Showdown at Centerpoint (32 page)

“And
they
all think
I’ve
been acting strangely,” said Q9.

“One shot, on the count of three, then I re-aim on
the assault boat and shoot it up as best I can. Jacen, don’t boost till I tell you to, all right?”

“All right, fine! I heard you the first time!”

“Here we go,” Jaina said again. “One—”

Jacen boosted himself up on his seat a bit to see what was about to happen.

“Two—”

Should he try harder to stop her? Jaina was going too far, but there really wasn’t time to argue.

“THREE!”

A blast of fire roared from the ventral laser cannon, catching the force field generator square in the center of the control panel. It exploded in a gout of fire that seemed to light up the entire repulsor chamber. The force field winked out of existence.

The blaze of light dazzled Jacen, but Jaina had been watching her targeting screen. She swung the laser cannon around in the general direction of the assault boat and fired again. The first shot missed the boat completely, the blast of light bouncing off the reflective walls of the chamber to ricochet around a dozen times before it dissipated. She fired again, and hit the left rear landing skid of the boat, kicking the body of the boat up a half meter or so before it slammed down to the decks with a tremendous crash. She tried one more shot and missed completely again. The blast bounced back and forth off the walls and floors of the chamber.

Jacen could see three figures, one large and two small, running for the nearest entrance to the side caverns. Good. At least his sister hadn’t killed them outright when she blew up that generator. “Jaina, the way those shots are ricocheting, you’re more likely to hit Chewie than Thrackan.”

She shook her head. “You’re right,” she said. “Go. Let’s get out of here.”

“Everyone hang on to something,” said Jacen. “I’ve never done this before.” He pulled back on the repulsor power control, and the
Millennium Falcon
lumbered up into the sky.

*   *   *

Thrackan Sal-Solo went sailing out of bed and crashed to the floor of his cabin. He lay there, half stunned for a moment, and then scrambled to his feet. The room was pitch-dark for a moment, but then the emergency lighting cut in.

Thrackan had taken over the captain’s cabin in the assault boat, putting him in the only private space on board. Even so, the cabin was small enough that it took him a minute to realize that the deck was canted badly downward to the right and rear of the boat. What had happened? He could hear shouting, panicking voices in the corridor. He pulled on a robe and stepped out of his cabin.

Thrackan stepped out into a milling, chaotic throng, a tangled knot of frightened, confused men. He spotted the boat’s captain, struggling to get forward to the control room. Thrackan grabbed the man by the shoulder. “Captain Thrag—what in blazes is going on?” he demanded.

“I don’t know, sir,” Thrag shouted back. He was short, fat, and bald, and not the most appealing person to see in his underwear this late at night, so long since his last shave. But there was a clear-eyed, hard-headed sort of integrity about the man. He took orders from Thrackan without being afraid of him. A rarity, that. “Some shots, and then some explosions, at least two of them. One pretty far off, and the other right under us. I think we lost one of the landing skids.”

“That can’t be. Let’s get forward.”

The two of them shoved their way forward to the control cabin. The captain hit the button and the hatch slid open, offering a clear view out the forward viewport.

“Burning stars,” gasped Thrackan.

“Look at that,” said Thrag. “I don’t believe it.”

The force field generator was a pillar of fire, the reflection of the flame glittering and gleaming from every corner of the silver walls of the repulsor chamber. The
force field itself was gone, and the prisoners had vanished. There seemed little doubt about where they had gone, either. There was the
Millennium Falcon,
rising straight up off the ground, headed for the sky.

“After them!”

“But the ship was hit by laser fire!” Thrag protested. “We have damage! We have to check it first.”

“No! If the ship is damaged, we fly with damage! Fly! Go!”

“That would put the life of every man aboard at risk.”

“Every man aboard is at risk of execution right now anyway, for dereliction of duty,” Thrackan snarled. “What about the man on watch? He should have been here. He should have raised the alert. Where is he?”

The captain laughed bitterly and hooked his thumb toward the rear of the boat. “With the rest of the sleepy drunks back there, would be my guess.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying look at the crew your people sent me. Dregs and scum, all of them. By the time men get posted to low-life duty like tending an assault boat, a lot of other people have turned them down. What do you expect when you recruit thugs?”

“Well, if they’ve all been rejected, then they won’t be much missed when they all get killed. Launch this boat now!”

Thrag looked Thrackan straight in the eye, and then saluted. “Very well, sir. But on your head be it,” he said, and sat down in the pilot’s chair.

*   *   *

Ebrihim had a very nasty feeling that he had a large patch of singed fur somewhere in the small of his back. In any event, there was the acrid smell of burnt hair, and there was definitely a tender spot back there. However, this was not exactly the time or the place to worry about such things. Besides, his lungs were about
to burst, and he was much more interested in catching his breath than in a lot of idle chitchat about whether or not his back had caught fire. The three of them—Chewbacca, Marcha, and Ebrihim—were hiding at the base of the cone nearest where the
Falcon
had been.

Had been
. Ebrihim watched the
Falcon
rising straight up into the freedom of the night sky, her way illuminated by the glow of its repulsor pads, and fires lit by Jaina’s marksmanship.

Where the ship
had been
. That was the key point. Nothing else mattered. Not really. It was cold and hard to say it, but even if the
Falcon
crashed, even if Thrackan Sal-Solo shot it down with the loss of all hands, this moment was a great victory. For Thrackan Sal-Solo had been denied even the hope of influencing Leia Organa Solo’s decisions.

But he had paid a price even
trying
to use her kidnapped children against her. Ebrihim knew the Drall, and he thought he even knew the Selonians and humans fairly well. His attempt at blackmail had no doubt sickened and disgusted thousands, millions of people throughout the Corellian system. It must have turned millions against him, turned passive dislike into active resistance. It must have gained sympathy for Leia—and for the New Republic.

All that would have been worth it for Thrackan, if he had succeeded in manipulating her, forcing her to recognize Corellian independence. Even if she had been forced into a public rejection of his demands, that would have done her tremendous damage. A mother turning her back on her children—yes, Thrackan Sal-Solo could have done a great deal with that.

He hoped deeply, profoundly, with all his heart, that the children survived. But even if they did not, they had defeated their father’s cousin, their enemy, simply by getting away.

“Good-bye,” he said into the comlink, though they were almost certainly out of range already. “Good-bye, and good luck. May—may the Force be with you.”
As he watched, the assault boat lifted off and lurched up toward the sky. There was no way to be sure, of course, but as best he could tell, the assault boat had lifted with all hands aboard. That left the three of them down here alone, even more stranded than they had been before. Of course, Ebrihim had no doubt they would have plenty of company in the near future.

The question was—who would that company be?

*   *   *

Jacen held the controls in a death grip as the
Falcon
rode her repulsors up into the early-morning sky. They came up out of the repulsor shaft, still moving straight up, but Jacen knew better than to try to fly too high and too long on repulsor power alone. He would have to make the transition to sublight engines—and make it quickly. The repulsors were not intended for indefinite boost in the first place—and Jacen knew just how much this ship had been through recently. He put his hand on the sublight engine throttles, and pulled back on them as slightly, and as gently, as he could.

The
Millennium Falcon
took off like a lightning bolt, streaking across the sky. Jacen pulled the
Falcon
’s nose up, trying to gain some altitude—or at least trying to avoid diving into the ground. He swallowed hard and eased the sublights back just a trifle, and then shut off the repulsors. The
Falcon
shuddered for a moment, but then settled down to smooth flight—at least for a moment or two. Then she was suddenly diving in toward the ground far below. Jacen pulled back up on the stick, forcing her nose up, fighting to keep her from fishtailing all over the sky. At last she seemed to stabilize as he got the feel of the controls. But he kept his tight grip on the joystick and kept his eyes constantly flitting back and forth between the viewports and the controls.

“Well, we’re out,” Jaina asked. “Now where do we go?”

“I don’t know,” Jacen said. “We never talked about that part, but—”

“Behind us!” Anakin shouted. “Look at the detector screen!”

Jacen had to look for a moment before he could even find the detector screen. But once he did, he had not the slightest trouble reading it.

There was cousin Thrackan’s assault boat, hot on their heels. A blast of laser flared past the
Falcon
’s starboard side, and Jacen flinched involuntarily—jerking the ship’s controls, and heeling the
Falcon
up and flipping her over on her roll axis until the topside of the ship was pointed down. The
Falcon
was suddenly climbing at about a forty-five-degree angle of attack, but with the cockpit pointed down instead of up. The artificial gravity system held them in their seats, but Jacen could look
up
and
back
and see the ground where a piece of sky should have been.

The accidental maneuver seemed to have shaken Thrackan off their tail, at least for the moment, but he would be back, no doubt about it. And he’d start shooting at them again.

“Shields up!” Jacen shouted.

“Where—where are the shield controls?” Jaina asked.

“Chewie moved ’em when he rewired the cockpit,” Anakin said from the observer seat. “Under your left hand, sort of. The panel with the big
red
buttons.”

“Where? Where?” Jaina said. “I don’t see it.”

“I’ll get it,” Anakin said. He undid his seat restraint, hopped out of his seat, and wriggled in between the two pilot stations. He reached in and flicked the safeties off a row of red switches, stabbed his chubby finger down on a big red button, and twisted two dials. “All right,
now
shields up! Top, bottom, and forward shields at—um—twenty percent. Rear shields at full.”

A dull crash and a shudder that ran through the
whole ship told Jacen that Anakin had gotten the shields up just in time—and that cousin Thrackan’s aim was getting better.

Was he trying to shoot them down? Were those warning shots? Or was he trying to disable them? So far, as best Jacen could tell, Thrackan had just used the assault boat’s chin guns, low-caliber lasers intended more for antipersonnel work than ship-to-ship fighting. But what did it
mean
? Jacen knew his dad would have been able to interpret the shots, know just what Thrackan intended, and what to do about it. But his father was not here, however devoutly Jacen might wish that he were. Probably—probably—Thrackan was trying to disable the
Falcon,
not kill them. The thought was not much comfort.

Thirty seconds before, he had been worrying about figuring out where to go. Suddenly he wasn’t all that interested in getting to anyplace at all.

All he wanted to do was get away from here, right now.

*   *   *

“Shoot!” Thrackan shouted. “Shoot, damn your eyes!”

“I can’t shoot them if I can’t get a lock on them,” Thrag growled. “The chin guns don’t have any sort of automatic target tracking. I can’t fly a pursuit and try for a pinpoint disabling shot at the same time. Maybe
you’re
that good, but I’m not.”

“We’ll see how good I am,” Thrackan said, climbing into the copilot’s chair. “Switch gunnery control to this station.”

“But it’s your own blood relatives!” Thrag protested.

“I ordered you to shoot at them, and I’m going to shoot at them myself. I’m not hypocrite enough to pretend there’s a difference there.”

Thrag turned his attention from his flying long enough to look Thrackan up and down. “Do your own dirty work, then, and welcome to it,” he said, and
switched over gunnery control. “But I never thought I’d meet a man who thought it a special point of pride to shoot down his own flesh and blood.”

*   *   *

Ossilege’s ensign rushed onto the flag deck, almost stumbling over his own feet in his hurry. “Sir, something’s happened!”

Ossilege turned, raised one eyebrow, and regarded the young man with a withering stare. “Thank you for that cogent and highly detailed report,” he said.

“Ah, yes, sir. I’m sorry. At the repulsor. Something’s happened there. We detected several energy pulses that read like laser fire and explosions, and then—then two ships came out of the repulsor, one in pursuit of the other. They’ve just gained enough altitude for us to see them over the limb of the planet. Both are being flown very badly, and one of them seems to be damaged.”

“Two ships?” Kalenda said. “That’s all there were down there, unless someone is playing a very cagey game.”

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.”