Star Wars_ The Adventures of Lando Calrissia - L. Neil Smith [110]
Behind him, the sublight thrusters outshone the Flamewind for a moment. Then, from the viewpoint of the fighters, they were gone, lost in the multicolored mist.
Lando knew his enemies—whoever they were, confound it!—would not be long in following. They’d had that gigantic antique battleship engine they were using as a collective booster. He had to think of something clever, and he had to do it fast.
Momentarily, the Flamewind paled. They were out of the Sixth Belt where they’d begun, and crossing the narrow space between it and the Fifth Belt, their destination.
Either that or they were headed from Six to Seven—Lando didn’t trust his navigational capacities at the best of times, let alone now.
No, they were headed toward the Oseon’s fractious primary. His hand swept instrument switches. The screens still showed an indecipherable hash, but coming up a little to the starboard was a small cluster of asteroids, irregulars, following their own course through the belt. He modified his course to meet them.
As he switched the instruments back off, he could see the tiny fleet of fighter craft behind him.
The screen had shown him half a hundred asteroids. His naked eyes showed him half a hundred more, all small—none greater than a few kilometers—all very tightly bunched together. Taking a great chance, Lando cut straight through them until he saw a sort of miracle ahead.
Whether it had been a single rock, struck and not quite split in half, or a pair of floating worldlets that upon colliding had not quite wholly fused, there was a deep crack around its circumference, seventy or eighty kilometers long, no more than twenty meters wide.
Using everything he had to stand her on her nose—without smearing everybody aboard into roseberry jam in the absence of inertial buffering—he steered for the crack, orienting himself correctly and establishing a tangent course to the double asteroid. At the last moment he killed everything but the attitude controls and the docking jets, brought her to a gentle stop deep within the crevasse.
The portside windows showed a half a dozen fighters streaking past without noticing where he’d hidden. Puffing little bursts of attitude reactant, he ground the Falcon gently into place. The guns he could control he aimed at open sky. The Flamewind pulsed luridly, looking like a far-off fireworks display.
Which is when he noticed the instruments.
One by one, as he checked them, most of his instrumentation seemed to turn reliable again. He guessed his hidey-hole was an iron-nickel asteroid that acted as a shield against the storm of radiation. The protection wasn’t perfect, but it was within the abilities of the ship’s electronics to correct.
He ducked his head beneath the panel, spoke loudly and distinctly.
“Vuffi Raa, come out of there! Coffeine break’s over!”
Reconnecting the little robot’s tentacles was not as easy as it was under ordinary circumstances. They themselves were sophisticated mechanisms, the equal of the fully equipped droids that drove buses and typed stories in newsrooms everywhere in the galaxy. Even deactivated, they had taken a lot of radiation, and their self-repair circuits, set in motion once they were attached to their owner, would require some hours to bring them to full efficiency.
Lando left Vuffi Raa in the cockpit to watch for enemy strays, and wended his way around the corridor to the passenger lounge.
Where he was greeted by utter chaos.
It looked as though a herd of house-sized animals had stomped through. Freed of the restraint of artificial gravity, impelled by sudden changes of direction without inertial damping, everything loose in the room had collided with everything stationary at least once. Perhaps more than once.
And that included Waywa Fybot and Bassi Vobah.
Wires hung loose from ceiling and walls. Small articles of