Part 6 (1/2)

Right in the middle of the authorized approach lane, nicely on course for Corellia itself.

Maybe she was going to pull this off after all. All she had to do was play her a.s.signed role and everything would be fine. Speaking of which, it was time to contact Corellian Traffic Control.

She switched on the comm system and punched in the proper frequency. ”Corellian Traffic Control, this is Freighter PBY- 1457, on approach to Corellia. Requesting landing and berthing instructions and permission-” Wham! Something slammed her forward in her restraint harness, and her freighter shuddered from a ma.s.sive impact.

Kalenda lunged for the flight controls. It couldn't be the buffer heat sink blowing already. The techs had promised it would be at least half an hour before it went. It had to beWham! Another hit. That was no internal explosion.

Someone was shooting at her. Even before she had completed the thought, she had flipped her freighter into a barrel roll and taken it into a dive straight for the planet.

There was a flare of light off her port bow as the next shot went wide. She punched up a view from the rear external camera on her cabin display and risked a peek at it even as she jinked her freighter sideways to dodge the next shot. A Pocket Patrol Boat, just as she had thought.

If anything but a PPB had made two hits on this old tub, shewouldn't still be alive. A PPB was a very small singlepilot s.h.i.+p that traded high speed for limited firepower. Of course, even the popgun on a PPB would be more than enough to take out this uns.h.i.+elded, unarmed junk heap if she took enough hits.

She jinked again, just in time to dodge the next shot.

Blast it all! It was obvious they had been waiting for her.

Her cover had been blown before she even entered the system. She had to think, and think fast. She couldn't outrun a PPB, and she couldn't outmaneuver it for long. She threw another random turn into her flight path as she rushed for the planet. Could she bluff a run back toward hypers.p.a.ce?

No, think! They obviously knew everything else about her.

They'd have to know her hypers.p.a.ce motors had been gimmicked. The bluff wouldn't fool anyone. She couldn't enter hypers.p.a.ce without the whole hypers.p.a.ce engine blowing outWham! A bigger hit that time, harder.

Alarm bells started going off, and Kalenda could smell smoke and burning insulation. Dead. She was dead if she played by the rules.

Her freighter lurched suddenly as the number-three engine flared and died.

Kalenda cut power to number three and diverted it to numbers one and two. No sense worrying about engine overloads now. The PPB would stay on her tail and use her for target practice until it ruptured the hull and got her dead. She couldn't reach the planet and she couldn't enter hypers.p.a.ce without the buffer heat sink exploding and dropping her right back outYes! That was it. It was a near-suicidal plan, but everything was relative, and staying here would be utterly suicidal.

She reached for the hypers.p.a.ce controls with one hand as she flew the s.h.i.+p with the other. She cut off all the safeties and overrides, cut the selector to manual, and stabbed in the activate b.u.t.ton before she could think of what she was doing. An uncalibrated, uncalculated jump into hypers.p.a.ce this near a planet was nothing more than a fancy way to kill herself, but if she stopped long enough to tell herself that, she would already be dead.

No smooth transition to light speed this time, but a lurching, horrific crash into hypers.p.a.ce, as graceful as slamming the s.h.i.+p into a brick wall. The freighter started to tumble end over end, but Kalenda didn't even try to stop it. Not whenBlam! With a horrible, shuddering explosion that sent the s.h.i.+p into new paroxysms, the buffer heat sink blew.

The plan had been for it to give out quietly during the cooldown phase. But with the hyperdrive under power, the heat sink failed in far more spectacular fas.h.i.+on, detonating with almost enough energy to tear the s.h.i.+p in two. The hull breached somewhere in the engine compartment, and air thundered aft out into s.p.a.ce. The c.o.c.kpit's hatch slammed shut automatically. Alarms were clanging everywhere, and Kalenda hit the general override b.u.t.ton, cutting the alarms off and killing power to all systems.

With the heat sink destroyed, it took less than a half second for the hyperdrive coils to overheat and melt down.

With an even more violent lurch, the freighter crashed back into normal s.p.a.ce. At least Kalenda hoped it was normal s.p.a.ce. Plenty of s.h.i.+ps had vanished from hypers.p.a.ce over the millennia and no one knew where they had gone.

But Kalenda had more immediate concerns than what sort of s.p.a.ce-time continuum she was in. She had to keep the s.h.i.+p from breaking up or blowing up. She needed to get the tumble under some sort of control. It wasn't easy with half the alt.i.tude control system destroyed, but she managed to get rid of about ninety-five percent of the tumble, leaving the s.h.i.+p in a sort of slow, off-kilter barrel roll.

She checked her system displays and confirmed what she had already suspected-the hyperdrive system wasn't there anymore. It looked as if the number-one engine was out for good as well. That left her the number-two engine, with a very large question mark behind it. The c.o.c.kpit displays said it was still there, and Kalenda devoutly hoped they were telling the truth.

At last she had time to look around and figure out where she was-and found that she had finally drawn at least one piece of good luck.

There, hanging round and lovely in the firmament, was Corellia, the planet half in daytime and half in night from this angle. At a guess, she had managed to travel all of a few hundred thousand kilometers in hypers.p.a.ce, and in something roughly like the right direction. At an eyeball estimate, she was on the opposite side of the planet than she had started out from, and perhaps twice as far away from it. She could just as easily have been thrown completely out of the galaxy, or into the dark between the stars.

In theory at least, she ought to be able to get down to Corellia from here. If that one engine really was still in one piece, she still might get out of this thing alive.

If she were realty lucky, the Corellians would think she was dead.

Maybe the PPB pilot would get it wrong and report her s.h.i.+p had blown up instead of jumping into hypers.p.a.ce. Or maybe everyone wouldquite properly-a.s.sume the odds against surviving an uncontrolled hypers.p.a.ce jump were too high to worry about her surviving.

In any event, even on the odd chance that they thought she was alive, they certainly did not know where she was.

She hoped to keep it that way.

Part of knowing how to survive was knowing when to rush, and when to take things slowly. Kalenda gave herself a good three hours for the next step. She did a careful checkout of the freighter-or as much of it as she could manage from the c.o.c.kpit. The only pressure suit on the s.h.i.+p was in its rack, in vacuum, on the other side of the sealed c.o.c.kpit hatch. A triumph of planning and design, that, but there was no help for it now.

Even on this s.h.i.+p, the c.o.c.kpit data displays could tell her an awful lot. She concentrated on the surviving main engine, and confirmed, by every means she could, that it was still operational. Not that she was going to trust it at anything like full power, of course. She would have to a.s.sume that it was about to fail, and treat it very gently.

The c.o.c.kpit's life support was in moderately good shape, though there seemed to be a few slow microleaks in the hull, and the cooling system was showing signs of failing.

She wouldn't want to stay in the c.o.c.kpit more than a day or two.

Not that she could, anyway. There were no food or water or sanitary facilities in the c.o.c.kpit. The s.h.i.+p's survival pack was stowed in a rack right next to the pressure suit.

Obviously, the only way out of this mess-and, incidentally, the only way she could complete her mission-was to get down to one of the planets in the Corellian star system.

Corellia itself was the obvious target, but not the only one.

For a moment she toyed with the idea of trying for another of the habitable planets in the Corellian System. There were certainly enough of them. Besides Corellia, there were Selonia, Drall, and the Double Worlds, Talus and Tralus, two planets that orbited about each other. If there were to be a search for her, it would almost certainly take place on Corellia, making it a good place to avoid.

But there were strong arguments against that line of reasoning.

They probably did think she was dead.

Therefore, there probably would not be a search. Besides, a planet was a rather largish place. Even if they were on the lookout for her, she was a trained operative, after all. She ought to be able to stay one step ahead of them.

Them. Who was the ”them” in this case? And what were ”they” up to that merited the taking of such risks?

One didn't attack New Republic operatives lightly. Kalenda realized she had no idea who she was up against. She had not spent any time at all wondering why the Corelliansor some group of Corellians-was so intent on killing NRI agents, or on how they knew her arrival plans.

But no time to worry about such things now. They were certainly important points, but they really didn't matter, one way or the other, unless she stayed alive. Best to focus on that small matter first.

She decided not to try for any of the other worlds. Corellia was closest. She had the best odds of reaching it. The risk of detection was only marginally greater there than on the other worlds. Besides, Corellia itself was where the action was. Whatever was going on, was going on there.

The question then became one of how to get there. It was all very well to look out the port and see the planet, but she couldn't simply point the freighter at Corellia and switch on the engine. She needed to do a great deal more navigation work first. One bit of good luck was that she seemed to have retained more or less the same initial velocity as she had started out with before her abortive jump to light speed. The only difference was that she was on the other side of the planet, moving away rather than toward it. The planet's gravity was slowing her, of course, and sooner or later would start pulling her back.

In plain point of fact, she was going to fall straight in on the planet and land about as lightly and gently as a meteorite unless she did something.

And, of course, she did not dare make anything like a normal landing. A daylight landing of any kind was out of the question. The risk of detection was too great.

A few minutes' careful work with the navicomputer let Kalenda work out a slow and careful approach to the planet that met the conditions she had chosen: a water landing, at night. She managed to find a trajectory that would allow her to come in just off the east coast of the main continent.

Not that she was especially pleased to find it was possible to do that sort of landing, but the risks of touching down on land at night were just too great. Kalenda did not know the lay of the land well enough to look out the window in the dark and judge whether she was coming down in a nice, empty glade or a village square, a soft canopy of trees or a patch of low scrubby bushes that hid solid rock just below.

Water was water no matter how you landed on it, and was more likely to be private. The odds on being heard or seen were much lower over water. Of course the odds on drowning were nil over land, but that could not be helped.