Star Wars: The New Jedi Order: Vector Prime (19 page)

All of the onlookers, even Han, who was so familiar with Lando’s schemes, stared in disbelief. How could Lando have set up so complete and large an operation in so short an amount of time? He’d been out here for only a year, and yet it seemed as if his operations could supply half the galaxy!

Contact from the surface of the blue-and-green planet welcomed them—all the more enthusiastically after the controller heard the names of the ships and their occupants—and gave them coordinates for landing, and as they descended through Dubrillion’s cloud cover, they saw that Lando’s current home was no less impressive than his mining operation. The city was tightly clustered, with tall towers and high groupings of many starports. Luke noted that most of those open bays were empty, leading to the speculation that Lando entertained many guests who were quick in and quick out.

Like smugglers.

As the
Jade Sabre
swooped along to its appointed dock, Luke also noted a pair of X-wings on one platform, XJ class, like his own, the latest version of the starfighter. There weren’t many of those advanced fighters flying about, and none at all outside the Star Destroyer and battle cruiser squadrons, with one notable exception. These fighters belonged to Jedi Knights.

The three ships set down on three circular bays, high above the surface, with low clouds drifting by. The landing zones were separated by narrow walkways, leading to a central hub, and a fourth walkway went out from that hub to the connected tower.

All of them disembarked and met at the central hub, with Jaina and R2-D2, who needed considerable help getting out of the X-wing, coming along last. The pair arrived just before Lando came sweeping out of the tower door, his huge welcoming smile, his eyes, as always, twinkling more than sparkling, giving the impression that there was something much more going on behind the man’s every gesture and expression.

“Ha-ha!” he laughed, moving over to wrap Han in a great hug, and then put one over Leia—one that pointedly lasted a little bit longer, drawing a jealous scowl from Han. He went to Luke next, and then stood before Mara, shaking his head.
“You look wonderful!” he said sincerely, bringing a smile to the woman, and Lando crushed her in a huge hug.

“Not many people dare to hug me,” Mara remarked.

“That leaves more of you for me, then!” Lando returned with a burst of laughter. He stopped abruptly and glanced over at Luke, but found the man nodding and smiling sincerely. Lando’s greeting of Mara could not have been more perfect.

The man was much more reserved with Chewbacca, offered a salute to R2-D2 and C-3PO, and then turned his attention to the three kids.

“How much bigger are you gonna get?” he asked, holding his arms out wide in disbelief. “It’s only been a year, but look at you! You’re all grown up.”

The smiles that came back at him were polite, and obviously embarrassed.

“What’re you doing here?” Lando asked, turning to Han. “And why didn’t you tell me you’d be coming? I could have prepared something.”

“Somehow, I don’t think we’ll be bored,” Han remarked dryly.

Lando chuckled, but stopped short, eyeing Han suspiciously, as if he didn’t know whether to take that as a compliment or an insult. His bright smile returned almost immediately, though, and with a flourish and a skip in his step, the vibrant Lando led them into the tower. He gave them the complete tour then, from the posh rooms in his guest suites, to the control rooms of the robotic processing plants on the other planet, detailing with great pride the volume of various minerals making their way up to the freighters and off to the Core. They ended the tour in the huge monitoring chamber at the center of his city, an oval-shaped room, its perimeter mimicking the orbital path of the asteroid belt, Lando’s Folly. The chamber walls were covered with one gigantic viewscreen, showing a real-time view of the asteroid belt. Lando led them to another large rectangular screen, set
out from one wall, and the man at the control panel respectfully moved aside.

Lando’s ensuing demonstration did not disappoint. He selected a section of the asteroid belt and magnified it on the rectangular screen to the point where they could see the small droid mining ships testing, drilling, and extracting, then hopping onto another asteroid.

“How much can you get from them?” Han asked. “Really?”

“Most asteroids aren’t profitable,” Lando admitted. “But every now and then …,” he added slyly, rubbing his hands together, dark eyes twinkling.

He continued the demonstration a bit longer, answered questions about volume and costs of setup, then led them out of that tower to another, up, up, to an enclosed hangar that held several small craft, with single central pilot pods, wing pylons extending from either side, connecting solar array wings that featured a top third and bottom third angled at forty-five degrees back in toward the central pod.

Lando’s guests, particularly the older ones, surely recognized the craft: TIE Advanced xl fighters, the type favored by the elite of the old Empire, including Darth Vader. The sight of the distinctive fighters clearly affected both Luke and Leia, whose expressions drooped. Han looked at Lando and scowled.

“Best design for our purposes,” Lando answered honestly.

“These are your belt runners?” Luke asked.

“It’s the adjustable shock couch,” Lando explained, leading the way to the nearest, and as they moved they noted similar, but larger, twin-pod craft, TIE bombers, farther back in the hangar. “Pilots in these things can take a real beating.”

“Don’t we know that?” Han asked dryly.

“So you fly these things through the asteroid belt?” Jaina asked, her expression and her tone showing that she was more than a little intrigued.

“Along Lando’s Folly, not through,” Lando corrected. “Against the flow of the asteroids. We’ve got a couple of particularly
nasty sections mapped out.” He stared at Jaina for a long moment, matching her eager expression. “You want to try?”

She looked at her parents first, for just a moment, and then at Mara, and it was obvious that she was pleading for permission.

The prep time seemed interminable to eager Jaina, but she paid attention as Lando’s technicians explained the basic differences in flying one of their modified TIE fighters. While the foot yokes and hand controls were easy enough to pick up, the adjustable shock couch, a pivoting, bouncing contraption, was very different from the stable cockpit of an X-wing or landspeeder. And the most important difference of all, Lando’s technician explained, concerned the inertial compensator. Unlike those on the X-wings and in most other craft, the ones on the modified TIE fighters could not be dialed down. The levels were preset, designed to give a pilot a good tactical feel of the craft, and often a wild ride, but would not allow the g’s to exceed safe limits.

“Early on, pilots would strap in and dial it down to ninety-five,” the technician explained to the three kids. “They’d bounce along until that inevitable collision, and then ricochet into a wild spin. We’d go get them, to find most unconscious. One almost died.”

That last statement brought a concerned look from Leia, and Jaina knew that her mother was almost ready to cancel the runs then and there.

But then the technician assured her, and the others, that the problem had been fixed. “When you hit one now, you’ll get the spin of your life,” he explained. “But you’ll live to brag about it.”

As a final confidence booster, the technician then pointed out the repulsor shields, solid defensive arrays controlled not by the pilot and powered not by the ship’s engines, but from a floating station,
Belt-Runner I
.

That news widened Luke’s eyes. There were available technologies to make the TIE fighters able to withstand many asteroid hits, using combinations of shields and an enhanced repulsor system, but for many years, the militaries of both the Empire and the New Republic had been trying to perfect off-ship shielding, with greater power sources lending deflector shields to small starfighters, thus freeing the drives of the starfighters to the tasks of maneuvering, accelerating, and firing. Thus far, little progress had been made with the technique, and Luke understood that if Lando could perfect it out here, the value to the enterprising man would be many times greater than all the treasure he could leech off of all the asteroids of Lando’s Folly. Maybe that was his real purpose.

“Also,” the technician continued, moving over to pat a shining white metallic hump beside the shock couch, “these babies have been outfitted with hyperdrive.”

Luke nodded admiringly; Lando and his technicians might be onto something truly impressive here.

“We’ll keep them safe,” Lando finished for the tech, and he offered a wink to Leia.

And then Jaina and the other two Solo youngsters got their test runs in the modified TIEs, including a half-speed crash into a mountainside, where they experienced their first real feel for the collision shields.

But even that exercise didn’t sate eager Jaina. Lando showed them a posting board prominently displayed in the entry hall of the city’s main tower, which listed the top pilots and their winning durations. She didn’t know any of the names, except two: Miko Reglia, who was listed at seventh, and Kyp Durron, the current champion, with a time of eleven minutes, thirteen seconds.

Jedi Knights, the master Kyp, and his apprentice Miko.

Jaina had work to do.

She cruised within the prep coordinates in her TIE fighter now, within sight of the entry point to the asteroid belt. Jacen was in the run now, building a respectable time approaching
the five-minute mark. Jaina couldn’t see him, but she heard his calls—or at least, the calls out to him, for her twin brother was keeping fairly quiet, finding a sense of calm within the meditation of the Force, she knew.

He passed the five-and-a-half-minute mark—he’d be on the board.

“Keep going,” Jaina whispered, but even as the words left her mouth, she heard her brother cry out, “Whoa!” and then just issue a long scream.

“He’s out,” came the call from
Belt-Runner I. “
Heck of a hit.”

Jaina caught sight of him then, of the spinning running lights as the TIE fighter careened off into space. “Jacen?” she called out, and when no response came back, she reached out to her twin with the Force, feeling him securely through their tight bond and understanding that he was shaken up, but was very much alive and well.

She let it go at that, for Anakin was just starting his run. Jaina caught flashes of his ship weaving in and out of the rocks, and she heard his breathing and occasional shouts over her comm unit. He sounded more animated than had Jacen, more consciously attuned to his physical senses. Jaina understood the philosophical fight that had been waging between her brothers, each trying to find the correct balance between Force and physiology, and she wasn’t surprised at all by the difference.

“We got him,” came the call from one of Lando’s tow ships, followed by assurances from Jacen that he was all right. Jaina could picture the look of relief on her fretting mother’s face.

“I want to do it again,” he added, and then Jaina imagined Leia’s predictable scowl.

They crossed Jaina’s line of sight then, TIE and tow ship. The modified fighter seemed perfectly fine, but still it was being towed She took a deep breath, steadying her nerves.

Then she heard Anakin squeal with delight, and caught sight of his TIE, skimming the edge of one huge rock.

She clicked off the signal, preferring to turn her attention inward, to find the peace of the Force, the calm emptiness. Hardly conscious of the effort, she rocked the foot yokes back and forth, trying to get a better feel for the craft, and gave a quick push on the throttle, jerking her back in the shock couch.

The seconds slipped past as she fell deeper into the meditation.

She heard the call from the ground controller that Anakin had surpassed Jacen—wouldn’t that make for fun conversation later on?—and focused back in to her surroundings, tuning the comm back to Anakin’s signal in time to hear his boast.

“I got you, Jac—” he started to say.

Jaina saw the whole thing. Anakin stooped his TIE under a spinning rock, then pulled into a hard climb right before the face of another.

He couldn’t avoid the third, didn’t even see it until it was right in his face.

He hit head-on, the TIE fighter ricocheting straight up, spinning tail-over-front at a tremendous rate. Up, up, it went, and then it stopped spinning—Anakin must have fired a compensating blast—and just kept drifting, tilted and appearing quite dead.

“Anakin?” came the frantic call from the ground station, Leia’s voice.

No answer.

Jaina gripped her controls as Leia cried out again, thinking that she could get to her brother quickest, though what good she might do, she didn’t know. Before she fired away, though, Anakin’s shaky voice replied.

“Amazing,” he said, and he sounded sick, or as if he had just been.

“Are you all right?” came Leia’s call and Lando’s voice, at the same time.

“I think so.”

“You beat Jacen,” Jaina piped in.

“Who cares?” came the response.

Only then did Jaina understand how shaken her little brother truly was. Normally, the fact that he had beaten Jacen would be paramount in his thoughts, a sterling victory.

“That’s enough,” Leia said, apparently catching on to the same thing. “Bring it in, Jaina.”

“Ready to fire!” Jaina called, clicking to a different channel and pretending she hadn’t heard. She wasn’t about to let Anakin’s misfortune slow her down—she knew she should have gone first! “Am I cleared for entry?” she asked the air controller on
Belt-Runner I
.

“Fire away,” he came back.

“Jaina!” Leia’s voice came in, her mom-sense easily finding her daughter’s new channel.

But Jaina throttled up quickly, speeding for the entry point of the belt. Most pilots went in at a virtual standstill, coming against the flow of the asteroids and using their drives only for dodging maneuvers. It wasn’t a distance test, after all, but merely a duration challenge.

Jaina, though, fearing her mother would find a way to call it all off, hit the belt running … and fast.