Perhaps too obvious. Perhaps that was why they were moving everyone out. She wondered how they would handle it: subtly with freighters, or blatantly with Imperial Star Destroyers. Kellering had implied this Hammertong thing had already been loaded for transport; a look at the ship they were using should give Manda a clue as to how they were going to go about it. That would affect how their screen net would be put together—
“They’re through,” Pav reported. “Gate’s closing. They’re headed your way.”
“Copy,” Shada said, frowning. There was something in Pav’s voice … “Trouble?”
“I don’t know,” Pav said slowly. “It all looks okay. But there’s something here that feels wrong, somehow.”
Shada tightened her grip on her blaster rifle. Pav might be a chattercase on the com, but she hadn’t survived long enough to become Manda’s team second without good combat instincts. “What do you mean?”
“I’m not sure,” Pav said. “They got through just a little bit too quick—”
And abruptly, Pav’s voice dissolved into an earsplitting shriek of jamming static.
With a curse, Shada ripped the comlink from her collar with her left hand, throwing it as far away from her as she could. So much for Kellering’s naïve assurances of safety. In the split of a hair the thing had suddenly gone sour … and Manda and Pav were right in the middle of it.
With Shada herself about to come in a close third. Beyond the fence, from over the next line of hills, the gleaming white figures of a dozen stormtroopers on speeder bikes had suddenly appeared. Headed her way.
Shada cursed again, lining up her blaster rifle with her right hand as she groped for the switch on her backup comlink with her left. If they were lucky, they’d have a minute before the Imperials found that frequency and locked it down, too. She located the switch, flicked it on—
“—trap—repeat, a trap,” Pav was saying, her voice tight. “They’ve got Manda—she’s down. Probably. And they’re coming for me.”
“Pav, it’s Shada,” Shada cut in, squinting through the sight and squeezing off a shot. The lead stormtrooper’s speeder bike exploded into a shower of sparks, pitching him to the ground and nearly doing the same to the two on either side of him. “I can be there to back you up in two minutes.”
“Negative,” Pav said. The tension in her voice was gone, leaving a sad sort of resignation that sent a cold chill up Shada’s neck. “They’re already too close. I’ll do what I can to keep them busy—you and Karoly had better get back to the ships and get out of here. Good luck, and good—”
There was a brief crinkle of sound, and then silence.
Ahead, the speeder bikes had shifted into evasive maneuvers. Shada fired four rapid shots, catching another of the stormtroopers with the third of them. “Karoly?” she called toward her comlink. “Karoly? Are you there?”
“They’re gone, Shada,” Karoly D’ulin said, her voice almost unrecognizable. “They’re gone. The stormtroopers—”
“Snap out of it,” Shada snarled, keying the Viper grenade launcher attached to her blaster rifle barrel. The recoil kicked the gun hard into her shoulder as the slender cylinder blasted out toward the approaching stormtroopers. “Can you get to your speeder?”
There was a short pause, and Shada could imagine Karoly’s earnest face as she pulled herself together. “Yes,” she said. “Are we retreating?”
“Not a chance,” Shada said through gritted teeth, getting halfway to her feet and heading at a crouch toward the bushes where her speeder bike was hidden. “We’re heading in. Get moving.” The approaching stormtroopers, finally presented with a target, opened fire—
Just as the grenade hit the ground ten meters in front of them, exploding into a billowing cloud of green smoke.
“We’re going in?” Karoly echoed in disbelief. “Shada—”
“I’m clear.” Shada cut her off, slinging the rifle over her shoulder and kicking the speeder bike to life. Over the roar of the engine she could hear the thuds of her erstwhile attackers falling out of the sky as the specially formulated smoke burned into the speeder bikes’ power connectors. “Call Cai and Sileen—tell them to bring the ships in for backup.”
“But where are we going?”
Shada swung the speeder bike around. Manda and Pav were gone, and she knew that eventually the pain of that loss would catch up with her. But for right now, she had only enough room for a single emotion.
Rage.
“We’re going to teach the Imperials a lesson,” she told Karoly. Kicking the throttle to full power, she jumped the fence, curved around the edge of the green cloud, and headed in.
It was a little over ten kilometers from the outer fence to the main base area, and for the first eight of them Shada flew low over the rolling hills and wondered where in blazes the vaunted Imperial defenses were. Either they hadn’t thrown this ambush together until Kellering’s ground car pulled up at the gate, or else they’d assumed their quarry would run for it and had concentrated their forces out beyond the fence.
Or else they were concentrating on Karoly. Blinking against the wind pounding against her face, trying not to think about what she might have gotten her teammate into, Shada kept going.
She was two kilometers out when the Imperials seemed to finally wake up to the fact they had an intruder in their midst … and those two kilometers more than made up for the preceding eight. Three Mekuun hoverscouts rose from nowhere to meet her, bolstered by two more squads of speeder-bike stormtroopers. Off to the side, sections of two hills opened up, revealing a pair of what looked like Comar antiatmospheric guns. The air around her was suddenly thick with blaster and laser bolts, some missing, the rest deflected by shields that hadn’t really been designed with this kind of all-out attack in mind. Clenching her teeth hard enough to hurt, Shada kept going, maneuvering and returning fire on pure reflex. Off to her left, she could see another whirlwind of Imperial activity near where Karoly should be coming in—
And then, suddenly, the hoverscouts and speeder bikes seemed to scramble out of her path. The Comar guns shifted their aim away from her—
And with a screaming roar the Skyclaw shot past overhead, spitting a withering fire of laser blasts at the Imperials.
“Kan si manis per tam, Sha,” Sileen’s voice blared from the Skyclaw’s belly loudspeaker. “Mi nazh ko.”
“Sha kae,” Shada shouted back, shifting fifteen degrees to her left as per Sileen’s instructions and permitting herself a flash of cold satisfaction. The Imperials might be able to jam comlinks and slice sophisticated encrypts, but she would bet starships to groundworms they wouldn’t have the faintest idea what to do with Mistryl battle language. To her left, she could see Cai and the Mirage now, running cover for Karoly, and she made a quick estimate of their intersect point. Just over the next row of hills, she decided. Dropping a little lower to the ground, she braced herself for whatever Sileen had sent her toward.
She topped the hills; and there, nestled in a wide valley, was a complex of perhaps twenty buildings, ranging in size from flat office blocks to a single windowless structure the size of a capital ship maintenance hangar. The Hammertong base, without a doubt.
And lying in the middle of it all, dominating the scene by the sheer unexpectedness of its presence there, was the long sleek shape of a Loronar Strike Cruiser.
“Sha re rei som kava na talae,” Sileen’s voice boomed again from above her. Without waiting for an answer, both fighters veered off to the right.
A motion to her left caught Shada’s eye, and she turned as Karoly’s speeder bike slid into formation beside her. “You all right?” Shada called.
“Yes,” Karoly shouted back. She still looked nervous, but at least she didn’t look as if she were going to freeze up again. “What did Sileen say? I didn’t catch it.”
“More Imperials coming,” Shada said. “She and Cai are going to intercept.”
“What about us?”
Shada nodded toward the Strike
Cruiser. “We’re going to make the Imperials hurt a little. Bow hatchway’s open—let’s try to get there before they get it sealed.”
They found out immediately what two of the smaller buildings on the periphery of the complex were for, as sections of wall fell away and four more Comar guns opened fire. But it was too little too late. Between the harassment from the two fighters and the small size and maneuverability of the speeder bikes themselves, Shada and Karoly made it past the hot drive nozzles at the Strike Cruiser’s stern and into the relative shelter of its flank with no damage apart from burned-out shields.
“Pretty rotten security they’ve got here,” Karoly huffed as they headed toward the bow hatchway. An instant later she nearly had to swallow those words as, from the ground beside the landing ramp, a dozen Imperials opened fire with blaster rifles. But the two speeder bikes had the edge in both firepower and targeting accuracy, and they’d covered no more than half the Strike Cruiser’s four-hundred-fifty-meter length before that nest of opposition had been silenced.
“Now what?” Karoly asked as they braked to a halt at the foot of the ramp.
“We do some damage,” Shada said, half standing up on her speeder bike and taking a quick look around. There was still some resistance, mostly from the Comars and the handful of speeder-bike stormtroopers that hadn’t yet been blown out of the sky. She and Karoly should have enough time to make their way to the Strike Cruiser’s bridge, drop a canister or two of their corrosive green smoke where it would do the most good, and get the blazes out again.
And then, over the distant hills ahead, a new group of Imperial forces appeared, burning through the air toward them like scorched mynocks. “Uh-oh,” Karoly muttered. “I take it back about their security. Maybe we’d better get out while we still can.”
Shada took a deep breath, her last views of Manda’s and Pav’s faces floating up from her memory. “Not until we’ve hurt them,” she said, swiveling around and pointing her speeder bike at the ramp. “Stay here long enough to give me a two-minute warning, then you can take off.”
Karoly hissed between her teeth. “Get moving,” she gritted out as she dropped her speeder bike into the limited protection of the ramp and unslung her blaster rifle. “I’ll cover you. Make it fast.”
“Bet on it,” Shada agreed tightly, trying to visualize the standard Strike Cruiser layout as she headed up the ramp. She would have to go forward about ten meters along the exit corridor, then starboard to the central corridor, then forward another twenty meters to get to the bridge. Standard Strike Cruiser complement was something over two thousand crewers; if there was even a fraction of that number aboard who felt like getting in her way … but she would just have to do what she could. She reached the top of the ramp, swerving to the side as she passed under the hatchway arch to avoid the exit corridor bulkhead—
And lurched to an abrupt halt. “Mother of—”
“What?” Karoly’s voice snapped from the comlink on her collar. “Shada? What is it?”
For a moment Shada was too stunned even to speak. Stretched out in front of her, where the command rooms, crew quarters, and combat stations should have been, was a vast cavern of open space, three hundred meters long and nearly fifty in diameter, running all the way from the bow to the main drive section. A heavily reinforced deck had been built across the bottom of the huge room, connected to the outer hull by an intricate spider webbing of support lines and bracing struts.
And extending down the center of the chamber for at least three-quarters of its length was a three-meter-diameter cylinder studded with thousands of pipe connections and multicolored power and control cable linkages. Carefully wrap-protected, just as carefully static-fastened to the deck, all ready for travel.
The Hammertong.
“Shada?” Karoly called again.
Shada swallowed, glancing around. The chamber seemed to be deserted, its crew or workers probably those who’d been shooting at them from the foot of the ramp. To her left, at the far forward end of the chamber, the standard Strike Cruiser bridge had been replaced by a simplified freighter-style cockpit, also unmanned. And from the looks of the status displays—and the way those drive nozzles had been humming when she and Karoly had passed them—it looked as if they’d been running an active status check on the flight systems when the Mistryl attack had interrupted them.
Which meant the ship should be pretty much ready to fly …
“Change of plans,” she told Karoly, swiveling around and gunning the speeder bike forward toward the cockpit setup. “Get in here. And seal the door behind you.”
She was running the start-up procedure at the Strike Cruiser’s helm by the time Karoly joined her. “Mother of space and time,” Karoly breathed, backing up to the copilot’s seat, her eyes goggling at the room behind them. “Is that the Hammertong thing Kellering was talking about?”
“I don’t know what else it could be,” Shada said, mentally crossing her fingers as she eased in the repulsorlifts. A ship this size wasn’t really designed to come this deep into a gravity well … but it seemed to be lifting okay. The Imperials must have added more repulsorlifts while they were gutting the interior. “Get the comm adjusted to our frequency, will you?”
“Sure.” Still keeping half an eye behind them, Karoly sat down and busied herself with the comm. “What’s the plan?”
“The Imperials went to a lot of work to build that thing and modify a ship to transport it,” Shada said, giving the displays a careful scan. For all their arrogance, the Imperials weren’t stupid, especially when it came to hardware as impressive as the Hammertong. If their ground defenses had been low-profile, they were bound to have some heavy space-based weaponry nearby to back it up.
But if it was there, it wasn’t showing up on the displays. Hiding around the horizon? Or could the Mistryl counterattack have caught the whole bunch of them by surprise?
Either way, there was no percentage in waiting around for them to get their seats under their rears. “You got Cai and Sileen yet?” she asked Karoly.
“Almost,” Karoly said, her hands busy on the board. “I’m running a split-freq mix … there we go.”
“Shada? Karoly?” Sileen’s voice came over the speaker. “What in blazes are you doing?”
“We’re giving the Empire a bloody nose,” Shada said. The Strike Cruiser had cleared the boundary of the base now and was starting to pick up speed, leaving what was left of the speeder-bike force behind them.
“Shada—look, we’re all upset about Manda and Pav,” Sileen said carefully. “But this is just crazy. You’re going to bring the whole Imperial fleet down on top of us.”
“They need to know they can’t just go around killing Mistryl,” Shada retorted. “Not without paying dearly for it. Karoly and I can handle it ourselves if you want to leave.”
There was a hissing sigh from the speaker. “No, we’d better stick together,” Sileen said. “Anyway, what can the Empire do to us that hasn’t already been done?”
“I’m in, too,” Cai said. “One small question: Now that we’ve got the Hammertong, what are we going to do with it?”
Shada glanced back at the long silent cylinder behind her, the enormity of what she’d gotten them into belatedly starting to sink in. What were they going to do with the Hammertong? She and Karoly could nurse the Strike Cruiser along for a short flight by themselves, but that was it. Anything beyond that—fancy maneuvering, combat, even basic running maintenance—was out of the question. “We’ll have to ditch the ship,” she told the others. “Someplace close by. Find a way to hide it, then see if we can disassemble the Hammertong into pieces we can put aboard one of our own freighters.”
“Sounds tricky,” Karoly said. “You got someplace in mind?”
“We’ve got company,” Sileen cut in before Shada could answer. “Imperial Star Destroyer, coming out of hyperspace aft.”
“Got it,” Karoly said, swiveling around to the sensor section of the board. “Confirm one Imperial
Star Destroyer. Launching TIE fighters.”
“The base probably called for help,” Shada said, keying the navcomputer. This was it: no second thoughts, no chance of grounding the Strike Cruiser and escaping aboard the fighters. They were committed now. “Cai, Sileen, here comes your course feed-code Bitterness. Make the jump to lightspeed as soon as you can; we’ll be right behind you.”
There was a brief pause. “You sure this is where you want to go?” Sileen asked.
“I don’t see us having a lot of choices,” Shada said. “It’s close, it hasn’t got much of an Imperial presence, and the locals don’t ask a lot of questions.” She could imagine Sileen gazing out at the Strike Cruiser and wondering just how far the locals’ indifference was going to stretch. But—
“All right,” was all Sileen said. “You want both of us to come with you, or should I head out and try to scare up a freighter?”
“That’s a good idea,” Shada agreed. “Go ahead. Cai and Karoly and I can handle this end.”
“Okay. Good luck.”
The Skyclaw flickered with pseudomotion and vanished into hyperspace. “Here we go,” Shada muttered, keying in their course and hoping fervently that the Imperials hadn’t torn the hyperdrive apart as part of the ship’s preflight check. Those TIE fighters back there were getting uncomfortably close, and there wasn’t much margin for error here. “Everything set there, Karoly?”
“Looks like it,” Karoly said, checking over her own board. “You going to let me in on the big secret of where we’re going?”
“No secret,” Shada said, reaching for the hyperdrive levers. “Just a useless little hole in space. Called Tatooine.”
It was not so much a landing as it was a marginally controlled crash; and by the time the Strike Cruiser had skidded to a halt against one of the rippling sand dunes, it was clear to Shada that the ship would never leave there again. Not without a great deal of assistance.
Star Wars: Tales from Mos Eisley Cantina Page 8