Crucible: Star Wars Page 8

  “That’s why we have beam generators and particle shields,” Lando said. “As the astrolith drops into the atmosphere, we slow it down with repulsor beams and guide it in with tractor beams. And crash pits are lined with particle shields to keep the ore inside the pit where we want it.”

  “The process is quite controlled,” said Dena. “The astroliths arrive with just enough momentum to smash one another into chunks. When those chunks are small enough to transport, they fall down a collection funnel into the repulsi-veyer line and are transported to a grinding mill.”

  “You must have a lot of safeguards, right?” Han asked. He was standing at the opposite end of the pullout, studying the nearest crash pit—Crash Pit One—through a pair of electrobinoculars. “I mean, there’s no chance a ‘lith could get away from you, right?”

  “Of course not,” Dena said. “Sarnus has a thin atmosphere and weak gravity, but those astroliths run ten million tonnes. An uncontrolled drop would cause a huge burn-off, and we’d have massive impact disintegration. We’d lose most of what we dropped.”

  “And probably half the refinery, too.” Lando’s tone grew wary. “But I’m sure you know all that, Han. Why are you asking?”

  “It’s probably nothing,” Han said, raising the shoulders of his bright-yellow pressure suit. “I’m just wondering if those beam nozzles should be pointing at the smelter houses.”

  “What?” Lando crossed the pullout in three quick strides, then took the electrobinoculars from Han and turned them on the nearest crash pit. “Dena, do you have any maintenance scheduled for Crash Pit One?”

  “Not until next week.”

  “Then something’s wrong,” Lando said. “I see three—no, make that four tractor beams out of alignment. And Han’s right. It looks like they’re turned toward the smelting center.”

  “That can’t be,” Dena said. “The turret mounts have safety chocks on them. The beam nozzles can only turn a few degrees—just enough to help with the lock-on.”

  Lando laid a finger over the control pad on top of the electrobinoculars, then said, “Well, they’ve turned around somehow. You’d better get on the comm to plant control and find out what’s happening—now.”

  “Of course,” Dena said.

  A soft click sounded in the helmet speaker as Dena switched her transmitter to plant control’s channel. Leia crossed to Lando’s side and took a turn with the electrobinoculars. At this distance, the beam generators looked like seven black drops surrounding a gaping red maw. But instead of the narrow ends pointing into the sky above the pit, four seemed to be turned toward the near side of the basin, where the cone-shaped towers of the smelting houses stood belching smoke into the thin Sarnusian atmosphere.

  Leia felt a cold prickle of danger sense creeping down her spine. “Lando,” she asked, “what happens if a breaker crew drops an asteroid chunk while the tractor beams are pointed at the smelting center?”

  “They can’t,” Lando assured her. “The breaker crews can’t start their drop until all four tractor-beam operators have a firm lock-on. There’s a fail-safe shutdown.”

  As he spoke, the crimson thread of a friction fire appeared high in the sky, fluttering and brightening as it chased the flaming trails of three previous drops toward the surface.

  “I see …” Leia continued to look through the electrobinoculars. “Just like the safety chocks that should be keeping those beams from turning more than a few degrees?”

  Lando fell silent for a moment, then asked in a low voice, “You’re thinking sabotage?”

  Leia lowered the electrobinoculars. “Lando, there are four tractor-beam nozzles pointed toward your smelting center,” she said. “Does that sound like an accident to you?”

  “Not to me,” Han said. “And Lando just made some nasty competition pretty angry.”

  Lando nodded inside his helmet. “The Qrephs. Of course,” he said. “I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am. I didn’t expect them to be this bold—or to move so fast.”

  “That’s the trouble with Columi,” Han said. “They’re always three steps ahead.”

  “Now you tell me.” Lando started back toward the landspeeder. “Dena, what does plant control say about those tractor beams?”

  A small pop sounded over Leia’s helmet speaker as Dena switched her transmitter back to the group channel. “Nothing yet. I haven’t been able to raise them.”

  Lando hissed a curse, then asked, “What about security?”

  “I can’t raise anyone,” Dena replied. “The only comm I have is suit-to-suit. There must be a problem with the satellite relay.”

  “Yeah, because somebody vaped it,” Han commented, following Lando toward the landspeeder. “How many workers are down there right now?”

  Lando looked to Dena. “Chief?”

  She checked her chronometer. “We’re just starting the shift change,” she said. “That means we’ll have thirty thousand workers on site, give or take a few hundred.”

  A cold lump formed in Leia’s stomach. With millions of tonnes of mass, an astrolith impact would cause an unimaginable explosion. Even at a reduced velocity, it could easily level the entire Sarnus Refinery and kill most of the on-site employees.

  “How quickly can you evacuate?” she asked.

  “Fifteen minutes, once the order is issued,” Dena said. “But with the comm net down—”

  “You can’t issue the order,” Han finished. “These are some bad Columi. Really bad.”

  They all fell silent for a moment, contemplating Han’s words.

  Then Dena asked, “Are you saying the saboteurs are trying to take out our entire workforce, too?” Despite her calm exterior, her presence was bleeding rage and hatred into the Force, so raw and powerful that it felt almost inhuman to Leia. “That would cripple us for years!”

  “Dena, this isn’t about capital assets and labor pools anymore.” There was just a note of irritation in Lando’s voice. “It’s about saving our people. Let’s see if we can raise someone down there without the satellite relay.”

  He reached inside the landspeeder and flipped a switch on the dashboard. The steady beep of an emergency beacon sounded inside Leia’s helmet, and a yellow strobe began to flash atop the landspeeder roof.

  She glanced back toward the crash pits and watched the sky for a moment, studying the four ribbons of flame as they continued to stretch and grow longer. The two lowest streamers seemed to be headed for the middle and far horizon, where Crash Pits Three and Six were located. But it was impossible to say where the two highest streamers were going, and Leia knew there would be many more astroliths even higher, too far above the atmosphere to betray their presence with a friction trail. Clearly, any attempt to estimate time-to-impact would be nothing but a wild guess.

  Leia turned back toward the landspeeder. Lando and Dena stood at the front bumper, facing in opposite directions, their lips moving in sporadic bursts as they attempted to establish a line-of-sight comlink connection with the production basin. Han was in the pilot’s seat, stabbing at the dashboard buttons as he attempted to raise someone—anyone—on the vehicle’s more-powerful communications array. Judging by the ferocity of his jabbing, he was having no more success than Lando or Dena.

  Leia opened a channel to the Falcon and tried to raise C-3PO or Omad Kaeg, whom Lando had hired—with Han’s reluctant blessing—to oversee the repair of the Falcon’s damaged sensor suite. If the ship’s military-grade rectenna happened to be turned their way, it might pick up even a semi-deflected transmission.

  When the only reply was an empty hiss, Leia began to despair. A typical drop took seventeen minutes from lock-on to impact, Dena had told them earlier. And it took almost that long to evacuate. Leia switched her transmitter back to the group channel, then waved to get her companions’ attention.

  “We don’t have time for this,” she said. “If an emergency evacuation takes fifteen minutes, we’re out of time already. Even if we connect with someone—”

  “Hold
on,” Han said. He turned to Dena. “Emergency evacuation? What triggers that?”

  “Plant control sounds an alarm, of course,” Dena said. “But I don’t see how—”

  “I mean what triggers it automatically?” Han interrupted. “Say something big explodes. Would that do it?”

  “Of course, if it was big enough to be seen,” Dena said. “But I don’t see how—”

  “Get in,” Han said. “I’ve got an idea.”

  Leia went for the front passenger seat. Lando took the seat behind her. Dena, who until then had been the group’s driver, went to the pilot’s seat.

  “Sorry, sister.” Han jerked his thumb toward the seat behind him. “Get in. I’ll take it from here.”

  Dena’s jaw dropped behind her faceplate, and she made no move toward the rear door. “Captain Solo, this is my—”

  “Han’s driving,” Lando interrupted. “Take the backseat. Now.”

  Leia felt a wave of outrage roll through the Force, but Dena obeyed. Han hit the throttles before the doors had even dropped shut, and the vehicle shot down the narrow road, weaving and bouncing as it descended toward the production basin.

  “We need something that will go up with a big flash,” Han said. “Maybe a processing core or something.”

  “The closest processing core is down in the slag well,” Dena said. “About ten kilometers from here.”

  “Too far,” Leia said. Given the long series of switchback curves, it would take at least five minutes to travel that far—even with Han behind the controls. “We need something closer.”

  “What about those storage tanks at the bottom of the scarp?” Lando asked Dena. “Didn’t you put them out here to protect the plant if there was an accident?”

  Dena did not reply immediately. A green light activated in the ceiling panel, indicating that the landspeeder interior was now fully pressurized. She covered her pause by making a show of deactivating her suit’s air supply and raising her faceplate.

  Leia chinned a release tab inside her own helmet. She didn’t quite trust Dena. The woman had a habit of thinking too long before answering a question, and Leia didn’t like the way Dena had offered to secure the closures on Han’s pressure suit. That was just too familiar—oddly familiar, given that he was her boss’s married best friend.

  Leia flipped her own faceplate up, then turned to ask, “Is that a difficult question, Chief Yus?”

  “It isn’t,” Dena replied, a little too quickly. “I’m just trying to recall what we have in each tank at the moment—and wondering whether we can breach them. They’re triple-walled durasteel, sandwiched around two ten-centimeter layers of duracrete. Crashing a landspeeder into one wouldn’t even crack it.”

  “Crashing a landspeeder …” Han let his sentence trail off, then asked, “Are you crazy? We’ve got a Jedi with us.”

  He started to elaborate but stopped to fight for control as they rounded a blind corner and discovered a hairpin curve coming up fast. Han decelerated hard and spun the yoke. The landspeeder’s stern swung around, tipping the vehicle onto its left side, and Leia felt the repulsorlifts starting to flip them.

  Then Han hit the throttles again, and the speeder shot forward. Dena let out an audible sigh of relief as the vehicle dropped onto its repulsorpads and sped down the next straightaway. Leia’s gaze returned to the sky. The first two astroliths were almost on the horizon, their streamers so long and bright that Leia could see the jagged notches of the crash pits beneath them.

  But the third streamer remained high up, its tail so short that it was visible only as a fan of orange. Before Leia’s eyes, the head blossomed into a red fireball the size of her fist, and by the time she comprehended what she was seeing, it had grown as large as her head.

  “We’re not going to make it,” she said.

  In the time it took her to speak the words, the fireball had swelled to the size of a starfighter, and the entire sky was orange.

  “Han, stop!” Leia cried. “We’re too late!”

  Han was already decelerating, braking so hard that Leia had to brace against the dashboard.

  The fireball continued to swell, blotting out the sky, burning so bright it hurt Leia’s eyes, continuing to expand until … it touched ground.

  A white flash filled the dust basin. Leia saw the smoking cones of the smelters tumbling sideways before they were engulfed by a curtain of flame and dust. The curtain rolled out toward the edges of the silver plain, hurling the white flecks of landspeeders and the dark polygons of buildings high into the air. It swallowed everything in its path, growing ever higher and brighter as it drew near.

  Han slammed the landspeeder into reverse, then started up the switchbacks backward, struggling to put some distance between them and the rolling curtain of fire. A pillar of yellow-white flame rose from the impact site, climbing thousands of meters into the sky before the atmosphere finally grew thin enough for it to boil across the heavens.

  A wall of billowing dust began to climb toward them, and Leia knew the legendary Solo luck had finally run out. No way, she thought … no way could they outrun a shock wave. She laid her hand over Han’s, then reached out in the Force and pushed. The wave hit. The landspeeder bucked, hard, and the world shattered.

  Six

  All that remained of the smelting center was a ten-kilometer impact basin ringed by a rim of sheer cliffs and broken stone. A day after the strike, the crater floor continued to glow and smoke, and Luke saw no activity there. But the surrounding plain shimmered with tiny flecks of color—the running lights and flood lamps of emergency crews digging through rubble sprays that had once been milling domes and flotation tanks. Though the effort was still being called a rescue operation, it had been twenty hours since anyone had been found alive.

  “I’m going to kill them,” Lando said. He was standing next to Luke in the infirmary, watching the rescue operations through a waiting-room viewport. Despite three broken ribs and a badly gashed face, he had spent the last twenty-four hours personally directing the rescue effort from this makeshift headquarters. “Craitheus and Marvid both. I’m going to hunt them down and put a pair of disruptor beams through their heads. Maybe three or four.”

  “You have a disruptor?” Luke asked. Disruptor weapons disintegrated their targets at the molecular level—causing so much pain in the process that they were banned in nearly every civilized society in the galaxy.

  Lando shot him a glower. “I can afford to buy one, you know.”

  “I’m sure you can,” Luke said. The rage in Lando’s Force aura made it impossible to read his true intentions, so it seemed possible that he was serious. “But you might want to hold off on that.”

  “And why would that be, Master Skywalker?” asked Dena Yus, who was also standing next to Luke, opposite Lando. Though she still had a few bruises on one side of her elegant face, she had avoided any serious injuries by ducking behind a seat as the shock wave hit. “Perhaps you intend to make the kill yourself?”

  “There isn’t going to be a kill,” Luke said, a little taken aback by her suggestion. “At least not until we have proof of the Qrephs’ guilt—and even then, only if there’s no other way to bring them to justice.”

  Dena’s lips tightened in mock disappointment. “That’s very noble, Master Skywalker. But we have all the proof we require. The Qrephs’ threats were quite explicit.” She shot him an odd smile, then continued, “I’ll happily swear to it, if that will soothe your Jedi conscience.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Luke said. He couldn’t quite decide whether she was trying to flirt with him or sic him on the beings she held responsible for the destruction of the refinery. “It’s not my Jedi conscience that concerns me—it’s our emotions. Anger clouds judgment. So does fear.”

  “And that way lies the dark side—I know.” Lando’s voice grew bitter. “I’ve got news for you, old buddy. The dark side is already here. It just killed twenty-eight thousand of my people and put Han and Leia both into a coma.” />
  “And rushing to judgment won’t change that,” Luke said. Anger did not begin to describe how he felt about what had happened to the Solos. The shock wave had caught them head-on, blowing the shattered viewscreen into their faces and leaving them both so badly injured that their recovery remained doubtful even now. A part of Luke wanted to join in Lando’s rage and pursue the vengeance Dena advocated, but he did not dare act on those emotions—not while they remained so powerful and raw. “We need to confirm our suspicions before we act.”

  “That’s easy to say,” Dena replied, “but hard to accomplish. All we really know about the attack is that someone used a laser torch to cut away the safety chocks on all four tractor-beam generators at Crash Pit One.”

  Luke raised his brow. “Are you sure it was a laser torch?” he asked. “There are other ways to cut—”

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Lando interrupted. “But forget about Sith—it wasn’t a lightsaber. We found pieces of a torch rig near one of the generator turrets.”

  “What we can’t figure out is how they took control of the beam targeting,” Dena said. “To do it from inside the control facility, they would have had to override the fail-safe lockouts.”

  “And that should have triggered safety alarms at both ends of the drop,” Lando added.

  “Maybe the control code was compromised,” Luke suggested. “That would have been child’s play for most Columi.”

  Dena gave him an approving smile. “Excellent thought, Master Skywalker. We already have a team of slicers analyzing our control systems. So far, they swear the programming is secure.”

  “Which is all the more proof that the Qrephs were behind this,” Lando said. “Had it been anyone else, we would have known by now how they did it.”

  “Perhaps,” Luke allowed. Beyond the observation wall, an amber beacon began to brighten and swell as a distant craft rose into the air and turned toward the infirmary. “But I think it’s more important to figure out why they did it—and what they intend to do next.”