Corellian Trilogy_ Assault At Selonia Part 29

"Gee," said Anakin. "I sure hope we don't let them Marcha, d.u.c.h.ess of Mastigophorous, rode up the strange silver disk elevator to the surface, Anakin at the controls, as usual. Down below her, the Millennium Falcon was concealed, and Chewbacca was working Ebrihim and Q9 and the twins hard, setting up a snug little underground camp in the huge, hidden repulsor chamber. They would be able to hide out there for quite some time, and be able to study the repulsor in detail.

With a little luck, they would find a way to keep anyone else from using it.

But all that was for later. Right now Marcha simply wanted to get up out from underground and stand under the bold night sky of Drall.

The disk elevator rushed smoothly upward and inward, to the apex of the huge chamber. The point of the cone opened itself as the edges of the disk merged with the edges of the chamber, and they were moving up a smooth, perfect cylinder, rising out of the ground mt0 a brilliant night, the sky awash with stars.

And more than stars. There, off to the east, Corellia and Selonia were two fat points of light near the horizon. And to the west, floating a bit higher in the sky, the Double Worlds of Talus and alus, with Centerpoint Station so tiny a fleck of light Marcha was not sure if she saw it, or simply imagined that she did.

"They're out there somewhere, aren't they?" Anakin asked, taking Marcha by the paw and leaning into her a bit.

"Yes, dear, they are," she said, wrapping her free arm around him.

"Your parents are out there, I am sure of it, working and fighting and struggling to set things right." Anakin nodded thoughtfully. "They always do," he said. "Is that why we have to stay here? So we can help them by figuring out this repulsor thing?"

"Yes, dear," said Aunt Marcha. "That's it exactly."

down.

Somewhere out on the edges of the Thanta Zilbra system, Wedge Antilles brought his Enhanced X-wing in for a landing on the flight deck of the Naritus, and wished to the devil he had an enemy he could shoot at.

Instead, they were evacuating people from a whole star system, just because the paranoids at NRI had heard some crazy rumor. The story was that someone had blown up one star, and was threatening to blow up Thanta Zilbra next, and then some other star-and it seemed to Wedge that the rumor mill had named practically every star in the Galaxy as being the next on the list.

It all sounded absurd on the face of it. How the devil would anyone go about blowing up a star? Zero hour was less than twelve hours away now, and there had been no sign of anything happening. And what about the rumors that the Chief of State was caught up in the middle of it, in serious danger? Wedge hope that part of it was wrong.

He knew how much the New Republic needed Chief of State Organa Soland he knew how much leia meant to Wedge's friends Han and Luke.

But the scuttleb.u.t.t about leia was a rumor, nothing more. Some of the fliers in his squadron had heard that the whole exploding-star story was a fake, though none of them could name any source beyond the usual friend of a friend of a buddy who knew someone who heard something in the staff canteen. Wedge ignored it all.

Rumors were not his department. His job was to follow orders, and at the moment that meant flying evacuation support missiona few in his X-wing, and but most pa.s.senger runs in a small runabout. He also had to ride herd on Rogue Squadron, and keeping that bunch of loose cannons under control was no easy task.

They were keeping him busy on this one, but that was to be expected when the fleet mission was to evacuate every single sentient being from the entire Thanta Zilbra system-including those who did not want to go.

Those were headaches enough without wasting time worrying if orders made sense. At least he was flying fighters again. For a while there, it had seemed as if he had been drawing every duty but the one he was best at.

Not that running courier jobs and running emergency spares to transports was the most exciting kind of flying.

But at least it was nearly over. The fleet was supposed to jump into hypers.p.a.ce no later than one hour before zero hour. Another s.h.i.+ft and a half, and it would all be over-and more than likely they'd have to move everyone off the transports back to their homes, with apologies all around for the inconvenience. Of course, a fair number of the people of Thanta zilbra had saved them the trouble. Unable to believe there was any danger, they had simply refused to go. A fair number of the New Republic representatives trying to convince them were not all that convinced themselves, and that didn't help matters.

But enough of all that, just for the moment. He needed to unwind, at least a little bit, before he went back out. He popped his canopy and pulled himself out of the fighter. He waited for the ground crew to bring in the egress ladder, then climbed down out of his s.h.i.+p.

He went to the pilot's ready room, stripped out of his flight suit, treated himself to a very brief but very needed shower, and got into a fresh set of coveralls.

Thus refreshed, and feeling a bit restless, he decided to wander over toward the operations center to see what had gone wrong while he was out on patrol sorting out the last foul-up.

The Naritus was the flags.h.i.+p for the three wars.h.i.+ps and eight large transports involved in this mission, and the ops center was the nerve center for the whole operation. It was from ops that s.h.i.+ps were dispatched and recalled, from ops that the word came to try this solution instead of that, or just to give up and go on to the next problem. It was from here that the fleet officers placed their comlink calls to the leaders of this mining outpost or the captain of that in-system freighter, urging them, cajoling them, pleading with them to get out now, before it was too late, before disaster struck. It was from here that the mission commanders tried to smooth things over aboard the overcrowded transports. There had already been fights and one or two near riOts.

Tempers were running hot.

Wedge arrived at the ops-center hatch, punched his access code into the keypad, and the hatch slid open. He stepped inside-and instantly noticed something was wrong. Ops was calm. Quiet. Usually it was a madhouse, people tearing around, trying to manage the flow of s.h.i.+ps and refugees and information.

But something had happened. And he realized it was not calm that had brought the room to silence, but horror. Everyone in the room, without exception, was staring at one or another of the monitor displays.

No one was bellowing orders into headsets, or punching commands into control panels, or flipping back and forth through a dozen com frequencies to hear from all the partic.i.p.ants in a given crisis. None of them were doing anything but sta'ing. Wedge looked from one face to another and saw the same expression.

Dumb shock, disbelief, astonishment, terror.

Wedge hurried over to the fighter communications station. "Parry, what is it?" he asked the duty officer.

Parry shook his head and pointed at the main display screen. "The star," he said. "None of us believed it. Not us, n0t the people on the stations we were supposed to evacuate. But it just started to happen.

Look at it. Look at it." Wedge turned and looked at the infrared image of the star's disk. Only an hour before, it had been a placid, featureless blob, with nothing more threatening than a sunspot or two to blemish its appearance.

Now it was a roiling, tortured inferno, bubbling over with flares and spicules and prominences, its surface churning away so violently that Wedge could see the movement as he watched. "It's going to blow," he said.

"It's really going to blow. I didn't believe it could happen. I don't believe it"

"And now what do we do about all the people who believed as little as we did?" Parry asked.

Wedge stared at the monitor screen and frowned.

"We have to go back, and get them," he said.

Wedge lost count of the number of missions he flew that day, all of them in the runabout, most of them with the s.h.i.+p way over its authorized carrying capacity. One look at the change in their sun, and suddenly everyone was convinced it was time to go. Back and forth he went to the settlement on Thanta Zilbra, jamming as many warm bodies as he could into the craft before lumbering back into the sky. The landing fields were chaos, so bad it was hard to find a place to land, and his runabout was repeatedly mobbed before he could even get the hatches open.

The Naritus was not in much better shape. They did not have the time or the available s.h.i.+ps to transfer civilians to the transports, and they were overcrowded anyway. Somewhere in the nightmare fog of that day, he heard a voice over his headphones, a voice at ops confirming what Wedge already knew the information given to the mission planners badly undercounted the population of Thanta Zilbra.

All he could remember later were faces, images, moments. There was no way to a.s.semble anything like a complete, orderly chronology. A crying child in her mother's arms, another baby thrust aboard his craft by a father who could not get aboard himself, the stale smell of too many bodies jammed into too small a s.p.a.ce, the stink of fear in the air. Doing an overflight of a fire burning Out of control in the middle of the Thanta Zilbra settlement, nosing his runabout through a throng of hysterical refugees piled onto the flight deck of the Naritus, making it impossible to continue operations.

The voice of a stranger, some other pilot somewhere else in the operation, coming into his headphones, softly singing a lullaby. Was she aware she was singing? Was she trying to soothe herself, or some terrified child jammed into her s.p.a.cecraft?

An old man, sitting on a box in the middle of the landing field, flatly refusing to leave, despite the pleading of his family. Was he determined to give up his spot to someone who had longer to live, or was he just stubborn, or crazy, refusing to believe in any danger that required him to leave his home? Smashedopen luggage, the most precious belongings of a lifetime abandoned on the landing pad, some of them forcibly discarded when the owner refused to believe it was a choice between his suitcase and someone else's life.

The chaos of small s.p.a.cecraft of all kinds, civilian and military, bobbing and weaving and flying in and out among the larger s.h.i.+ps of the rescue fleet. A collision in s.p.a.ce, as a civilian pleasure boat slammed into an X-wing, and both craft exploded. No one lived through that.

And then, at last, sitting at the controls of his runabout, asking for launch clearance to go back for th next load, and hearing the request denied. There was no nCOULI Al LUNM 289 to go back. It was over. The fleet had to leave.

8cri'ing into the mike, demanding clearance, insisting there was time plenty of time, for at least one more run, knowing there were still people back there. He knew they 'were there. He had seen them, spoken with them, promised them he would return.

And hearing the order to secure for the jump to lightspeed. That order, that moment, he remembered clearly. The Na, itus activated its hyperdrive, if only for a few moments, and suddenly she was gone from Thanta Zilbra, escaped, away. Wedge could feel the change in her engines as she dropped back into normal s.p.a.ce, a light-week or so away from the doomed sun.

Suddenly the urge to shout, to scream, to protest, was gone as well. He sat there, empty, wooden, spent. After a time he released his seat restraints, disembarked from the runabout, and shouldered his way through the crowds of refugees on the flight deck, pushed his way toward a viewport. From here, seen by light that had left the star seven days before, Thanta Zilbra still seemed healthy and well, a warm, inviting dot of light in the sty, not far off at all.

But that was not the way it really was. Not anymore.

Wedge shoved his way back through the crowds of sob bing, terrified, stunned people, back toward the operations Center.

They were all watching it there, of course. There was nothing else left to do. The cameras from the staybehind drones were sending their signals via hyperwave link, and so Wedge could see it, see it happen. The star seemed to grow darker, shrink in on itself. Its surface seethed with energy as it backed down in on itself, collapsing down untilUntil it flared, blasting outward in a blinding gout of white starfire that bloomed past the incinerating planets, past the vaporized s.p.a.ce stations, until it reached e Stay-behind camera andThe screen went black.

"Right on schedule," Parry said, half to himself.

Wedge had not even noticed he was there. "Bovo Yagen is next.

That's confirmed, too. No rumor. Estimated system population twelve million-if you want to believe estimates after today. And they're spread out over two inhabited planets and dozens of stations, asteroids and habitats. If we couldn't pull ten or fifteen thousand people out of this system, what the h.e.l.l are we going to do there?"

"I don't know," said Wedge. "I don't know."

All he knew for sure was that unless some way could be found to stop the next nova, millions of people were going to die.

TO BE CONCLUDED.