Showdown at Centerpoint (6 page)

Han waited as long as he dared, then one moment longer, then one more. And then—

He slammed down the relay reset switch as hard as he could, dumping all of the feedback energy directly into the engine start manifold. He stabbed down on the engine start button—and felt a horrifying lurch, just as a low, rumbling explosion shook the ship from base to apex. That would have to be the repulsors blowing. For a long, sickening moment, nothing else happened. But then the
ENGINES NOW CERTAINLY ARE INITIATED FULLY
indicator came on, and Han had three good engines.

Three? Not four? One of them must have been blown out by that LAF fighter. Han had been afraid of that. But even if he had one less engine than he had hoped for, that was three more than he had expected.

Ignoring all his own advice on the subject, he brought the throttle up fast. There wasn’t time to nurse the engines. There was a distant bang and sudden flurry of violent vibrations that faded almost before they started, but the engines were holding. At least for now. At least for now.

Han watched the acceleration meter, the velocity gauge, and the none-too-reliable altitude meter. For a wonder, the displays were all in standard units, and not some obscure Selonian format he had never seen before.

But what he was seeing was by no means reassuring. He had flown enough reentries to know at a glance that they were far from out of trouble. The best they
were going to manage was a controlled crash. Han risked a glance out the viewport and saw that the
Jade’s Fire
was still staying close, somehow. Mara was some kind of pilot.

Now if only he had a view that would show him the direction he was going. Unfortunately, the ship was flying stern-first, and the stern holocam, which might have shown him at least a vague idea of where he was heading, had given up altogether at some point in the proceedings.

On the bright side, air friction was slowing down the ship’s axial spin. Finally it stopped altogether, which at least made piloting the coneship that much easier. It was about time
something
got easier.

Han watched his velocity and altitude gauges, and knew just how much trouble he was still in. He had to shed some more speed. He had no choice in the matter. There was a way to do it, but it had its own drawbacks. And making it work without maneuvering thrusters was not going to be easier. He would have to do all his steering by playing with the thrust of the main engines—not simple when he was already juggling their thrust vectors to compensate for the missing engine. Still, it was doable. Maybe.

He eased back just a trifle on the thrust to number three engine, and the coneship slowly pitched back, until it was flying at about a forty-five-degree angle of attack. It was still falling straight down, but now its nose was pointed an eighth of a turn away from the vertical. If Han had it figured right, that ought to start the coneship developing a bit of aerodynamic lift, in effect causing it to work like an airfoil. The coneship began to move sideways as well as down, and every millimeter of lateral movement came straight from the energy of their fall.

The ship began to bang and shudder violently, but every crash and rattle was that much more excess energy expended.

“Honored Solo!” Dracmus protested above the
racket, “You have put us in lateral flight! Where are you taking us?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Han said. “But we have to go lateral to shed some speed.”

“But suppose we land outside the zone controlled by my Den?!”

“Then we have a problem,” Han shouted back.

Dracmus did not reply to that, but she had a point. Landing completely at random on a planet in the midst of civil war was not exactly prudent.

Han pushed it from his mind. The job of the moment was getting this thing down in one piece. Down
where,
they could sort out later.

He checked his gauges. They were still falling like a rock—but like a slower rock, a gliding rock. And hull temperatures were actually falling, just a trifle. Maybe, maybe, they were going to make it.

Of course, landing on the sublight engines, rather than on the now-dead repulsors, and landing blind would be challenges in their own right. It would be at least another ninety seconds before he had to worry about such things.

He checked the gauges and shook his head. The lateral flight trick was slowing them down, but nowhere near enough. At this rate, they’d be lucky to drop below the speed of sound before they hit.

There was no way around it. He was going to have to get something more out of the engines. What about that fourth engine, the one that had refused to light? Maybe it was just its initiator link that had been blown off. Maybe the engine itself was still there, if he could just get it to come on. Maybe if he tried a parallel backfeed start. With the other engines up and running, he could borrow part of their energy output and back-flush it through the unlit engine. It
might
work. Han reset the power flow from the number two engine, routing five percent of it through the initiator lines to engine three. He stabbed down the button marked
PRESSING HERE WILL CAUSE ENGINE NUMBER FOUR TO START
.

A weird high-pitched squeal cut through the clamoring roar that filled the command deck, and the coneship began to oscillate wildly as the engine lit and died and lit and died. A display indicator came on, announcing
ENGINE FOUR NOW OPERATING NICELY
, but it went out again, then popped on and faded one more time before coming back on and staying that way.

Four engines. He had four good engines. He might come out of this alive after all. But then he checked his altitude, and found good reason to doubt it. They were only three kilometers up. Han realized that he would have to shed all of his lateral speed immediately if he was going to set this thing down. He pitched the ship around until it was flying flat on its side, the thrust axis parallel to the ground. The planetary horizon swooped into view and kept going right past, until Han was flying exactly upside down, his feet pointed at the sky and his head pointed at the ground.

He throttled all the engines up to maximum, and just a bit beyond, and held it there, until the ground stopped rushing past from side to side and was simply coming straight at him. Zero forward velocity, or close enough.

But plenty of velocity in the direction of down. Han pitched the coneship over again, until he was flat on his back, looking at the sky, and made sure the engines were cranked up to maximum power. There was nothing else he could do. “Hanging on!” he shouted in Selonian. “Be strapped in and braced. We are going to be hitting hard!”

Green lights started to flash all over the propulsion status display. In most ships that would have been a good thing, but not on this crate. To a Selonian, green was the color of danger, disaster. The engines were running full out, at or beyond the point of catastrophe. Han wanted desperately to see if he could bully or tempt just a little bit more out of them, but did not
dare. No point in coming this far just to have the ship detonate a half kilometer off the ground.

Maybe, maybe, they had slowed down enough to make this a survivable crash. Han cut power to all systems and diverted it all into the inertial dampers. There was no way the dampers could absorb all the energy of impact, but they would soak up some of it. Maybe if they were running at max power, it would be just enough.

And that was it. That was all. There were no tricks left. Nothing left to do but hold on and watch the numbers in the altimeter evaporate. Han had not the faintest idea where they were about to land. There had not been time, in his one quick glance at the ground, to do anything more than see that it was there. He had seen water, flat land, and some good-sized hills, but which of them he was about to hit, he had no idea.

One kilometer up. Eight hundred meters. Seven hundred. Five hundred. Four hundred. Three fifty. If only the repulsors were still working. Too bad he had been forced to fry them to a crisp starting the engines. Three hundred. How accurate was that altimeter, anyway? Two hundred. One fifty. One hundred meters up. Seventy-five. Fifty. Han braced for the impact and resisted the impulse to shut his eyes. Zero.

Negative ten meters. Not all that accurate. But every extra meter was another fraction of a second for the coneship’s engines to slow them down. Neg twenty. Neg fifty—

SLAM!! A hundred crazed banthas jumped onto Han’s chest all at once, driving him down into the padding of the pilot’s flight station. Dracmus screamed, a startling, high-pitched ululation. A metal bulkhead tore itself apart somewhere in the ship with a terrible metallic shriek, and a dozen alarms started hooting at once. The overhead viewport held together, somehow, and Han could see the sky was filled with smoke and steam—and mud.

Huge gobs of sodden earth splattered down on the viewport, covering it all but completely.

Han hit the alarm cutoff, and was astonished by the sudden near-silence. But for Dracmus moaning in fright, and the plopping sounds of the last of the mud raining down on the ship’s hull, all was quiet. They were down, and alive. A sudden flurry of water, falling in a single thin sheet of droplets, fell on the ship, washing some—but far from all—of the mud off the viewport.

Han got to his feet, feeling more than a little wobbly. “That one was close,” he said in Basic, to himself as much as anything. “Come,” he said in Selonian. “We must leave ship. Might be—” He stopped dead. Half his Selonian seemed to have faded away, at least for the moment. After that close a call, it was a wonder he was calm enough to remember his own name. But he couldn’t think of the words for “chemical leak,” or “fire,” or “short circuits.” “Bad things,” he said at last. “Might be bad things on ship. Must leave
now.
”

The two Selonians, both of them clearly shaken up, got to their feet and followed Han down the ladder to the lower deck and over to the main hatch. Han punched at the open button, and was not the least bit surprised when nothing at all happened. The ship they had risked their lives to land, the ship that the Hunchuzuc needed so badly, was a write-off. A complete loss. Han knelt down, fumbled with the access panel for the manual controls, got the cover off, and turned the hand crank. The hatch swung reluctantly open, and jammed up twice before it swung wide enough for them to get out. Han stuck his head out first and looked around.

It looked like they had landed square in the middle of a shallow pond—and splashed it dry on impact. The bottom of the pond was completely exposed, but for one or two puddles here and there. The mud was steaming here and there, letting off the heat produced
by the ship’s impact. It was a beautiful, perfect spring day. Somehow, the picturesque meadows and woodlands that surrounded the splashed-out pond made the mud and the mire and the mess of the landing seem just that much more out of place, just that much more absurd.

The coneship had buried itself at least a half meter into the soft mud of the pond bottom. What had been a meter and a half drop from the hatch to the ground was suddenly a lot shorter. Han sat down on the edge of the hatch and hopped down—only to sink in over his ankles in the thick mud. He lifted his left foot up out of the muck, nearly losing a boot in the process, and planted it as far away from the ship as possible before pulling his right foot out.

He squelched out of the pond basin toward dry land and saw a Selonian, an older-looking female with graying dark brown fur and a moody look in her eyes.

“That’s a Hunchuzuc coneship, be it not?” the Selonian asked, watching Dracmus and Salculd stagger out of the craft.

“That’s right,” Han said, a bit distractedly as he slogged through the mud. That was the Selonians for you. A spaceship crash-lands in a pond in front of one, and what was the response? Not shock, or surprise, or fear. Not “hello,” not “what an amazing escape,” not “are you all right?” No. The first thing to worry about was what Den was involved.

“Hmmph,” said the Selonian. “This is Chanzari land. We be Republicists, Hunchuzuc allies.”

“Good,” said Han, still struggling toward shore. “Glad to hear it.” Han half climbed, half crawled out of the pond basin, and paused there a moment.

The old Selonian looked at the ship and shook her head. “Coneships,” she said, her tone derisive. “The Hunchuzuc are foolhardy. Selonians do not belong in space.”

Han looked at the Selonian for a long moment.
“You know,” he said, “I’d just about worked that out for myself.” He turned his back on the coneship and staggered off toward the other side of the clearing, where the
Jade’s Fire
was settling in for a nice, calm, sedate landing.

T
endra Risant sat in the pilot’s station of the
Gentleman Caller,
and wondered if it was going to be all right, wondered how it could be all right. She had done her part, however little that might be. In purely objective terms, all was well. She had used the radionics transmitter to tell Lando of the fleet hidden in the Sacorrian system. His friends had gotten the news, and it might well prove vital to them. She knew Lando was alive, and well, and that he was glad she was in-system.