“What’s our strategy?” asked Colonel Hammax, studying the tracking display over Pakkpekatt’s right shoulder.
“Given that she’s a hundred times as large as we are, and considerably more than a hundred times as powerful, it seems to me the real question on the table is, what’s her strategy?”
“How close are you going to let her get?”
Pakkpekatt pawed his chest. “That, too, depends on her.”
“The effective radius of the vagabond’s defensive zone at Gmar Askilon was twelve kilometers,” said Taisden. “Given the size of this orbit, we shouldn’t have any trouble keeping a cushion of twelve hundred kilometers, which I hope would be more than sufficient.”
“Shouldn’t we at least try to contact General Calrissian?” asked Hammax.
“I don’t want to spook the vagabond,” said Pakkpekatt. “We got along very well with her at Gmar Askilon so long as we were sitting still and in a passive sensing mode. Let’s stay that way until we have a better idea why she’s here.”
“Sure seems like it’d be nice to know if anyone’s alive,” said Hammax. “If I’m going to have to go inside—”
“There will be time for that,” said Pakkpekatt. “For now, I want silence. Can you reach Penga Rift with a directional comm signal?”
“For another minute or so. She’s about to go over the horizon to nightside.”
“Notify them what we’re doing—instruct them to observe a comm and sensor blackout, and to stand by.” Pakkpekatt studied the tracking display. “Patience will serve us best now.”
“Look, this isn’t that complicated,” Lando said impatiently, squeezing into the tubule beside Lobot. “Tell it we want to leave. Get it to promise not to fry my yacht when it tries to come alongside. That’s all we want—that’s all we’re asking. Then we’ll be gone, and it can go where it wants and do what it wants.”
“If it tries to go anywhere, it might destroy itself,” said Lobot. “I have to make it understand that first.”
“As long as we’re not on it when that happens, what do we care?” Lando demanded. “For all I know, those droids are back there plotting to duplicate the beckon call signal—I wouldn’t put it past either of them to take things into their own hands.”
“Your response to these developments seems to have an alarmingly narrow focus,” said Lobot. “You are indifferent to the fate of this vessel, to the mystery concerning the planet’s moons, to why Lady Luck is even here—”
“That’s right. All I care about right now is getting out of here alive,” said Lando. “And if you’re worrying about anything else, I say you’re the one with the problem. Come on, I can already taste the tranna nougat and doth brandy waiting for me in my suite. Say ‘pardon me’ and then palaver your persuasive head off until you have a docking permit for our lifeboat and exit passes for us.”
“I will see what can be done,” Lobot said with a frown. “But I don’t know why you think anything has changed. The vagabond will not take instructions from me.”
“If you care what happens to this ship, you’d better hope you’re wrong,” Calrissian said. “Because if Lady Luck’s here, the rest of the task force can’t be far away. And if Glorious and Marauder have to break us out, it’s not going to be gentle or pretty.”
“I will try,” said Lobot.
Lando clapped him on the thigh. “That’s the fellow. I’ll be nearby.”
The vagabond made its approach to Maltha Obex at high speed, slowing only at the last to settle into a retrograde high equatorial orbit. Orbiting more slowly than the planet turned, the vagabond would linger on the dayside for nearly thirty hours while the planet seemed to slowly spin backward beneath it.
“What do you think this is about?” Pakkpekatt asked. “Anyone?”
“A very detailed surface scan,” said Taisden. “She’s looking for something.”
“Or she’s sunbathing,” said Hammax. “It’s cold where she’s been,” he added when the others looked at him quizzically. “Dr. Eckels said it’s a biological, didn’t he?”
“Let us be careful not to anthropomorphize,” said Pakkpekatt. “Agent Taisden, it appears that the vessel’s present orbit will bring her very close to us shortly before she crosses the terminator.”
“Sixty kilometers,” said Taisden. “And within sixty kilometers of Penga Rift nineteen hours after that. How comfortable are we with that spacing, Colonel?”
“I would prefer not to be that close.”
“There’s no way we can change our own orbit without calling attention to ourselves,” said Taisden. “If she stays where she is—”
Pakkpekatt hissed and shook himself. It went against both habit and nature for him to take the initiative in such a situation. “We may have no choice but to call attention to ourselves in one way or another,” he said, sitting back in his couch. “And if we must do so, it is better done when the vagabond is still a generous distance away.”
“She’ll never be farther away than she is right now.”
Pakkpekatt reached forward and cradled the flight controls lightly in his hands. “Notify the others what we are doing. Then page Calrissian on the frequency he was using for his suit comm at Gmar Askilon. Bounce the page through the satellite.”
“Wait—what happens if the yacht’s slave circuits are activated again?” asked Hammax. “We seem to be assuming they won’t be. Even if the general and his aide are out of it, couldn’t one of the droids send the signal?”
“We will have to trust that they will not do so if it is not safe to do so,” said Pakkpekatt. “Send the page.”
Moments later, they heard Lando Calrissian’s voice, shaky, hoarse and impatient, saying, “Yes, what is it, Threepio? What’s happening now?”
“Sir, I did not—”
“Calrissian!” Pakkpekatt roared. “What are you doing alive?”
“Pakkpekatt!” Calrissian answered in kind. “What are you doing on my ship? And why are you just sitting there?”
“Hey, General—we’re still waiting for our invitation,” said Hammax.
“Hammax? Is that you?”
“They kept telling me you were dead, but I told them they were being overly optimistic.”
“Spoken like a man on the wrong end of a gambling debt,” said Lando. “Tell you what, Colonel—I’ll forgive half of it for a ride back to Imperial City.”
“Better sweeten that offer—I can get clear of the whole thing if we take you back in a box.”
Even though his own outburst had triggered the torrent of animated familiarity, Pakkpekatt made an effort to reclaim and restrain the conversation. “General Calrissian, please advise your status.”
“Status? Let’s see, what don’t you know? The ship’s empty—completely automated, bioengineered. No one else is aboard. We’re all more or less well. Lobot, haven’t you gotten anywhere yet? Are you hearing all of this? What’s your status, Colonel? Where’s the task force?”
“We are the task force now,” said Pakkpekatt. “The rest were recalled to other duty, and you and your party were written off.”
“That’s not funny, Colonel,” said Lando. “The admiral would never do that.”
“Which admiral? Coruscant is overrun with them,” said Hammax. “General Rieekan redlined the mission after you ran off with his date.”
Pakkpekatt rebuked the colonel with a glance. “General Calrissian, we’ve been looking for you ever since your escape. We believe we have a complete Qella genetic sequence, and we have an autoresponder set up. Rather than force the issue, I’d like to wait and see—”
Laughing tiredly, Lando said, “Predictable. Isn’t this where we started, Colonel?”
“—if we can’t get, as Colonel Hammax said, an invitation,” Pakkpekatt continued. “I understand you must be eager to get out. But can you hold out a few more hours so we have a chance to—as someone once suggested I might consider—pick a lock rather than blow one up?”
Lando sighed. “I bow to the indis
putable wisdom of your advisor. We can hold out a bit longer.”
Hour after hour, the vagabond searched the surface of Maltha Obex, listening for the sign it had been told to wait for, waiting for the cue that would tell it what to do next.
Five times before, it had come here, obediently following the plan built into its very substance, trying to keep an appointment with those who had shaped it and sent it into the void. Five times it had lingered, searching, waiting, bathing in the rich energies of N’oka Brath, the glowstone. Five times it had gone away again, not aware enough to be disappointed, but knowing that its purpose was unfulfilled.
Never before, though, had it arrived here crippled—burned and poisoned by the intense energies that had poured in through the same aperture through which N’oka Brath fed it. The burns had healed, but the poisons lingered, and with them a memory of the form and action of the attacker.
And never before had it found others waiting—tiny creatures sharing the circles above Brath Qella, the homestone, the place of beginning. They were unfamiliar in form and did not sing. But they did not move toward the vagabond, or reach out to touch it, and so it left them alone, no imperatives having been invoked. Still, it noted them and watched them closely.
After the appointed time for waiting, the vagabond began singing. And for the first time in all its journeys home, an answer came.
But the answer did not come from Brath Qella—it came from one of the tiny eggs sharing the circles. And the answer was sung harshly, without the gentle strength of Brath Qella. The vagabond searched its memories and knew the answer to be form without substance, a deception, a predator’s lure.
And there were imperatives concerning predators.
When the vagabond finally broke its silence and broadcast a fourteen-second interrogative, only Taisden was on the flight deck to hear it.
Hammax was napping in his cabin, wearing all but the boots and gauntlets of a combat suit. Pleck was on the observation deck trying to coax what he considered a more realistic measure of the vagabond’s displacement from what he suspected was a faulty magnetometer. Pakkpekatt and Eckels were behind closed doors in Lando’s suite, engaged in a heated discussion prompted by Eckels’s belated discovery that an NRI team was aboard the Qella vessel.
Taisden’s alarm roused all of them from their other pursuits, and brought all but Pleck running forward to the flight deck.
“Don’t know what the question was, but we are responding,” Taisden told them. “And the target is changing orbit and accelerating.”
“Toward us?”
“Toward the relay satellite.”
“She sure can motor when she wants to,” Hammax said, shaking his head.
“Is this good?” Eckels demanded. “Is this what you expected?”
“Maybe,” Taisden said. “If she’s going over there to make nice, next time we can transmit our reply directly from Lady Luck—”
At that moment a blue glow appeared at the vagabond’s bow, making it suddenly bright both through the viewscreens and on the monitors.
“The scythe,” said Pakkpekatt.
“Impossible,” said Taisden. “The satellite’s three thousand klicks away from it—”
Three slender but brilliant beams of energy slashed across the darkness and came together at a point 3,409 kilometers ahead of the vagabond. Where they converged, there was a small explosion intense enough to leave an afterimage in their eyes. Then the glow vanished, and the lances disappeared, leaving a spreading cloud of atomized plasteel and metal glittering in the light of N’oka Brath.
“She did not go there to make nice,” Hammax said in awe. “What kind of weapon is that?”
Even before the vagabond turned back, Taisden had shut down the autoresponder. At the same time, Pakkpekatt pulled the throttles back, dropping them into a lower, faster orbit that would carry them away from the vagabond and over its horizon.
“She could have taken out the whole task force at Gmar Askilon at any time,” said Taisden, shaking his head.
“Give me voice to Calrissian,” said Pakkpekatt. “Run it through one of Penga Rift’s regular satellites.”
“Ready,” said Taisden. “Comm two.”
“General,” said Pakkpekatt, “this is Lady Luck. Why are you firing on us?”
“It wasn’t our doing,” Lando said. “What did you say to it? Why are you running away?”
“If your yacht has a sensor cloak or a shield of invulnerability, General, this would be a very good time to inform us.”
Lando’s answer was lost in a blast of static as the vagabond reached across nearly eight thousand kilometers and vaporized Penga Rift’s ORS-2.
“Going over the horizon from that thing looks better all the time,” said Pakkpekatt.
“Six minutes.”
“Colonel—” Eckels’s voice had a tremble. “Perhaps it is time to transmit it all while there is still an operational satellite that can be used to relay it. Whatever message we sent just now was not taken well. Perhaps we need to be more convincing—or more confusing.”
Pakkpekatt looked to Taisden. “I have no better ideas, Colonel.”
“Then do it,” he said. “Doctor—”
“Yes. Let me speak to Penga Rift.”
Captain Barjas’s voice answered the hail. “Doctor—thank goodness. We’re showing two satellites have suddenly gone dead, and we were concerned.”
“The vagabond has turned hostile,” Eckels said. “Is everyone back on board?”
“Except for you. We just got the last of them up.”
“Good. I order you to leave orbit immediately, and jump out to the agreed coordinates for rendezvous one.”
“Very well, Dr. Eckels. Good luck, sir.”
“We’ll be all right. Get out of here—take care of my people.”
“Eight minutes to horizon,” said Taisden.
“What? How are we losing ground?”
“The target is accelerating toward ORS-One, which is currently relaying the Qella database.”
Hammax shook his head. “Keeping the rock between us and it might not be all that easy to do.”
“Penga Rift is getting under way,” said Taisden.
“Perhaps the reply should be coming from the surface—” Eckels began.
Pakkpekatt ignored him. “Is there any spare bandwidth on ORS-One?”
“I can make some,” said Taisden.
“I want to talk to Calrissian.”
The agent’s fingertips danced over the controls. “Ready on two.”
“General, this is Pakkpekatt.”
“Colonel,” said Lando. “Looks a little warm out there. Is this a good time to mention that my yacht’s uninsured? Perhaps you might consider running away just a little faster—”
“General Calrissian, I don’t know how long we’ll be able to talk. Is there anything you can do to put a stop to this?”
“I don’t think so,” said Lando. “We just had a little mutiny over here—about ten minutes ago, my good friend Lobot drained the power cell on our only blaster into one of the droids. The droids are backing him up.”
“Do you know of any weakness or vulnerability of the vagabond that we can exploit?”
“Yes. Blaster cannon, cruiser-weight and up. The hull’s not armored, and there don’t seem to be ray shields, at least not at those frequencies. You can hole it and hurt it. But you have to get in the first shot, and make it good.”
They could hear a second voice saying, “Lando, it does not deserve this—”
Then Eckels found his voice in protest, drowning out Lobot. “This is completely unacceptable, Colonel. This artifact is unique, irreplaceable—”
“And deadly,” said Pakkpekatt. “Acknowledged, General. Stand by.” He gestured to Taisden. “Hypercomm, secure, to Rieekan and Collomus.”
“Go.”
“This is Colonel Pakkpekatt, commanding, Teljkon task force at Maltha Obex,” he said. “Confirming: We’ve found the vagabond and made contac
t with the team aboard. But the target has turned hostile, and we can’t get anywhere near—”
The flight deck was suddenly and momentarily flooded with light, marking the precipitous disappearance of the third satellite.
“—it. I believe we could jump out using the planet as our shield, but only at the cost of losing contact with the vessel. I am opting to try to maintain contact, and requesting immediate assistance and support to secure the target and recover our people.” He paused as though listening, then added, “Don’t bother with a cruiser—send a Star Destroyer, or two. We’re going to need a heavyweight to stop her.”
Chapter Eleven
The morning after the Battle of N’zoth, the Kell Plath Corporation liner Star Morning entered the system and requested a rendezvous with Intrepid for the purpose of picking up passengers.
Since the news did not directly involve Luke, he knew nothing of it until Wialu sent him a message requesting that he come to the cabin she and Akanah had been sharing. He found the women putting the cabin in order, preparing to leave. Akanah greeted him with an eager embrace.
“Did you hear? Our ship will be here in about an hour.”
Luke turned to Wialu. “You’re going back to J’t’p’tan?”
“We are going away,” she said. “It is time for us to find a quieter place. We need to grieve, and heal—to absorb the lessons of J’t’p’tan, and find a new focus.”
His gaze narrowed. “Then the rest of the Circle—they’re on the ship already?”
“We are no longer needed at J’t’p’tan,” she said.
“And so the Fallanassi disappear again.”
“We do not require or desire the attention of outsiders,” said Wialu. “And events have already cost us much privacy. We will go away long enough and far enough to earn it back.”
“I don’t suppose I was expecting an invitation to come along,” Luke said, turning his gaze on Akanah.
“I wish there were more time,” she said, showing a sad smile. “I wish that I could finish what I started. It was unfair to you for me to make that promise, not knowing if there would be a chance to keep it.”
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