The Black Fleet Crisis_ Tyrant's Test Part 12

Praget's vote sealed the outcome, but Leia stood tall and impa.s.sive until the last member of the Council had weighed in. The final tally was five to two against her.

"The pet.i.tion will be reported to the Senate at its next general session, " said Behn-Kihl-Nahm, barely holding a rush of angry words in check. "This meeting is adjourned."

When he rang the crystal, he did so with enough force that it cracked--a crack substantial enough to mute its voice but not severe enough to shatter it.

Behn-Kihl-Nahm did not believe in omens, but he handled the crystal carefully as he removed it from the dais and made certain that no One else saw.

Ambush "Captain! The intruder's soliton wave has vanished!"

Captain Voba Dokrett struck Gorath's navigator a mighty blow across the back. "Emergency stop! Take us back to reals.p.a.ce! Smartly now--it's your first daughter's life if the enemy isn't under our guns when we exit."

Dokrett spun away from the navigator's station and hunted down the gunnery master with his eyes.

"Instruct the blaster batteries to target the intruder fore and aft for weapons, then hole her amidships."

"Sir, shouldn't we disable the intruder first?"

"Bloodprice's ion batteries were ineffective. Dogot went by the book and died. Give the order."

"Yes, sir," said the gunnery master. "All fire stations, attend.

Numbers one and three forward, - acquire tracking and target bow section.

Numbers four and six forward, target aft section. Numbers two and five, rig for hull cutting and stand by."

The gunnery master was barely finished barking the orders when the crossover alarm began to sound and Gorath began to shudder and hum.

"A prize share to every officer if we take the intruder intact!"

Dokrett cried. "For the glory of Prakith and in service to our beloved governor, Foga Brill, I commit this vessel to the fight before us!"

All around Gorath's bridge, display screens came alive as the cruiser plunged back into the sea of electromagnetic energies that was the sublight universe.

"Captain, there is no sign of Tobay," called the sensor master. "If they did not observe the target's soliton change, they will have jumped on ours and overshot the entry."

"How sad for her crew, to lose their prize shares at the ninth hour," Dokrett said. "Range to target!"

"Eight thousand meters."

Grinning broadly, Dokrett clapped his hands on the navigator's shoulders. "Ha! It seems you are a good father after all," he exclaimed.

"Should we wait for Tobay, Captain?"

"No!" he barked. "Fire!"

The gunnery master leaned toward his station.

"Numbers one and three forward, fire! Numbers four and six forward, fire! "

Almost at once and nearly as one, four of the cruiser's eight primary batteries sent fierce pulses of energy lancing toward the great vessel ahead.

There was no fire, nor any explosions, but Dokrett's telescopic scanner showed plumes of debris scattering from black-edged-slashes across both ends of the intruder's hull. "Enough!" Dokret cried. "To the heart of her, now!"

Moments after the gunnery master relayed the orders, the four active batteries fell silent, and the two batteries standing by opened fire The ferocious haft of blaster bolts from their muzzles battered a single spot amidships on the giant vessel until another black-edged hole opened there. Then the focus of the blaster bolts spread into a circle, chewing at the edges of the opening until it was twenty meters across.

"Cease fire!" Dokrett shouted. "That should be enough to keep them busy. Gunnery master, enable all batteries for counterfire.

Navigation master, bring us up alongside. Boarding parties, to your breaching pods!

The prize is nearly ours."

There was no response from the target as Gorath closed on it, moving to within a hundred meters of the opening amidships. At that distance, the great bulk of the vessel--more than five times the length and three times the diameter of the Prakith light cruiser--filled every viewscreen and gunner's port.

"Captain!" called the sensor master. "Something odd--at this distance, with a ship that size the reading from the magnetic anomaly detector should be nearly off the scale. But by the reading I'm getting, I would have said nothing larger than a pinnace was out there."

Dokrett nodded. "Look at the way she burned," he said. "Look at the way she's built. That's not durasteel or matrix armor. Whatever it is, we've never seen its kind before. What do you show for power generation?"

The sensor master waved his hands, frowning in puzzlement. "Field strength is negligible."

"Very well," said Dokrett, much pleased by the answer.

"Open the ports. Away all pods."

In the moment between the opening of the ports and the launching of the first breaching pod, something shot out from the intruder and slammed into the hull of Gorath with such force that it knocked Dokrett to his knees. Alarms began to sound all over the bridge as the impact of a second projectile again made the cruiser shake from bow to stern.

"Fire! Fire!" Dokrett screamed as he dragged himself to his feet. A few scattered batteries were already engaged, though their efforts seemed undirected. "Gunnery master! Destroy those launchers!"

"We're trying. But the angle--we can't bring the mains to bear from here- -" Movement on the starboard viewer caught Dokrett's eye, and he glimpsed the third projectile as it leaped across the gap between the two ships--it seemed to be ball-shaped, trailing a thick cable extending back to the intruder. Gorath groaned under the impact.

"What's happening?" Dokrett demanded. "I want to see what's happening."

"I have something," the sensor master shouted.

One pod had cleared its stowage bay, and the relay from its: viewers showed that all three projectiles had buried themselves in the cruiser's hull. Gorath was now anch.o.r.ed to the vagabond by three slender, undulating tethers at bow, stern, and amidships.

"Navigation!" Dokrett called, wheeling around.

"Break us free! Thrusters full! Stand by, main engines!"

At that moment, two more projectiles erupted from two different points along the hull of the intruder. These were slender and spiked, and they drove themselves deep into Gorath's hull.

There was fear in Dokrett's eyes as he started across the deck toward the navigation master. "Full ahead, now!" he screamed.

But before the captain had covered half the distance to his beleaguered underling, every bridge station exploded in a shower of sparks. Every metal structure of the ship suddenly became part of the path for an enormously powerful electrical current coursing through the tethers from the alien vessel. The current leaped across isolation blocks and vaporized insulators, vaulted across the open air and skipped over the face of the bulkheads, coursed up the legs of crew members and grounded through their faces and hands. In little more than a second, most of the cruiser's systems were slag.

Just as quickly, most of the crew was dead, and those not yet dead were dying--of ma.s.sive burns, paralyzed hearts, and scrambled neural systems. On the bridge, the gunnery master and his chair were fused into a single carbonized sculpture. Captain Dokrett was immolated by a lightning spike that used him as a shortcut from a fire-control vent head above his head to the decking under his feet.

By the time the attacking current ceased, small fires were burning in a hundred places throughout the ship, providing the only relief to the darkness that had abruptly fallen inside Gorath's s.p.a.ces. But when those fires had consumed the available oxygen, the smoke-filled ship became as black, still, and silent as a mausoleum.

The extent of the destruction was not as obvious from the outside.

The commander of Pod 5 and his squad of a.s.sault troops saw flickering discharges through the Open bay doors and scattered viewports, a.s.sessed the crushed hull plates at the impact points, noted the gun turrets going cold, spotted the darkening of the outer hull from spot fires within, marked the unbroken static on the command channels. Still, the ship seemed largely intact.

Then the tethers joining the ships suddenly patted close to the intruder's hull, and the pod commander faced a quick and irreversible choice between following his last orders and returning to the cruiser.

Loyalty weighed more heavily on him than obedience. As the enormous vessel began to move off, he turned the pod toward Gorath. There was one voice raised in protest, but the commander silenced the dissenter with a sharp look.

"The enemy vessel is badly wounded," he said with a savage satisfaction. "See how slowly it moves. Tobay is nearby. We will help our brothers on Gorath, and then together we will hunt that demon down and destroy it."

When the vagabond returned to reals.p.a.ce after the Prakith encounter, the rumbling entry growl seemed to Lando to have edged closer to a howl. He signaled to the others for silence and then listened attentively to the sounds the vessel was making.

"'Is there a problem?" Threepio asked at last.

"I don't know," Lando said. "Get me the database on bioengineered structures and I'll look it up. I don't know if this ship's even susceptible to the kind of fatigue that kills metal ships. Maybe that's why the Qella built her this way--so she could go on forever, indestructible and self- repairing."

"That seems like a reasonable inference," Threepio said.

"Except the mechanisms that do the repairs are just as susceptible to failure, so you need mechanisms that repair the repair mechanisms, and so on. Is everything working as designed? I have no idea."

"Perhaps it was damaged in the attack," said Lobot. "That could account for the altered spectrum of the entry growl."

"How would I know?" exclaimed Lando. "I don't even know something as elementary as what makes her go, what energy source we're tapping when we touch a trigger point. It takes fusion generators to drive a hypers.p.a.ce engine for a capital vessel---everyone knows that, right?

But the radmeter says there are no fusion generators aboard." Lando shook his head. "I'm half ready to throw my hands up and just say it's magic."

"We should learn something in the next few moments," Lobot said.

"The last time the vessel jumped to escape capture, it changed course and jumped out less than fifteen minutes later. If the ship is under the direction of rule-based logic, as I believe it is, it should do so again."

"Of course, we were goosing her with a cutting blaster at the time," Lando said wryly. "Wait--quiet."

Straining at first to do so, both men could pick out a buzzing whine that seemed to come from a point several compartments away. As the ship began to shudder rhythmically around them, the sound swiftly grew louder, drowning out the normal background noises of the vessel and acquiring a destructive- sounding rasp.

"What is that?" Lobot asked, the worry in his tone a reflection of the worry on Lando's face. "It sounds like--" "It sounds like we're under fire again," Lando said grimly.

"Could it be Colonel Pakkpekatt's armada?"

"Not a chance in a billion," Lando said. "Someone must have followed us out from Prakith. Lobot, seal up your suit, fast."

"What about your missing glove?"

"Someone has to operate the portals," Lando said.

"That means bare skin. If we lose pressure, I'll make another sample-bag mitten. But I need you functional in case I don't have time or it won't hold. Hurry!"

By the time Lobot had snapped his helmet in place, the chamber's even glow was flickering. As Lando retrieved an unused sample bag from the depleted equipment sled, the chamber illumination failed entirely.

So had Threepio's courage. He had been clinging to the equipment sled while Artoo scanned and cataloged the displays from the center of the chamber, and now his frantic kicking had started the sled tumbling in slow motion. "Artoo! Artoo, come here this instant. Oh, this is ghastly--my circuits and gears can't bear any more.

Master Lando, you simply must do something. Surely now you will signal Lady Luck."

"Forget it," Lando said, jetting toward the chamber's forward portal, through which they'd entered a short time before. "What I'm going to do is find out what that noise is all about."

But when he pressed his hand against the portal's trigger, nothing happened. He repeated the motion, then turned toward Lobot. "Did you see a one-way sign?"

Tight-lipped, Lobot shook his head.

It was the same at the other end of the chamber.

"We're locked in," Lando announced.

"What does that mean?" Threepio fretted. "You can use your blaster, can't you?"

"Not without knowing if there's atmosphere on the other side, I can't," said Lando.

"This is the limit," Threepio declared. "Master Lando, I insist that you bring your yacht here immediately-" Before the droid could complete his demand, before Lando could voice the rejection that was forming on his tongue, the chamber was filled with a near-deafening wail that was the malignant cousin of the sound they had heard earlier. But the source was much closer this time--no more than one or two bulkheads away.

"Hear the sizzle?" Lando shouted, drifting back from the portal.

"That's the sound a blaster bolt makes when it hits a body, burning the fat and making the water boil--but a million times worse than I ever heard before. Someone's slicing this ship to pieces."

By then, Lando had drawn close enough to the tumbling sled for Threepio to release his grip on it and lunge clumsily toward Lando's nearest leg.

"What the--Threepio, what are you doing?"

Lando demanded, twisting around to see what had struck him.

Then a new sound made Lando forget about Threepio It was the muted roar of an explosive decom-pression--a big rupture, and close by, close enough to make the chamber walls around them ripple visibly in the beams from Artoo's floodlamps.

"Sweet cold starlight--" Lando breathed, slowly shaking his head.

"She's in trouble now. We're all in trouble."

"There is no reason to be fearful," Threepio said brightly. "We are safe now."

"Shut up, Threepio. You don't know what you're talking about."

"Please don't worry, Master Lando. No one needs to worry. I have taken care of everything," Threepio declared proudly.

"What?" Looking down, Lando saw Threepio drifting away into the darkness with Lady Luck's beckon call clutched tightly in the hand of his working arm. Lando grabbed at the pouch where the transmitter had been, as though unable. to believe what the droid had done.

"Do you know what you've done?" Lando said, his tone low and menacing.

"Why, of course. I have signaled Lady Luck to come and rescue us."

"No," Lando said, barely restraining his fury.

"You've condemned us. There's something out there big enough and powerful enough to take on the vagabond and survive. How long do you think Lady Luck will last after she shows up? You've called a crewless ship into a combat zone. She's got no way to defend herself. How did you expect her to get past whatever's out there tearing pieces out of the hull?"