Showdown at Centerpoint (7 page)

But none of that could change the fact that she was
stuck
out here, and no one could get to her. She looked through the forward viewport at the bright star of Corell, dead ahead. Unless that interdiction field went down, it was going to take her months to cross the distance from here to there. It was worth it, she knew that. She had more than likely saved lives, many lives—perhaps even Lando’s life.

But the thought of more months alone on this ship was more than she could bear.

But the people Lando was with, the Bakurans, had asked her to send them more information. There was not much she could tell them that she had not said already—but she would tell them what she could. She switched on the radionics transmitter and set to work.

*   *   *

The Bakuran light cruiser
Intruder
fired her main forward turbolaser battery three times, and three times Pocket Patrol Boats exploded. “Very well,” said Admiral Hortel Ossilege. “You may hold your fire. Bring the turbolasers to their stowed position and power them down. Make sure our friends can detect what you are doing. We have shown we can hurt them at will. Now we extend an invitation to leave. Let us see if our friends out there understand that we plan to play rough if they stay.”

A reasonable tactic,
Luke Skywalker thought, feeling none too happy about it. A show of overwhelming force
might
convince the surviving defenders to withdraw. After all, the odds of a handful of fighters defeating the
Intruder
and her sister ships,
Sentinel
and
Defender,
and all their fighters were almost zero.

On the other hand, the Rebels had faced such odds more than once in the war against the Empire, and had emerged victorious. Good training, strong motivation, good equipment, good intelligence—and plain good luck—could even up the odds quite a bit. There was no such thing as certainty in war.

Luke Skywalker stood next to Admiral Ossilege on the bridge of the
Intruder
. As always when he agreed with the man, he did not feel comfortable doing so. Luke glanced at Lando Calrissian, standing on the other side of Ossilege, and the look on his face told Luke that Lando shared his concerns. The tactics were sound, even conservative. The enemy forces consisted of little more than twenty or so PPBs. There was nothing much to be gained in wiping out such a small force. If Ossilege could convince them to withdraw without exposing his own forces to needless casualties, that would be all to the good.

Very sensible and cautious. Except that Ossilege was not a cautious commander. If it seemed he was trying something careful, Luke had a hunch that it was merely a cover for something madly audacious to follow.
Ossilege had shown a tendency to dare too much rather than too little. When he played a conservative game, the odds were fair that what appeared to be caution was just an elaborate preparation for a very large gamble indeed. Or had losing the
Watchkeeper
to the Selonian planetary repulsor cost him his nerve? Ossilege was a small, wiry-looking man, who favored dress-white uniforms that set off his collection of medals and ribbons. He was a dried-up, self-important little man who seemed to have little patience for anyone or anything. He looked to be a comic-opera caricature of an admiral—but Luke had never met as hard-edged, as cold-blooded, a military commander. No one found it relaxing to spend time in the presence of Admiral Ossilege.

Of course, with the massive, overwhelming bulk of Centerpoint Station dominating the sky outside the viewports, Luke would have felt a little edgy even if the
Watchkeeper
hadn’t been destroyed.

“There they go,” Lando announced, pointing toward a cloud of tiny dots lifting away from one of the docking bays of Centerpoint. The defending fighters were withdrawing. “Decided they couldn’t do any good against us, I guess.”

“Or perhaps they decided we would be unable to do Centerpoint any harm,” said Ossilege. “A wise tactician retreats from an indefensible position in order to preserve his forces. But a wise tactician will likewise avoid expending his forces needlessly in the defense of the impregnable.”

“What are you saying?” asked Luke.

Ossilege gestured toward Centerpoint. “We are dismissing the enemy fighters because they are so small in comparison to us. But, proportionately, we are far smaller in comparison to Centerpoint. It is, somehow, the source of power that can impose an interdiction field over an entire planetary system. What other powers might it have?”

“No way to know,” said Lando. “I figure the one
thing we can count on is being surprised. And I doubt that many of the surprises are going to be pleasant.”

Just at that moment, a service droid wheeled up from behind them and came around to stop in front of Lando. “And here’s a surprise now,” Lando muttered. “Yes, what is it?” he asked the droid.

“Begging your pardon, sir, but Lieutenant Kalenda wishes to see both you and Master Skywalker, sir. A new message from Source T has come in.”

Lando looked worriedly at Luke. “That ought to make me happy,” he said. “But I have the feeling she’s not calling in just to chat.” He turned toward the service droid. “Lead the way.”

*   *   *

Source T was Tendra Risant. Lando and Luke had met Tendra on her home world of Sacorria, one of the so-called “Outlier” worlds of the Corellian Sector. The local authorities had kicked Lando and Luke off Sacorria almost immediately after meeting Tendra.

As they followed the droid down to the cruiser’s com section, it crossed Lando’s mind, not for the first time, that Tendra would be vastly amused to learn that Bakuran military intelligence had given her a name as ridiculously pompous as Source T.

Lando had met Tendra while searching the galaxy for a rich wife. Tendra was certainly well off enough to qualify as rich, and it was certainly within the realm of possibility that she would make a good wife for Lando—if they could get together in the same place at the same time long enough to get to know each other.

But even if they had not had the time to fall madly, passionately in love with each other, the two of them had very definitely made a connection with each other, established a solid bond, something that they could build on, someday, if the universe gave them that chance.

As best he could piece together, Tendra had somehow
managed to spot some sort of military buildup in the Sacorrian system. Connecting the buildup to the interdiction field, she had decided she had to get word to Lando. Toward that end, it would seem she had gotten her hands on a spaceship, bribed her way off Sacorria, and crashed it into the Corellian interdiction field.

None of that would have done anyone much good, but for one other fact—Lando had given her a radionics communications set. The radionics set did not use any of the standard comlink frequencies, but instead sent and received messages on a modulated carrier wave in the radio band of the electromagnetic spectrum. The radionics signals were completely immune to the system-wide jamming, and were likewise completely undetectable to anyone using comlink equipment. The downside was that like all other forms of electomagnetic radiation—infrared, visual light, ultraviolet, gamma ray, X ray, and so on—radio band radiation traveled at the speed of light. Tendra’s messages to Lando, and his replies, therefore likewise crawled along at the speed of light, and were highly susceptible to interference.

She was still aboard her ship, the
Gentleman Caller,
at the outskirts of the Corellian system, ambling gradually in toward the inner system at speeds that were distinctly sublight. It took long hours for her messages to reach him—but it could well take long, weary months before her ship could cross the same distance.

Unless, of course, they could bring down the interdiction field. And that was what they were here to do.

They arrived at the com section. He and Luke waited as the service droid extended a data probe and plugged into the security port by the com section door. Lando’s original radionics set was still aboard his ship, the
Lady Luck,
but the
Intruder
’s tech staff had had no trouble at all putting together their own radionics set from the plans and spec sheets the
Lady Luck
also carried,
and had actually managed to make their transmitter more powerful, and their receiver more sensitive.

But it wasn’t radionics Lando had on his mind. He was concerned with Tendra.

As if the situation with Tendra wasn’t complicated enough, there was the small matter of the actual information she was broadcasting to Lando. It was enough to give the intelligence staff fits.

The security system beeped its clearance code, and the hatch to the com section slid open. Lando looked inside before entering and let out a small sigh. There she was, as if the mere thought of anxious intelligence officers was enough to summon one. Lieutenant Belindi Kalenda, of New Republic Intelligence, was waiting for them, and she did not look happy.

“Didn’t anyone ever tell your lady friend how to
count
?” she demanded the moment the hatch slid shut. Kalenda had never been much for small talk, and she was just about at the end of her tether now.

“What’s the problem now, Lieutenant Kalenda?” Lando asked wearily.

“The same as always. Numbers, that’s the problem,” Kalenda said. She was a somewhat odd-looking young woman. Her wide-spaced eyes were glassy, almost milky, and a bit off-kilter. She was almost, but not quite, cross-eyed. She was a bit darker-skinned than Lando, and her black hair was done up in a complicated sort of braid piled on top of her head. The scuttlebutt was that she had at least some small skill in the Force, or at least that her intuition was good, and her hunches tended to play out, that she seemed to see more than most people. In any event, she had an odd way of seeming to look past your shoulder at something behind you, even when she was glaring right at you—as she was right now. “Numbers. We still have no idea how many ships are waiting out there at Sacorria.”

“We wouldn’t know there were any ships at all there, if not for Lady Tendra,” Lando said sharply. “Maybe
your NRI operatives on Sacorria know more about ship spotting, but did any of them have the initiative to get into the Corellian system and let us know about them?”

Kalenda looked woodenly at Lando. “I never told you there were NRI agents on Sacorria,” she said warily.

“And I never told you I used to be a smuggler, but you know it just the same,” Lando snapped. “Don’t treat me like a fool. If you didn’t have agents there, someone wasn’t doing their job.”

“Let’s try and get back on track here,” Luke said, attempting to smooth things over a bit. “What’s wrong with Lady Tendra’s message?”

“We have sent three follow-up queries asking her to give further details of the types, sizes, and numbers of ships she saw. Her latest message seems longer and more detailed, but once you weed out all the qualifiers and caveats, we still have nothing but the vaguest sorts of estimates.”

“She can’t tell you what she doesn’t know,” Lando said, wondering how many times he would have to tell that to Kalenda before she would believe it. Or when he would stop being frustrated by the intelligence group reading messages intended for him—and reading them first.

“But we have to know more than we do!” Kalenda said. “Whose ships are those? How many are there, and how well armed are they? Who commands them, and what are their intentions? You’ll have to transmit again, and ask for more information.”

“I won’t,” Lando said sharply. “I don’t care what your psych teams say about her responding best to me. She told you all she can, and I’m not going to help you harass her anymore.”

“But we need more—”

“The trouble is, she doesn’t have any more,” he snapped. “You have all the details you’re going to get. Did you expect Tendra to be able to tell you the fleet
commander’s middle name by looking at ships in orbit through macrobinoculars? She’s given us a warning, and a very useful one. She’s given you all the information she can, and there are limits on how far we can press her.”

“And there are also limits to how many messages you can ask her to send,” Luke put in. “Every time she sends us one, the odds of her being detected go up.”

Kalenda looked at Luke sharply. “Detected? How? By whom?”

“Think about it,” Lando said.
“You’re
the intelligence officer. The
way
she’s broadcasting is secret, but it’s not hidden in any way. She’s broadcasting in clear, without any coding or encryption. Anyone who had the right sort of gear for scanning radio-band frequencies could lock in on her radionics transmission in a heartbeat.
You
did it easily enough. Then they’d not only know that
we
know about the ships tucked away in orbit of Sacorria, they’d be able to triangulate back and zero in on her location, the same way we did.”

“What difference would that make?” Kalenda asked.

“Plenty, if we’re talking about the people who control the interdiction field. They’d want to silence her. Say they switched the field off for thirty seconds. With good targeting and good planning, that would be enough time for a ship to drop into hyperspace, pop out next to the
Gentleman Caller,
blow Tendra out of the sky, and then return to base before the field went back up.”

“But she broadcasted constantly for days without anything happening to her,” Kalenda objected.

“She didn’t have any choice. She had to transmit until I responded. Now she doesn’t have to take that chance. Your radionics broadcasts are much more powerful than hers, and they’re closer to anyone listening in the inner system. If the opposition spots your transmissions, they’ll know to look for her.”

Kalenda’s face was expressionless. Had she known all this, and elected to risk Tendra’s life on the chance of getting more information? Or had it not occurred to her? That seemed unlikely enough in an officer as sharp as Kalenda seemed to be—though the last few days had been hard on all of them. Lando half expected her to offer excuses, to lie and say she hadn’t thought it through.