• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The bay had now been partitioned off by a temporary bulkhead into two parts. In the front third, suspended in a metal brace hung from the bay ceiling, was a two-seat B-wing fighter, old but—he’d been guaranteed—reliable.

The rear portion of the bay was filled with boulders. Well, they were not boulders exactly. Hanging from cables were pieces of debris, many of them chunks of downed coralskippers. Dead coralskippers, he reminded himself. They’d been hollowed out by volunteer crews who’d later decided they never wanted to field-dress one of the organic spacecraft again. Now they were shells, each one capable of holding one or two members of Luke’s team. There was other wreckage in the bay, as well—pieces of Yuuzhan Vong and New Republic ships, chunks of permacrete. The press of a button from Lando’s bridge or a comlink carried by Luke would sever all those cables and activate an inertial compensator mounted on the bulkhead opposite the ramp door, shoving the debris and the insertion team out through the door.

The work crew’s final welding of the bulkhead between the forward and rear portions of the bay was what was generating the sparks. Lando approved. He wanted that bulkhead to be strong. He didn’t need debris to come crashing through to wreck his B-wing.

He wasn’t as familiar with B-wings as he’d like to be, but the vehicle should be able to get him and his droid back home—if he could reach the docking bay from the bridge. If he had time. If not, he’d be launching in an escape pod. He’d be captured by the Yuuzhan Vong. He’d be enslaved and tortured.

No, he decided, if he couldn’t reach the B-wing, there would be no escape pod for him. He’d ride the wreckage of the corvette all the way down to Coruscant’s surface. And he’d look good while doing it.

Lando was on the bridge when Luke’s team came up the temporary ramp into the landing bay. It was Luke and Mara, Tahiri, several of the Wraiths, whom he’d barely met—the bald one, the tall one, the Devaronian, the skinny bearded man, and the severe-looking woman—and a final surprise, Danni Quee.

He shouldn’t have been startled. He should have known that the persistent scientist would have insisted on being a part of the mission to find out what was going wrong with Coruscant’s planet shaping to learn whatever she could of the Yuuzhan Vong.

R2-D2 waited at the bottom of the ramp. Lando knew that Luke wasn’t taking him along, and why; the astromech droid wasn’t mobile enough to navigate the difficult terrain the insertion team expected to face, and would certainly be an instant victim of Yuuzhan Vong wrath if captured.

R2-D2 tilted backward, as if leaning back to stare up at Luke, and Lando could imagine the plaintive noises and musical tones he’d be making. Luke stopped at the top of the ramp, still within range of R2’s holocam view, and turned back to his droid companion. His gesture was conciliatory, reassuring.

“Pretty sad, huh?” Lando asked.

His own droid companion, YVH 1-1A, looked up from its sensors. “Sad,” it confirmed, but without inflection.

“Ready to face the danger?”

“I am ready,” YVH 1-1A said. “Of course I am ready. I am programmed to be ready. Always ready. Never uncertain about facing danger.”

Lando gave the droid a little frown. It sounded as though the combat droid had picked up some conversational mannerisms from a protocol droid like C-3PO. But YVH 1-1A still didn’t have the linguistic modules to help him develop idiosyncrasies like that. Oh, well. Something to worry about when they got back. He hit the switch on his comm unit. “Borleias Control, this is Record Time. Ready for takeoff.”

“We’ll give you the word. The assault is anticipated within the half hour.”

“Hey, what odds am I getting that I’ll blow up before getting out of the atmosphere?”

“Um, about one in a hundred, sir.”

“I’ll put a thousand credits on surviving at least to orbit.”

“I’ll take that, sir. I could use ten credits.”

“How do you collect if you win?”

Silence answered him. Lando grinned at YVH 1-1A, but the droid merely