“But—”
“Just do it,” Luke said. “I want to see how they respond. But be ready to drop shields and fight if they come back for a second pass.”
The LAFs came up from behind, six of them. Four turned to take a firing pass right over the topside of the Watchkeeper, doing a strafing run across her upper deck. Explosions flickered and flared over the decks of the Watchkeeper, but her shields held. The main batteries swung about and poured fire at the LAFs. Two of them flew right into the battery fire before the others peeled off and headed for that same slice of sky.
But Luke had very little time to worry about that. The other two LAFs were on them, sweeping past in a blaze of turbolaser fire, catching both ships with repeated hits; but with shields at maximum, the small lasers on the LAFs weren’t able to do any appreciable damage. Of course, with the shields maxed up, neither ship could fight back, either, but that scarcely mattered just at the moment. The two LAFs swooped past, unmolested—and followed their fellows down the same vector, toward the limb of the planet, which every other enemy fighter had taken. All of them were rendezvousing there now, coming together in a mass formation.
“Now I get it,” Lando said. “That clinches it for me. They are trying to draw us toward that one point at all costs, and they are under very strict orders to do so. There isn’t a fighter pilot living who wouldn’t want to take another crack at two nice big fat slow-moving targets who didn’t shoot back. Luke, you sure five kilometers up and three back is distance enough?”
“Not really,” Luke admitted. “Make it ten and six and re-form at that station-keeping point. But what are they trying to pull us toward?” he asked as he flipped the X-wing around and flew toward the new escort point.
“Got me,” Lando said. “A big cloaked ship, or some kind of minefield, maybe.”
“Except a ship or mines would have to be between us and the fighters for that to make sense,” Luke said, watching the Watchkeeper move forward in leisurely pursuit of its tormentors. “Their fighters just flew straight through that patch of space.” The Watchkeeper sailed on, bringing her main battery to bear on the enemy fighter fleet. She fired again and again, making a lot of hits. “Whatever it is, they’re willing to pay a big price to get a ship to it. But what is it?”
“You’ve got me, Luke. Maybe they’ve got some sort of—”
Suddenly, out of nowhere, a giant, invisible fist slammed into the Watchkeeper. The lower hull slammed upward, pancaking it against the upper hull, as huge sections of ship broke free and flew off into space. Massive explosions ripped through the ship, and merged into a single fireball that completely engulfed it.
“Evasive!” Luke called out, and flipped his X-wing around to boost away from the expanding fireball at maximum thrust. The Lady Luck was beside him, matching the X-wing’s acceleration, but the shock wave of the explosion was moving faster. Luke cut the X-wing’s engines and went to maximum shields a half heartbeat after the Lady Luck did so. The shock wave rushed past the two ships, slamming into them, sending them tumbling off wildly into space before it passed by them. Debris of all sizes clattered into the shield, bouncing the ship around even more.
At last the explosion shock wave was past them, and Luke was able to bring the X-wing back under control. But he could not see the Lady Luck. “Lando!” he called. “Lando!”
“I’m here,” he said. “Behind and below you. Took some hull damage and lost the port sublight engine, but I’m here. You okay?”
“I’m okay,” Luke said. He brought the nose of the X-wing about and looked back toward the point in space where a destroyer had been swatted like a fly. Where the Watchkeeper had been was nothing, absolutely nothing at all. “But what happened?”
“I was about to ask you. Luke—what was that?”
“I don’t know,” Lando. “But I’ve got a very nasty hunch we haven’t seen the last of it.”
* * *
“It is as we feared,” said Dracmus as she watched the main display aboard the Jade’s Fire. “The fools have used it. They have gone ahead and used it.”
“Used what?” Han asked. “What was that?”
“A planetary repulsor,” said Dracmus. “Similar in principle to the repulsors used in spacecraft to make them hover, but immeasurably more powerful. The device itself is buried under the surface of Selonia. There is such a device hidden on each of the planets on this system. It was by use of the planetary repulsors that the long-lost architects of the Corellian system transported the various planets here.”
“What?” Leia said.
“The Corellian system is an artifact, a built thing, Honored Chief of State. Built when, and by whom, and for what reason, I could not say. But it was built.”
“A huge buried repulsor,” said Han. “That was what the Human League was looking for!”
“Yes,” said Dracmus, “though they may well have found it by now. The Dralls and the folk of the Double Worlds are searching for their repulsors as well. We Selonians found ours first, and quickly made it operational. Not surprising, given our skill at underground work. I am told that aiming the device is still quite difficult, which was why that ship needed to be lured to a certain point. But our engineers will soon solve that, I have no doubt. Then we will be able to strike any point in the sky, at will, whenever we choose.”
“We? We?” Han said. “Your people, your den, control that thing?”
“I don’t believe so. But, in truth, I am not sure. My information is old, and the struggle to gain control of it has been tremendous, as you might imagine. The fight over the repulsor got swept up in other issues, and got out of control, until we had something close to civil war, in fact.
“There were two factions. One—mine—calls itself the Republicanists. We sought to use the repulsors as a bargaining chip. We wished to turn our repulsor over to the New Republic in return for a guarantee of Selonia’s sovereignty inside the New Republic and the Corellian Sector government. That was why we wanted to bring you to Selonia, honored Solo. It was hoped that we might use you to open the negotiations.”
“And the other faction?” Han asked.
“Calls itself the Absolutists. Sought to use the repulsor as a weapon to establish absolute Selonian independence. But the issues became so complex, and the fight so desperate, that either side could have used it as the weapon.”
“But there were fighters from all the Corellian worlds here,” Mara objected.
“Yes. Precisely. A huge irony. We have long suspected that all the revolutionary groups—the Absolutists, the Human League, the Drallist Front, all of them—were being coordinated by someone outside themselves. We have proof of that now—but we are no closer to knowing who that outside force was, or what they did it for.”
“It’s incredible,” Han said. “I can’t believe it.”
“But how does it all fit together?” Leia demanded. “What does it have to do with the starbuster plot? Who blew up that first star? And why the race to find the repulsors on the other planets?”
“I don’t know,” said Dracmus. “I don’t know what to think.” She paused a minute and looked toward the screen, where they had just seen the Bakuran ship destroyed. “All I know for certain is that my planet has just declared war on the New Republic.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
On the Clock
Lando replying to Tendra. It’s a long story why, but I only arrived in-system very recently, and have just now received your transmission.…”
Tendra listened to the words, over and over again, her eyes filled with tears. He was here. He was alive. And he was fighting. Relief swept over her, even as she felt renewed fear for his safety. She thought of the long speed-of-light delays that was one of the most clumsy features of radionics. It took hours for a radionic message to get from the inner system to Tendra aboard the Gentleman Caller. What if something had happened in those hours? What if Lando had lived long enough to send her a message, but died in battle before she could hear it? No. No. S
he would not believe it. She would not ever consider it. She had work to do. She had come here with a purpose, and at long last she could act on that purpose. With the radionic link to Lando established, she could send warning of the fleet massing in the Sacorrian system. She had long since composed a detailed message, telling all she knew, but now that the moment had come, she could not resist reading it over one last time. After all, with all the effort she had made, she might as well be sure she got it right.
* * *
Marcha, Duchess of Mastigophorous, rode up the strange silver disk elevator to the surface, Anakin at the controls, as usual. Down below her, the Millennium Falcon was concealed, and Chewbacca was working Ebrihim and Q9 and the twins hard, setting up a snug little underground camp in the huge, hidden repulsor chamber. They would be able to hide out there for quite some time, and be able to study the repulsor in detail. With a little luck, they would find a way to keep anyone else from using it.
But all that was for later. Right now Marcha simply wanted to get up out from underground and stand under the bold night sky of Drall. The disk elevator rushed smoothly upward and inward, to the apex of the huge chamber. The point of the cone opened itself as the edges of the disk merged with the edges of the chamber, and they were moving up a smooth, perfect cylinder, rising out of the ground into a brilliant night, the sky awash with stars.
And more than stars. There, off to the east, Corellia and Selonia were two fat points of light near the horizon. And to the west, floating a bit higher in the sky, the Double Worlds of Talus and Tralus, with Centerpoint Station so tiny a fleck of light Marcha was not sure if she saw it, or simply imagined that she did.
“They’re out there somewhere, aren’t they?” Anakin asked, taking Marcha by the paw and leaning into her a bit.
“Yes, dear, they are,” she said, wrapping her free arm around him. “Your parents are out there, I am sure of it, working and fighting and struggling to set things right.”
Anakin nodded thoughtfully. “They always do,” he said. “Is that why we have to stay here? So we can help them by figuring out this repulsor thing?”
“Yes, dear,” said Aunt Marcha. “That’s it exactly.”
“Gee,” said Anakin. “I sure hope we don’t let them down.
* * *
Somewhere out on the edges of the Thanta Zilbra system, Wedge Antilles brought his Enhanced X-wing in for a landing on the flight deck of the Naritus, and wished to the devil he had an enemy he could shoot at. Instead, they were evacuating people from a whole star system, just because the paranoids at NRI had heard some crazy rumor. The story was that someone had blown up one star, and was threatening to blow up Thanta Zilbra next, and then some other star—and it seemed to Wedge that the rumor mill had named practically every star in the Galaxy as being the next on the list.
It all sounded absurd on the face of it. How the devil would anyone go about blowing up a star? Zero hour was less than twelve hours away now, and there had been no sign of anything happening. And what about the rumors that the Chief of State was caught up in the middle of it, in serious danger? Wedge hoped that part of it was wrong. He knew how much the New Republic needed Chief of State Organa Solo—and he knew how much Leia meant to Wedge’s friends Han and Luke.
But the scuttlebutt about Leia was a rumor, nothing more. Some of the fliers in his squadron had heard that the whole exploding-star story was a fake, though none of them could name any source beyond the usual friend of a friend of a buddy who knew someone who heard something in the staff canteen. Wedge ignored it all. Rumors were not his department. His job was to follow orders, and at the moment that meant flying evacuation support missions—a few in his X-wing, but most passenger runs in a small runabout. He also had to ride herd on Rogue Squadron, and keeping that bunch of loose cannons under control was no easy task.
They were keeping him busy on this one, but that was to be expected when the fleet mission was to evacuate every single sentient being from the entire Thanta Zilbra system—including those who did not want to go.
Those were headaches enough without wasting time worrying if orders made sense. At least he was flying fighters again. For a while there, it had seemed as if he had been drawing every duty but the one he was best at.
Not that running courier jobs and running emergency spares to transports was the most exciting kind of flying. But at least it was nearly over. The fleet was supposed to jump into hyperspace no later than one hour before zero hour. Another shift and a half, and it would all be over—and more than likely they’d have to move everyone off the transports back to their homes, with apologies all around for the inconvenience. Of course, a fair number of the people of Thanta Zilbra had saved them the trouble. Unable to believe there was any danger, they had simply refused to go. A fair number of the New Republic representatives trying to convince them were not all that convinced themselves, and that didn’t help matters.
But enough of all that, just for the moment. He needed to unwind, at least a little bit, before he went back out. He popped his canopy and pulled himself out of the fighter. He waited for the ground crew to bring in the egress ladder, then climbed down out of his ship.
He went to the pilot’s ready room, stripped out of his flight suit, treated himself to a very brief but very needed shower, and got into a fresh set of coveralls. Thus refreshed, and feeling a bit restless, he decided to wander over toward the operations center to see what had gone wrong while he was out on patrol sorting out the last foul-up.
The Naritus was the flagship for the three warships and eight large transports involved in this mission, and the ops center was the nerve center for the whole operation. It was from ops that ships were dispatched and recalled, from ops that the word came to try this solution instead of that, or just to give up and go on to the next problem. It was from here that the fleet officers placed their comlink calls to the leaders of this mining outpost or the captain of that in-system freighter, urging them, cajoling them, pleading with them to get out now, before it was too late, before disaster struck. It was from here that the mission commanders tried to smooth things over aboard the overcrowded transports. There had already been fights and one or two near riots. Tempers were running hot.
Wedge arrived at the ops-center hatch, punched his access code into the keypad, and the hatch slid open. He stepped inside—and instantly noticed something was wrong. Ops was calm. Quiet. Usually it was a madhouse, people tearing around, trying to manage the flow of ships and refugees and information.
But something had happened. And he realized it was not calm that had brought the room to silence, but horror. Everyone in the room, without exception, was staring at one or another of the monitor displays.
No one was bellowing orders into headsets, or punching commands into control panels, or flipping back and forth through a dozen com frequencies to hear from all the participants in a given crisis. None of them were doing anything but staring. Wedge looked from one face to another and saw the same expression. Dumb shock, disbelief, astonishment, terror.
Wedge hurried over to the fighter communications station. “Parry, what is it?” he asked the duty officer.
Parry shook his head and pointed at the main display screen. “The star,” he said. “None of us believed it. Not us, not the people on the stations we were supposed to evacuate. But it just started to happen. Look at it. Look at it.”
Wedge turned and looked at the infrared image of the star’s disk. Only an hour before, it had been a placid, featureless blob, with nothing more threatening than a sunspot or two to blemish its appearance.
Now it was a roiling, tortured inferno, bubbling over with flares and spicules and prominences, its surface churning away so violently that Wedge could see the movement as he watched. “It’s going to blow,” he said. “It’s really going to blow. I didn’t believe it could happen. I don’t believe it.”
“And now what do we do about all the people who believed as little as we did?” Parry asked.
&nbs
p; Wedge stared at the monitor screen and frowned. “We have to go back and get them,” he said.
* * *
Wedge lost count of the number of missions he flew that day, all of them in the runabout, most of them with the ship way over its authorized carrying capacity. One look at the change in their sun, and suddenly everyone was convinced it was time to go. Back and forth he went to the settlement on Thanta Zilbra, jamming as many warm bodies as he could into the craft before lumbering back into the sky. The landing fields were chaos, so bad it was hard to find a place to land, and his runabout was repeatedly mobbed before he could even get the hatches open.
The Naritus was not in much better shape. They did not have the time or the available ships to transfer civilians to the transports, and they were overcrowded anyway. Somewhere in the nightmare fog of that day, he heard a voice over his headphones, a voice at ops confirming what Wedge already knew: the information given to the mission planners badly undercounted the population of Thanta Zilbra.
All he could remember later were faces, images, moments. There was no way to assemble anything like a complete, orderly chronology. A crying child in her mother’s arms, another baby thrust aboard his craft by a father who could not get aboard himself, the stale smell of too many bodies jammed into too small a space, the stink of fear in the air. Doing an overflight of a fire burning out of control in the middle of the Thanta Zilbra settlement, nosing his runabout through a throng of hysterical refugees piled onto the flight deck of the Naritus, making it impossible to continue operations. The voice of a stranger, some other pilot somewhere else in the operation, coming into his headphones, softly singing a lullaby. Was she aware she was singing? Was she trying to soothe herself, or some terrified child jammed into her spacecraft?
An old man, sitting on a box in the middle of the landing field, flatly refusing to leave, despite the pleading of his family. Was he determined to give up his spot to someone who had longer to live, or was he just stubborn, or crazy, refusing to believe in any danger that required him to leave his home? Smashed-open luggage, the most precious belongings of a lifetime abandoned on the landing pad, some of them forcibly discarded when the owner refused to believe it was a choice between his suitcase and someone else’s life.
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