the same way the LAFs were." "A tractor beam, then," Leia said. "We could
set that up and- "And what? That ship isn't all that much smaller than this
one. The tractor on this ship doesn't have a tenth the power to hold that
ship. If we tried it, more than likely they'd pull us down instead. I'm
sorry, Leia. There's nothing at all we can do." Deep in her heart, Leia knew
Mara was right. But it felt wrong to give up without a fight. They had to do
somtgt;ihing, "Stay close," Leia said. "Get as close as you can without
getting into the debris cloud and take up station keeping." "Leia, there is
nothing we can- "Suppose they get temporary control, or slow just enough
thai they can abandon ship?" Leia asked. "We need to be close enough to get
in and help." Mara hesitated a moment. "All right. But we won't be able to
hold station keeping long. We're about five minutes from atmosphere right
now, and once we hit it-well, that will be the end of things." Leia knew
that. Without shielding, without braking from the engines, the coneship
would turn into a meteorite, a streak of fire that burned across the sky
before crashing in the planet. "I'll stay close as long as I can," Mara
said. "But it won't be long." "Do it," Leia said. But even as she urged Mara
onward, she wondered why. What good would it do to watch from closer in as
her husband was incinerated? "Out!" Han shouted at Salculd as he came up out
the hatch to the command deck. "Out of pilot chair now! I take over." "But
what are you- "No time!" he snapped. He sealed the hatch, just in case they
lived long enough to worry about air leaks. "I must take over. No time to
explain what to do. Out! Move!" Salculd moved, undoing her seal restraints
and bailing out of the pilot's station. Han dove into the vacated seat and
checked the status board. Good. Good. Repulsors showing full power in
reserve. "Switching on rcpulsors!" he announced. He adjusted them for their
tightest beam and maximum range. "Honored Solo! The repulsors cannot work at
this range!" Dracmus said in Basic. "They arc only effective within two
kilometers of surface!" "I know that," Han said. "They need something to
work against before they can set up a repulsion effect. But at these speeds,
they'll encounter a fair amount of resistance from the top of the
atmosphere. I know, I know, not enough to slow us down-but enough to start
large power transfers through the feedback dispersal loop." "But what good
does that do?" "I've taken the disperser out of the loop and run the cables
through the initiator, power intake on the engine power system. The feedback
energy is just accumulating in the repulsor system. When the power level is
high enough, I'll reset the feedback power breaker and dump the energy right
into the initiator intake on the engine power systems." "What?!" "Jump-start
it," Han said. "I'm going to jump-start it." There was a moment of dead
silence in the control cabin before Dracmus let out a strangled moan and
covered her face with her hands. "What is going on?" Salculd demanded in
Selonian. "I go to start engines by accumulating repulsor feedback power and
dumping through initiator manifold," Han replied. "But feedback buildup will
destroy repulsors!" "Get even more destroyed by crashing into Selonia," Han
said in his awkward Selonian. "This not work and you have idea, you try
yours. Hang on." The idea was crazy. Han knew that. But not doing anything
at all would be crazier still. Even a million-to-one shot was better than no
chance at all. He watched the feedback charge accumulator display as the
excess energy built up in the repulsor system. The more power, the better
the chance of restarting the engines-unless he accumulated so much power the
repulsors simply blew out. The closer they got to the planet, the more
resistance the repulsors encountered, and the faster the feedback
accumulated. But of course, the farther they fell, the less time they would
have to put on the brakes, if and when the engines did light. Han knew that
even the maximum power output he could hope for would be borderline minimum
to get the sublight engines going-and he was going to gel exactly one
chance. Whether or not this stunt worked, it was going to blow out the
repulsors and the feedback accumulator and half the other systems on the
ship. Han checked his estimated flight path meters. Twenty seconds from the
average top of the sensible atmosphere-though the tops of atmospheres had a
nasty habit of not being where they were supposed to be, raising and
lowering depending on storms and tides and solar heating. But twenty seconds
was the outside, the longest he could possibly wait. The repulsors were not
likely to provide much more charging of the accumulator if they were being
melted off. It was going to be a tough call, a threading of the needle
between competing disasters. Han checked the altitude and acceleration
displays. The coneship was gathering speed, terrifying speed, with every
second. Even if he got the engines lit, there might not be time to slow the
ship before piling it in. "Honored Solo! Hull temperature suddenly
increasing!" Salculd cried. "Atmosphere's here a little early!" Han said.
"Hang on! We're going to jump this thing and see what happens." One chance,
Han told himself. Exactly one chance. For a fleeting moment he thought of
Leia, watching from the Jade's Fire and unable to do anything. He thought of
his three children, off somewhere in the care of Chewbacca and Ebrihim the
Drall. No. No. He could not die. Not when they ali needed him. One chance.
The ship bucked and shuddered as the atmospheric buffering shook it hard
enough to get past the inertial dampers. One chance. Han waited as long as
he dared, then one moment longer, then one more. And then- He slammed down
the relay reset switch as hard as he could, dumping all of the feedback
energy directly into the engine start manifold. He stabbed down on the
engine start button-and felt a horrifying lurch, just as a low, rumbling
explosion shook the ship from base to apex. That would have to be the
repulsors blowing. For a long, sickening moment, nothing else happened. But
then the engines now certainly arc initiated kuij.y indicator came on, and
Han had three good engines. Three? Not four? One of them must have been
blown out by that LAF fighter. Han had been afraid of that. But even if he
had one less engine than he had hoped for, that was three more than he had
expected. Ignoring all his own advice on the subject, he brought the
throttle up fast. There wasn't time to nurse the engines. There was a
distant bang and sudden flurry of violent vibrations that faded almost
before they started, but the engines were holding. At least for now. At
least for now. Han watched the acceleration meter, the velocity gauge, and
the none-too-reliable altitude meter. For a wonder, the displays were all in
standard units, and not some obscure Selonian format he had never seen
before. But what he was seeing was by no means reassuring. He had flown
enough reentries to know at a glance that they were far from out of trouble.
The best they were going to manage was a controlled c
rash. Han risked a
glance out the viewport and saw that the Jade's Fire was still staying
close, somehow. Mara was some kind of pilot. Now if only he had a view that
would show him the direction he was going. Unfortunately, the ship was
flying stern-first, and the stern holocam, which might have shown him at
least a vague idea of where he was heading, had given up altogether at some
point in the proceedings. On the bright side, air friction was slowing down
the ship's axial spin. Finally it stopped altogether, which at least made
piloting the coneship that much easier. It was about time something got
easier. Han watched his velocity and altitude gauges, and knew just how much
trouble he was still in. He had to shed some more speed. He had no choice in
the matter. There was a way to do it, but it had its own drawbacks. And
making it work without maneuvering thrustcrs was not going to be easier. He
would have to do all his steering by playing with the thrust of the main
engines-not simple when he was already juggling their thrust vectors to
compensate for the missing engine. Still, it was doable. Maybe. He eased
back just a trifle on the thrust to number three engine, and the coneship
slowly pitched back, until it was flying at about a forty-five-degree angle
of attack. It was still falling straight down, but now its nose was pointed
an eighth of a turn away from the vertical. If Han had it figured right,
that ought to start the coneship developing a bit of aerodynamic lift, in
effect causing it to work like an airfoil. The coneship began to move
sideways as well as down, and every millimeter of lateral movement came
straight from the energy of their f all. The ship began to bang and shudder
violently, but every crash and rattle was that much more excess energy
expended. "Honored Solo!" Dracmus protested above the racket, "You have put
us in lateral flight! Where are you taking us?" "I haven't the faintest
idea," Han said. "But we have to go lateral to shed some speed." "But
suppose we land outside the zone controlled by my Den?!" "Then we have a
problem," Han shouted back. Dracmus did not reply to that, but she had a
point. Landing completely at random on a planet in the midst of civil war
was not exactly prudent. Han pushed it from his mind. The job of the moment
was getting this thing down in one piece. Down where, they could sort out
later. He checked his gauges. They were still falling like a rock-but like a
slower rock, a gliding rock. And hull temperatures were actually falling,
just a trifle. Maybe, maybe, they were going to make it. Of course, landing
on the sublight engines, rather than on the now-dead repulsors, and landing
blind would be challenges in their own right. It would be at least another
ninety seconds before he had to worry about such things. He checked the
gauges and shook his head. The lateral flight trick was slowing them down,
but nowhere near enough. At this rate, they'd be lucky to drop below the
speed of sound before they hit. There was no way around it. He was going to
have to get something more out of the engines. What about that fourth
engine, the one that had refused to light? Maybe it was just its initiator
link that had been blown off. Maybe the engine itself was still there, if he
could just get it to come on. Maybe if he tried a parallel backfeed start.
With the other engines up and running, he could borrow part of their energy
output and back-flush it through the unlit engine. It might work. Han reset
the power flow from the number two engine, routing five percent of it
through the initiator lines to engine three. He stabbed down the button
marked
PRESSING HERE WILL CAUSE ENGINE NUMBER FOUR TO START.
A weird high-pitched squeal cut through the clamoring roar that filled the
command deck, and the cone-ship began to oscillate wildly as the engine lit
and died and lit and died. A display indicator came on, announcing ENGINE
FOUR NOW OPERATING NICELY, but It went out again, then popped on and faded
one more time before coming back on and staying that way. Four engines. He
had four good engines. He might come out of this alive-after all. But then
he checked his altitude, and found good reason to doubt it. They were only
three kilometers up. Han realized that he would have to shed all of his
lateral speed immediately if he was going to set this thing down. He pitched
the ship around until it was flying flat on its side, the thrust axis
parallel to the ground. The planetary horizon swooped into view and kept
going right past, until Han was flying exactly upside down, his feet pointed
at the sky and his head pointed at the ground. He throttled all the engines
up to maximum, and just a bit beyond, and held it there, until the ground
stopped rushing past from side to side and was simply coming straight at
him. Zero forward velocity, or close enough. But plenty of velocity in the
direction of down. Han pitched the concship over again, until he was flat on
his back, looking at the sky, and made sure the engines were cranked up to
maximum power. There was nothing else he could do. "Hanging on!" he shouted
in Selonian. "Be strapped in and braced. We are going to be hitting hard!"
Green lights started to flash all over the propulsion status display. In
most ships that would have been a good thing, but not on this crate. To a
Selonian. green was the color of danger, disaster. The engines were running
full out. at or beyond the point of catastrophe. Han wanted desperately to
see if he could bully or tempt just a little bit more out of them, but did
not dare. No point in coming this far just to have the ship detonate a half
kilometer off the ground. Maybe, maybe, they had slowed down enough to make
this a survivabie crash. Han cut power to all systems and diverted it all
into the inertial dampers. There was no way the dampers could absorb all the
energy of impact, but they would soak up some of it. Maybe if they were
running at max power, it would be just enough. And that was it. That was
all. There were no tricks left. Nothing left to do but hold on and watch the
numbers in the altimeter evaporate. Han had not the faintest idea where they
were about to land. There had not been time, in his one quick glance at the
ground, to do anything more than see that it was there. He had seen water,
flat land, and some good-sized hills, but which of them he was about to hit,
he had no idea. One kilometer up. Eight hundred meters. Seven hundred. Five
hundred. Four hundred. Three fifty. If only the repulsors were still
working. Too bad he had been forced to fry them to a crisp starting the
engines. Three hundred. How accurate was that altimeter, anyway? Two
hundred. One fifty. One hundred meters up. Seventy-five. Fifty. Han braced
for the impact and resisted the impulse to shut his eyes. Zero. Negative ten
meters. Not all that accurate. But every extra meter was another fraction of
a second for the coneship's engines to slow them down. Neg twenty. Neg
fifty- SLAM!! A hundred crazed banthas jumped onto Han's chest all at once,
driving him down into the padding of the pilot's flight station. Dracmus
s
creamed, a startling, high-pitched ululation. A metal bulkhead tore itself
apart somewhere in the ship with a terrible metallic shriek, and a dozen
alarms started hooting at once. The overhead viewport held together,
somehow, and Han could see the sky was filled with smoke and steam-and mud.
Huge gobs of sodden earth splattered down on the viewport, covering it all
but completely. Han hit the alarm cutoff, and was astonished by the sudden
near-silence. But for Dracmus moaning in fright, and the plopping sounds of
the last of the mud raining down on the ship's hull, all was quiet. They
were down, and alive. A sudden flurry of water, falling in a single thin
sheet of droplets, fell on the ship, washing some-but far from all-of the
mud off the viewport. Han got to his, feel, feeling more than a little
wobbly. "That one was close," he said in Basic, to himself as much as
anything. "Come," he said in Selonian. "We must leave ship. Might be-" He
stopped dead. Half his Selonian seemed to have faded away, at least for the
moment. After that close a call, it was a wonder he was calm enough to
remember his own name. But he couldn't think of the words for "chemical
leak," or "fire." or "short circuits." "Bad things," he said at last. "Might
be bad things on ship. Must leave now." The two Selonians, both of them
clearly shaken up, got to their feet and followed Han down the ladder to the
lower deck and over to the main hatch. Han punched at the open button, and
was not the least bit surprised when nothing at all happened. The ship they
had risked their lives to land, the ship that the Hunchuzuc needed so badly,
was a write-off. A complete loss. Han knelt down, fumbled with the access
panel for the manual controls, got the cover off, and turned the hand crank.
The hatch swung reluctantly open, and jammed up twice before it swung wide
enough for them to get out. Han stuck his head out first and looked around.
It looked like they had landed square in the middle of a shallow pond-and
splashed it dry on impact. The bottom of the pond was completely exposed,
but for one or two puddles here and there. The mud was steaming here and
there, letting off the heat produced by the ship's impact. It was a
beautiful, perfect spring day. Somehow, the picturesque meadows and
Showdown At Centerpoint Page 4