Star Wars_ Legacy of the Force 04_ Exile - Aaron Allston [4]
Still, she was not rich, not even financially comfortable. Creditors—more successful smugglers, members of organized crime—now demanded their due whenever they could contact her, whenever they could catch up to her during Breathe My Jets’s brief stays in port. She’d been threatened, she’d taken a beating at a landfall on Tatooine, and rumor had it that one creditor had given up and hired a bounty hunter to eliminate her—to demonstrate the folly of not paying on time.
She needed this mission to go well. If it did, she could pay everyone off, start over. If it didn’t, she might find herself in a position to describe explosive decompression in a firsthand account.
Now she looked at the distant star Corell through the bridge’s forward viewport as she sat slumped in her captain’s chair. She sagged not out of defeat, but from habit and a deliberate attitude of indifference that gave her a reputation for being cool under fire. Though born to well-fed, well-tended middle-manager parents on Bespin, she now had skin like Tatooine leather and a craggy face that might have benefited from a drooping mustache.
Grudgingly, she sat upright. Glancing at the undersized, youthful Hutt in the specially designed copilot’s couch beside her, she nodded. “All right, Blatta. Put me on.”
Blatta flipped a switch on the control panel before him. A display there lit up and showed Captain Lavint’s face, a live holocam feed. He spoke in typically deep, gooey Hutt tones. “Broadcast in five, four, three…” He held up two fingers, silently signaling the continuation of the countdown, then one, then closed his fist to indicate they were broadcasting.
Lavint stared into the holocam recorder. “Captain to fleet. In a minute I will broadcast the nav data for our final jump. That jump will bring us as close as the planet Corellia’s gravity well will allow, and then one of two things will happen—we’ll be jumped by Galactic Alliance forces, or we won’t.
“If we’re not, congratulations—the armaments and bacta we’re carrying will earn us tidy profits. If we are, our instructions are clear: break and run, straight down into Corellia’s atmosphere. It’s every ship for herself. You see your best friend being assaulted, you wish him well and get down to ground. Don’t hang back and fight to free him.
“Good luck.” She gave her viewers a brisk nod, and Blatta cut the transmission.
“Nav data?” he asked.
“Send it.”
He did. The instant he did so, a one-minute chron timer appeared on both cockpit displays, counting down. It was just enough time for the fleet’s captains and navigators to load the data and test it, not enough time for them to waste and increase their jitters.
More or less as a single body, the thirty-odd ships and vehicles of the fleet accelerated, pointing straight for the distant, unseen planet. Those who had defensive shields activated them. And at exactly the same moment, each cockpit crew saw the stars before them lengthen and begin the axial swirling that was the visual characteristic of hyperspace entry.
This jump would take only a few seconds—
It took less than that. They’d been in hyperspace half the time they should have been when the stars stopped spinning and snapped back into distant points of light. Corell was larger, closer, but not as close as the sun should be, and there was no comforting sight of the planet Corellia directly ahead of them. Instead, there was empty space decorated with the occasional fast-moving colored twinkle of light.
Lavint swore, but her invective was drowned out by Blatta’s shout: “Enemy ships! Chevron formation. We’re toward the point, and the two flanks are falling in on our formation.”
“Which one’s the Interdictor?” One of the enemy ships had to be some sort of Interdictor, a capital ship carrying gravity-well generators—devices that would project a gravity field of sufficient strength to yank ships right out of hyperspace.
Blatta highlighted a point of light on his