The Black Fleet Crisis_ Tyrant's Test Part 13

"Oh," said Threepio. "I see."

"Lando--" "Leave me alone, Lobot," Lando said, his tone underlining the warning. "I'm going to take this pile of cheap cybernetic junk apart.

I'm going to burn his arms and legs into little pieces so that I'll have something to throw at the boarding party. Say, how would you like his backplate to use as a s.h.i.+eld?"

"Lando, listen," Lobot insisted. "The firing has stopped."

Lando swung his head around. "So it has. But we're not moving. I don't think she's gonna move again." He looked back at Threepio.

"Neither are you."

"Artoo--Artoo, where are you? Master Lando has gone mad. You must protect me. I don't deserve to die."

"Almost n.o.body does," Lando said, pulling out the cutting blaster.

"But we die anyway. Be philosophical."

"Lando, wait," said Lobot. "We know this s.h.i.+p.

We have the advantage over anyone coming aboard.

Whateve} brings them here can as easily take us back."

"Sure--as prisoners," said Lando. "I've visited enough prisons, thank you. I don't intend to be captured."

"All right, then," Lobot said. "Let's think about how to fight them and win. Let's use our advantage.

Forget Threepio. What he did is a distraction, and raging over it is a waste of time."

With a growl, Lando twisted and pointed the cutting blaster at the forward entry portal. Its beam lit the chamber briefly and harshly, leaving a meter-wide hole that did not close.

"She's really hurting," Lando said, shaking his head. "All right--Lobot, Artoo, let's go. We have to move quickly." He pointed toward Threepio. "Golden Boy stays here."

"Lando---" Lobot began.

"He'll just slow us down."

"Lando--" "But if we leave him here, maybe he'll slow them down. A diversion. Who knows--maybe they won't even blow him to bits," said Lando. "Come on."

"Where are we going?"

"Chamber twenty-one." Lando jetted toward the hole he had blasted, and the others followed him through.

So did Threepio's plaintive voice. "You can't abandon me here in the dark--Artoo--please--" Artoo whimpered sympathetically, but he did not turn back.

Nearly five light-years Rimside from the pulsar 2GS-91E20, the powerful external worklights on the under curve of Lady Luck's bow stabbed out into the ebony void toward the target Colonel Pakkpekatt was tracking.

"It's too small by half," said Colonel Hammax, looking up from the displays and out through the viewports, straining to pick out what the NRI deep-contact list called Anomaly 2249.

"Or it is now only half what it was. We will continue," said Pakkpekatt, bobbing his head.

Hammax glanced back down. "Target is now sixty-one thousand meters dead ahead."

"Tell me, Colonel--how is it that a personal yacht has a sensor system that appears to have resolution comparable to a front-line intelligence picket and better range--far superior to that on a cruiser like Glorious?"

"Shorter procurement cycle," Hammax said. "He buys what he needs, without having to get the permission of anyone who sits in an office far from the consequences of saying no."

"And what is his need?"

Hammax shrugged. "Considering that this s.h.i.+p mounts only a single low- grade laser cannon, sensors like that might help keep you out of a lot of trouble."

"That does not answer my question," Pakkpekatt said. "Who is this Lando Calrissian? This bridge belongs to a meticulous professional, someone who insists on the best tools and on knowing how to use them.

The storage holds belong to a mercenary or a brigand, a man who respects no rule but expediency. The personal quarters belong to a sybarite, a self- indulgent hedonist who surrounds himself with soft pleasures. Which one is Calrissian?"

"I didn't know the baron before he came aboard Glorious," Hammax said.

"But by reputation, Colonel, he's all three."

"They could not abide each other," Pakkpekatt stated firmly. "Such a man would never be content in any of his pursuits. He would always be drawn else- where--the hedonist to purpose, the brigand to security, the perfectionist to impulsiveness, and on. You understand?"

"Humans are contradictory creatures," said Hammax.

"Forty thousand meters."

"That I know, Colonel--but can you tell me why they think it a strength?" Pakkpekatt asked.

"I think that's the first of the contradictions," Hammax said with a grin.

"You are no help to me," the Hortek said, annoyed.

"Go and wake the others. It is time."

Before Lady Luck had closed another five thousand meters on the unknown object tagged by NRI trackers as Anomaly 2249, all four members of the team were at their stations.

On the bridge, Pakkpekatt was handling the piloting duties, Taisden was monitoring the sensor matrix, and Hammax was controlling the laser cannon by means of a lightweight targeting headset. Aft on the enclosed observation deck, Pleck tended the bank of NRI-issue tracking and holo imagers he and Taisden had installed.

It was becoming a familiar drill, but Pakkpekatt did not allow them to become casual about it. The first five anomalies they had investigated had included a burned-out Modern starfreighter, an abandoned bulk-cargo barge apparently holed by a collision, and a sizable section of an ancient deep- s.p.a.ce antenna--all harmless. But they had also found a fully operational Kuat Ranger running with a blacked-out telesponder, which fled at their approach, and a live Ilthani s.p.a.ce mine, which Hammax detonated With a precise burst from the yacht's laser cannon.

At three thousand meters, it became clear that Anomaly 2249 was not the Teljkon vagabond or any part of it. The work floods illuminated a metal mesh cylinder some sixty meters long, capped by solid metal spheres fifteen meters across and studded with circular metal fittings.

It was slowly turning end over end, rotating around a slightly eccentric center of gravity.

"What in blazes is that?" Hammax asked. "s.p.a.ce-s.h.i.+p?

Probe? I don't recognize the configuration."

"Nor do I," said Pakkpekatt. "But I know what it is not." He dragged a datapad toward him and consulted the report provided to him by the keepers of NRI's network of stationary blackball-tracking buoys.

"Anomaly ten-thirty-three, near Carconth, is the next highest probability candidate."

"Colonel?"

"Yes, Agent Pleck?"

"Could we give this one a few more minutes--get in to maybe five hundred meters and do a flyaround? I'd like to be able to resolve all the hull detail for the a.n.a.lysts, and there may be markings on the far side."

"I am not interested in performing any extra services for the a.n.a.lysis Section," Pakkpekatt said curtly, turning Lady Luck away from the mystery object and onto a heading for Carconth. "Let them clear their anomalies themselves. Colonel Hammax, retract the cannon pod. Agent Pleck, lock down your imagers. Hy pers.p.a.ce in one minute. This will be a nine-hour jump, so we'll make the watch change now."

Apart from the ugly smell it left hanging in the air, Lando had no qualms about burning a path through the chain of chambers for himself and the others. If the s.h.i.+p survived what was almost certainly more serious damage elsewhere, closing the wounds Lando was making would be no problem--and if the s.h.i.+p was already doomed, the wounds he was making were irrelevant.

But Lobot quickly became uncomfortable watching Lando do it. After only four chambers and four black-edged burnholes, Lobot caught Lando and stayed his hand before he could make the fifth.

"Can't we at least try each portal before we destroy it?" he pleaded.

"Do you have some reason to think the vagabond is recovering?"

Lando asked, pulling his arm free and pointing the blaster ahead.

Lobot cringed as the beam burned a hole into the next chamber. "I don't know what's happening," he said. "I do know that we are leaving a trail that will be no challenge to follow, a fact which makes our flight futile. The boarding parties will simply find us in the last chamber."

A new sound reached them as Lando stopped and looked back. It was a series of wet-sounding percussive reports, akin to the sound of a stone falling into soft mud.

"Fluids blowing under pressure," Lando said, craning his neck. "I heard a bad fuel slug pop once, sounded a lot like that." He looked back at Lobot. "Yeah, you're right. We won't be hard to follow. But the darkness helps us, and we don't have to be conveniently waiting for them at the end of the line."

"Is that your whole plan?" Lobot demanded. "Do you think Threepio will have them coming after us so recklessly that we can surprise an entire boarding party with hand tools?"

"My plan is to postpone the confrontation," Lando said. "That's all I have going right now. I'm only thinking about putting some distance between us and whoever's coming in back there."

"Then what about making more than one hole?

Make them make a decision. Get them to split up."

"I'd gladly burn some more holes to make it harder for them to follow us, but I don't know what I'd be cutting into," said Lando. "And I sure don't want to increase the odds of burning through into vacuum."

"The topography of the s.h.i.+p does not make any chamber face coterminous with the hull," said Lobot.

"When you placed the sensor limpetre" "We don't know what s.p.a.ces have been breached by the attack," Lando said. "I could even hit vacuum going straight ahead through the portals. I'm telling you--" Just then the shoulder joint of Lobot's contact suit b.u.mped gently against the face of the chamber. Moments later, Lando, too, drifted into a solid barrier.

"s.h.i.+p's moving again," Lando said.

"Just barely moving."

"Changing direction, too."

"Under way, or under tow?"

"No telling from here," Lando said. "But more likely under way--there hasn't been enough time to sweep the s.h.i.+p, and it'd be risky to take her under tow until that was finished. Come on." Lando jetted toward the opening he had made, grabbed the edge, and pulled himself through.

What he saw as he pointed his lights and his blaster at the opposite end of the chamber startled him to speechlessness. The portal was already irising open.

As Lando began to retreat he swiped at his suit controls with his gloved hand, killing the lights. Behind him, Lobot took the cue and did the same. But even after Artoo obeyed the instruction Lobot placed in his language register, the chamber remained faintly lit by the glow from a narrow ring encircling each of its open portals--all six of them.

"Lando--" "I see, I see," Lando said.

"Lando, those are the STAFF ONLY doors you were talking about.

What's going on?"

"I'm not sure." He jetted diagonally to the nearest of the four previously unknown portals for chamber 229 and stole a peek through it.

"What can you see?"

"More of the same, only different," Lando said heading for the portal to chamber 228. "Check the one behind us."

Both the chamber ahead and the one they had just left were also now showing multiple portals lit by glow-rings.

Some of the new portals opened to tiny dead-end chambers, others to narrow cylindrical pa.s.sageways, still others to the vast inters.p.a.ce Lando had discovered when planting the sensor limpet, "Any ideas?"

Lando asked Lobot.

"Possibly. Rule-based logic must be strictly prioritized, following a conditional decision tree," said Lobot. "The first thing the s.h.i.+p did was to seal all portals, giving the highest priority to containing the damage--a reasonable response to an attack, especially if there was a hull breach. Then, after an inventory of the damage, the next highest priority was given to restoring freedom of movement, perhaps to facilitate repairs."

"Or escape," said Lando. "Are you saying you think this means the attack is over?"

"It doesn't matter," said Lobot. "The s.h.i.+p has thrown all the doors open. We may never have another chance like this." He pointed at the portal below them, leading to the interior. "The heart of the s.h.i.+p is that way."

"Maybe--and for all you know, it's at the other end of a ten-kilometer maze. And if she's on the verge of breaking up, what then?"

Lando demanded.

"What else can we do?"

"I have to see how bad the damage is. Give me your left glove."

"Why?"

"Because you won't need it where you're going, and I do need it where I'm going--out to the hull and forward to find out how much damage there is."

"That's pointless. Either it can repair itself or it cannot," said Lobot. "We have to look for the control nexus."

"You can do what you like. I need to know where things stand."

"The s.h.i.+p knows," Lobot insisted.

"When you figure out how to talk to her, let me know. Until then, we're both wasting time. The glove, please."

Lobot hesitated, then unlocked the retaining ring and twisted the glove sharply clockwise. He sent it spinning across the chamber toward Lando with more force than necessary.