Star Wars - Black Fleet Crisis 1 - Before the Storm

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  The claw yawned open to its fullest and a moment later touched the bulkhead.

  Nothing happened.

  “More pressure, Artoo,” said Lando.

  The droid's thrusters spat plumes of vapor into the chamber, until its silver body was visibly vibrating.

  “That's enough, Artoo,” Lando said. “Let me in there.”

  “What are you thinking, General?” asked Hammax.

  “That maybe this ship knows it wasn't built by droids,” said Lando, extending his gloved hand to touch the same spot Artoo had tried.

  Again there was no response, even when Lando's suit thrusters exerted themselves.

  “We must have misread the instructions,” said Threepio. “Artoo, could you possibly have turned everything upside down?”

  The little droid's response was indignantly terse.

  “I can't get any real pressure on it,” Lando fumed.

  “Maybe these Qella were stronger than we are, at least under these conditions.”

  “Strength hasn't opened any Qella doors yet,” 'said Lobot.

  Lando twisted around to look at Lobot. “No, it hasn't, has it?”

  Grasping his right wrist joint, Lando squeezed the release and twisted.

  “What are you doing?” Hammax protested.

  “A spacesuit and a droid probably register about the same, wouldn't you say?” With a sharp yank, Lando tugged the glove off his right hand.

  The air in the chamber was bitterly cold, and his hand begun to ache almost at once. Tucking the glove under his left elbow, Lando spun back to face the corner and reached out to touch the bulkhead.

  It retreated under his touch, the surface folding back on all sides until there was a hole in the corner almost as large as a bubble helmet and deep enough that Lando was uncertain whether he could reach the farthest recesses.

  “He did it!” Threepio exulted.

  “There's some sort of handle back here,” Lando said, peering into the opening. “At least, that's what it looks like to me. Artoo, get over here and get a picture for the' folks at home.”

  “General, suggest you reglove,” Hammax said while Artoo attended to that duty. “The handle might be keyed to Qellan biology.”

  “I guess we'll find out, won't we?” Lando said.

  “That's enough, Artoo. Anyone want to retreat back into Lady Luck before I knock on the door? Counting one, two, three—”

  “We're ready here, Lando,” said Lobot.

  “Okay, then.” Drawing a deep breath, Lando reached with his bare hand for the handle deep inside the hole. His shoulder was pressed against the opening before his fingertips brushed it. He had to slip his shoulder inside the hole and press his helmet against the bulkhead to close his fingers around the handle.

  “Got it,” he said. “What do you think, Lobot? Push, pull, twist, lift—” But Lobot never had a chance to answer.

  There was a flash of brilliant blue light outside the portal, and when it was gone, so was the tunnel to Lady Luck’s airlock. In the next instant the atmosphere in the chamber began boiling out into space, sweeping everything and everyone toward the open portal.

  Lando clung desperately to the handle inside the hole, though he lost his grip on the glove and watched it being whisked away beyond his reach. But both Artoo and Lobot were being swept toward the opening, their thrusters unequal to the sudden windstorm.

  The equipment sled, with Threepio perched atop it, spun crazily toward the opening as well.

  The glove, far lighter and moving faster than any of the party, struck the outer bulkhead, rebounded, and tumbled out into space. But bare moments before Artoo reached the opening, there suddenly was no opening. As neatly as the smaller hole had opened under Lando's touch, the portal knitted itself closed from edge to center.

  Artoo , Threepio, Lobot, and the sled all struck an unbroken chamber wall—and then began sliding aft along it.

  “The ship's moving!” Lando cried, feeling the acceleration pressing him more firmly against the aft bulkhead. “Hammax! Colonel! What's going on?”

  There was no answer—not even static. “Anyone on the Glorious, respond!”

  “Lando!” Lobot called. “All of my links are gone. We're not just moving. This ship just jumped into hyperspace.”

  It all happened so quickly that no one witness was certain of all the details.

  Without warning, one of the Qella's beam weapons sliced Lady Luck free from the vagabond. Another pierced the hull of the interdiction picket Kauri and left it in flames.

  As the interdiction field collapsed, the vagabond swung about with surprising swiftness and accelerated away from its previous course.

  The captain of the Marauder screamed for permission to fire—just as the Qella vessel seemed to suddenly stretch to twice its true length and then vanish into a blinding white pinch of spacetime.

  Lady Luck was left drifting, the remnants of the cofferdam trailing from its airlock.

  “Do we have a good track?” Pakkpekatt demanded.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That's something to work with,” he said.

  “Sir, she jumped toward the Core.”

  Pakkpekatt's expression did not change. “Dispatch a crew to recover the yacht. Bring Lightning around to the target's last heading and jump her out ten. We'll go out twenty, Marauder thirty, and then walk it out at intervals of one light-year till we get to the border. She's got to be out there somewhere.”

  “Yes, sir—but how far? She could have jumped all the way to Byss, for all we know.”

  The mere mention of the former Emperor's throne world, deep in the Core, darkened the mood on the bridge still further.

  “Let's hope not, sailor,” said Pakkpekatt. “Let us earnestly hope not.”

  Chapter 12

  Long before they reached Lucazec, Luke Skywalker settled on Mud Sloth as the name for Akanah s previously unnamed Verpine Adventurer.

  He realized he had been spoiled by years in high-performance military spacecraft, operating under wartime conditions or a military waiver.

  But realizing that didn't make it any easier to adjust to civilian navigation restrictions. Not only was Mud Sloth a dawdler in realspace, but its hyperspace motivator simply refused to enter or leave hyperspace within a planetary Flight Control Zone.

  Luke didn't object in principle to FCZ regulations. They helped ensure that less experienced pilots in less capable ships made slow approaches to populated worlds and busy spacelanes. But he had never been subjected to a four-day realspace crawl just to leave Coruscant. He was accustomed to reaching for the hyperdrive moments after his ship cleared the atmosphere.

  Mud Sloth insisted on waiting until it had cleared the star system.

  But there was nothing to be done about it. The Adventurer wouldn't accept his military waiver, and didn't even have a System Configuration option on its cockpit displays. It was designed to prevent such meddling.

  Driven by impatience, Luke briefly considered powering down the hyperdrive and opening up the service access to see what he could do with it. But he soon talked himself out of it, realizing that reprogramming a motivator was beyond his talents as a tinkerer. Even a starship as simple as the Adventurer was far more complex than the Incom T-16s and landspeeders he'd spent so many days hopping and rebuilding back on Tatooine.

  No, when it came to hyperspace, it was too easy for a small oversight to become a final, fatal error.

  Anyone who'd flown for long had heard the stories and respected the danger. Of all the risks inherent in traveling unimaginable distances at incalculable speeds, the one that entered most pilots' nightmares was the one-way jump—never coming out of hyperspace. Even Han and Chewie left the exacting business of rebalancing a motivator to professionals, and never begrudged them their hefty fees.

  But that had left Luke trapped in cramped quarters with Akanah for just over eleven days on the way to Lucazec—something he had not been prepared for.

  After months in isolation, he h
ad not been prepared for that much close contact with anyone. Luke wondered how he would have borne it if Akanah had not been so willing to make allowances.

  She did not force conversation on him, either idle or earnest. Nor did she make him feel as though he was being watched, that she was waiting for him to do something. Without his ever asking, she granted him the only kind of privacy available under the circumstances—the privacy of the mind and heart. She did not intrude there without his invitation, hiding her own needs and curiosity so perfectly that they seemed more like comfortable old friends than strangers.

  At her suggestion, they adopted a watch schedule that had them sleeping at opposite ends of the day, spaced so that neither of them had to climb into a hot bunk. She seemed to welcome the reassurance that someone was awake while she rested, and did not seem to mind that the schedule reduced their time together to a few hours twice a day.

  Luke thought Akanah must be accustomed to being alone, for she seemed to have mastered the art of keeping time moving without restless motion. She read from a battered old datapad, meditated in the copilot's couch, and intently studied the Adventurer's owner, pilot, and system helps.

  At times she even sought privacy for herself.

  Akanah practiced her Fallanassi craft in silence behind the drawn curtain of the sleeper, and stripped to a body-hugging monoskin to exercise only when it was Luke's turn in the zippered bunkbag. She even politely ignored him when he made both discoveries, making it unnecessary for him to apologize, or for her to explain.

  They did take meals together, dipping twice a day into Akanah's modest cache of stabilized foodstores—many of them long-expired Imperial expedition packs, a telltale sign of desperately tight finances. But even meals did not become an occasion for substantive conversation until near the end, with Lucazec visible through the viewport and the reason for their journey too much in their thoughts to be ignored.

  “Sixteen more hours,” Luke said, tearing open a pouch of Noryath brown meatbread. “I hate the waiting. I want to crawl back in the bunk and sleep until the autopilot starts asking whether we want to orbit or land.”

  “If I thought this was the end of our journey, rather than just the end of the beginning, I might feel the same way,” said Akanah, and sipped at her flask of tart pawei juice.

  “Do you think there's any chance the Fallanassi may have come back, after the war?”

  “No,” said Akanah. “You see, the Empire feared us as well as coveted our power. They didn't come down with weapons drawn to round us up, as they did with so many other populations they enslaved—”

  “Yeah, I've seen how they work. But how did they even know you existed? I thought you were a secret sect. Or am I the only one who never heard of the Fallanassi?”

  “You are right, there is a contradiction,” said Akanah. “The explanation is simple, but an embarrassment. We were divided among ourselves about the coming war and what our moral duty was. One of our community, for reasons of her own, went to the Imperial governor and revealed herself.”

  “You were betrayed.”

  “No—no, that's too strong a word. Even though her name is no longer spoken, she had a high purpose in what she did. She believed that by allying ourselves with the Empire, we could be the water that would quench the flame.” Akanah's eyes were touched by wistfulness. “But she was wrong. It was too late for that—the fire was already beyond control.”

  “Well—I don't know why you called it an embarrassment,” said Luke. “The only communities that think with one mind are those that only have one mind. And I haven't met anyone yet who hasn't ever been passionately wrong about something, sometime.”

  “You are generous,” said Akanah, “more generous than the circle was able to be.”

  “It's easier for me,” he said. “I wasn't the one betrayed.”

  She acknowledged him with a nod. “The Empire sent General Tagge to Wlalu—who held the wand of privilege then—to offer us the protection of the Emperor. He said it was important for us to show our loyalty—that that was the only way we could escape the fate of the Jedi. We knew what that meant. The Jedi were being hunted down as traitors and sorcerers, and no one dared openly favor or befriend them.”

  “Forgive me—I don't mean to sound suspicious. But how do you know all this?” Luke asked. “You said you were just a child, and offplanet at the time.”

  “No, I was still on Lucazec when General Tagge came there,” said Akanah. “My mother—her name was Isela--was one of the women who met with Wialu in circle afterward, to decide what to do. And children are not protected from adult concerns in our community, as they are in so many places. Isela told me of the Empire's invitation, and what it might mean to refuse it.”

  “I guess I don't understand, then,” said Luke, trying to remember where he had heard the general's name before. “How did you become separated from the others? I assume the Fallanassi let Lucazec rather than either refuse or accept.”

  “No, that was months later,” explained Akanah. “Wialu did refuse General Tagge. She told him that the loyalty of the Fallanassi was to the Light, and that we would not let ourselves be used to further the ambition of generals, kings, or emperors.”

  “Tagge—I remember now,” said Luke. “He was on the first Death Star when Leia was a prisoner.” He paused, then added, “He was probably still on board when my proton torpedo blew it to bits.”

  Luke didn 't know what possessed him to make that claim before Akanah, and her response made him feel even more foolish for having done so.

  She stiffened as he spoke, and he could feel her withdrawing from him, though she barely moved.

  “Do you seek honor from me for this? In time you will understand that the Fallanassi honor no heroes for killing, not even killing one who has been our tormentor,” said Akanah.

  “I'm sorry,” Luke said, and wondered at his own words. Everything suddenly seemed upside down. It was strange and unsettling that the deed for which he had been so lionized now became touched with regret—regret over the killing of an enemy who had been his own sister's tormentor. That moment had decided both his future and the galaxy's, and he had never, in all the years since, questioned the rightness of what he had done.

  Akanah nodded, and her face seemed to soften. “I will not speak of it again.”

  Luke was happy to leave behind his ill-considered words, and the jumbled thoughts and alarming feelings that had followed them. “How did the Empire respond to Wialu?” he asked. “Is that when you left Lucazec?”

  “No, not until later,” said Akanah. “Tagge tried to force us to come to him by destroying our relationship with our neighbors. Lucazec was an open-immigration world then, and tolerant—or so we thought. We shopped in villages nearest to ours and hired workers from them. Tagge placed agents in those villages, to kill house animals, and set fires, and turn the waters bitter, and make other strange things happen.”

  “And then blame the Fallanassi,” Luke guessed.

  “Yes. The Empire's agents whispered against us, until those who'd been our friends feared us. The workers stopped coming to our village, and three of our circle were attacked when they went to Jisasu for food and to sell our medicines.

  “That was when my mother sent me away--not to protect me, because she and the others could protect the children well enough. But she didn't want to expose me to the hate that surrounded us then. I was one of five who were sent away, to friends on Paig, to schools on Teyr or Carratos.”

  “How many of you went to Carratos?”

  “Only me,” Akanah said. She smiled sadly, her eyes bright with tears. “They were to send for us when Lucazec was peaceful again, or come for us when they headed for a new home.”

  “But they never did.”

  “No. I never heard from any of the body again.” She shook her head. “I don't know why.”

  “And you still don't know what happened?”

  “All I was ever able to learn is that they left Lucazec, that our vi
llage was abandoned and in ruins. I couldn't even find the other children, on Teyr and Paig. I think the circle came for them. I think I was the only one left behind.” She tried to say it matter-of-factly, but the hurt still showed.

  “Or maybe you're the only one the Empire didn't find. Have you considered that?”

  “I have tried not to think about that,” Akanah said, looking past him to the pale brown disk of Lucazec. “I would rather be the only one left behind than the only one left alive.”

  The region of Lucazec that Akanah called the North Plateau had no true spaceport. Luke was directed to set the Mud Sloth down at a quiet little airfield identified only by its latitude and longitude. There he and Akanah were met by three men wearing drab brown clothing so similar one to the next that it might as well have been a uniform.

  They identified themselves as the airfield marshal, the district censor, and the port magistrate. The censor had a small recorder, into which he both spoke and repeated their answers. “Point of origin.”

  “Coruscant,” said Luke.

  “Registry of your vessel.”

  “Carratos,” Akanah supplied.

  “Do you affirm that you are both citizens of the New Republic?”

  “We are,” said Luke.

  “Purpose of your visit.”

  “Research,” said Akanah. “Archaeological research.”

  “No digging is permitted without a license from the proctor of history,” the magistrate warned them. “All artifacts must be submitted to the Office of the Proctor so that the appropriate taxes can be determined. Evasion of antiquities taxes is a state crime punishable by—” Luke made a small gesture, slicing the air with his fingertips. “We are aware of the regulations, Magistrate.”

  “What? Yes, of course,” the magistrate said, and lapsed into silence.

  Luke turned to the shortest of the three men.

  “Marshal, I would like to arrange for my ship to be hangared. I wouldn't want any curious children to accidently injure themselves.”