “You have won the first round,” he said to the screen. “But let us not forget the main event is still to come.”

L
uke stepped out into the huge airlock where the
Lady Luck
and his X-wing were waiting, and breathed a sigh of relief.

Jenica had taken them on a roundabout route, but they had gotten here faster than he had thought possible. And with that clock counting down toward the death of Bovo Yagen, there was no time at all to waste.

He thought he knew what he had to do next, but he had to be sure. He had to check. The others watched as Luke found a packing crate that had been abandoned on the airlock deck and sat down on it. He shut his eyes and concentrated, forcing himself to take it slow, to be sure, to extend his senses as far as possible.

“Leia is on Selonia,” he said at last as he opened his eyes. “No doubt about it. I can
feel
her there. My guess is that Han is with her, and probably Mara Jade as well. The three children are on Drall, and if what Kalenda told us is right about how they all escaped from Corellia, that probably means Chewbacca and the
Falcon
are there with them. I can get a sense of a mind that’s
probably
Chewbacca, but I can’t be sure. Not at this range. And I might add that all of them seem worried. It’s hard to explain, but—but I get the sense, the
feeling, that all of them—Leia and the kids, and the people with them—are all prisoners of one sort or another.”

“Then we’d better get cracking and bust them out,” Lando said briskly. “You go to Leia,” Lando said. “Take Artoo and the X-wing. Figure out the coordinates for the kids’ location on Drall and give them to me. I’ll fly Gaeriel and Jenica back to the Bakuran fleet, where they can inform Admiral Ossilege of what we have learned. Gaeriel should get back to her post on the ship, and Jenica is our expert on Centerpoint. She ought to be of some help if things get rough. After I’ve dropped them off, Lieutenant Kalenda and I will fly on to Drall and see what we can do about getting to Chewbacca and the kids.”

Jenica looked toward Lando. “You’re not very optimistic, are you?”

“We don’t know how to find the Drall repulsor,” Lando replied. “I don’t care how good an engineer Chewbacca is, there isn’t going to be any way for him to work on a repulsor he can’t get to. We have to rescue them, of course, but unless they’re sitting right on top of a repulsor, I don’t see how finding Chewbacca is going to help us get one.” He turned back to Luke. “Leia is by far the better chance. She’s on a planet where they’ve got a working repulsor, and it’s probably controlled by the people holding her. All you have to do is let her know what’s going on, and then hope she can talk her captors into jamming Centerpoint.”

Luke smiled faintly. “Yeah. Easy. Should be a piece of cake.”

Jenica rubbed her chin. “It all
nearly
makes sense,” she said thoughtfully. “But I don’t like the fact that we’re leaving Centerpoint unguarded.”

“I don’t think the loss of the overwhelming force represented by two small ships, two droids, and five people is going to matter that much,” Lando said. “What are we going to be able to do, anyway? Wait for
someone to land and then sneak up and kick them in the shins?”

Jenica cocked her head a bit to one side and nodded. “Point taken. I guess I don’t know what more we can do.”

Luke stood up and nodded. “In that case,” he said, “I suggest we do what we can, right now.”

*   *   *

“We have you, but we’ll not keep you long,” said Kleyvits, speaker for the Overden. She sat at a table opposite Mara, Leia, and Han. Dracmus sat at Kleyvits’s side, demonstrating simply by her presence that her clan had submitted to the victors. She did not look happy to be there. “We need merely come to certain straightforward agreements, and then all may be on their way.”

“We’re not going to come to your agreements,” Leia said wearily. The morning had lengthened into late afternoon, and they were in the sumptuous interior of the prison villa. For prison it had proved to be. The Overden had thrown a force field around the
Jade’s Fire,
and guards around the force field. Leia could see the ship on the landing pad, just outside the door, but there would be no escape aboard her this time. “Even if we did wish to reach agreement, we could not do so while you were detaining us. Even if we did, it would be pointless. My government would never ratify any agreement made under duress.”

“How can you be under duress when you will be free to go as soon as we are agreeing?”

“We are under duress
now,
” Leia said, her voice and manner calm, imperious. “And we will not agree in any event. Therefore, the point is moot.”

“I ask you again to be reconsidering,” Kleyvits said. “All we ask is that you are acknowledging reality. We are free. We are no longer of the New Republic. We
have thrown you off. We are our own place, our own planet. We ask merely that you are recognizing this fact.”

“You are no freer now than you were under the New Republic,” Mara said, her voice cold. “There was no dictator over you, no one telling you how to think and feel and act. You have thrown off no tyranny. It is not freedom for Selonia you ask her to recognize. It is the dominance of the Overden.”

“Hey, I’ll tell you what,” Han said. “Let’s give them what they want. Complete freedom. Complete freedom from trade, from interstellar commerce, from imports. Complete freedom from travel off-planet. Total embargo. How does that sound?”

“It sounds quite pleasant to us of the Overden, who wish to be free of anti-Selonian influence. Is that not so, my dear friend? Speak for the Hunchuzuc. Do you not agree that complete isolation would be the greatest of blessings?”

“Oh yes, eminent Kleyvits,” Dracmus said in a mournful tone, clearly feeling miserable and humiliated. “There could be no doubt that all the people of Selonia long to be isolated from the outside universe.”

“What about all your friends and relations on Corellia, where you lived all your life?” Han asked.

“They will rejoice with me in knowing we are free of all outside influence,” Dracmus said, staring down at the table.

“I’m afraid you’re no good at lying, Honored Dracmus,” Han said. “I’ve seen dead people who were more convincing.”

Dracmus looked up worriedly, and risked a quick look over at Kleyvits. “Please be in no doubt at all about my sincerity, Honored Solo.”

“Don’t worry on that score,” said Han. “I have no doubts at all.”

“I insist that we return to the main point,” Kleyvits said, clearly a bit put off by Dracmus’s performance.
“Recognize the freedom of Selonia under the guidance of the Overden or never leave this planet alive.”

“You’ve got yourself a deal,” Leia said.

Kleyvits looked toward her eagerly. “Then we have persuaded you?”

“Absolutely,” said Leia. “We pick the second choice, the one about not leaving alive. Go ahead and kill us all right now.”

Kleyvits sighed wearily, and extended her claws to drum them on the tabletop, making a rather unsettling clicking noise. It was hard to miss just how sharp those claws were. “I can see,” said Kleyvits, “that we are going to be here for a while.”

*   *   *

Thrackan Sal-Solo sat in the copilot’s seat and watched intently as the pilot brought the assault boat up to the rim of the huge cylinder that was the planetary repulsor. Slowly, slowly, slowly up and over. The assault boat hung motionless in the air for a moment, then spun slowly about, until its nose was pointed directly at the two bright spots of light on the evening horizon. Talus and Tralus. Thrackan could not spot it with the naked eye from this distance, but he knew that, with just the slightest of magnification, he would be able to see Centerpoint there as well.

All was in readiness. All he had to do was press the button, command the radionics system to send its signal, and then order the pilot to bring them back down into the repulsor. Then it would simply be a matter of waiting for the radionics signal to cross the distance between here and Centerpoint to reach the control center. The automatic control center would shut off the jamming, and that would be that. He would not even have to come up here again to transmit the broadcast over com channels. The com signal wouldn’t be blocked by the repulsor or require line of sight. Most convenient.

Simple, really. Thrackan was not generally of a poetic turn of mind, but it occurred to him that what he was about to do was to cast a stone into a pond, square into the middle. The ripples would move out from where the stone struck, out in all directions. Some of the consequences he could predict, but he knew, if anyone did, just how risky a game he was playing. The ripples might well spread out in directions he had not considered, touch on shores he did not expect. He wanted to turn off the communications jamming because it served his own purposes, but being able to communicate would serve many other purposes beyond his own.

Some consequences he could predict. Once the jamming was down, the original controllers of the starbuster plot would immediately use the primary com system to send the command shutting down the interdiction field. They would move into the Corellian system and run right up against the Bakuran ships. That suited Thrackan fine. Let the two sides battle it out. Let one side defeat the other. The winner, whoever it was, would be weakened by the fight, and Thrackan’s own forces would have an easier time of it in the final confrontation.

He was also just about certain that the system’s original controllers would lock out the subsystem Thrackan had been using, preventing him from manipulating the system any further.
They
would not want the jamming back on. So be it. That meant Thrackan’s enemies here in the Corellian system would suddenly be able to communicate with each other, exchange information. They would learn things about each other, and about Thrackan—but they would learn them too late. He was not worried about that.

But what of the consequences he had not imagined? What unknown risks was he about to take? There was, clearly, no way to know.

But there was one thing he did know. Shutting off the communications jamming would allow Thrackan
Sal-Solo to tell the whole Corellian system that he had Han Solo’s children. Han Solo would hear it, and know it, and be helpless to do anything about it.

What sweeter revenge could there be?

Thrackan pushed the button. The command signal went out.

*   *   *

Ossilege watched on the
Intruder
’s long-range scanners as the assault boat hovered just barely into view over the top of the repulsor, turned itself slightly, and then floated back down out of sight. He looked toward the
Intruder
’s chief gunner and saw the man shake his head. “I’m sorry, sir. There just wasn’t time to set up a shot. Not at this range. Especially with atmosphere in the way. If he had stayed there another thirty seconds—”