“You sound close by,” was the faraway-sounding answer. “Just keep coming.”
“What are you doing in here? Are you stuck and too embarrassed to admit it?”
“I am occupied.”
“Occupied with what?” When he was answered with what seemed a pointed silence, Lando changed the subject. “You know we jumped out.”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t by any chance have anything to do with that?”
“No.”
One more toe-push brought Lando to a point where two passages merged into one. “The jump didn’t sound good,” he said, pausing there. “Lot of shaking and rattling we haven’t heard before.”
“There was much damage.”
Lando started again in the direction of the voice. “Yeah, I saw some of it. Are you feeling all right, pal?”
“Fine.”
“Really? I gotta tell you, you sound a little flat.”
“I am occupied.”
“That again,” said Lando. “Well, if everything’s all right, it would have been nice if you’d answered the messages Artoo sent to you for me. You could have saved me what’s turning into a long and annoying climb.”
“Impossible.”
“What’s impossible?”
There was a long silence.
“Lobot?”
“Impossible to reply. The channel was in use.”
Lobot’s voice was at last starting to promise that Lando might see him around one more twisting turn. “If there’s some reason why I shouldn’t come up there, maybe you could tell me now.”
“No reason. Come ahead. You are close now.”
“You said that once before.”
“I was not listening with my ears.”
“Of course,” said Lando. “I make that mistake all the time.” Pausing, he pulled the cutting blaster from the slash pocket of his flight suit and slipped the stay loop over his wrist.
“You will not need that,” said Lobot.
Lando’s head jerked up. There was still no sign of Lobot in the passage ahead. “You spying on me, buddy?”
Again, Lobot did not answer right away. “We are aware of you.”
Drawing a deep breath, Lando reached out and pressed his palms against the inside of the passage, resuming his awkward floating crawl with new determination. “You’ll have to pardon me for intruding—I thought you were alone in here,” he called as he scrambled along. “I hope I can count on you to make the introductions.”
“Yes. A little farther, Lando.”
Ahead, the passage turned sharply, hiding what lay beyond. Lando let the blaster come into his hand before going around the bend. Then he wedged himself into the passage, using one foot to press his back against the wall, as he deciphered what he was seeing.
The next section of passage had a gentle curve that limited his view to twenty meters or so. But in those twenty meters, no fewer than fifty smaller side passages joined it. The openings were puckered in appearance, and the side passages were dark—the pale light illuminating the main passage seemed to stop where they joined to it.
Pulling himself forward cautiously, Lando directed the beam of his hand torch down the first of the side passages. Barely two meters in, the branch was completely blocked by what appeared to be a rounded plug, lighter in color than the enclosing walls. The configuration put Lando in mind of concussion missiles in their launchers, or assault pods in their drop tubes.
Spinning in midair, Lando aimed his light into another side passage, and the next, and the next. They were all blocked—no, not blocked, he thought, filled—in just the same manner by ellipsoidal objects potentially large enough to enclose and imprison a human being.
“Lobot, where are you?” Lando said quietly.
“Molo nag aikan nag molo kron aikan sket…”
The dreamy, disassociated voice came from a side passage another few meters away. Lando pulled himself along one-handed until he reached it, then pointed the beam of his hand torch inside without warning.
Lobot was floating inside, his feet toward Lando, his head at the object filling the passage. When the intense light reached Lobot’s face, he raised a hand, squeezed his eyes shut, and turned his head away. That was when Lando glimpsed a shocking sight. The right side of Lobot’s head was bare—there was only an outline of white skin and a pattern of socket holes where the interface band had been.
“Lobot, what’s happened?”
“—eida kron molo sket aikan sket tupa vol…”
Drawing himself closer, Lando grabbed Lobot by the foot and shook him. “Hey, come back to me, pal.”
Lobot flinched from the touch, jerking his foot away, but ended his recitation.
“Talk to me, or I’m going to have to pull you out of there,” Lando said. “Maybe I’d better do that anyway—”
“No!” The vehemence with which the word was launched was part passion and part fear. At the same time, Lobot’s hands slammed outward against the sides of the passage, his fingers digging deep as the substance there yielded to provide him with secure handholds.
Only then, with Lobot’s arms no longer obscuring his view, did Lando realize what was happening. Half of the interface band was still in place on Lobot’s left side. The other half was attached to the curve of the object beyond. A network of fine wires, no longer than the span of Lando’s hand, connected the two as a tether.
“Starfire—you found a way to talk to the vagabond.”
A smile crept onto Lobot’s face. “Yes.”
“To the vagabond, or to these things?” Lando gestured with the light.
“There is no distinction.”
“Is it conscious?”
“It is aware.” Lobot opened his eyes and looked at Lando for the first time. “I will need to remember to discuss this with Threepio. I may have better answers for him now.”
Lando wedged himself sideways in the opening of the side passage. “What kind of conversation are you having?”
“It is willing to give me information. It will not give me control.”
“Ask it where we’re going this time.”
“It is hurting,” Lobot said. “I think it is going home.”
Lando contemplated that information for a moment, then gestured with the beam of light. “What are these—eggs?”
“No. These are Qella,” said Lobot. “The ship is the egg.”
Chapter Seven
Bathed in the brilliant fire of the cluster’s many suns, three New Republic warships made their entry into star system ILC-905 in the formation known as triangle-high-forward.
On the point, a hundred kilometers ahead of the others, was the picket Folna, with all its sensitive antennae passively scanning in all directions to the limit of their range. Trailing in the flank position was another vessel of the same size, the gunship Vanguard. In the anchor position, flying parallel to Vanguard, was the command vessel for the patrol group—the cruiser Indomitable, under Commodore Brand.
Though Folna’s sensing officer was reporting all displays clear, both the cruiser’s and the gunship’s primary and secondary armaments were at combat readiness, with their accumulators half charged, their aiming coils warm, and their crews on two-hour rotations. In addition, three of Indomitable’s five squadrons, including Red Flight’s K-wing bombers, were fully armed and lined up for deployment, with their pilots standing by.
It would take just twelve seconds to bring the gun batteries to full power. Thirty-five seconds after the klaxon sounded in the bays, the first E-wings would clear Indomitable’s flight deck.
Or if Brand didn’t like the odds, a word from him—and ninety seconds to spin up the hyperdrives—would have all three ships wheeling about and jumping out to safety.
Despite those precautions, the tension aboard all three ships was palpable. On the bridge of Indomitable, it was excruciating. The patrol group was hunting for the enemy in the enemy’s own territory, and it would be just their bad luck, thought Brand, if they should f
ind them.
Or, worse still, be found.
In any space patrol, there was an irreducible risk of being seen by an enemy they could not see. That risk was multiplied many times over by the richness of Koornacht Cluster’s starfields.
Even with the best available instruments, an Imperial-class Star Destroyer was undetectable against the background of a first-magnitude star at a range of only six thousand kilometers. A ship the size of Vanguard could creep within three hundred klicks without being spotted. Any inattention, any errors of assessment, any deficiencies in the systems, and those margins would narrow still further.
Active sensing—a laser pulse, a radar ping—could remove that vulnerability, separating a nearby ship from a distant star. But active sensing created a vulnerability of its own, announcing their presence like a shout in the night.
As they had been for the last nine system entries, the active sensors of the patrol group were silent. Brand was counting on the skill of the seven officers seated at the passive-sensing stations in Folna’s darkened elint compartment—the bug box, in ship slang.
Sharp eyes and clear minds, Brand thought as he restlessly paced Indomitable’s bridge. The debacle at Doornik 319 had been embarrassment enough to his command. No more surprises. No more mistakes.
“Look after your station, Lieutenant,” he barked, stopping behind a Hrasskis officer and leaning in to jab a finger toward the console. “You’ve got a yellow on your check board.”
“I’m on it, sir.”
“Twelfth planet entering our scan radius in one minute,” called out one of the cruiser’s own elint specialists.
Brand straightened and turned toward the forward viewpanes. “Helmsman, how is our velocity?”
“Beginning to pick up some measurable stellar gravity assist now, Commodore. Base velocity is one-third formation standard.”
“Let her roll,” Brand said—altering, on a sudden impulse, the procedure they had used in the past. “I don’t care what the engineers at Technical say—I don’t believe that the braking thrusters don’t light us up,” he added. “Let’s just be a rock this time.”
“Infalling in formation, sir?”
“Loose formation—we’ll let ’em drift. It won’t amount to much at this point. Signal the patrol.”
“Yes, sir.”
By the time the patrol group was closing on the sixth planet, the gravity of the star ILC-905—with some minor assistance from the system’s outer planets—had boosted the group’s velocity to 41 percent of formation standard.
An angry and puzzled Colonel Foag had long since registered his displeasure, signaling Brand from Folna’s bug box by means of ship-to-ship laser. “You’re shrinking our safety radius,” he complained. “The faster we go, the more pressure there is on my people—with the analysis lag and their reaction time, we lose a thousand, two thousand kilometers at least. Why the impatience?”
“It’s not impatience, Colonel Foag. I’m just adjusting the tradeoffs slightly,” said Brand. “I’m well aware that if elint ran the show, we’d make entry at one-tenth formation standard with engines cold and ninety percent of the ship’s systems shut down.”
Later, recording his mission debriefing, Brand could point to the fact that all the ships destroyed during the mass recon of the cluster were making constant-velocity passes through their target systems:
—This suggests that the Yevethan sensor grids are capable of detecting even very small vessels when they are following a flight profile requiring the use of braking and maneuvering thrusters—
But the truth was that in the moment before he ordered the change, Brand had experienced a sudden, inexplicable spike of fear. Coming from a tribe that respected instinct as much as reason, Brand treated that fear as information. And the only response available to him at that moment was to make the group’s system entry as stealthy as possible, even if it hindered the work of Foag’s crew.
Brand had done the same thing in combat many times before—taken risks to follow an impulse and found justification for it later. It had carried him to the rank of commodore and filled his service record with close calls and commendations. It also guaranteed that he would never rise any higher than that—“too high-strung” and “too erratic to command the confidence of other senior officers” were among the review board’s disqualifying conclusions.
Even knowing that, Brand could not, would not, change his ways. Honoring his feelings had saved his life more than once—and he had donned his dress uniform for the funerals of a roomful of by-the-book officers, too many of them friends.
As the patrol group left the fifth planet behind, Brand left the bridge for a quick, unannounced tour of Indomitable’s ready stations.
By that time, the crew had been standing at conflict-yellow alert for fourteen hours straight, and the fine edge of their vigilance had been blunted by fatigue and boredom. As more and more crew members came to the conclusion on their own that ILC-905 was clean, personal chatter, laughter, and even friendly roughhousing crept in to change the atmosphere in the gun batteries and on the flight decks. Conflict-yellow was in danger of being treated just like any other watch—peaceful, routine, business as usual for a warship under way.
Brand’s visit put an end to that. Sweeping through station after station like a cold shower, he infected them with his own restless apprehension.
“Asteroid belt coming up next,” he said, peering through a gunsight. “You going to be ready, aren’t you, son? Have to be more ready than they are.”
Extracting a promise, Brand moved on.
“Asteroid belt coming up,” he said, poking his head into a fighter cockpit. “You have everything you need to do your job, Lieutenant? You know one pilot can be the difference.”
Collecting a vow, Brand continued down the line.
In less than an hour, he was back on the bridge. He left behind him as a residue of the lightning tour the conviction that the commander knew something—that something was going to happen.
Brand did not know what was going to happen. But he was not surprised when something did.
Like many single-star systems, ILC-905 had an asteroid ring between the outermost rocky planet and the innermost gas giant—the remnant of a planet that never was, torn asunder by the giant’s massive gravitational field.
Like most asteroid rings, this one’s density was low. It was only a minor obstacle to navigation, and a poor place to hide anything larger than a probot. Despite what he said on his tour, Brand did not expect to find an Imperial shipyard cached there.
Nor did he expect a Yevethan thrustship to drop out of hyperspace almost dead ahead of them, six million kilometers on the far side of the asteroid ring.
Like a giant strobe, the instantaneous flash known as Cronau radiation put the arriving ship not only on the screens in Folna’s elint center, but on the other ships’ screens as well. Alarms began to keen on every deck as Brand upgraded the alert to conflict-orange.
“What was the phase shift?” he demanded, bounding out of his chair.
“Phase shift is negative,” said the tracking officer. “She’s heading away from us.”
“Going where?”
The navigator turned his head to answer. “If I had to guess—third planet, just like us.”
“What are the chances they’ve spotted us?”
The tactical officer leaned over the plot table and studied the geometries. “Very small, in my opinion. We couldn’t have spotted them at this distance if they’d just been cruising along in realspace like we are. Having them fall out of hyperspace like that was an incredible break.”
“Maybe not,” said Brand. He turned toward the viewpane and looked out at ILC-905, crossing his arms over his chest. “If they did move one of the shipyards here, they’ll have created some long supply lines for themselves. This could be a pretty popular spacelane.”
“That could be, sir,” the tactical officer agreed. “If they’re trying to use the yard, and not just hide it.�
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Brand nodded. “Comm—”
“Yes, sir?”
“Signal the Intrepid that we have a contact, one Yevethan T-type, and give our coordinates. Advise them that we’re investigating further. Helmsman—”
“Yes, sir?”
“Let’s close the gap a little. Give me ten percent forward thrust until we clear the asteroid ring. Otherwise maintain course, hands off. We’re going to follow her in.”
A little more than an hour later, the Yevethan ship began a long braking maneuver that ended with it disappearing behind the limb of the third planet. By that time, the patrol group had closed to within half a million kilometers, bringing the planet within range of its full array of sensors.
“Any sign of anything in orbit?” Brand demanded.
“Negative,” said the sensor chief. “But we haven’t seen complete orbital tracks for anything above two thousand kilometers.”
“Given its approach, the most probable orbit for the target is three-two-five-zero klicks,” the tracking officer announced.
Brand walked to the forward viewscreens. “Show me,” he said, and a three-dimensional tactical map appeared side by side with the forward view.
Indomitable’s first officer, Captain Tobbra, had a career book that was unremarkable in every respect, the product of a long habit of erring on the side of caution. That caution had been freshly renewed by a new baby back on Trallan, Tobbra’s homeworld.
Tobbra was keenly aware that but for a few months’ seniority, the flag chair might have been his instead. As it was, he thought of it as a shared command, and saw it as his role to counterbalance Brand’s excesses.
“Commodore, if we get any closer, that ship’s sure to spot us when she comes around,” he said in a guarded voice, joining Brand.
“I don’t doubt it,” said Brand.
“If we stand off here, even back off a bit, Folna should be able to get everything we need for Five-Tac,” Tobbra pressed, using the slang term for the fleet commander’s tactical staff.
“That’s true as well,” said Brand. “But right now, we have the advantage—we know where they are, and they don’t know we’re here. You’d have me surrender that advantage.”
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