The Black Fleet Crisis_ Tyrant's Test Part 14

"Thanks," Lando said, catching it cleanly with his bare hand. "I'll bring it back."

"Is every gambler always sure that the next draw's a winner?" Lobot asked. "If you make it back, you can look for me in here." He jerked a bare thumb in the direction of the portal behind him.

"I'll do that," Lando said, jetting toward a portal on the opposite side of the chamber. "If you want to help me out, you might try blazing your path with the paint stick. The ship might be too busy with other things just now to get around to wiping the marks."

"I will consider it," Lobot said. As soon as Lando disappeared through the opening with a wave, Lobot turned to Artoo-Detoo. "Go get Threepio and bring him here."

Artoo released the equipment grid and dove toward the portal, chirping his relief and approval.

"Don't spare the propellant," Lobot called after him.

Alone, he removed his right glove and his helmet, clipping both to the equipment grid. Bending his neck forward, he reached up with his bare hands and lightly caressed the edges of the Hamarin interface band, his fingertips playing briefly over the attachment release at the back of his head.

The interface had never come off in thirty-four years, not for maintenance upgrades, nor for sleep, nor for vanity. It did more than connect Lobot with a universe of interlinked data resources and control interfaces.

The band had become a secondary link between the halves of his own brain, supplementing the corpus callosum so as to allow him to process the tremendous flood of data that pressed in on his awareness. His fingers knew it as part of the familiar and ordinary contours of his head. His mind no longer recognized a boundary between biology and technology; his integrated consciousness bridged both.

Even so, this time, his fingers were exploring the interface as an object apart--and he was wondering what it would be like not to find it there, either with his hands or with his thoughts.

Outside chamber 228, as elsewhere, the inner face of the vagabond's inters.p.a.ce--the open area between what Lando thought of as the ship proper and the outer hull--was covered with hexagonal cells containing sculpted Qella faces. It seemed to Lando that the entire ship must be tiled with them.

As he jetted past the unbroken and unending bas-relief, Lando wondered how many faces there were, and whether each was unique. When he contemplated the numbers, it became almost unthinkable that it was a portrait gallery, that each represented an actual individual-long dead, in all likelihood, and perhaps remembered nowhere else but here.

There must be hundreds of thousands--perhaps millions. I'll have to ask Lobot or Artoo to calculate it, Lando thought. Who could have made them all? Just gathering and organizing them into this collage would have been a monumental task. How were they made?

Are they like the rest of this ship, almost alive?

The Qella watched with impa.s.sive eyes as he pa.s.sed, more sanguine about Lando's presence than he-was about theirs.

And why are they here? All that work, and who would see them? The discovery of access portals to the inters.p.a.ce did not alter Lando's impression of the inters.p.a.ce as a private place. They gaze outward as if the outer hull weren't there, as if they're held in trance by something they see lying beyond, as if they all share the same thought.

Was it infinity? Eternity? Mortality?

Soon after entering the inters.p.a.ce, Lando discovered that the inner hull and outer hull were connected by slender stringers. Crisscrossing and arrayed in a continuous row, they st.i.tched the two hulls together with an open pattern of diamonds and triangles, like a series of X's.

The smallest openings were large enough for Lando to pa.s.s through easily. Lando suspected that the stringers encircled the entire inner hull, like the spokes of a velocipede wheel--a single structure serving as strut, s.p.a.cer, and shock mount.

As he continued forward, Lando encountered a second ring of stringers and learned they had another function.

For this row was a solid barrier, with membranes closing the s.p.a.ces between the strands, sealing off the next section of inters.p.a.ce. The obstacle drove Lando back inside the ship at chamber 207.

Forward from that point, the portals leading to the inters.p.a.ce were still illuminated by glow-rings but sealed tight. Although none of them would open to Lando's touch, the center of those he tried to open transformed into a hexagon of the same transparent material they had seen in the auditorium. In chamber after chamber, the viewports allowed him to glimpse the reason the portals would not open--a gaping slash in the outer hull that started at chamber 202 and continued forward nearly to the bow.

When Lando peered out into the inters.p.a.ce, he saw stars.

Even though the giant transparency was opaque, the best view of the damage was from the auditorium.

Looking through a previously unknown portal, Lando could see that the attacker had come close to shearing the bow off the vagabond. The burn patterns were familiar and distinctive--the damage was the result of the pulsed output produced by a capital ship's batteries.

This is what we heard, Lando thought, keying the suit's comlink.

"Lobot, are you there?"

"Listening."

"I'm in the auditorium," Lando said. "There's a big hole along the starboard side, and everything forward of here is a wreck. The last few pulses punched all the way through her, opening up a smaller hole in the far side. The whole section is sealed--I can't get any closer to the damage without cutting my own door, which I don't need or want to do."

"Is there any indication that the breach is being repaired?"

"It's hard to tell," Lando said. "There's so much hull missing, and I can't get enough light on the closest edges. I'll probably have to wait here a while to know."

"Is there any sign anyone has come aboard?"

"No sign I can see. It's pretty clear they were going after the weapon nodes," Lando said. "Which means they must have seen her fight before, most likely at Prakith."

"Can you see anything of the vessel or vessels that attacked us?"

"Not a hint. From the angle of incidence, I'd say they were well aft of us when this started. Lobot--the orrery is gone."

"No!" Lobot protested. "Gone or inactive?"

"Gone. Destroyed. The whole shadow-box chamber would have been filled with bolt scatter after the initial burn-through. Everything that wasn't swept out in the decompression's been vaporized."

"Perhaps it will regenerate."

"From what? There's nothing out there. No, it looks as if you and I are going to be the last to have seen it."

"That is dismaying," said Lobot.

"No telling from where I am, but I'd guess there are a few thousand fewer portraits in the gallery, too. Probably came close to losing this chamber."

"How long do you plan to stay and observe?"

Lando glanced at his chronometer. "I'll give it twenty minutes. If I can't see some activity by then, I'll start back. How are you doing?

Any sign of trouble there? Where are you now--still in two-twenty-eight?"

"I am fine," said Lobot. "But I do not know how to tell you where I am. I would already be lost if not for Artoo's holomap."

"You've gone into the inner pa.s.sages?"

"Maybe I should come back now," said Lando.

"I've seen most of what I need to. Did you blaze your route?"

"I would rather you did not," Lobot said. "The silence is surprisingly agreeable. I am hearing much more clearly now. That is why I did not blaze my route.

That is why I am now going to turn off my comlink."

Lando began an angry protest. "Lobot, what's going on--" "You said that I should do what I like. That is what I have decided to do."

"Fine, but don't turn off your comlink. What if--" "I will signal you if I want you," Lobot said. "Until then, I will wish you good judgment, and you can wish us good luck."

That was the end of the conversation. Lando was unable to raise Lobot on any comm channel, not even with an emergency signal.

He's sided with the droids against me, Lando thought, smashing his fist against the face of the chamber in frustration. Which is just more proof that this ship is making all of us nuts. By the time we get out of here--if we ever do--we're all going to need a mindwipe.

Turning back toward the portal, Lando pressed the facescreen of his helmet against the transparency and peered into the darkness. The contours of the holes appeared to have changed slightly, as though the holes might be beginning to knit. How far it would go, though, he could not tell. Left untreated, the edges of a cavity wound will heal without regenerating what was destroyed.

Switching off his suit lamps, Lando looked out through the blast hole at the star patterns beyond, seeking a familiar pattern, a recognizable star or distinctive spiral nebula. The odds did not favor him. Even after a lifetime roaming the s.p.a.celanes, there was far more unknown than known in a galaxy of a hundred billion stars.

But if there was any way he could, he needed to touch the familiar, and remind himself what it was he was fighting to live long enough to see again.

Lady Luck dropped back into reals.p.a.ce just shy of a light-second from Anomaly 1033 and just more than a light-year from Carconth.

At those distances, the anomaly was invisible except to sensors, but the red supergiant star was still a spectacular sight. Five hundred times as large and a hundred thousand times as bright as the sun Coruscant orbited, Carconth commanded the sky like few other stars. At the peak of its fluctuations, it was the second largest and seventh brightest of the known stars. The Astrographic Survey Inst.i.tute and its predecessors had been maintaining a supernova watch at Carconth for more than six hundred years.

The chances were that Anomaly 1033 was something left behind by an alien expedition to Carconth.

There had been many such, most unrecorded in Old or New Republic records. But Colonel Pakkpekatt and his volunteers would have no chance to find out, and little opportunity to gawk at the galactic spectacle visible off the yacht's port beam.

Within moments of their arrival, Lady Luck's controls went dead under Pakkpekatt's hands. Accelerating as it turned, the yacht veered sharply some sixty degrees to starboard and twenty degrees toward galactic north, pointing its bow in the general direction of Kaa. The displays churned as the autonavigator ran through its calculus and sent the results to the hypers.p.a.ce motivator.

"What's wrong, Colonel?" Bijo Hammax asked.

"Something has activated a slave circuit," said Pakkpekatt, lifting his hands from the panel and sitting back in the pilot's flight couch.

"The yacht is no longer under my control."

"But you're not trying to get control back." The whistle of the yacht's hyperdrive winding up to a jump was now clearly audible to both officers.

"That is correct."

At that moment, Pleck and Taisden joined them on the flight deck.

"Colonel--" Pleck began.

Hammax turned his couch toward Pakkpekatt.

"Colonel, I don't understand why you're letting us be hijacked."

"It is very difficult to defeat a well-designed slave circuit without doing extensive damage to the vessel," said Pakkpekatt. "They would be of little use if they could be easily overridden."

"But that doesn't explain--" Taisden shouldered forward past Pleck.

"Colonel, I can have the hyperdrive offline in thirty seconds."

"I doubt very much if you can, Agent Taisden. I also doubt very much if you have thirty seconds."

"Let me try."

"No," Pakkpekatt said.

"You think she's going to take us to them," Hammax concluded.

"The most likely person to have installed the slave circuits is also the most likely person to have activated them," said Pakkpekatt. "We will know in"--he glanced down at the nav display--"six hours if that person was General Calrissian."

Seconds later, Lady Luck vaulted forward through a tunnel of stars.

"Where are they?, Captain Gegak screamed at the bridge crew of the destroyer Tobay. "Where is the target?

Where is Gorath?"

"There is no sign of either ship, Captain," the sensor master ventured.

"I do not detect Gorath's tran-sponder."

"Idiot! Do you think I cannot read a tracking screen?" Gegak bellowed, balling both hands into fists.

His rage was indiscriminate and comprehensive, leaving no one on the bridge feeling safe enough to move or speak. "I am betrayed! One of you is in league with Captain Dokrett. Someone has conspired to steal our share of the prize."

Gegak stalked behind the officers at their stations.

"Who is the thief? Who is the traitor? Is it you, Frega?"

He seized the hair tuft of the navigation master and used it to roughly yank his head backward.

"Captain, I depend on the sensor master. Not five seconds pa.s.sed from his call before we left hypers.p.a.ce-" Sensor Master Nillik rose from his station before Gegak reached it, and retreated before him with hands raised. "I have not betrayed you, Captain. The instruments have betrayed me--" With a snarl, Gegak lunged forward and closed the gap between them to little more than an arm's length.

"And who is responsible for the maintenance of your instruments?"

"I am, Lord Captain--but, I beg you, hear me--" "I hear only the whining of a traitor."

"This ship is old, twice the age of Gorath, and we have had neither the prize money nor the blessings of Foga Brill with which to maintain it.

You cannot expect-" Gegak produced a neural whip from inside a fold of his bright tunic and brandished it in front of him. "I can expect that my officers will not repay the favor I do them with excuses."

"Captain--please!" Nillik now found himself backed against a bulkhead.

"To track a ship through hypers.p.a.ce is difficult even with the most sensitive installations.

I was given no time to cool and retune the soliton antennawI could not hear the target at all. I was barely able to hear Gorath above our own compression wave."

"You are only making excuses for your inattentiveness."

"No, Captain--it was not my attentiveness that wavered. The signature was so faint that I lost and reacquired it half a dozen times before the final loss of signal.

That was the only reason for my delay. I do not know for certain if those ships left hypers.p.a.ce behind us or continue on somewhere ahead of us."