Apocalypse (73 page)

The freighter rocked as a pair of shots caught it squarely on the aft deflector. “Never mind,” Qennto said before Car’das could answer. He punched the board, and once again the starlines lanced out and faded into the blotchy hyperspace sky.

Maris exhaled in a huff. “That was
too
close.”

“Okay, so maybe he
is
mad at us,” Qennto conceded. “Now. Like Maris said, kid, what do you mean,
try
this one?”

“I didn’t have time to calculate a proper jump,” Car’das explained. “So I just aimed us into an empty spot with no stars.”

Qennto swiveled around. “You mean an empty spot with no
visible
stars?” he asked ominously. “An empty spot with no collapsed stars, or pre-star dark masses, or something hidden behind dust clouds?
That
kind of empty spot?” He waved a hand toward the canopy. “
And
out toward the Unknown Regions on top of it?”

“We don’t have enough data in that direction for him to have done a proper calculation anyway,” Maris said, coming unexpectedly to Car’das’s defense.

“That’s not the point,” Qennto insisted.

“No, the point is that he got us away from Progga,” Maris said. “I think that deserves at least a thank-you.”

Qennto rolled his eyes. “
Thank
you,” he said. “Such thanks to be rescinded if and when we run through a star you didn’t see, of course.”

“I think it’s more likely the hyperdrive will blow up first,” Car’das warned. “Remember that nullifier problem I told you about? I think it’s getting—”

He was cut off by a wailing sound from beneath them, and with a lurch the
Bargain Hunter
leapt forward like a giffa on a scent.

“Running hot!” Qennto shouted, spinning back to his board. “Maris, shut ’er down!”

“Trying,” Maris called back over the wailing as her fingers danced across her board. “Control lines are looping—can’t get a signal through.”

With a curse, Qennto popped his straps and heaved his bulk out of his seat. He sprinted down the narrow aisle, his elbow barely missing the back of Car’das’s head as he passed. Poking uselessly at his own controls, Car’das popped his own strap release and started to follow.

“Car’das, get up here,” Maris called, gesturing him forward.

“He might need me,” Car’das said as he nevertheless reversed direction and headed forward.

“Sit,” she ordered, nodding sideways at Qennto’s vacated pilot’s seat. “Help me watch the tracker—if we veer off this vector before Rak figures out how to pull the plug, I need to know about it.”

“But Qennto—”

“Word of advice, friend,” she interrupted, her eyes still on her displays. “This is Rak’s ship. If there are any tricky repairs to be made, he’s the one who’ll make them.”

“Even if I happen to know more about a particular system than he does?”

“
Especially
if you happen to know more about it than he does,” she said drily. “But in this case, you don’t. Trust me.”

“Fine,” Car’das said with a sigh. “Such trust to be rescinded if and when we blow up, of course.”

“You’re learning,” she said approvingly. “Now run a
systems check on the scanners and see if the instability’s bled over into them. Then do the same for the nav computer. Once we get through this, I want to make sure we can find our way home again.”

It took Qennto over four hours to find a way to shut down the runaway hyperdrive without slagging it. During that time Car’das offered his help three times, and Maris offered hers twice. All the offers were summarily refused.

Sometime during the first hour, as near as Car’das could figure from the readings tumbling across the displays, they left the relatively well-known territory of the Outer Rim, passing into a shallow section of the far less well-known territory known as Wild Space. Sometime early in the fourth hour, they left even that behind and crossed the hazy line into the Unknown Regions.

At which point, where they were or what exactly they were flying into was anyone’s guess.

But at last the wailing faded away, and a few minutes later the hyperspace sky collapsed into starlines and then into stars. “Maris?” Qennto’s voice called from the comm panel.

“We’re out,” she confirmed. “Running a location check now.”

“I’ll be right there,” Qennto said.

“Wherever we are, we’re a long way from home,” Car’das murmured, gazing out at a small but brilliant globular star cluster in the distance. “I’ve never seen anything like
that
from any of the Outer Rim worlds I’ve been to.”

“Me, neither,” Maris agreed soberly. “Hopefully, the computer can sort it out.”

The computer was still sifting data when Qennto reappeared on the bridge. Car’das had made sure to be back at his own station by then. “Nice cluster,” the big man commented as he dropped into his seat. “Any systems nearby?”

“Closest one’s about a quarter light-year directly ahead,” Maris said, pointing.

Qennto grunted and punched at his board. “Let’s see if we can make it,” he said. “Backup hyperdrive should still have enough juice for a jump that short.”

“Can’t we work on the ship just as well out here?” Car’das asked.

“I don’t like interstellar space,” Qennto said distractedly as he set up the jump. “It’s dark and cold and lonely. Besides, that system up there might have a nice planet or two.”

“Which means a possible source of supplies, in case we end up staying longer than we expect,” Maris explained.

“Or a possible place to settle down away from the noise and fluster of the Republic for a while,” Qennto added.

Car’das felt his throat tighten. “You don’t mean—?”

“No, he doesn’t,” Maris assured him. “Rak always talks about getting away from it all whenever he’s in trouble with someone.”

“He must talk that way a lot,” Car’das muttered.

“What was that?” Qennto asked.

“Nothing.”

“Didn’t think so. Here we go.” There was a screech, more genteel than the sound from the
Bargain Hunter
’s main hyperdrive, and the stars stretched out into starlines.

Silently, Car’das counted off the seconds to himself, fully expecting the backup hyperdrive to crash at any time. But it didn’t, and after a few tense minutes the starlines collapsed again to reveal a small yellow sun directly ahead.

“There we go,” Qennto said approvingly. “All the comforts of home. You figure out yet where we are, Maris?”

“Computer’s still working on it,” Maris said. “But it looks like we’re about two hundred fifty light-years into Unknown Space.” She lifted her eyebrows at him. “I’m thinking we’re going to have a stack of late-delivery penalties when we finally get to Comra.”

“Oh, you worry too much,” Qennto chided. “It won’t take more than a day or two to fix the hyperdrive. If we push it a little, we shouldn’t be more than a week overdue.”

Car’das suppressed a grimace. Pushing the hyperdrive, if he recalled correctly, was what had wrecked the thing to begin with.

There was a twitter from the comm. “We’re being hailed,” he reported, frowning as he keyed it on. He threw a look at the visual displays, searching for their unknown caller—

And felt his whole body go rigid. “Qennto!” he snapped. “It’s—”

He was cut off by a deep rumbling chuckle from the comm. “So, Dubrak Qennto,” an all-too-familiar voice rumbled in Huttese. “You think to escape me so easily?”

“You call that
easy
?” Qennto muttered as he keyed his transmitter. “Oh, hi, Progga,” he said. “Look, like I told you before, I can’t let you have these furs. I’ve already contracted with Drixo—”

“Ignore the furs,” Progga cut in. “Show me your hidden treasure hoard.”

Qennto frowned at Maris. “My
what
?”

“Do not play the fool,” Progga warned, his voice going an octave deeper. “I know your sort. You do not simply run
from
something, but run rather
to
something else. This is the lone star system along this vector; and behold, you are here. What could you have run to but a secret base and treasure hoard?”

Qennto muted the transmitter. “Car’das, where is he?”

“A hundred kilometers off the starboard bow,” Car’das told him, his hands shaking as he ran a full scan on the distant Hutt ship. “And he’s coming up fast.”

“Maris?”

“Whatever you did to shut down the hyperdrive, you did a great job,” she said tightly. “It’s completely locked.
We’ve still got the backup, but if we try to run and he tracks us again—”

“And he will,” Qennto growled. Taking a deep breath, he switched the transmitter back on. “It wasn’t like that, Progga,” he said soothingly. “We were just trying to—”

“Enough!” the Hutt bellowed. “Lead me to this base. Now.”

“There isn’t any base,” Qennto insisted. “This is the Unknown Regions. Why would I set up a base out
here
?”

A light flashed on Car’das’s proximity sensor. “Incoming!” he snapped, his eyes darting back and forth among the displays as he searched for the source of the attack.

“Where?” Qennto snapped back.

Car’das had it now, coming from directly beneath the
Bargain Hunter:
a long, dark missile arrowing straight toward them. “There,” he said, pointing a finger straight down as he stared at the display.

It was only then that his brain caught up with the fact that this wasn’t the vector a missile would take from the approaching Hutt ship. He was opening his mouth to point that out when the missile burst open, its nose ejecting a wad of some kind of material. The wad began to expand as it cleared the shards of its container, opening like a fast-blooming flower into a filmy wall stretching over a kilometer across.

“Power off!” Qennto snapped, lunging across his board to the row of master power switches. “Hurry!”

“What is it?” Car’das asked, grabbing for his board’s own set of cutoffs.

“A Connor net, or something like it,” Qennto gritted out.

“What,
that
size?” Car’das asked in disbelief.

“Just
do
it,” Qennto snarled. Status lights were winking red and going out now as the three of them raced against the incoming net.

The net won. Car’das had made it through barely two-thirds
of his switches when the rippling edges came into sight around the sides of the hull. They folded themselves inward, curling around toward the bridge—

“Close your eyes,” Maris warned.

Car’das squeezed his eyes shut. Even through the lids he saw a hint of the brilliant flash as the net dumped its high-voltage current into and through the ship, sending a brief coronal tingling across his skin.

And when he carefully opened his eyes again, every light that had still been glowing across the bridge had gone dark.

The
Bargain Hunter
was dead.

Through the canopy came a flicker of light from the direction of the Hutt ship. “Looks like they got Progga, too,” he said, his voice sounding unnaturally loud in the sudden silence.

“I doubt it,” Qennto rumbled. “His ship’s big enough to have cap drains and other stuff to protect him from tricks like this.”

“Ten to one he’ll fight, too,” Maris murmured, her voice tight.

“Oh, he’ll fight, all right,” Qennto said heavily. “He’s way too stupid to realize that anyone who can make a Connor net that big will have plenty of other tricks up his sleeve.”

A multiple blaze of green blasterfire erupted from the direction of the Hutt ship. It was answered by brilliant blue flashes vectoring in from three different directions, fired from ships too small or too dark to see at the
Bargain Hunter
’s range. “You think whoever this is might get so busy with Progga that they’ll forget about us?” Maris asked hopefully.

“I don’t think so,” Car’das said, gesturing out the canopy at the small gray spacecraft that had taken up position with its nose pointed at the freighter’s portside flank. It was about the size of a shuttle or heavy fighter,
built in a curved, flowing design of a sort he’d never seen before. “They’ve left us a guard.”

“Figures,” Qennto said, glancing once at the alien ship and then turning back to the green and blue flashes. “Fifty says Progga lasts at least fifteen minutes and takes one of his attackers with him.”

Neither of the others took him up on the bet. Car’das watched the fight, wishing he had his sensors back. He’d read a little about space battle tactics in school, but the attackers’ methodology didn’t seem to fit with anything he could remember. He was still trying to figure it out when, with a final salvo of blue light, it was over.

“Six minutes,” Qennto said, his voice grim. “Whoever these guys are, they’re good.”

“You don’t recognize them, either?” Maris asked, looking out at their silent guard.

“I don’t even recognize the design,” he grunted, popping his restraints and standing up. “Let’s go check on the damage, see if we can at least get her ready for company. Car’das, you stay here and mind the store.”

“Me?” Car’das asked, feeling his stomach tighten. “But what if they—you know—signal us?”

“What do you think?” Qennto grunted as he and Maris headed aft. “You answer them.”

This is the period of the classic
Star Wars
movie trilogy—
A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back
, and
Return of the Jedi
—in which a ragtag band of Rebels battles the Empire, and Luke Skywalker learns the ways of the Force and must avoid his father’s fate.

During this time, the Empire controls nearly the entire settled galaxy. Out in the Rim worlds, Imperial stormtroopers suppress uprisings with brutal efficiency, many alien species have been enslaved, and entire star systems are brutally exploited by the Empire’s war machine. In the central systems, however, most citizens support the Empire, weighing misgivings about its harsh methods against the memories of the horror and chaos of the Clone Wars. Few dare to openly oppose Emperor Palpatine’s rule.

But the Rebel Alliance is growing. Rebel cells strike in secret from hidden bases scattered among the stars, encouraging some of the braver Senators to speak out against the Empire. When the Rebels learn that the Empire is building the Death Star, a space station with enough firepower to destroy entire planets, Princess Leia Organa, who represents her homeworld, Alderaan, in the Senate and is secretly a high-ranking member of the Rebel Alliance, receives the plans for the battle station and flees in search of the exiled Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi.