Before the Storm - Michael P. Kube-McDowell [92]
The glove, far lighter and moving faster than any of the party, struck the outer bulkhead, rebounded, and tumbled out into space. But bare moments before Artoo reached the opening, there suddenly was no opening. As neatly as the smaller hole had opened under Lando’s touch, the portal knitted itself closed from edge to center.
Artoo, Threepio, Lobot, and the sled all struck an unbroken chamber wall—and then began sliding aft along it.
“The ship’s moving!” Lando cried, feeling the acceleration pressing him more firmly against the aft bulkhead. “Hammax! Colonel! What’s going on?” There was no answer—not even static. “Anyone on the Glorious, respond!”
“Lando!” Lobot called. “All of my links are gone. We’re not just moving. This ship just jumped into hyperspace.”
It all happened so quickly that no one witness was certain of all the details.
Without warning, one of the Qella’s beam weapons sliced Lady Luck free from the vagabond. Another pierced the hull of the interdiction picket Kauri and left it in flames.
As the interdiction field collapsed, the vagabond swung about with surprising swiftness and accelerated away from its previous course.
The captain of the Marauder screamed for permission to fire—just as the Qella vessel seemed to suddenly stretch to twice its true length and then vanish into a blinding white pinch of spacetime.
Lady Luck was left drifting, the remnants of the cofferdam trailing from its airlock.
“Do we have a good track?” Pakkpekatt demanded.
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s something to work with,” he said.
“Sir, she jumped toward the Core.”
Pakkpekatt’s expression did not change. “Dispatch a crew to recover the yacht. Bring Lightning around to the target’s last heading and jump her out ten. We’ll go out twenty, Marauder thirty, and then walk it out at intervals of one light-year till we get to the border. She’s got to be out there somewhere.”
“Yes, sir—but how far? She could have jumped all the way to Byss, for all we know.”
The mere mention of the former Emperor’s throne world, deep in the Core, darkened the mood on the bridge still further.
“Let’s hope not, sailor,” said Pakkpekatt. “Let us earnestly hope not.”
Chapter 12
Long before they reached Lucazec, Luke Skywalker settled on Mud Sloth as the name for Akanah’s previously unnamed Verpine Adventurer.
He realized he had been spoiled by years in highperformance military spacecraft, operating under wartime conditions or a military waiver. But realizing that didn’t make it any easier to adjust to civilian navigation restrictions. Not only was Mud Sloth a dawdler in realspace, but its hyperspace motivator simply refused to enter or leave hyperspace within a planetary Flight Control Zone.
Luke didn’t object in principle to FCZ regulations. They helped ensure that less experienced pilots in less capable ships made slow approaches to populated worlds and busy spacelanes. But he had never been subjected to a four-day realspace crawl just to leave Coruscant. He was accustomed to reaching for the hyperdrive moments after his ship cleared the atmosphere. Mud Sloth insisted on waiting until it had cleared the star system.
But there was nothing to be done about it. The Adventurer wouldn’t accept his military waiver, and didn’t even have a System Configuration option on its cockpit displays. It was designed to prevent such meddling.
Driven by impatience, Luke briefly considered powering down the hyperdrive and opening up the service access to see what he could do with it. But he soon talked himself out of it, realizing that reprogramming a motivator was beyond his talents as a tinkerer. Even a starship as simple as the Adventurer was far more complex than the Incom T-16s and landspeeders he’d spent so many days hopping and rebuilding back on Tatooine.
No, when it came to hyperspace, it was