He probed carefully into the mechanism with the tip of his little finger; and with a satisfying click, the panel unlocked and slid open. “There we go,” he said. He got to his feet again—
And jumped back from the opening as a stuttering of blaster fire flashed through.
“Yeah, there we go all right,” Han said. He was against the wall on the other side of the opening, blaster ready but with no chance of getting a shot in through the rear guard’s fire. “How many people has Ferrier got on this ship, anyway?”
“A lot,” Lando growled. The door, apparently deciding that no one was going through after all, slid shut again. “I guess we do this the hard way. Let’s get back to the main hatchway and try to catch them there.”
Han grabbed his shoulder. “Too late,” he said. “Listen.”
Lando frowned, straining his ears. Over the quiet hum of ship’s noises, he could make out the rapid-fire spitting of stormtrooper laser rifles in the distance. “They’re aboard,” he murmured.
“Yeah,” Han nodded. The deck vibrated briefly beneath their feet, and abruptly the laser fire slackened off. “Subsonic grenade,” he identified it. “That’s it. Come on.”
“Come on where?” Lando asked as Han set off down the cross corridor.
“Aft to the escape pod racks,” the other said. “We’re getting out of here.”
Lando felt his mouth drop open. But he looked at his friend, and his objections died unsaid. Han’s face was set into tight lines, his eyes smoldering with anger and frustration. He knew what this meant, all right. Probably better than Lando did.
The escape pod bobbed on the surface of the sea, surrounded by a hundred other pods and floating bits of reef. Through the tiny porthole Han watched as, in the distance, the last of the Imperial assault shuttles lifted from the Coral Vanda and headed back to space. “That’s it, then?” Lando ventured from the seat behind him.
“That’s it,” Han said, hearing the bitterness in his voice. “They’ll probably start picking up the pods soon.”
“We did all we could, Han,” Lando pointed out quietly. “And it could have been worse. They could have blown the Coral Vanda out of the water—it might have been days before anyone came to get us then.”
Which would have given the Empire that much more of a head start. “Oh, yeah, great,” Han said sourly. “We’re really on top of things.”
“What else could we have done?” Lando persisted. “Scuttled the ship to keep them from getting him—never mind that we’d have killed several hundred people in the process? Or maybe just gotten ourselves killed fighting three assault shuttles’ worth of stormtroopers? At least this way Coruscant has a chance to get ready before ships from the Dark Force start showing up in battle.”
Lando was trying—you had to give him that. But Han wasn’t ready to be cheered up yet. “How do you get ready to get hit by two hundred Dreadnaughts?” he growled. “We’re stretched to the limit as it is.”
“Come on, Han,” Lando said, his voice starting to sound a little irritated. “Even if the ships are in mint condition and ready to fly, they’re still going to need two thousand crewers apiece to man them. It’ll be years before the Imperials can scrape that many recruits together and teach them how to fly the things.”
“Except that the Empire already had a call out for new ships,” Han reminded him. “Means they already have a bunch of recruits ready to go.”
“I doubt they have four hundred thousand of them,” Lando countered. “Come on, try looking on the bright side for once.”
“There’s not much bright side here to look at.” Han shook his head.
“Sure there is,” Lando insisted. “Thanks to your quick action, the New Republic still has a fighting chance.”
Han frowned at him. “What do you mean?”
“You saved my life, remember? Shot those goons of Ferrier’s off my back.”
“Yeah, I remember. What does that have to do with the New Republic’s chances?”
“Han!” Lando said, looking scandalized. “You know perfectly well how fast the New Republic would fall apart without me around.”
Han tried real hard, but he couldn’t quite strangle off a smile on that one. He compromised, letting it come out twisted. “All right, I give up,” he sighed. “If I stop grousing, will you shut up?”
“Deal,” Lando nodded.
Han turned back to the porthole, the smile fading away. Lando could talk all he wanted; but the loss of the Katana fleet would be a first-magnitude disaster, and they both knew it. Somehow, they had to stop the Empire from getting to those ships.
Somehow.
CHAPTER
26
Mon Mothma shook her head in wonderment. “The Katana fleet,” she breathed. “After all these years. It’s incredible.”
“Some might even put it more strongly than that,” Fey’lya added coolly, his fur rippling as he gazed hard at Karrde’s impassive face. He’d been doing a lot of that throughout the hastily called meeting, Leia had noticed: gazing hard at Karrde, at Luke, at Leia herself. Even Mon Mothma hadn’t been left out. “Some might, in fact, have severe doubts that what you’re telling us is true at all.”
Beside Karrde, Luke shifted in his seat, and Leia could sense his efforts to control his annoyance with the Bothan. But Karrde merely cocked an eyebrow. “Are you suggesting that I’m lying to you?”
“What, a smuggler lie?” Fey’lya countered. “What a thought.”
“He’s not lying,” Han insisted, an edge to his voice. “The fleet’s been found. I saw some of the ships.”
“Perhaps,” Fey’lya said, dropping his eyes to the polished surface of the table. Of all those at the meeting, Han had so far been the only one to escape Fey’lya’s posturing and his glare. For some reason, the Bothan seemed reluctant to even look at him. “Perhaps not. There are more Dreadnaught cruisers in the galaxy than just the Katana fleet.”
“I don’t believe this,” Luke spoke up at last, looking back and forth between Fey’lya and Mon Mothma. “The Katana fleet’s been found, the Empire’s going after it, and we’re sitting here arguing about it?”
“Perhaps the problem is that you believe too much, or too easily,” Fey’lya retorted, turning his gaze on Luke. “Solo tells us the Empire is holding someone who can lead them to these alleged ships. And yet Karrde has said only he knows their location.”
“And as I’ve mentioned at least once today,” Karrde said tartly, “the assumption that no one else knew what we’d found was just that: an assumption. Captain Hoffner was a very astute man in his way, and I have no trouble believing that he might have pulled a copy of the coordinates for himself before I erased them.”
“I’m glad you have such faith in your former associate,” Fey’lya said. “For myself, I find it easier to believe that it is Captain Solo who is wrong.” His fur rippled. “Or has been deliberately deceived.”
Beside her, Leia felt Han’s mood darken. “You want to explain that, Councilor?” he demanded.
“I think you were lied to,” Fey’lya said bluntly, his eyes still not meeting Han’s. “I think this contact of yours—who I notice you’ve been remarkably reluctant to identify—told you a story and dressed it up with false evidence. That piece of machinery you say Calrissian examined could have come from anywhere. And you yourself admitted that you were never actually aboard any of the ships.”
“What about that Imperial raid on the Coral Vanda?” Han demanded. “They thought there was someone there worth grabbing.”
Fey’lya smiled thinly. “Or else they wanted us to believe that they did. Which they very well might … if your unnamed contact is in fact working for them.”
Leia looked at Han. There was something there, beneath the surface. Some swirl of emotion she couldn’t identify. “Han?” she asked quietly.
“No,” he said, his eyes still on Fey’lya. “He’s not working for the Imperials.”
“So you say,” Fey’lya sniffed. “You offer little proof of that.”
“All right, then,” Karrde put in. “Let’s assume for the moment that all of this is in fact a giant soap bubble. What would the Grand Admiral stand to gain from it?”
Fey’lya’s fur shifted in a gesture Leia decided was probably annoyance. Between her and Karrde they’d pretty well burst the Bothan’s theory that Thrawn was not, in fact, an Imperial Grand Admiral; and Fey’lya wasn’t taking even that minor defeat well. “I should think that was obvious,” he told Karrde stiffly. “How many systems would we have to leave undefended, do you suppose, in order to reassign enough trained personnel to reactivate and transport two hundred Dreadnaughts? No, the Empire has a great deal to gain by hasty action on our part.”
“They also have a great deal to gain by our total lack of action,” Karrde said, his voice icy cold. “I worked with Hoffner for over two years; and I can tell you right now that it won’t take the Imperials a great deal of time to obtain the fleet’s location from him. If you don’t move quickly, you stand to lose everything.”