Star Wars_ The Old Republic_ Revan - Drew Karpyshyn [74]
“I don’t think so,” she replied, staring at the screens. “Its signature doesn’t match any design I’ve ever seen before.”
From her voice it was clear she was as puzzled as he was. If the ship hadn’t followed them here, the odds against it showing up at the same time they were here were astronomical. But Scourge understood the ways of the Force too well to believe in coincidence. There had to be some connection between them and the unexpected visitor.
“Looks like a small freighter of some kind,” Nyriss muttered. “I don’t think they’ve seen us.”
Scourge realized they had two options. The first was to make a quick jump to hyperspace in an effort to escape before being noticed.
Nyriss decided to take the second option. Reaching out a finger, she activated the shuttle’s ion cannon, locked onto the unidentified vessel, and fired.
THE INSTANT THE EBON HAWK dropped out of hyperspace near Nathema, Revan was overwhelmed by a barrage of mental images. Everything came crashing in on him, the memories he was so desperate to regain fusing with a trauma he had tried so hard to repress. Caught between the two, he cried out and clutched his head in his hands.
For several seconds he didn’t move, his conscious will battling with his runaway subconscious. One by one, he was able to take the recollections, process them, and store them away, slowly regaining control.
He knew with absolute certainty that he had been to this world before. He remembered its deserted city and its lifeless surface. He remembered searching the empty buildings with Malak, looking for archives, records, and astrogation charts that would guide them on the next step of the journey. But most of all, he remembered the horror of a dead planet entirely stripped of the Force.
T3 was at his side, beeping with concern. Revan blinked away the last of his fugue state and glanced down at the Hawk’s sensors to see what had the little droid so upset.
The sensors had picked up another vessel in the system. It was difficult to draw on the Force so close to the ravaged world, and he struggled to get some sense of the passengers on the other ship. By the time his groggy mind registered the threat they posed, it was too late.
The ion blast hit the Hawk full-bore, shorting out its circuits and engines and leaving them at the mercy of the gravitational field from the planet below.
Revan scrambled to steer the ship as it was pulled down into Nathema’s atmosphere, wondering at the chances of surviving a second crash landing in a row. The ion blast had damaged the flight controls and stabilizers, and the ship veered wildly as it plummeted toward the surface. He had no idea if the other vessel was following him; his sensors had been knocked out along with everything else. But he knew if he didn’t get the engines and repulsors back online, the Ebon Hawk would be smashed to pieces by the fall.
“Tee-Three!” he shouted, but the astromech had already sprung into action.
T3 had connected himself to the cockpit’s main control panel with a twenty-centimeter-long slicing tool. Lights on the cockpit dashboard began to flicker and flash as T3 rerouted power from damaged circuits. Through the cockpit window, Revan could see the distant outline of a city far below, the skyscrapers seeming to growing rapidly as the Hawk rushed toward them at terminal velocity.
Inside the control panel something crackled and popped. Smoke poured into the cockpit. T3 squealed in alarm, but his warning was drowned out by the sound of the Hawk’s engines roaring back to life.
Revan pulled back hard on the stick, and the nose of the Hawk grudgingly angled upward, emergency repulsors screaming.
“Brace for impact!” he shouted an instant before they slammed into the edge of one of the massive skyscrapers, sending a shower of permacrete and plasteel tumbling to the empty street below.
The Hawk ricocheted off the building and began to spin wildly. Then it slammed into the ground at an awkward angle, skipping along the street like a stone cast across water before finally coming to rest.
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