Showdown at Centerpoint (4 page)

“Good,” Mara said. “Hang on.”

*   *   *

Han was almost too busy trying to keep from being flung out of his chair to notice the flashing lights visible in the overhead viewport. “Smooth and gentle, Salculd! Not sudden!” he shouted as he tried to concentrate on the blink code—not easy to do when the ship he was on was flailing about like a cornered bantha. The trouble was that Han was only marginally better at reading code than he was at sending it. Even under perfect conditions, he might have had problems. He struggled to catch it all. At least Leia used the special word-end signal between words. Otherwise, he’d have never gotten anywhere.
“B-A-N-D-I- something-something
word ends,” he muttered to himself. “Bandi? Bandits! Oh, great!” He tried to concentrate on the next word.
Missed something -R-O-M word ends
. Burning suns, Leia, do you have to send so fast?
Missed something -E-H-I-N-D word ends J-A-D-E-S-F-I—

Han missed the end of it as the coneship bobbled about again, but he had read enough to know the score. Bandits, enemy fighters, were headed this way, coming from behind the
Jade’s Fire
. And either by bad luck or good timing they were heading in right as the coneship was at its most vulnerable.

Han glanced over at the Selonians. You didn’t have to be an expert at reading Selonian expressions to know that they were both scared silly, Salculd only slightly less so than Dracmus. Han reminded himself she did not speak Basic. There was no point at all to telling Salculd about the bandits until she had the ship under control. Han was sure she hadn’t even seen the blink-code message. Good. Let her work. Let her work.

The coneship slowly lumbered around into braking position, its fat stern pointed almost precisely straight down at the planet, but canted just slightly into the ship’s direction of travel, so the braking run could kill the craft’s forward momentum as well.

Han checked his instruments, doing his best to make sense out of the Selonian notation. By some miracle or other, Salculd seemed to have gotten them into the right position, and at the right attitude. “Good, good,” he said as calmly as he could. Probably they had just a few seconds left before the bandits jumped them. But trying to rush Salculd would be worse than useless at this point. If she got any more scared, she might freeze completely. “Now then, Salculd, one other matter. Is time to, ah,
test
our defense plan. You will bring the ship to spin, please, of three spins per minute.”

“Test?”
Dracmus sputtered. “But you said it was a one-time-only trick.”

Han had been hoping no one would bring that up. At least Dracmus had spoken in Basic. There was still a million-to-one chance Salculd hadn’t caught on. “Quiet,” he said in Basic before switching back to Selonian. “Make the spins, please, Honored Salculd. Make sure all is well, in case needed.”

It was clear that Salculd did not believe him—but it would seem she was willing to pretend she did, at least for a little while. “Yes, yes,” she said, “of course. Commencing axial spin.” The ship began to rotate around its conical axis, so the stars pinwheeled across the sky. Han studied the overhead view, as best he was able. He could just about spot the
Fire,
and the bandits were almost certainly smaller, and coming from behind. There was no way he could find them, especially with the ship spinning like a top. He gave it up. No point in worrying about things he could not change.

“Disable internal damping,” Han said calmly, casually. The inertial dampers prevented anything more than a few percent of a ship’s acceleration and motion from being felt by those aboard. Without them, the occupants of a ship accelerating to light speed could be squashed to jelly. No one liked turning them off—but sometimes you had to do what you didn’t like.

“But if we cannot restart inertial damping—”

“Worry about such later!” Han snapped. He knew better than Salculd what it might mean if they couldn’t get the dampers back on. But they would have to live long enough for the problem to come up. “We need to use centrifugal effect if plan is to work, and inertial damping cancels it out. End damping!”

Salculd inhaled nervously and reached out her hand to cut off the inertial damping system. All of a sudden, Han felt his weight double, then triple, as the dampers stopped compensating for the ship’s deceleration. A moment later he felt the disorienting sensation of the ship spinning.

“Confirm all inner airlocks sealed,” Han ordered.

“All inner airlock doors sealed. Pressure in locks,” Salculd said. “Honored Solo, must we truly—”

“Quiet! We must. Be ready for next step! Maintain course, maintain thrust, unless I order otherwise!” Han struggled to concentrate on the spinning starfield overhead. If this was going to work, it would take exact timing. But how could he time anything if he couldn’t see? Maybe he would get lucky and the
Jade’s Fire
would signal the all clear.

And maybe he would wake up and discover the whole nightmare trip to Corellia had just been a dream. If only wishing could make it true. He had done his best. Now all they could do was hang on and see how it came out.

*   *   *

“Rear, ventral, and dorsal shields to full, forward shields to one quarter,” Mara ordered. “Divert shields as needed for ship safety.”

Leia worked the shield settings. “Shields configured as ordered.”

“Good,” Mara said. “Maintain turbolasers at standby. We are going to hold this course and speed. Act like they aren’t there. They can’t know how good or bad our detectors are. They’ve never seen this kind of ship before, but I know LAFs. They have the gear to detect turbos going on-line, but not shield activation. If we keep the guns off and stay on course, they might decide we can’t see them.”

“What good does that do us?” Leia asked.

“They might blow right past us and zero in on the coneship. My guess is that whoever is on those LAFs is targeting the Hunchuzuc, not us.”

“But Han is—”

“Safer this way,” Mara said, watching her displays. “We can handle seven or eight of them at once, but not twelve. Not in a direct engagement. But if the LAFs don’t engage us, we’ll have nice, clear forward view
shots right up their stern plates while they’re focused on the coneship. We can pick off three or four of them before the rest bring fire to bear on us. Set up the targeting system for tracking follow-fire. If they engage us directly, we return fire. If they go past us, commence fire when they are three kilometers past us. Understood?”

“Yes, but—”

“No buts,” Mara said. “This ship fights my way, or not at all.”

Leia gave in again. Mara had far more experience at this sort of fight than she did. “Very well,” she said. “Stand by. Here they come.”

Leia watched the stern detector displays as the LAFs came in, directly behind the
Fire
’s stern, trying to hide in the detection shadow produced by the sublight engines. They
were
trying to sneak up. From that bearing they wouldn’t even show up on most ships’ detectors.

The LAFs swept in, their images in the detection screen breaking up just a bit due to interference from the sublight engines. Leia tensed up as they swept through the optimum firing range, and felt herself relax just a trifle as they swept on, past the
Fire
. But she didn’t relax too far—not when they were passing her by to take a crack at her husband’s ship.

The LAFs flashed past the
Fire,
zeroing in on the coneship. “The coneship!” she cried out. “It’s spinning up. They must have got our warning.”

“Let’s hope Han’s idea works better than it ought to,” Mara said.

It wasn’t the most tactful thing to say, even if Leia had been thinking the same thing herself. But there was no time. “Coming up on three kilometers distance,” she said.

“Commence fire,” Mara ordered.

“Not unless they fire first!” Leia said. “Maybe they’re just here to throw a scare into us, or they might be on escort duty. No way to tell with communications jammed.”

“All right,” Mara said, the doubt plain in her voice. “You can make that—”

But the first flash of turbolaser fire from the lead LAF shut down the argument. Leia released the safeties on the
Fire
’s follow-fire circuits and started selecting targets, aiming first for the LAF that had opened fire.

*   *   *

“Here they come!” Han shouted in Basic, forgetting for a moment to speak in Selonian. Salculd got the message all the same. She looked up through the viewport at the tiny spots of light in the sky, and understood precisely what was going on. She let out a most undignified squawk. The whole slowly spinning coneship lurched to one side and came close to heeling over into a disastrous tumble.

“Calmness!” Han shouted. “Be calm, alert. Throttle down all engines. End all thrust. Stand by to open outer airlock doors on my command.”

“Thrott—throttling down all engines,” Salculd said. “Ready on the airlock doors.”

“Wait for it,” Han said, watching the LAFs come closer. Weight faded away as Salculd powered down the engines. With the inertial dampers off-line, and the engine thrust gone, Han found himself in zero gee for the first time in a long time. Han knew people who had spent half their lives in space without experiencing zero gravity—and with the flip-flops his stomach was doing all of a sudden, he could understand why.

But there was no time for that now. Not with a sky full of Light Attack Fighters heading in. “Be ready, ready,” he told Salculd.

The lead LAF fired and caught them with a glancing blow to the starboard side, slamming into the hull like a giant fist. “It’s all right!” Han shouted, having not the least idea if it was or not. “It’s all right. Stand by on the airlock doors. Wait for it. Be ready—”

*   *   *

The
Jade’s Fire’s
forward quad turbolaser blazed away, tracking the lead LAF across the sky. The LAF broke off its attack run, trying to fly an evasive pattern and escape. For a moment it managed to break out of the tracking pattern, but the
Jade’s Fire
regained a positive lock and poured in fire again. The LAF’s shields flared and blazed for a moment before giving way altogether. The fighter exploded, a blossom of fire that flared up and was gone.

Leia fed two new targets to the follow-fire system, and got busy herself with the manual guns, reading the detection screens for herself. But the rest of the LAFs were not going to be such easy pickings. They had their rear shields powered up to maximum, and did a better job of evasive maneuvers, good enough to completely bamboozle the follow-fire systems.

But not good enough to fool Leia. She settled in with the manual controls and began looking for targets. She concentrated her fire on the toughest shots, the LAFs closest to the coneship. She got a lock on one and fired, holding the guns on target long enough to burn through the shields and blow the fighter to bits.

Just then the coneship cut its engines, allowing it to drop straight for the planet’s surface. It threw the LAFs off, if only for a moment or two.

Leia shook her head and sighed. Not much of an evasive maneuver, but probably the best Han could manage with that clunky piece of junk. But suddenly her detector displays showed a cloud of debris blooming out from the coneship in all directions.

Fear stabbed at her heart. That one hit on the coneship’s hull couldn’t have done that much damage, could it? Could the craft be breaking up before her eyes, with Han aboard? She had no desire to watch the death of her husband—but then something happened to one of the LAFs, and then another, and another. As they swooped in close to the coneship, they bounced
and skittered and wobbled off course. Two of them lost power, and the third was rocked by a small explosion amidships. Leia got a target lock on one of the survivors and fired, catching a piece of him before he managed to get his shields up. Leia tried to track to a new target, but the LAFs had plainly decided to take the hint and accept the fact they weren’t welcome. They scattered, hightailing out of there in all directions.

But how in the blazes had—Suddenly she understood. Of course. Of course. “Mara! His trick worked! Get us out from behind Han, fast! New course, five or six kilometers to one side of him, and try to overtake him if you can. It’s not going to be so safe to be behind him for a while.”

She smiled, relief flooding over her. She should have known Han wouldn’t give up without a fight.

*   *   *

Han listened closely as the last of the junk went lumbering out of the airlocks, banging and clattering and thudding and reverberating through the ship. There was no air in the locks left to transmit noise, of course, but there was on the other side of the interior bulkheads—a fact that had made itself known with every bit of broken-down hardware that had slammed around the locks.

Han had spent half a day policing the ship, looking for every bit of surplus or broken hardware he could. Buckets of bolts, worn-out spare parts, garbage from the galley, unidentifiable bits of machinery that had been sitting in the hold for who knew how long—he had thrown all of it into the locks.

And all of it had tumbled out into space when the locks were opened, thrown clear by centrifugal force. Result—a cloud of slow-moving space junk left right in the path of the attacking LAFs. And the LAFs had quite sensibly configured their shields for maximum
power aft, to defend against laser blasts from the
Jade’s Fire
—leaving them with minimum power forward.

But plowing through a cloud of bits and pieces of broken metal and plastic at a closing speed of something like a thousand kilometers an hour was very far from a good idea.

However, piling a ship into a planet was an even worse one. “Good!” Han said. “They’re gone! But we are not out of this yet. Reestablish inertial dampers and cut ship spin.”

“At once, Honored Solo,” Salculd replied. There was an odd shimmering sort of vibration as the inertial field came back on and weight returned.

The ship’s ungainly spin slowed, and stopped—and then started up again in the opposite direction—and started to get faster.