Star Wars_ Fate of the Jedi 07_ Conviction - Aaron Allston [72]
This entailed using the arc welder included among the craft’s emergency tools, running off the shuttle’s power, to burn two holes in the span connecting the port and starboard personnel pods, then fitting the rudder’s main post down through the holes. After that, they attached wires and cables to the trailing edges of the solar panels and rigged the hatch-closing wheels as pulleys.
From a few meters away, they admired their handiwork.
Ben used his datapad to take some holocam stills. “Looks like bantha poodoo.”
Luke nodded. “You’re being generous.”
Vestara took holocam shots of her own. “So what’s our plan?”
Luke hopped up on the port strut and then moved to sit on the pod. “We have to assume that Abeloth-Nenn has seized control of some portion of the Theran Listeners. Which means that, for all practical purposes, all the Oldtimers could be against us. Which means we avoid human contact on the way back to Hweg Shul. We have the planetary map on our datapads, so we need to plot a course to Hweg Shul—flatlands only, since we can’t steer this contraption well enough to navigate hills or mountains.”
Ben frowned, clearly doing some mental calculations. “I’m pretty sure we can’t get there by night’s end.”
“So we get there tomorrow night. Unless we stumble across some speeder bikes or landspeeders en route. We can’t change what we can’t change, Ben.”
“I don’t know about that. Obviously, we can build a landspeeder out of bantha poodoo.”
Luke grinned. “Get in.”
Steering was about as hard as they had anticipated.
Once the port ion engine fired, they could get up to speeds of nearly fifty kilometers per hour. That would have put them back in Hweg Shul after a hard ten-hour run, but only if they could have flown a straight line. The total trip, including zigzags to avoid mountains and hill ranges, was more like eight hundred kilometers.
They would run straight for an hour or two, then have to vector to navigate around a series of hills. That entailed Luke in the port pod and Ben, not strapped in, behind Vestara in the starboard pod, shouting at each other across the intercom—“Port! Port!” “I’m going!” “Keep going! Port! Stop stop stop!”—while manically spinning the improvised pulley wheels. Once the shuttle had finished its laborious, lumbering turn, they’d have to return the rudder to point straight back—“Starboard, starboard! Stop stop stop!” Within a couple of hours, both were hoarse.
But the kilometers flew past, and Luke’s attempts to navigate by the stars, comparing the starfield above with data on his datapad, indicated that they were on a preposterous, overcorrection-driven, but roughly accurate route back to Hweg Shul.
At the end of that night, they cut the ion engine a hundred meters or so from a hilly ridge. Luke and Ben pushed the shuttle, still on repulsors, up against the ridge. Vestara killed the repulsors, and all three piled sand atop the vehicle.
Though the shuttle’s comm system had been blown by the sabotage, they still had their personal comlinks, and these devices, in the last hour before dawn and the first hour after, picked up faint, distant comm signals.
“… storm activity resulted in three deaths and hundreds of thousands of credits’ damage to Hweg Shul. Authorities have offered no explanation for the freak events, which are similar to storms attested to thirty years ago and in the distant past …”
“… launce still recovering from the savage beating he sus …”
“… thority investigators are now on the ground, but restrictions on traffic to and from orbit are still in place, pending further …”
With the first winds of the day’s dust storm, those tenuous transmissions faded away, replaced by static.
“Not good, Dad.”
“Not good, Ben.”
“Plus, I’m hungry and I smell bad.”
Luke opened his mouth to answer, but Ben interrupted, an impersonation