THE BLACK FLEET CRISIS #3 - TYRANTS_TEST

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  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?"

  "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 thou
gh 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."

  "But that doesn't explain--" Taisden shouldered forward past Pleck.

  "Colonel, I can have the hyperdrive offline in thirty seconds."

  "I doubt very much if you can, Agent Taisden. I also doubt very much

  if you have thirty seconds."

  "Let me try."

  "No," Pakkpekatt said.

  "You think she's going to take us to them," Hammax concluded.

  "The most likely person to have installed the slave circuits is also

  the most likely person to have activated them," said Pakkpekatt. "We

  will know in"--he glanced down at the nav display--"six hours if that

  person was General Calrissian."

  Seconds later, Lady Luck vaulted forward through a tunnel of stars.

  "Where are they?, Captain Gegak screamed at the bridge crew of the

  destroyer Tobay. "Where is the target?

  Where is Gorath?"

  "There is no sign of either ship, Captain," the sensor master

  ventured.

  "I do not detect Gorath's tran-sponder."

  "Idiot! Do you think I cannot read a tracking screen?" Gegak

  bellowed, balling both hands into fists.

  His rage was indiscriminate and comprehensive, leaving no one on the

  bridge feeling safe enough to move or speak. "I am betrayed! One of

  you is in league with Captain Dokrett. Someone has conspired to steal

  our share of the prize."

  Gegak stalked behind the officers at their stations.

  "Who is the thief? Who is the traitor? Is it you, Frega?"

  He seized the hair tuft of the navigation master and used it to roughly

  yank his head backward.

  "Captain, I depend on the sensor master. Not five seconds passed from

  his call before we left hyperspace-" Sensor Master Nillik rose from his

  station before Gegak reached it, and retreated before him with hands

  raised. "I have not betrayed you, Captain. The instruments have

  betrayed me--" With a snarl, Gegak lunged forward and closed the gap

  between them to little more than an arm's length.

  "And who is responsible for the maintenance of your instruments?"

  "I am, Lord Captain--but, I beg you, hear me--" "I hear only the

  whining of a traitor."

  "This ship is old, twice the age of Gorath, and we have had neither the

  prize money nor the blessings of Foga Brill with which to maintain

  it.

  You cannot expect-" Gegak produced a neural whip from inside a fold of

  his bright tunic and brandished it in front of him. "I can expect that

  my officers will not repay the favor I do them with excuses."

  "Captain--please!" Nillik now found himself backed against a

  bulkhead.

  "To track a ship through

  hyperspace is difficult even with the most sensitive installations.

  I was given no time to cool and retune the soliton antennawI could not

  hear the target at all. I was barely able to hear Gorath above our own

  compression wave."

  "You are only making excuses for your inattentiveness."

  "No, Captain--it was not my attentiveness that wavered. The signature

  was so faint that I lost and reacquired it half a dozen times before

  the final loss of signal.

  That was the only reason for my delay. I do not know for certain if

  those ships left hyperspace behind us or continue on somewhere ahead of

  us."

  Gegak growled and stabbed the neural whip into Nillik's abdomen. The

  sensor master screamed and collapsed writhing to the floor.

  "I should have been informed of your difficulties," the captain said,

  returning the whip to its pocket. His voice was suddenly tranquil.

  "You have forgotten the first rule of survival in an autocracy--speak

  truth to power. I hope the pain will help you learn from your

  mistake."

  Then the captain turned his back on the gasping sensor master. "Point

  the bow toward Prakith. Make flank speed. Call the second master to

  the sensing station.

  We will search back to the point where Gorath disappeared from our

  instruments. And I will hear no more excuses for failure. I have

  expended all my tolerance on Nillik."

  Chapter 5

  Luke found it difficult not to step off the slidewalk to pursue Akanah

  and prolong the argument. The thinly veiled threat she had offered as
<
br />   her parting words, suggesting that she might continue on to J't'p'tan

  without him, might withdraw her promise to lead him to his mother's

  people, was not without power.

  But that threat was also nakedly manipulative, and his reflexive

  resentment allowed him both to see the emotional blackmail and to

  resist it.

  It was not that he gave no credence to the threat.

  Akanah's conduct on Atzerri had made clear that She was perfectly

  capable of striking out on her own when her interests so dictated. But

  he had no compromise or concession to offer her. The old, familiar

  demon of Duty had reentered his consciousness during the conversation

  with the shipwright, and he could do nothing else until he either

  answered to his conscience or silenced it.

  There was no point in seeking a rapprochement with Akanah until Luke

  knew his own mind--until he knew if he could allow himself to continue

  the journey.