Showdown at Centerpoint (3 page)

Salculd sat up in her seat and looked from one to the other before grinning even more widely than before. “Yes, Honored Dracmus!” she said. “I obey with pleasure!”

“See that you don’t find
too
much pleasure in obeying, Salculd,” Dracmus growled. “Honored Solo, if you would proceed.”

“Take your seat,” Han said to Dracmus in Selonian. “We all must strap in and prepare for acceleration. Salculd, you will fly a standard approach to the intended
field of landing, starting on my command. Is that understood?”

“Yes, indeed,” Salculd said. “Absolutely.”

Han picked up the handlight placed next to his seat for the purpose, and signaled back to the
Fire
.

BEADY TO COMMENCE EMNTRY MANEUVERZ
, he Signaled, managing to spot every mistake just after he made it. “Someday I gotta take the time to brush up on this stuff,” he muttered to himself.

WE ARE JUST ABOUT BEADY OURSELVES
, Leia signaled back.
TAKING POSITION TO YOUR STERN. WILL FOLLOW YOU IN
.

“Ha, ha, ha,” Han said. “Glad I married such a humorist.” He shifted back to Selonian. “Very well, Salculd, take us in. With much care.”

As he watched, the
Jade’s Fire
came about on her long axis, putting her stern toward the coneship. Salculd edged the throttle upward, transferring minimum power to the engines. As the coneship began to accelerate toward the planet, the
Fire
drifted back, falling astern off the port side. As the faster, more maneuverable ship, and the one that was easier to control, it made sense for the
Fire
to go in second, where she could keep watch on the coneship. But even the spares on board the
Fire
had not been enough to patch up the coneship’s stern detector grid. The coneship was, and would continue to be, all but completely blind astern. All she had was one wide-angle holocam set in the base of the cone, between two of the sublight engines. It would be useful during the final approach and landing, but even with the main engines off, its resolution was so poor that the
Jade’s Fire
would be lost to view if she drifted only a few kilometers away. Once the engines came on, the stern holocam view could only get worse.

In other words, Han might—or might not—be able to see the
Fire
’s blink code signals if she signaled again. In theory, he could use the coneship’s running lights to send blink code of his own, but he would not be able to
see the lights himself, rendering it just that much harder to send accurate code. Han was hoping the question of signaling wouldn’t come up.

The poor visibility to the stern made for another good reason to have the
Fire
go in second. Better to have a ship you trusted at your back.

At least a ship you more or less trusted. Han had managed to put to rest most—but not all—of his reservations regarding Mara. He could think of no reason, no motive, for her acting against Han and Leia and the Republic, and there was no hard evidence that she had done so. But she had never explained her actions to his satisfaction, either. She had been in the right places at the right times—and the wrong places at the wrong times—a bit too often in recent days.

On the other hand, if she had wanted to do real damage, Mara was too much of a pro to let things be bungled. And the opposition had certainly done some bungling, thank the stars. Not everything had gone their way. Say whatever else you might about the woman, but Mara was competent.

And that was a compelling argument.
No,
Han told himself as the
Jade’s Fire
was lost completely to forward view.
Leave it be
. They really had no choice but to trust Jade. He watched as the
Fire
came into somewhat fuzzy view on the stern viewscreen. It was time to forget everything else and remember that the main thing was to get this crate down onto the surface. “Now, Salculd, it is your task,” he said. “Do well.”

“I will,” Salculd said. “Don’t worry about that.” The ship chose that moment to lurch to one side, and Salculd grabbed frantically at the controls. “Sorry, sorry,” Salculd said. “Stabilizer overcompensating. All right now.”

“I can’t tell you what a comfort that is,” Han said. For a moment he considered the idea of shoving Salculd out of the pilot’s station and taking over, but he knew better than that. The controls were set up for a Selonian, and the coneship had so many idiosyncrasies
it made the
Millennium Falcon
look like a standard production ship. It might be an alarming thought, but unless things got really hairy, it was probably safest to trust Salculd.

Salculd edged the throttle up just a trifle more and the coneship moved just a bit faster in toward the planet. At least the coneship was not such a relic that it relied on ballistic reentry, using friction with the atmosphere to slow itself down. It could make a nice, civilized powered reentry. At least Han hoped so. Most spacecraft were designed to survive at least one ballistic reentry, but not this thing.

The planet moved closer. In another few minutes Salculd would have to turn the ship over and point its engines forward to slow the craft. That was the part that worried Han. Once they were decelerating, they would be at their most vulnerable. The coneship’s fragility was far from the only source of danger. Someone on Selonia had sent a whole fleet of Light Attack Fighters up to meet the Bakuran ships.

The Bakurans had done a fair amount of damage to the LAFs, but Han had to assume that whoever commanded them would have the sense to hold some of them in reserve. And as Dracmus assured him that the Hunchuzuc had no such ships, it only made sense to assume that whoever it was who did have Light Attack Fighters might take a dim view of the coneship’s arrival. Things could get sticky. Han had worked on the assumption that there would be trouble, and done his best to plan accordingly.

The
Jade’s Fire
could provide a certain amount of covering fire, if push came to shove, but the other ship would be an uncertain protection at best. The coneship was completely unarmed, and had no shields at all. It didn’t even have enough reserve power to hook up any weaponry—a moot point in any event, as there was no practical way to dismount any of the
Jade’s
weapons or attach them to the coneship. Han had looked into it. Short of standing in the airlock and taking potshots at
any attackers with his hand-blaster, there was not much he could do.

But Han was used to working with nothing. Even a ship as decrepit as this one could play a few tricks if need be. He had found a way to rig up a defense that might provide some measure of protection if things got hot.

Of course, sometimes, when you worked with nothing, nothing was exactly what you got. And sometimes, if you got into a fight with people who had better hardware, those other people won. Not a happy line of thought when you were on board a flying practice target headed into a war zone.

And his thoughts didn’t get any happier a few minutes later when Leia sent that attack warning.

L
eia Organa Solo, Chief of State of the New Republic, sat at the navigator’s station aboard the
Jade’s Fire,
watching the coneship drift in toward the planet Selonia. She had been a fool to let Han stay aboard that bucket of bolts. But she knew perfectly well that there had been no chance at all to get him off that ship, once he had decided he owed something to the Selonians on board.

But what, exactly, was he getting them into? Leia was forced to think not just like a wife but like a politician. She could not see any way of avoiding it, but there was no question that Han was being drawn in by these Selonians—and that Leia was being drawn in as well. It would be easy, all too easy, for the New Republic to find itself on one side or another of a fight it had no business in. It would be even easier to get tempted into bargains with these Hunchuzucs, bargains that had a few too many hidden strings attached …

“He’ll be all right, Leia,” Mara said. “We’ll stay right with them, all the way down. The
Fire
can offer them more protection than you think.”

“Hmmm? What? Oh, yes,” Leia said, pointlessly embarrassed. It was somewhat mortifying to be reassured by Mara Jade, of all people. Somehow to have Mara assume that Leia was worrying about her husband’s safety when she was really thinking about the
politics of the situation made it even worse. Was she so callous that calculation of political advantage even pushed aside worries about her husband? So calculating that even Mara Jade was capable of more concern for Han?

But Leia told herself, rather firmly, that she had more sense than that. She had no choice but to think on more than one level. What good would it do Han if she got so tied up in sentimental worrying that she failed to foresee the dangers ahead?

“Han will be all right,” Leia said again, trying to convince herself as much as her companion. “If anyone can get that tub down to the surface, he can.”

“
If
anyone can,” Mara agreed, none too reassuringly. Mara was at her usual post, at the pilot’s station, guiding the
Jade’s Fire
down toward the surface. She frowned and adjusted the thrust controls a bit, slowing them down again.

“Trouble?” Leia asked.

Mara shook her head without taking her eyes off the viewport. “Nothing we can’t handle, but I don’t like being behind the coneship. That Selonian pilot needs a flying lesson or two. If she hits the brakes like that too many times, she’s going to get our nose assembly right up her stern.”

“Can we back off a little?”

“Not if we want them to stay in visual contact with us. That stern holocam has no resolution at all. We might be too far back for it to see us as it is—Burning stars, she doesn’t know how to fly!” Mara pulled her joystick violently up and to the right. “She’s doing the pitchover maneuver way too early—and without shutting off her engines. Nearly clipped her.”

Leia watched as the lumbering bulk of the coneship began its turnover, flipping end over end to direct its sublight engines toward the planet and slow its descent. It was painfully obvious that the pilot was not managing very well. The ship was lurching abruptly from one attitude to the next, pausing at intermediate
stages of the maneuver instead of moving smoothly from a nose-to-planet attitude direct to stern-to-planet. It only made it worse—much worse—that the pilot was doing it under power. Leia was a pretty fair pilot, and she would have been very reluctant to try doing it that way.

Mara was forced to fly two more evasive patterns just to keep the
Fire
from crashing into the other ship. Finally she backed the
Fire
off by five kilometers. “They’re going to be nose-on to us anyway,” Mara said. “They’ll be able to see us reasonably well.”

“With a little luck,” Leia said, a bit doubtfully. The
Fire
had first-rate detection systems, and could have tracked the coneship halfway across the Corellian system, but all the coneship had was straight visual. Leia peered out the
Fire
’s viewport and managed, with great difficulty, to spot the tiny dot that was the coneship. The bright bulk of the planet’s dayside loomed up behind the ship, rendering it all but invisible. How easy would the
Fire
be to see, a little spot of red against the blackness of space?

Mara wasn’t even using the main viewscreen anymore, but watching her detector displays.
She
wasn’t relying on visual detection. Oh, well. As long as at least one ship could see the other, things should be all right—

“Trouble!” Mara announced. “Leia, weapons and shields to standby, fast!”

Leia ran the power-up routines as quickly as she could. She ran quick checks on the ship’s turbolasers and shields. “All weapon and shield systems functional and on-line,” she announced. “What’s happened?”

“Power up the defense tracking systems and tell me,” Mara said. “All the nav systems can tell me is that a bunch of blips just showed up out of nowhere.”

“Light Attack Fighters,” Leia announced as the defense trackers came on. “A double flight of them, twelve in all, coming in from right over our stern. Must have dropped out of a high polar orbit.”

Mara shook her head as she stared down at the navigation display. “We can handle them, but it won’t be easy. Not with the coneship to cover.”

“We’re too far off to extend our shields toward the coneship.”

“And we’re going to stay that way,” Mara said sharply. “I’m not getting any closer to that pilot than I have to—especially in combat. She’s already nearly rammed us twice. Get close enough to provide shield cover, and we’ll all be dead. Covering fire is the best I’m going to be able to do. How soon until the LAFs get here?”

“Firing range in thirty seconds.”

“Stand by for combat maneuvers.”

“No! Wait! We have to blink-code to Han, warn them!”

“You’ve got twenty-five seconds,” Mara said, steel in her voice. There was no point even trying to argue.

Leia reached for the landing light controls and flipped them back to blink-code mode. She forced herself to take a full five seconds to compose her message, and then sent it three times, in rapid succession. “Done,” Leia said.