Star Wars_ The Black Fleet Crisis 01_ Before the Storm - Michael P. Kube-McDowell [101]
Not long after, back in the ruins of the village of Ialtra, the bodies of two dead Imperial agents merged with the shadows that had enveloped them, and vanished as though they had never been.
Chapter 13
Near a brown dwarf star on the edge of the Koornacht Cluster, the New Republic astrographic probe Astrolabe dropped out of hyperspace.
The broad flat underside of the small unarmed ship was heavily studded with scanners. Four scan platforms carried everything from stereo imagers and neutron dippers to quark detectors and wide-band photometricons. Many of the instruments were duplicated as a hedge against malfunctions. The combination of the thin, wide profile and the scanner configuration had given the Astrogator-class probes the nickname “flatfish,” which in turn had given rise to an unofficial logo popular with the crews.
“Your tour operators, the Astrographic Survey Institute, welcome you to Doornik-1142,” the pilot called back to his survey team. “Be sure to take in all the recreational opportunities of this undiscovered gem of Farlax Sector—look out the viewports! Then later, you can look out the viewports! And whatever else you do during your nineteen-hour stay, make sure you take the time to look out the viewports!”
It was an old, familiar joke, and drew no more than ritual chuckles from the survey team. ASI vessels were the restless, peripatetic travelers of the stars—professional tourists on breathless sightseeing expeditions through the galaxy. Capable of exceptionally high speeds in realspace, a flatfish rarely took more than a day to complete a mapping and survey pass across the top of an entire star system.
Most planets were overflown at close to maximum speed. Only if the approach data showed signs of life would a probe slow to quarter-speed. Only the markers of technological habitation could make them linger as long as a single orbit. Only the most extraordinary anomalies in the scans could make a flatfish pilot turn back and make a second pass. And landings were so rare as to be nearly unheard of.
Astrolabe had been diverted from work in Torranix Sector to fill a gap in the standard star charts—a gap left by the fallen Empire’s obsessive secrecy, which treated ordinary astrographic data about the territory it controlled as classified military data.
The pilot, an eighteen-year veteran known to his crew as Gabby, had overflown more than a thousand planets in his career—but had set foot on only three. His senior surveyor, Tanea, had nearly three thousand overflights on her jacket, yet had ground-level memories of only half a dozen. The junior surveyor, Rulffe, expected to pass the five hundred mark on this tour, but had never drawn a breath on any world but his homeworld.
This mission began like all the others. The first hour was the busiest—while Tanea and Rulffe checked out the scanners, Gabby calibrated the probe’s autonav for the shortest-path mapping pass over the system’s quartet of cold, gaseous planets. They had every reason to think that their visit to Doornik-1142 would be short and uneventful, ending with a compressed data dump to Coruscant and the jump to the next gravitational well.
But it would end early, and hard.
Gabby and Tanea were playing a word game over the ship’s comm system as Astrolabe approached the second planet.
“Hemostat,” said Gabby.
“Oh, easy. Statistics.”
“Eh—experience.”
Tanea laughed. “That’s not legal, but I’m going to give it to you anyway, because I’m such a kind and loving soul. Encephalitis.”
“Tissue.”
Tanea frowned. “I take it back. I think you’ve got me now—”
Without warning the ship began to shake violently. The cabin was filled with a roaring sound like an animal wind, a deep growly rumble, and crackling like fire.
“What the hell!” Rulffe exclaimed.
“Something’s wrong with the engines!” Gabby cried as the roar became a screaming whistle.
In the next moment, the air was ripped from his lungs in a frosty