Luke reached out and shut down the hyperdrive, silencing most of the alarms. Lando pulled the ship out of its tumble and hit a series of reset commands, quieting the last of the alerts.
Luke let his friend work. He could sense something, a huge and powerful disturbance in the Force. He closed his eyes and reached out with his Force senses.
"What was that?" Lando demanded, when he finally had the ship put to rights. "What maniac would put an interdiction field way out here in the middle of nowhere?"
"Not out here," Luke said as he opened his eyes. "In there." He pointed through the viewscreen toward the stilldistant point of light that was the star Corell, at least two months' travel away at sublight speeds. "It's very weak, and very subtle, but I can feel the way it interacts with the Force. We've just hit the fringes of an interdiction field that covers the whole Corellian star system."
"Are you nuts?" Lando asked. "No one could build an interdiction field that big. No one."
"Well someone has," Luke said. "It's here. We've just run into the edge of it."
Luke reached out again, this time trying not to sense the shape of a field in space, but the feel of the minds in the Corellian System. He did not try to reach any one mind, but instead to get some overall sense of emotion. Even at this extreme range, he ought to be able to get something.
But the power of what he got back astonished him. Hate, fear, revenge, anger, terror-all the dark emotions were running wild in the minds of the Corellian System.
"Lando," Luke said, "turn this ship around. We're not more than a few hundred kilometers inside the interdiction field. Fly us back out of the interdiction field in normal space, and then set a lightspeed course for Coruscant. We need to go for help. Now."
Lando seemed about to protest, but then he stopped.
`You're right," he said. "You're absolutely right." He took up the controls, and began turning the ship around.
"Hurry, Lando," Luke said.
Luke looked out the viewport again, to the gleaming light of Corell. "Hurry," he said again.
"I've got a bad feeling about this."
TO BE CONTINUED
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Roger MacBride Allen was born in 1957 in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He graduated from Boston University in 1979.
The author of a dozen science fiction novels, he lived in Washington, D.C., for many years. In July 1994, he married Eleanore Fox, a member of the U.S. Foreign Service. Her current assignment takes them to Brasilia, Brazil, where they will live for the next two years.
The End
Star Wars - Ambush At Corellia Page 33