• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“What is it, Vuffi Raa? Just now I’ve got—”

“Look forward, Master, to the edge of the crevasse.”

Lando settled in his chair, strapped himself in, and, as a happy afterthought, turned the local gravity in the lounge up to approximately three times the normal pull. “That ought to keep them in one place! I—oh, no!”

“Oh, yes, Master. You can make out the reflections from their hulls. The fighter squadron has found us. They’ll be firing into this canyon—without any chance of missing—in a very few seconds!”

• XIII •

“MASTER, I HAVE failed you again! We cannot escape, my pilot skills are therefore useless. Nor can I man the guns—my programming forbids it!”

Lando waggled back and forth at the controls, loosening the Falcon in its rocky nest. He was wishing he could bring the starboard quad-guns to bear, but that was asking too much.

Aside: “We all have our limits, Vuffi Raa, remember what I told you about diamonds. Just—”

Diamonds? That gave the gambler an idea—a gambler’s idea, to be sure, but it was all he had at the moment.

“Get out of there, old automaton, strap yourself in the jumpseat behind us, and warn me if anybody comes up the tunnel to the cockpit. I may be able to get us out of this mess, but I want my back safe and my elbows unjogged.”

As soon as the droid had restationed himself, Lando began hitting switches. He had some time: the crevasse was deep, composed mostly of metal-bearing rock. It would take the enemy a while to find the Falcon, especially since they were out in that impossible …

Taking his first risk, he cut the gravity in the lounge. A needle on a power-consumption gauge dropped slightly to the left. Next, he began robbing power from every other system. Out went every light in the ship. Off went the life-support—they’d all be fine for a few minutes without it, and, if his plan didn’t work, they wouldn’t need it. He’d never reactivated the inertial damping; he placed it on standby, contingent on what happened next. When he was finished, only the panel lights were glowing, that and Vuffi Raa’s great eye behind him. The ship was deadly silent.

With enormous reluctance, he cut the standby power to every gun on the ship. It made him feel naked, but they were useless for what he had in mind.

“All right, Vuffi Raa, everything quiet back there?”

“I can hear the pair of them wondering what’s going on, Master.”

“Let them wonder.”

He reached across the instrument array and flipped the shields on. Lights sprang into bright existence, making him feel better. Then he unlatched a metal cover over a graduated knob. Normally it was set at a tiny minus value, placing the main strength of the shields just under the first few molecules of the ship’s skin. There were sound reasons for this, but Lando didn’t care about them now.

He turned the knob, slowly, very carefully.

The ship’s structure groaned as the shields expanded, first a millimeter, then a centimeter away from the surface of the hull. Stresses were transmitted through the hull members to the heavily buttressed casing of the field generator. Lando turned the knob a little more.

The Falcon had been tightly wedged within the rock, the wheel of her upper airlock hatch scraping one side of the crevice, the bottom of her hull abraded by the other. There hadn’t been a millimeter to spare.

Now Lando was demanding more room, expanding the shields against the asteroid’s substance. He turned the knob again; something groaned like a living—dying—thing aft of the cockpit, but the panel lights still showed everything intact.

Half a dozen fighters shot by the lip of the crevasse, seeking, searching, probing. One of them fired an experimental shot. It penetrated and rebounded half a dozen times within the walls before it faded.

Another group of fighters swooped past.

And another.

They were circling the asteroid, searching the long canyon, hundreds of kilometers in extent, for the hidden freighter that had burned at least two of their number out of the polychrome skies of the Oseon.

Their flybys were becoming more