Showdown at Centerpoint (2 page)

H
onored Solo, we are running out of time!” the voice squawked from the comm unit. “We will be entering atmosphere soonest if our approach is not controlled!” The intercom gave out a strangled squeal. Either the comm circuit up to the ship’s control cabin was on the verge of giving out again, or else Han had just gotten lucky, and Dracmus was about to lose her voice.
That
would be a blessing.

Han slapped the answer switch and tried to stay focused on his work. “Keep your shirt on, Dracmus,” he said, shouting just a bit. “The comm unit send-circuits needed work as well. Tell honored Pilot Salculd that I’m nearly done.” Why did the universe require all shipboard repairs to be on the rush?
What I wouldn’t give to have Chewbacca here,
Han thought.

“What shirt?” the voice asked worriedly. “Should shirts be worn? Is this for safety?”

Han sighed and pushed the answer button again. “It’s an expression. It means ‘be patient,’ ” he said, struggling to keep his own patience. Dracmus was a Selonian, and most Selonians did not like being in space. Understandable for a species that mostly lived underground, but having an agoraphobic being in command was enough to drive anyone crazy.

Han Solo made the last hookup, closed down the last of the inspection hatches, and crossed his fingers
for luck.
That ought to do the trick,
he told himself. It had better. It was about time that
something
worked properly. If the coneship he was aboard was a fair example of the breed, Selonian spacecraft weren’t much for reliability. Han engaged the power switch and waited for the inverter system to energize.

Han was starting to question his own sanity in volunteering to help fly this particular coneship down out of free space to the surface of Selonia. He could have said so long and good luck and ridden down with Leia on the
Jade’s Fire
. But when a job needed doing, and no one else could do it, volunteering was not really all that
voluntary
. He hadn’t had much choice in the matter. He couldn’t have left Dracmus high and dry. He had obligations to her, and to her people.

And Dracmus had made it clear they
had
to get this ship down. Her people couldn’t afford to abandon any spacecraft, no matter what shape the craft was in. The nameless coneship might be a piece of space-going junk, but Dracmus had assured Han that it was better than anything else the Selonians had at the moment. Or, more accurately, it was better than anything that the Hunchuzuc Den and their Republicists had.

“Hurry, Honored Solo!” Dracmus called again.

Why couldn’t that intercom break down the way everything else did on this ship? Han hit the answer button again. “Stand by, Dracmus. Pilot Salculd—watch your power settings!”

Knowing he was with the Hunchuzuc would have been a bit more useful if Han had had some clear idea about who or what the Hunchuzuc Den was. All he knew for sure about them was that the Den was part of an amorphous faction of Selonians who lived on Corellia, and that, so far as Dracmus knew, they were still allied to a pro-New Republic alliance of Selonian Dens called the Republicists, and that he was mixed up with them.

Dracmus was a member of the Hunchuzuc, and she had either kidnapped Han or rescued him from
Thrackan Sal-Solo—or both. Han was still not sure. The Hunchuzuc
seemed
to be having a fight with the Overden, the leadership on Selonia proper, a fight that was going on in parallel with the Republic’s battle against the rebellions in the Corellia system, though the two fights did not seem to be directly related to each other. The Overden was on the Absolutist side, which wanted absolute independence for Selonia. But even if the Hunchuzuc were Republicist and the Overden were Absolutist, Han was coming to the conclusion that neither side much cared about principles, either way. Each was primarily against the other.

But Han did know a few things for sure. He knew that Dracmus had saved his life, and that she had taken risks to treat him well. He knew that a member of his own family—Thrackan Sal-Solo—had treated Dracmus’s people with the utmost cruelty. By Selonian standards, that alone was enough to brand Han himself as a villain, a killer, a monster. Yet Dracmus had given Han every benefit of the doubt. She had treated him with decency and respect. If that was all Han knew, it was also all he had to know.

“When will it be working?” Dracmus called, her voice growing more strident. “The planet is getting closer!”

“That is the idea when you’re trying to reenter,” Han muttered to himself. Decency and respect to one side, there was no denying that Dracmus could be one major pain in the neck. Han pressed the answer stud again and spoke. “It’s working now. Tell Salculd the inverter is back on-line. Have her power up the control circuits and let’s see how it goes.”

“We shall do so, Honored Solo,” said the faint, worried-sounding voice from the comm unit. “Salculd says she is initiating control circuit power-up.”

Han was kneeling down in front of the inspection hatch, and a low-powered hum made him think he might be just a bit too close to the inverter array. He stood up and backed away. The hum faded out after a
moment, and the array’s indicator lights came on, showing normal operation.

Han pressed down the answer button again. “Don’t hold me to this,” he shouted, “but I think it’s working. The spare parts off Mara’s ship did the trick. We ought to be able to get underway anytime you like.”

“Good to hear, most Honorable Solo,” Dracmus said, the relief in her voice almost painfully obvious. “Very good to hear indeed. We shall proceed at once.”

The indicators flickered a bit to show the inverters were drawing more power. “Take it easy up there,” Han said. “Throttle up nice and slow, all right?”

“We are doing so, Honored Solo. And we shall hold at one-third power. We have no desire to overload our systems again.”

“That’s very reassuring,” Han said. “But I think I’d better head up there and keep an eye on you just the same.”

Han crossed to the access ladder and climbed up to the nose cabin of the coneship.

The coneship was just that—a fat cone, with the engines at the base and the control cabin in the point. The nose itself was nearly all transparent transplex, affording a spectacular overhead view. The pilot, Salculd, lay flat on her back, looking up and out at the sky ahead. For a human pilot, it would not be the most comfortable way to work. Of course, Selonians were most decidedly not human.

Salculd looked over to the lower deck access hatch as Han climbed out of it. She gave him a toothy smile and then returned her attention to her work.
She
looked comfortable enough. Dracmus was pacing at the rear of the cabin, looking anything but calm or relaxed.

Though they were fairly standard bipeds, Selonians were taller but thinner than humans. Their arms and legs were shorter, and their bodies rather longer. They could manage equally well walking on two feet or four. Retractable claws in both their hand-paws and foot-paws
made them impressive climbers and diggers. Their tails were only about half a meter long, but they packed a major wallop when used as a club—as Han had reason to know.

They had long, pointed faces, and their entire bodies were covered in sleek, short-haired fur. Dracmus was dark brown. Salculd was mostly black, but her belly fur was light brown. They both had bristly whiskers that were as expressive as human eyebrows, once you got a little practice in interpreting them. They also had mouths full of very sharp teeth. Han had been able to interpret the teeth with no practice at all. In short, they were elegant and impressive-looking creatures.

“How does all go?” Han asked Salculd the pilot, speaking in his rather labored Selonian. Salculd did not speak Basic.

“All is well, Honored Solo,” Salculd replied. “At least until the next subsystem flips out.”

“Wonderful,” Han said to himself. “Everything be well, Honored Dracmus?” he asked in Selonian.

“Fine, fine, all is fine, until we crash and die,” Dracmus replied.

“Glad we have a consensus,” Han muttered to himself.

“It is
good
to plan ahead like that,” Salculd said. “Here I was just going to land the ship the regular way. Now I am knowing that I will fail and we will crash. It is most comforting.”

“That is enough, Pilot Salculd,” Dracmus snapped. “Concentrate all attention on your duties.”

“Yes, Honored Dracmus,” Salculd said at once, her tone of voice most apologetic.

Salculd was a fairly experienced pilot, and knew her ship at least reasonably well, if not as well as Han would have preferred. Dracmus, on the other hand, was trained to deal with humans, and incompletely trained at that. When it came to ship handling, she had no experience, no knowledge, and no skill. Even so, she commanded the ship—not just in deciding where it
would go, but down to the last detail of every maneuver. Salculd could not, or would not, overrule her. Dracmus was of higher status, or seniority, or something, relative to Salculd, and that was that, insofar as either of the Selonians was concerned. Neither seemed much concerned by the fact that Dracmus had only the slightest understanding of space operations, or by the fact that during the raid on Selonia she had repeatedly ordered the ship to do things it could not, and come alarmingly close to getting them all killed.

Salculd might have a smart mouth, and an irreverent attitude, but she followed all of Dracmus’s orders—no matter how boneheaded—with alarming dispatch. It took some getting used to.

Han took his own place in the control seat next to Salculd. He had done his best to adjust the padding to fit a human frame, but the seat would never be comfortable. Han lay back and looked up.

The view out the transparent nose of the coneship was nothing less than spectacular. The planet Selonia hung big and bright in the sky, filling the middle third of the field of view. Selonia had smaller oceans than Corellia, and the land mass was broken up into thousands of medium-sized islands, more or less evenly spaced across the face of the planet.

Instead of two or three large oceans and four or five continental landmasses, Selonia’s surface was a maze of water and land. Hundreds of seas and bays and inlets and straits and shoals separated the islands. Han remembered reading somewhere that no point on land anywhere on Selonia was more than one hundred fifty kilometers from open water, and no point on the water was more than two hundred kilometers from the nearest shoreline.

But there was more to the view than the spectacular planet. Mara Jade’s personal ship, the
Jade’s Fire,
hung in space a kilometer or two away, her bow hiding a bit of the planet’s equatorial region. She was a long, low, streamlined ship, painted in a flame pattern of red and
gold. The ship looked fast, sleek, strong, maneuverable—and Han knew she was all of those things. He wished, not for the first time, that he was aboard her, and not just because the
Fire
was a better ship. Leia was aboard the
Fire,
along with Mara Jade.

After Dracmus had managed to blow out nearly every system on board the coneship, the
Fire
had rescued them and provided Han with the spare parts he needed to repair the craft. Now the
Fire
was preparing to see the coneship to a safe landing.

Han did not like Leia being on one ship while he was on the other, but the arrangement made too much sense. Mara, not yet completely recovered from her leg injury, still needed some looking after, and she needed a copilot, at least until she recovered. Space knew the Selonians, Dracmus and Salculd, needed all the help
they
could get. Besides which, Leia spoke Selonian—spoke it better than Han, for that matter—and given recent events it made more than a little sense to have at least one speaker of the Selonian language aboard each ship, in case of difficulties at the landing field. The plan was for the two ships to fly toward Selonia in formation and land side by side.

But even if it all seemed perfectly reasonable and harmless for Leia to stay on Mara’s ship while he flew in the coneship, Han didn’t have to like it. He didn’t need to ask what could go wrong. So many things had gone wrong already.

A bright light flashed on and off from the forward port of the
Fire
. Leia was using the landing lights on the
Jade’s Fire
to send Mon Calamari blink code—combinations of long and short flashes to form the letters of the Basic alphabet. The technique was slow and clumsy, but the normal com channels were jammed and it beat not being able to talk at all.

READY TO BEGIN ENTRY
, Han read.
SIGNAL WHEN YOU ARE READY
. “They say they are ready.” He turned to Salculd. “Are we prepared?”

“Yes,” said Salculd.

“Very well,” Han said. “Honored Dracmus,” he said in Basic, so that Salculd could not understand. “You will now do what I say. Stop pacing, take your seat, and instruct Salculd to accept orders from me. I would then ask you most kindly to shut up until we are on the ground. I want you to give no orders and say nothing. I just want you to sit quietly. Or else I tell the
Jade’s Fire
that escorting us is a suicide run. I will instruct them to leave us here.” It was all bluff, of course, but Dracmus was panicky enough that she wasn’t likely to think it through.

“But—” she protested.

“But nothing. I know blink code and you don’t. I can talk to the
Fire
and you can’t. You nearly got us killed ordering this ship around before, and I’m not going to put up with that again.”

“I must protest! This is robbery of the worst kind!”

Han grinned. “Actually, it’s more like piracy. Or you could call it a pretty mild form of hijacking. And I might add that if you don’t know robbery from piracy, you have no business running a ship.”

Dracmus glared at Han, about to protest—but then she shook her head. “So be it. I must accede. Even to my eye, my ship orders were none too good, and I wish to live some more.” She shifted to Selonian. “Pilot Salculd! You will obey the orders of Honored Han Solo as you would my own, and do so until such time as we reach the ground.”