Heir To The Empire (23 page)

“Yes, sir,” Pellaeon agreed cautiously, hurrying to catch up with the other. “I’m sure it’s just a matter of time.”

Thrawn raised an eyebrow. “You misunderstand me,” he said mildly. “I mean that literally. He’s out there right now, not very far away. And-” he smiled slyly at Pellaeon “-he’s helpless.”

Pellaeon frowned. “I don’t understand, sir.”

“That maneuver he used has an interesting side effect I suspect he didn’t know about,” the Grand Admiral explained. “Backfiring an acceleration compensator like that does severe damage to the adjoining hyperdrive. A light-year away, no farther, and it will fail completely. All we have to do is make a search along that vector, or persuade others to do our searching for us, and he’ll be ours. You follow?”

“Yes, sir,” Pellaeon said. “Shall I contact the rest of the fleet?”

Thrawn shook his head. “Preparing for the Sluis Van attack is the fleet’s top priority at the moment. No, I think we’ll subcontract this one out. I want you to send messages to all the major smuggling chiefs whose groups operate in this area-Brasck, Karrde, Par’tah, any others we have on file. Use their private frequencies and encrypt codes-a little reminder of how much we know about each of them should help ensure their cooperation. Give them Skywalker’s hyperspace vector and offer a bounty of thirty thousand for his capture.”

“Yes, sir.” Pellaeon glanced back down the crew pit, at the activity still going on around the tractor beam station. “Sir, if you knew that Skywalker’s escape was only temporary . . . ?”

“The Empire is at war, Captain,” the Grand Admiral said, his voice cold. “We cannot afford the luxury of men whose minds are so limited they cannot adapt to unexpected situations.”

He looked significantly at Rukh, then turned those glowing eyes back on Pellaeon. “Carry out your orders, Captain. Skywalker will be ours. Alive . . . or otherwise.”

In front of Luke, the scopes and displays glowed softly as the diagnostic messages, most of them bordered in red, scrolled past. Beyond the displays, through the canopy, he could see the X-wing’s nose, lit faintly by the sheen of distant starlight. Beyond that were the stars themselves, blazing all around him with cold brilliance.

And that was all. No sun, no planets, no asteroids, no cometary bodies. No warships, transports, satellites, or probes. Nothing. He and Artoo were stranded, very literally, in the middle of nowhere.

The computer’s diagnostic package came to an end. “Artoo?” he called. “What’ve you got?”

From behind him came a distinctly mournful electronic moan, and the droid’s reply appeared on the computer scope. “That bad, huh?”

Artoo moaned again, and the computer’s summary was replaced by the droid’s own assessment of their situation.

It wasn’t good. Luke’s reverse-triggering of the acceleration compensator had caused an unanticipated feedback surge into both hyperdrive motivators-not enough to fry them on the spot, but scorching them badly enough to cause sudden failure ten minutes into their escape. At the Point Four the ship had been doing at the time, that translated into approximately half a light-year of distance. Just for good measure, the same power surge had also completely crystallized the subspace radio antenna.

“In other words,” Luke said, “we can’t leave, we aren’t likely to be found, and we can’t call for help. Does that about sum it up?”

Artoo beeped an addition. “Right,” Luke sighed. “And we can’t stay here. Not for long, anyway.”

Luke rubbed a hand across his chin, forcing back the sense of dread gnawing at him. Giving in to fear would only rob him of the ability to think, and that was the last thing he could afford to lose at this point. “All right,” he said slowly. “Try this. We take the hyperdrive motivators off both engines and see if we can salvage enough components to put together a single functional one. If we can, we remount it somewhere in the middle of the aft fuselage where it can handle both engines. Maybe where the S-Foil servo actuator is now-we don’t need that to get home. Possible?”

Artoo whistled thoughtfully. “I’m not asking if it’ll be easy,” Luke said patiently as the droid’s response came up. “Just if it would be possible.”

Another whistle, another pessimistic message. “Well, let’s give it a try anyway,” Luke told him, unstrapping his restraints and trying to wriggle around in the cramped confines of the cockpit. If he pulled off the back of the ejection seat, he would be able to get into the cargo compartment and the tools stored there.

Artoo warbled something else. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to get stuck,” Luke assured him, changing his mind and reaching for the in-cockpit pouches instead. The gloves and helmet seals for his flight suit were stored there; it’d be just as easy at this point to gear himself for vacuum and then get into the cargo compartment through its underside hatch. “If you want to be helpful, you might pull up the maintenance specs and find out exactly how I go about getting one of those motivators out. And cheer up, will you? You’re starting to sound like Threepio.”

Artoo was still jabbering indignantly over that characterization when the last of Luke’s helmet seals cut off the sound. But he did sound less frightened.

It took nearly two hours for Luke to get past all the other cables and tubing in the way and remove the port engine hyperdrive motivator from its socket.

It took less than a minute more to discover that Artoo’s earlier pessimism had been justified.

“It’s riddled with cracks,” Luke told the droid grimly, turning the bulky box over in his hands. “The whole shield casing. Just hairlines, really-you can barely see some of them. But they run most of the length of the sides.”

Artoo gave a soft gurgle, a comment which required no translation. Luke hadn’t done a lot of X-wing maintenance, but he knew enough to recognize that without an intact superconducting shield, a hyperdrive motivator was little more than a box of interconnected spare parts. “Let’s not give up yet,” he reminded Artoo. “If the other motivator’s casing is all right we may still be in business.”

Collecting his tool kit, feeling inordinately clumsy in zero-gee freefall, he made his way under the X-wing’s fuselage to the starboard engine. It took only a few minutes to remove the proper access cover and tie back some of the interfering cables. Then, trying to get both his faceplate and his glow rod together in the opening without blinding himself, he peered inside.

A careful look at the motivator casing showed that there was no need to continue the operation.

For a long moment he just hung there, one knee bumping gently against the power surge vent, wondering what in the name of the Force they were going to do now. His X-wing, so sturdy and secure in even the thick of combat, seemed now to be little more than a terribly fragile thread by which his life was hanging

He looked around him-looked at the emptiness and the distant stars-and as he did so, the vague sense of falling that always accompanied zero-gee came flooding back in on him. A memory flashed: hanging from the underside of Cloud City, weak from fear and the shock of losing his right hand, wondering how long he would have the strength to hang on. Leia, he called silently, putting all the power of his new Jedi skill into the effort. Leia, hear me. Answer me.

There was no answer except for the echoing of the call through Luke’s own mind. But then, he hadn’t expected one. Leia was long gone, safe on Kashyyyk by now, under the protection of Chewbacca and a whole planet of Wookiees.

He wondered if she’d ever find out what had happened to him.

For the Jedi, there is no emotion; there is peace. Luke took a deep breath, forcing back the black thoughts. No, he would not give up. And if the hyperdrive couldn’t be fixed . . . well, perhaps there was something else they could try. “I’m coming in, Artoo,” he announced, replacing the access panel and again collecting his tools. “While you’re waiting, I want you to pull everything we’ve got on the subspace radio antenna.”

Artoo had the data assembled by the time Luke got the cockpit canopy sealed over him again. Like the hyperdrive data, it wasn’t especially encouraging. Made of ten kilometers of ultrathin superconducting wire wound tightly around a U-shaped core, a subspace radio antenna wasn’t something that was supposed to be field-repairable.

But then, Luke wasn’t the average X-wing pilot, either.

“All right, here’s what we’re going to do,” he told the droid slowly. “The antenna’s outer wiring is useless, but it doesn’t look like the core itself was damaged. If we can find ten kilometers of superconducting wire somewhere else on the ship, we should be able to make ourselves a new one. Right?”

Artoo thought about that, gurgled an answer. “Oh, come on now,” Luke admonished him. “You mean to tell me you can’t do what some nonintelligent wire-wrapping machine does all day?”

The droid’s beeping response sounded decidedly indignant. The translation that scrolled across the computer scope was even more so. “Well, then, there’s no problem,” Luke said, suppressing a smile. “I’d guess either the repulsorlift drive or else the sensor jammer will have all the wire we need. Check on that, will you?”

There was a pause, and Artoo quietly whistled something. “Yes, I know what the life support’s limitations are,” Luke agreed. “That’s why you’ll be the one doing all the wiring. I’m going to have to spend most of the time back in hibernation trance.”

Another series of whistles. “Don’t worry about it,” Luke assured him. “As long as I come up every few days for food and water, hibernation is perfectly safe. You’ve seen me do it a dozen times, remember? Now get busy and run those checks.”

Neither of the two components had quite the length of wiring they needed, but after poking around a little in the more esoteric sections of his technical memory, Artoo came to the conclusion that the eight kilometers available in the sensor jammer should be adequate to create at least a low-efficiency antenna. He conceded, however, that there was no way to know for sure until they actually tried it.

It was another hour’s work for Luke to get the jammer and antenna out of the ship, strip the ruined wire off the core of the latter, and move everything to the upper aft fuselage where Artoo’s two graspers could reach it. Jury-rigging a framework to feed the wire and protect it from snagging took another hour, and he took a half hour more to watch the operation from inside to make sure it was going smoothly.

At which point there was nothing left for him to do.

“Now, don’t forget,” he warned the droid as he settled himself as comfortably into the cockpit seat as possible. “If anything goes wrong-or you even think something’s about to go wrong- you go ahead and wake me up. Got that?”

Artoo whistled his assurances. “All right,” Luke said, more to himself than to the droid. “I guess this is it, then.”

He took a deep breath, letting his gaze sweep one last time across the starry sky. If this didn’t work . . . But there was no point in worrying about that now. He’d done all he could for the moment. It was time now for him to draw upon inner peace, and to entrust his fate to Artoo.

To Artoo . . . and to the Force.

He took another deep breath. Leia, he called, uselessly, one last time. Then, turning his mind and thoughts inward, he began to slow his heart.

The last thing he remembered before the darkness took him was the odd sense that someone, somewhere, had in fact heard that final call. . . .

Leia . . .

Leia jerked awake. “Luke?” she called, propping herself up on one elbow and peering into the dimness surrounding her. She could have sworn she’d heard his voice. His voice, or perhaps the touch of his mind.

But there was no one. Nothing but the cramped space of the Lady Luck’s main cabin and the pounding of her own heart and the familiar background sounds of a ship in flight. And, a dozen meters away in the cockpit, the unmistakable sense of Chewbacca’s presence. And as she woke further, she remembered that Luke was hundreds of light-years away.

It must have been a dream.

With a sigh, she lay back down. But even as she did so, she heard the subtle change in sound and vibration pattern as the main sublight drive shut down and the repulsorlift kicked in. Listening closer, she could hear the faint sound of air rushing past the hull.

Slightly ahead of schedule, they were coming in to Kashyyyk.

She got out of bed and found her clothes, feeling her quiet misgivings gnawing with renewed force as she got dressed. Han and Chewbacca could make all the reassuring noises they wanted, but she’d read the diplomatic reports, and she knew full well how strong the undercurrent of resentment was that the Wookiees still harbored toward humans. Whether her status as a member of the New Republic hierarchy would make up for that was, in her view, entirely problematical.

Especially given her chronic difficulty in understanding their language.

The thought made her wince, and not for the first time since leaving Nkllon, she wished she’d had Lando use some other droid for his little voice-matching trick. Having Threepio and his seven-million-language translator along would have made this whole thing so much less awkward.

The Lady Luck was already deep into the atmosphere by the time she arrived in the cockpit, skimming low over a surprisingly flat layer of clouds and making smooth curves around the treetops that were occasionally visible poking through them. She remembered when she’d first come across a reference to the size of Kashyyyk’s trees; she’d had a full-blown argument with the Senate librarian at the time about how the government could not afford to have its records data shot through with such clearly absurd errors. Even now, with them right in front of her, she found the things hard to believe. “Is that size typical for wroshyr trees?” she asked Chewbacca as she slipped into the seat beside him.

Chewbacca growled a negative: the ones visible above the clouds were probably half a kilometer taller than the average. “They’re the ones you put nursery rings on, then,” Leia nodded.

He looked at her, and even with her limited ability to read Wookiee faces his surprise was quite evident. “Don’t look so shocked,” she admonished him with a smile. “Some of us humans know a little about Wookiee culture. We aren’t all ignorant savages, you know.”