“Colonel?”
“Yes, Agent Pleck?”
“Could we give this one a few more minutes—get in to maybe five hundred meters and do a flyaround? I’d like to be able to resolve all the hull detail for the analysts, and there may be markings on the far side.”
“I am not interested in performing any extra services for the Analysis Section,” Pakkpekatt said curtly, turning Lady Luck away from the mystery object and onto a heading for Carconth. “Let them clear their anomalies themselves. Colonel Hammax, retract the cannon pod. Agent Pleck, lock down your imagers. Hyperspace in one minute. This will be a nine-hour jump, so we’ll make the watch change now.”
Apart from the ugly smell it left hanging in the air, Lando had no qualms about burning a path through the chain of chambers for himself and the others. If the ship survived what was almost certainly more serious damage elsewhere, closing the wounds Lando was making would be no problem—and if the ship was already doomed, the wounds he was making were irrelevant.
But Lobot quickly became uncomfortable watching Lando do it. After only four chambers and four black-edged burnholes, Lobot caught Lando and stayed his hand before he could make the fifth.
“Can’t we at least try each portal before we destroy it?” he pleaded.
“Do you have some reason to think the vagabond is recovering?” Lando asked, pulling his arm free and pointing the blaster ahead.
Lobot cringed as the beam burned a hole into the next chamber. “I don’t know what’s happening,” he said. “I do know that we are leaving a trail that will be no challenge to follow, a fact which makes our flight futile. The boarding parties will simply find us in the last chamber.”
A new sound reached them as Lando stopped and looked back. It was a series of wet-sounding percussive reports, akin to the sound of a stone falling into soft mud.
“Fluids blowing under pressure,” Lando said, craning his neck. “I heard a bad fuel slug pop once, sounded a lot like that.” He looked back at Lobot. “Yeah, you’re right. We won’t be hard to follow. But the darkness helps us, and we don’t have to be conveniently waiting for them at the end of the line.”
“Is that your whole plan?” Lobot demanded. “Do you think Threepio will have them coming after us so recklessly that we can surprise an entire boarding party with hand tools?”
“My plan is to postpone the confrontation,” Lando said. “That’s all I have going right now. I’m only thinking about putting some distance between us and whoever’s coming in back there.”
“Then what about making more than one hole? Make them make a decision. Get them to split up.”
“I’d gladly burn some more holes to make it harder for them to follow us, but I don’t know what I’d be cutting into,” said Lando. “And I sure don’t want to increase the odds of burning through into vacuum.”
“The topography of the ship does not make any chamber face coterminous with the hull,” said Lobot. “When you placed the sensor limpet—”
“We don’t know what spaces have been breached by the attack,” Lando said. “I could even hit vacuum going straight ahead through the portals. I’m telling you—”
Just then the shoulder joint of Lobot’s contact suit bumped gently against the face of the chamber. Moments later, Lando, too, drifted into a solid barrier.
“Ship’s moving again,” Lando said.
“Just barely moving.”
“Changing direction, too.”
“Under way, or under tow?”
“No telling from here,” Lando said. “But more likely under way—there hasn’t been enough time to sweep the ship, and it’d be risky to take her under tow until that was finished. Come on.” Lando jetted toward the opening he had made, grabbed the edge, and pulled himself through.
What he saw as he pointed his lights and his blaster at the opposite end of the chamber startled him to speechlessness. The portal was already irising open.
As Lando began to retreat he swiped at his suit controls with his gloved hand, killing the lights. Behind him, Lobot took the cue and did the same. But even after Artoo obeyed the instruction Lobot placed in his language register, the chamber remained faintly lit by the glow from a narrow ring encircling each of its open portals—all six of them.
“Lando—”
“I see, I see,” Lando said.
“Lando, those are the STAFF ONLY doors you were talking about. What’s going on?”
“I’m not sure.” He jetted diagonally to the nearest of the four previously unknown portals for chamber 229 and stole a peek through it.
“What can you see?”
“More of the same, only different,” Lando said, heading for the portal to chamber 228. “Check the one behind us.”
Both the chamber ahead and the one they had just left were also now showing multiple portals lit by glow-rings. Some of the new portals opened to tiny dead-end chambers, others to narrow cylindrical passageways, still others to the vast interspace Lando had discovered when planting the sensor limpet.
“Any ideas?” Lando asked Lobot.
“Possibly. Rule-based logic must be strictly prioritized, following a conditional decision tree,” said Lobot. “The first thing the ship did was to seal all portals, giving the highest priority to containing the damage—a reasonable response to an attack, especially if there was a hull breach. Then, after an inventory of the damage, the next highest priority was given to restoring freedom of movement, perhaps to facilitate repairs.”
“Or escape,” said Lando. “Are you saying you think this means the attack is over?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Lobot. “The ship has thrown all the doors open. We may never have another chance like this.” He pointed at the portal below them, leading to the interior. “The heart of the ship is that way.”
“Maybe—and for all you know, it’s at the other end of a ten-kilometer maze. And if she’s on the verge of breaking up, what then?” Lando demanded.
“What else can we do?”
“I have to see how bad the damage is. Give me your left glove.”
“Why?”
“Because you won’t need it where you’re going, and I do need it where I’m going—out to the hull and forward to find out how much damage there is.”
“That’s pointless. Either it can repair itself or it cannot,” said Lobot. “We have to look for the control nexus.”
“You can do what you like. I need to know where things stand.”
“The ship knows,” Lobot insisted.
“When you figure out how to talk to her, let me know. Until then, we’re both wasting time. The glove, please.”
Lobot hesitated, then unlocked the retaining ring and twisted the glove sharply clockwise. He sent it spinning across the chamber toward Lando with more force than necessary.
“Thanks,” Lando said, catching it cleanly with his bare hand. “I’ll bring it back.”
“Is every gambler always sure that the next draw’s a winner?” Lobot asked. “If you make it back, you can look for me in here.” He jerked a bare thumb in the direction of the portal behind him.
“I’ll do that,” Lando said, jetting toward a portal on the opposite side of the chamber. “If you want to help me out, you might try blazing your path with the paint stick. The ship might be too busy with other things just now to get around to wiping the marks.”
“I will consider it,” Lobot said. As soon as Lando disappeared through the opening with a wave, Lobot turned to Artoo-Detoo. “Go get Threepio and bring him here.”
Artoo released the equipment grid and dove toward the portal, chirping his relief and approval.
“Don’t spare the propellant,” Lobot called after him.
Alone, he removed his right glove and his helmet, clipping both to the equipment grid. Bending his neck forward, he reached up with his bare hands and lightly caressed the edges of the Hamarin interface band, his fingertips playing briefly over the attachment release at the back of his head.
/> The interface had never come off in thirty-four years, not for maintenance upgrades, nor for sleep, nor for vanity. It did more than connect Lobot with a universe of interlinked data resources and control interfaces. The band had become a secondary link between the halves of his own brain, supplementing the corpus callosum so as to allow him to process the tremendous flood of data that pressed in on his awareness. His fingers knew it as part of the familiar and ordinary contours of his head. His mind no longer recognized a boundary between biology and technology; his integrated consciousness bridged both.
Even so, this time, his fingers were exploring the interface as an object apart—and he was wondering what it would be like not to find it there, either with his hands or with his thoughts.
Outside chamber 228, as elsewhere, the inner face of the vagabond’s interspace—the open area between what Lando thought of as the ship proper and the outer hull—was covered with hexagonal cells containing sculpted Qella faces. It seemed to Lando that the entire ship must be tiled with them.
As he jetted past the unbroken and unending bas-relief, Lando wondered how many faces there were, and whether each was unique. When he contemplated the numbers, it became almost unthinkable that it was a portrait gallery, that each represented an actual individual—long dead, in all likelihood, and perhaps remembered nowhere else but here.
There must be hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions. I’ll have to ask Lobot or Artoo to calculate it, Lando thought. Who could have made them all? Just gathering and organizing them into this collage would have been a monumental task. How were they made? Are they like the rest of this ship, almost alive?
The Qella watched with impassive eyes as he passed, more sanguine about Lando’s presence than he was about theirs.
And why are they here? All that work, and who would see them? The discovery of access portals to the interspace did not alter Lando’s impression of the interspace as a private place. They gaze outward as if the outer hull weren’t there, as if they’re held in trance by something they see lying beyond, as if they all share the same thought. Was it infinity? Eternity? Mortality?
Soon after entering the interspace, Lando discovered that the inner hull and outer hull were connected by slender stringers. Crisscrossing and arrayed in a continuous row, they stitched the two hulls together with an open pattern of diamonds and triangles, like a series of X’s. The smallest openings were large enough for Lando to pass through easily. Lando suspected that the stringers encircled the entire inner hull, like the spokes of a velocipede wheel—a single structure serving as strut, spacer, and shock mount.
As he continued forward, Lando encountered a second ring of stringers and learned they had another function. For this row was a solid barrier, with membranes closing the spaces between the strands, sealing off the next section of interspace. The obstacle drove Lando back inside the ship at chamber 207.
Forward from that point, the portals leading to the interspace were still illuminated by glow-rings but sealed tight. Although none of them would open to Lando’s touch, the center of those he tried to open transformed into a hexagon of the same transparent material they had seen in the auditorium. In chamber after chamber, the viewports allowed him to glimpse the reason the portals would not open—a gaping slash in the outer hull that started at chamber 202 and continued forward nearly to the bow.
When Lando peered out into the interspace, he saw stars.
Even though the giant transparency was opaque, the best view of the damage was from the auditorium. Looking through a previously unknown portal, Lando could see that the attacker had come close to shearing the bow off the vagabond. The burn patterns were familiar and distinctive—the damage was the result of the pulsed output produced by a capital ship’s batteries.
This is what we heard, Lando thought, keying the suit’s comlink. “Lobot, are you there?”
“Listening.”
“I’m in the auditorium,” Lando said. “There’s a big hole along the starboard side, and everything forward of here is a wreck. The last few pulses punched all the way through her, opening up a smaller hole in the far side. The whole section is sealed—I can’t get any closer to the damage without cutting my own door, which I don’t need or want to do.”
“Is there any indication that the breach is being repaired?”
“It’s hard to tell,” Lando said. “There’s so much hull missing, and I can’t get enough light on the closest edges. I’ll probably have to wait here a while to know.”
“Is there any sign anyone has come aboard?”
“No sign I can see. It’s pretty clear they were going after the weapon nodes,” Lando said. “Which means they must have seen her fight before, most likely at Prakith.”
“Can you see anything of the vessel or vessels that attacked us?”
“Not a hint. From the angle of incidence, I’d say they were well aft of us when this started. Lobot—the orrery is gone.”
“No!” Lobot protested. “Gone or inactive?”
“Gone. Destroyed. The whole shadow-box chamber would have been filled with bolt scatter after the initial burn-through. Everything that wasn’t swept out in the decompression’s been vaporized.”
“Perhaps it will regenerate.”
“From what? There’s nothing out there. No, it looks as if you and I are going to be the last to have seen it.”
“That is dismaying,” said Lobot.
“No telling from where I am, but I’d guess there are a few thousand fewer portraits in the gallery, too. Probably came close to losing this chamber.”
“How long do you plan to stay and observe?”
Lando glanced at his chronometer. “I’ll give it twenty minutes. If I can’t see some activity by then, I’ll start back. How are you doing? Any sign of trouble there? Where are you now—still in two-twenty-eight?”
“I am fine,” said Lobot. “But I do not know how to tell you where I am. I would already be lost if not for Artoo’s holomap.”
“You’ve gone into the inner passages?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe I should come back now,” said Lando. “I’ve seen most of what I need to. Did you blaze your route?”
“I would rather you did not,” Lobot said. “The silence is surprisingly agreeable. I am hearing much more clearly now. That is why I did not blaze my route. That is why I am now going to turn off my comlink.”
Lando began an angry protest. “Lobot, what’s going on—”
“You said that I should do what I like. That is what I have decided to do.”
“Fine, but don’t turn off your comlink. What if—”
“I will signal you if I want you,” Lobot said. “Until then, I will wish you good judgment, and you can wish us good luck.”
That was the end of the conversation. Lando was unable to raise Lobot on any comm channel, not even with an emergency signal.
He’s sided with the droids against me, Lando thought, smashing his fist against the face of the chamber in frustration. Which is just more proof that this ship is making all of us nuts. By the time we get out of here—if we ever do—we’re all going to need a mindwipe.
Turning back toward the portal, Lando pressed the facescreen of his helmet against the transparency and peered into the darkness. The contours of the holes appeared to have changed slightly, as though the holes might be beginning to knit. How far it would go, though, he could not tell. Left untreated, the edges of a cavity wound will heal without regenerating what was destroyed.
Switching off his suit lamps, Lando looked out through the blast hole at the star patterns beyond, seeking a familiar pattern, a recognizable star or distinctive spiral nebula. The odds did not favor him. Even after a lifetime roaming the spacelanes, there was far more unknown than known in a galaxy of a hundred billion stars.
But if there was any way he could, he needed to touch the familiar, and remind himself what it was he was fighting to live long enough to see again.
Lady Luck dropped
back into realspace just shy of a light-second from Anomaly 1033 and just more than a light-year from Carconth.
At those distances, the anomaly was invisible except to sensors, but the red supergiant star was still a spectacular sight. Five hundred times as large and a hundred thousand times as bright as the sun Coruscant orbited, Carconth commanded the sky like few other stars. At the peak of its fluctuations, it was the second largest and seventh brightest of the known stars. The Astrographic Survey Institute and its predecessors had been maintaining a supernova watch at Carconth for more than six hundred years.
The chances were that Anomaly 1033 was something left behind by an alien expedition to Carconth. There had been many such, most unrecorded in Old or New Republic records. But Colonel Pakkpekatt and his volunteers would have no chance to find out, and little opportunity to gawk at the galactic spectacle visible off the yacht’s port beam.
Within moments of their arrival, Lady Luck’s controls went dead under Pakkpekatt’s hands. Accelerating as it turned, the yacht veered sharply some sixty degrees to starboard and twenty degrees toward galactic north, pointing its bow in the general direction of Kaa. The displays churned as the autonavigator ran through its calculus and sent the results to the hyperspace motivator.
“What’s wrong, Colonel?” Bijo Hammax asked.
“Something has activated a slave circuit,” said Pakkpekatt, lifting his hands from the panel and sitting back in the pilot’s flight couch. “The yacht is no longer under my control.”
“But you’re not trying to get control back.” The whistle of the yacht’s hyperdrive winding up to a jump was now clearly audible to both officers.
“That is correct.”
At that moment, Pleck and Taisden joined them on the flight deck. “Colonel—” Pleck began.
Hammax turned his couch toward Pakkpekatt. “Colonel, I don’t understand why you’re letting us be hijacked.”
“It is very difficult to defeat a well-designed slave circuit without doing extensive damage to the vessel,” said Pakkpekatt. “They would be of little use if they could be easily overridden.”
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