observation port, crossed in two strides to Lando Calris-sian's station at
the long-range scanners. Bands of red and yellow light played upward across
the conman's swarthy features; Lando flicked a calibration switch, altering
the flow of the reflections to show the glitch in the spectrograph readings
that had caused him to send a flag signal up to Han.
"Looks like a heat reading on the fifth planet of that system there.
Damonite Yors B--nothing there, never has been. The graph's cooling fast . .
." He tapped the black bands in the colored spectrum, "...
but those are reactor fuel lines."
Han reached past his shoulder to punch through a more accurate readout and
swore.
"Good thing I brought my mittens." Lando reached to adjust another screen.
"That's sure big enough for the Adamantine. By the heat streak in the
atmosphere they've been down there for about ten hours."
Han was already at the main console, keying the course. "Hang on, Leia," he
whispered. "Don't check out on me now."
Planetfall was a nightmare. The whole atmosphere a whirling wrack of storms,
the Falcon was buffeted and thrown like a plastene plate in a riptide. Han
and Chewbacca worked side by side over the console, fighting ion storms that
struck them in sheets and fritzed out the sensors that were their only guide
to the terrain below'. Han allowed himself to think of nothing, to be aware
of nothing except the elusive spot of heat on the readout--the spot that
slowly dimmed from orange to brown in the hours it took them to struggle
down through titanic gales.
She couldn't die, he thought. He had literally no idea--none--of what he
would do, what would become of him, if she should die.
He couldn't imagine life without her.
Through a millrace of flying atmospheric garbage, the sensors began to pick
out the debris track on the ice below. Most of it was imbedded meters deep
already in the long, hard melt slick where the primordial planetary ice had
been liquified by the passage of the crashing ship, to refreeze within
minutes; a rummage of hull fragments, broken-off stabilizers, deformed
nodules unrecognizable already from atmospheric friction.
The slick ran at a steeply acute angle toward a chasm in the ice, kilometers
deep and nearly half a kilometer across. Han brought the Falcon in low over
it, holding his breath as he followed the trail--It didn't g o over. Tell me
it didn't go over.
The ice slick ended in a shallow vee at the chasm's edge.
"There she is," said Lando.
For a minute Han thought his friend was speaking of Leia herself, rather
than the vreckage of the ship.
There was a ledge that you could have put a small manufacturing plant on,
forty or fifty meters below the edge of the chasm--the drop
was unguessably deep beyond that, and the visibility appalling. The crashing
ship's hull had ruptured when it had gone over the edge of the glacier plain
above, and the whole business balanced near the dropoff to the deeper chasm
like a billion-credit house with a seaside view. A dull rubicund glow showed
where the dying engines lay, through the buckled panels and flying ice.
The serial numbers were visible.
"What ship is that?"
Chewie was already punching them in. The Corbantis, out of Durren orbital.
Reported missing barely two hours before the Falcon had lifted out of
Hesperidium.
Not the Adamantine. Not the Borealis. Han didn't know whether to feel relief
or despair.
It was a fight to bring the Millennium Falcon around for another pass, to
put her down on the lip of the first drop, a dozen meters from the V-shaped
notch where the Orbantis had gone over. They dropped a towline first, using
the notch as a site, so that the weighted end of sixty-five meters of
megafilament cable hung down the face of that first cliff only a short
distance from the wreck. Leaving Lando at the Falcon's controls, Han and
Chewie suited up and went out, following the line across the waste, hanging
on for dear life against the butcher winds that obscured the face plates of
their e-suits with flying ice, and let themselves down the ragged black mess
of frozen cliff toward the dying glow of the wreck.
Even the powerful sodium glare of the e-suits' lights couldn't pierce the
swirling murk to show much of the damage on the ship. Against the howl of
static Han yelled into the helmet mike, "Small craft!" and pointed at the
burn marks that scored the hull. Chewie roared assent.
"You see any kind of Destroyer track on the sensors, Chewie? Anything that
could have carried TIEs or fighters?" The Wookiee demurred.
Farther on, the smashed silvery disk of a shield generator dangled from the
ice- and blast-scarred metal in the wobbling white glow of the e-suits'
light. "That's heavy guns for a planet-hopper, even if you could get one out
this far."
Chewbacca's growl rumbled in Han's earpiece. The Wookiee pilot knew more
about out-of-the-way smuggler bases in this part of the galaxy than the
average miser knew about the contents of his or her creditbox, and Han
believed him when he said there was no place in forty parsecs where a
planet-hopper fleet could have put in.
Great, Han thought. So there's a Destroyer-or a fleet of Destroyers--rovin
around out here someplace. Just what I needed to make my day complete.
The crew they found in the outer holds were dead. Under the white mounds of
frost and ice it was difficult to tell, but Han thought these were men and
women who'd died during the initial battle. In addition to the ruptured
coolant lines and dangling wires indicative of major systems blowouts, the
holes in the outer hull through which Han and the Wookiee climbed were too
huge for the emergency sealant systems to cope with. The blast doors had
shut at once, to save the atmosphere in the rest of the ship, and Chewbacca
had to cut out the switch boxes to manually let himself and Han through.
Beyond, the bodies were simply white with frost. They glittered softly in
the dark, hundreds of them, oriented along the corridors like iron filings
in a magnetic field, crawling inward to the warmer heart of the ship as the
cold seeped through the breached insulation and killed them as they crawled.
They lay facedown. Han was glad of it. He'd seen men and women who had died
of cold, and mostly their faces were peaceful. Still, picking his way among
the corpses like some clumsy intruder in his green plast e-suit, he would
just as soon not see their faces.
Farther in, a few panels still glowed with power, candle-dim spots of amber
or red. Radiation warning lights were on all over the ship, and a garbled
female voice from the tannoy repeated over and over, with the pleasant
persistence of a droid, that radiation levels were critically high, and all
crew members were advised to implement antiradiation procedure D-4 in
mitigation. After seven or eight times through the announcement Han wanted
to find that droid and hammer it into tiny fragments, but it went on as a
demented background to the escalating hell of the search as long as he and
Chewie remained on the dying ship.
There was enough heat now to make their suits smoke--the gauges on his wrist
showed Han that they were just a touch below the freezing point of
alcohol--and the dead were not so thick on the floors. Into his helmet mike
he said, "They're in the reactors."
Chewie nodded. Night caught on the snows of Hoth, Han had slit open the body
of his dead tauntaun so that its lingering warmth might keep his friend Luke
from dying of cold and shock. What remained of the (2orbantis crew, by the
same expedient, had made their way inward, to crouch by the fading heat of
the reactors in a last despairing bid to outlast the cold until rescue could
arrive. This was where Han and Chewie found them, radiation burned as if
they'd been rolled in a supernova, seventeen of them still alive among
twisted heaps of the dead. Two more died during the agonizing process of
loading them onto antigrav tables from sick bay and struggling out across
the windswept waste and up the cliffside to the Falcon with them One by one,
fifteen exhausting journeys that left Han and Chewbacca numb with fatigue as
they rigged salvaged life-support equipment in holds originally stocked with
the smuggled glitterstim and rock ivory that had been Han's stock-in-trade
years ago. On the last of the journeys to get extra stasis fluids and
antishock drugs, Han downloaded the vessel's logs.
"Where do we take them? asked Lando, as he guided the bucking, heeling
freighter up through the insanity of the atmosphere again. Han stood slumped
for a moment in the doorway of the bridge, almost too tired to move. It was
one of the few times he'd seen his friend shocked out of his cockiness,
quiet in the face of catastrophe. Then he crossed to the auxiliary controls,
stumbling with fatigue as he walked. "Hey, I can do this, man," added Lando,
looking up quickly. "You go back there and lie down. Some of those guys in
the holds look better than you do."
Han gave him a universal gesture and dropped into the chair, but beyond this
he made no attempt to help in liftoff. It had taken nearly ten hours to
transfer all the survivors, and he knew he was far too tired to be at the
controls of anything more complicated than a self-conforming chair. Battered
as he felt, it itched him to see anyone handling the Falcon but himself.
"Bagsho is probably our best bet." He shut his eyes, leaned his forehead on
his fists in an attempt to block out the memory of the reactor core, the
huddled shapes of the bodies pressed against one another in the small
pockets of heat from the coils. Most of those who'd survived were the ones
who'd had time to put on some kind of protective clothing, but there were
over a dozen in radiation suits who'd died anyway, blind, burned husks of
flesh. There'd been no chance, none whatsoever, that Leia had been anywhere
on or near that vessel since she'd snipped the ceremonial ribbons at its
maiden launch.
His near-hysterical desire to double-check every corpse in the reactor
chamber, every corpse in the ship, was, he knew, only that hysteria.
But he couldn't stop seeing her there flesh burned purple and slick, hair
gone, eyes gone . . .
He pulled a deep breath and made himself continue, fairly casually, "The
sector medical facility's there, and a small base. At least we can check in
about enemy movements in this sector. I didn't see signs of really heavy
artillery but it takes more than just a couple of planet-hoppers to put out
a cruiser."
"Enemy?" Lando didn't turn his head--he was concentrating hard on keeping
the Falcon from being flipped into eternity by the tearing forces of the
stratosphere, but there was a world of gesture in his voice. "What enemy?
The partisans in Durren? That crazy wildcat pirate fleet or invasion or
whatever it is that's supposed to be hitting Ampliquen? The palace coup
that's going on in Kay-Gee? There isn't . . ."
Something hit the Falcon like the zap of a live wire.
Solo gave a yelp of protest and was diving for the control panel even as the
lurch of impact hurled him off his feet. Behind him down the corridor he
heard Chewie roar. Lando yelled, "What the . . . ?"
and Solo scrambled to hands and knees, almost made it to his feet when
another impact jolted him halfway across the bridge.
"Where are they coming from?"
"There's nothing out there!" screamed Lando, slamming the controls into a
straight-up dive that took them out of the final whirling shrouds of the
atmosphere and into the black of space. Another laser beam caught the
shields and overload lights went on like a red-and-amber Winterfeast display
over the main console. Han was already piling up the ladder to the gunnery
turret, cursing and wondering if this had anything to do with Leia's
disappearance, with the dying battlecruiser on the planet below', or if this
was just some little dividend from bored galactic gods who thought Solo had
had it too easy lately.
There was nothing on the targeting screen.
Another laser bolt hit them and the readout showed a thin patch the size of
a sabacc table in the port underside shield.
Solo cursed and hit the recalibrate switch. At the same moment Lando's voice
yelled in his earjack, "You see 'em?"
Solo saw.
They were like microscopic dust on the monitor--Blast it, those things
couldn't be more than a couple of meters long!" Each was about the bulk of a
laser cannon, barely large enough to accommodate a pilot.
How the blazes did they get them out here? Where was their command base?"
Another jarring impact, and the stars veered wildly as Lando evaded.
ports. Whatever they were, they were painted matte black and bore no lights
at all.
Blast it, they were everywhere! Solo got off a scattering of shots but it
was like trying to hit gnats with a smashball club. At the same time his
hands jammed the controls before him, ratcheting down to the lowest
calibration, trying hard to get a look at the things. "Where are they coming
from?" he shouted again into the comm.
"There's nothing on the scan!" yelled Lando's voice back. "No base, no ship
. . ."
"Well, they sure couldn't come through hyperspace at that size!
Blast it!" Another hit, and the thin patch in the shield was registering as
a hole now. Han tried to get off another couple shots, but Lando was
flipping and swerving the ship to cover the open shield.
Han hoped those guys in the holds were still strapped in tight. Not that any
of them was conscious enough to care.
"Drones?"
"You can't send a drone through hyperspace! And that's no drone shooting!"
The methane storms of Damonite fell away behind them, a glowing acid yellow
disk against the blackness that whirled past the glassine ports as Lando
dropped and cut and dodged. Han wasted another couple of shots and had a
quick look at something as the Falcon swept through a little gaggle of the
attacking ships.
Were they ships at all? thought Han; Did they
have live pilots? He wasn't
sure. They were maybe two and a half meters long and less than a meter
through, fulgin cylinders bristling with the knobs of what looked like
miniaturized laser cannon. What did they have in there, little guys the size
of his thumb?
"Get us outa here!" he yelled, though he knew for a fact that was exactly
what Lando was trying to do.
The tiny ships surrounded them like a cloud of piranha-beetles, whipping and
following every move and quite effectively impeding any chance of breaking
into hyperspace. Another red light went on, meaning another shield had gone.
There was a perceptible jar, and from the gun turret Han saw the white
flicker of lightning spread across the whole surface of the Falcon below and
around him as the shields tried to compensate. At the same moment Lando
yelled in his earjack, "They're not going for the decoy transmissions, so
they can't be drones!"
"I'm gonna clear us a path!" Han yelled back, as a blast of white at the
corner of his eye told him the miniature ships had taken out some part of
the Falcon's upper structures. "Straight through seven by six bearing zero,
punch it on three?
"Han, old buddy, what . . . ?"
"Do it!" At the same moment he hit every fore cannon he had, straight
columns of white destruction flowing out in an almost continuous burst at
seven by six. Like a pittin chasing its shadow, the Falcon followed the path
of the light, faster and faster, Han watching the slow-growing flare of
destruction ahead of them and calculating by feel rather than by
instrumentation when the last possible moment would be to jump without
hurling themselves into their own fire. The little bronze toothpick ships
came pouring back in the wake of the blast, firing at the now-steady target
following the heels of the light.
He counted, "One . . . two . . ." ('This had better work . . .) The last of
the shields went in a flare of white, and red glare bathed Han's face from
the sides, white from the front as the Falcon dove toward the laser ruin
ahead . . .
"Three!"
Lando hit it--he had reflexes like a tingball set--and the stars stretched
into lines of white.
"I never thanked you." Leia stepped through the tall arch that led from her
small terrace into the shadowy chamber. Liegeus, who had come in with a