If the Seps were paying that much attention to the imminent collision, they weren’t paying that much attention to the CR-20. It was the second destroyer that was the threat, the one a few seconds behind its sister vessel, the one most likely to be ready to fire.
“Second target’s got a lock on us, sir,” Derel said. “Cannon, two and four—take, take, take.”
Lasers streaked away thirty degrees to starboard, and five seconds later a faint flare of white light bloomed on the right-hand edge of the bridge viewscreen. The second Sep ship was out of visual range for the moment, but its transponder was still visible on Derel’s screen. Pellaeon could see it. He could also hear the rapid chatter in the background on the comm system, the sound of sensor operators trying to confirm how much damage the turbolaser impact had caused.
“She’s not dead,” Derel said, “but she’s got enough problems to slow her down, sir.”
“That might be enough.” Pellaeon stared at the growing shape that was the CR-20. Five hundred meters was ludicrously close. A near miss. Or not a near miss, if everyone was unlucky. “Skywalker, twenty seconds.”
“I see you, Leveler.”
“How very reassuring…”
“Here we go.”
Rumahn took the only sensible precaution left. It was correct procedure. It was also unnerving. “Brace, brace, brace—collision, collision, brace, brace, brace.”
Pellaeon thought that the last problem he’d have to worry about was his spine or knees taking a pounding if that kriffing transport didn’t duck in time. The vessel seemed to be streaking down the length of Leveler’s deck, and then it was gone.
The lead Sep destroyer had taken its place. The two ships were now head-on. The second destroyer had fallen back some distance.
“Okay, chum,” Pellaeon said. “Get out of my sky.”
Maybe the Sep on the other bridge was staring at Leveler and saying the same thing.
One thing was certain: Pellaeon would not pull up until he was right on the point of collision. And that was—
Less than a minute away.
Derel tapped his sensor screen as if to get attention. “If Sep Two fires on us from that position, he’s going to endanger this joker.”
“Cruiser’s clear,” Baradis said. His face was close enough to his sensor screen to throw legible light on it. A pulsing red light traveled down his chin. “And coming about… aligning…”
“Hold course until he’s docked.” If Leveler deviated now, Skywalker would miss the bay at best and smash into it at worst. “Steady…”
The Sep destroyer didn’t look like it was about to blink first. It loomed in the viewscreen.
“Cannon—ready?”
“Ready, sir.”
Safe range was a matter of seconds away, too. There was no point blowing up a ship right under your nose and getting hit by its debris.
“Is Skywalker onboard?”
“No, sir—”
It was a split-second call. Forward collision, getting caught by an exploding ship, losing the troop transport. Pellaeon, relying on his instinct as surely as any Jedi, had to make it.
“Fire.”
Derel didn’t even manage to give the take command. Brilliant blue streams filled the viewscreen as the turbolasers targeted the Sep destroyer. The first rounds hit the destroyer’s hull just under its bows, but Pellaeon saw very little detail after that. The blinding light, spinning short-lived flames, and red-hot storms of debris gave him no idea what was happening other than they’d hit the Sep hard and the ship had started to break apart. Then a massive jolt that felt like having his head hammered down into his spine left Pellaeon reaching for the collision alarm. He hit it with the flat of his palm. Lights flickered; the Sep ship was swinging wildly as if trying to turn 180 degrees, venting flame and plasma and clearly out of control.
But it had managed to get a few shots in of its own. Either that, or one of the approaching Sep cruisers had fired. It was now hard to tell what had actually hit them. Unable to see anything other than the stricken Sep destroyer from the viewport, Pellaeon leaned over Derel to check his screen.
Suddenly the battle had fallen into slow motion.
“We’ve lost maneuvering, port thrusters,” Baradis said.
“Damage reports,” Rumahn yelled over the noise. “Hull breach in engineering section six, port thrusters damaged, one bank of hyperdrive generators down.”
Pellaeon stared at the screen. The Sep cruisers seemed to be taking their time. “They’re not exactly rushing,” he said. “That was the whole point, then, to disable us. They still want us in one piece.”
Had the Seps really been ready to sacrifice one warship to keep Leveler occupied while another crippled her?
And I’ve just about killed my ship to rescue one woman. That’s how it stacks up in the history books, personal feelings apart.
Maybe the Sep ships were taking it slowly because they thought Leveler might self-destruct rather than be captured. They certainly seemed to think the concussion missiles were that significant. There was nothing else Leveler had that other Republic assault ships didn’t.
“Is the CR-twenty docked now, Number One?”
“It is, sir.”
“Can we jump? Commander?”
“We’re not dead in the water,” Baradis said, “but it’s going to take ten or fifteen minutes to patch through enough power to jump again. We need to reroute relays.”
Pellaeon was running on blind reflex now. It had always stood him in good stead in the past. There was a fine line between guesswork and training so ingrained and finely honed that it literally didn’t require conscious thought. But no computer targeting, no reliable nav computer, and now hyperdrive trouble; he was running out of ideas.
“Have we got enough power to fire up the shield arrays?” Shields were massively hungry systems. It was always a trade-off between weapons and shields. “We need to buy some time.”
“I’ll find a way, sir…”
“Good man. Do it.”
Leveler wasn’t finished yet. Pellaeon was certain.
But he still thought one step beyond the unthinkable, what he would do if the next plan didn’t work. He knew what his orders were.
He wondered if a few thousand lives were really worth the secrets of missiles that would probably be sold to the next highest bidder within the year anyway. He glanced at the group of Jedi, utterly silent. Ash Jarvee looked as if she was waiting for orders.
“Do you do miracles?” he asked.
Hangar Deck,
Leveler
The CR-20 skidded along the deck, little skips like a stone tossed across water. The metallic screeches put Callista’s teeth on edge.
She’d thought Skywalker was a better pilot than that. She was too busy keeping Ince stable to look up, but she heard Skywalker muttering angrily, and flashing hazard lights reflected off the interior bulkheads as the transport shuddered to a noisy halt. When she realized that the CR-20 was stationary, it took a moment for her to work out that Leveler was vibrating, not the troopship, and the flashing lights were hazard warnings on the hangar deck. Rex and three of the troopers were carrying Ince down to the ramp when crew in fire hazard suits raced in to meet them halfway.
“We’ve been hit,” one of them said. “You might want to bang out of here and see how far you can jump under your own power. You can make Kemla.”
Skywalker jumped down from the gantry as if he’d taken a shortcut. “No, this man’s too badly injured. We need to get him to medbay right away.”
“Your call, sir.”
“How bad is the ship?”
“Manual targeting, no concussion missiles, and they’re trying to restore hyperdrive generators. We’re relying on shields and manual turbolaser targeting for about fifteen minutes.”
“What about the concussion missiles?”
“Offline. Computer targeting problem. It’s all computer problems.”
Altis made his way down a gantry ladder and
dusted off his hands. “Now, we might be able to help there… Callista?”
“I can do it,” said Callista. The ship that had seemed like a living beast to her when she first boarded it now drew her again. “Let me try. Show me the targeting computer.”
“You need to touch it?”
“Yes.”
The crewman went quiet, finger pressed to his ear as if he was talking to someone on a comlink. Callista couldn’t see his face under the fire-resistant hood, and she couldn’t hear him. While she waited, Ince was whisked away on a repulsor and the ship shuddered a few times as if taking heavy fire.
“Captain says go ahead, and Lieutenant Derel will meet you at the end of passage seventy-eight-alpha on this deck.” He pointed to blast doors on the opposite side of the hangar. “You want a ride down there? We have speeder carts.”
“I can outrun one of those, thanks.”
She didn’t look back; she simply sprinted for the doors, almost forcing them apart in frustration when they didn’t open fast enough, and then ran full-tilt down the passage, scattering crew and civilian contractors. She was suddenly aware of Ahsoka on her heels.
“What are you coming for?” Callista panted.
“You might need a hand,” Ahsoka said.
“You can’t feel machines. I can.”
“I’m coming anyway.”
At least she doesn’t think I’m a crazed dark sider anymore. That’s something. Nothing like a late epiphany, is there?
The passage was a lot longer than she’d imagined. Leveler wasn’t a full-sized assault ship, but she was big enough to leave Callista gasping for breath by the time she reached the turbolift that ran from the bridge down to the deck. Derel was waiting. She could see him all the way down the passage from the final turn, hands clasped behind his back, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, head down, occasionally glancing up; another clone almost exactly like Ince in appearance, but giving a distinctively different impression in the Force.
He seemed remarkably relaxed. There was nothing he could do to make her run any faster, after all.
She skidded into the turbolift with Ahsoka behind her. Derel punched the controls and the cage fell like a stone. “This is a separate system,” he said. “The missiles are independent of the main weapons systems because it’s just a bolt-on for trialing. Do you need to know how it works?”
“Well, yes…”
The bridge deck levels flashed by the viewport in the turbolift. “What kind of detail?”
“Just tell me in the broadest terms, like it’s an animal. I have to think myself into the computer. I don’t need technical data to do that.”
“Okay.” Derel blinked a few times. “The concussion missiles have onboard computers that let them track a target. But they need to leave the ship with all kinds of information on what they’re hunting, so they don’t pick on the wrong prey. Like a friendly ship, for example. The missile computer needs to tell each missile what its prey looks like and where it needs to bite it, and how hard, to kill it. But the problem seems to be that the missiles can’t hear it. Does that make sense?”
Perfect. “Yes. You give good briefing, Lieutenant.”
The turbolift doors opened. Derel led Callista and Ahsoka down a ladder and keyed open a compartment. As soon as Callista put her hand on the bulkhead, she felt the ship respond to her like a tsaelke. She could almost feel a heartbeat. Warships each had their own unique sounds and vibrations that told those who lived in them that all was well, or if something was out of kilter, and she understood that completely now. The missile computer turned out to be a modest durasteel box about the size of a speeder drive. The only visible signs of activity were blue and green lights on the side, and a small diagnostics screen sunk into the metal.
“Where does it get its information on targets?” she asked. She placed both palms flat on its top. She could feel its sharp mind, its insatiable need to search. “Which systems talk to it?”
“It’s got a database of known ship profiles from Rep Intel, and we augment that with sensor readings during missions. It should be able to see the Sep ships as confirmed targets.”
Callista nodded. “I can do this.” She could feel it; she could feel the targeting computer searching over and over for something, constantly tripping over… a gate, a closed door, something it simply could not pass through. “Okay, when the systems talk to one another, do the missiles launch?”
“If the launch key’s open.”
“Open it.”
Whatever that meant, the key wasn’t turned down here. Derel pressed his headset mouthpiece close to his lips and said something. But by then she was already losing herself in the crystals and circuits of the machine, feeling the zip and tingling of minute electrical impulses, seeing at first a wonderfully regular, intricate landscape of lines, lights, and gleaming metal. There was a sense of movement, of things happening at breakneck speed, yet frozen motionless. Then she felt overcome by the faintest vibration that seemed to start in her stomach. It filled the marrow of her bones; it traveled to her skin. She was somehow a very different shape now. Whereas she’d been aware all the time of existing at a fixed point—a perfect intersection of a line that ran from ear to ear, and another that passed through the crown of her head to midway on her tongue—she was now everywhere on a flat plane. Everything that she’d understood of physical existence no longer applied.
She was the machine—she was the whole ship. She could feel the barrier that stopped the computer from reaching its objective. She was also a mass of senses far beyond those of human flesh and blood, the ship’s sensor arrays; she was the beating heart of its generators. She looked without eyes from one part of the infinite plane to another, saw the barriers, and opened them with a breath. She felt as if she were inhaling cool clean air after being trapped in a stuffy cage.
The sense of escape was wonderful. Somehow, she felt she was flying. It was like nothing she’d ever known before.
The world within her eyes—not before them, in them—was now velvet black and infinite. She was flying at incredible, effortless speed, consumed with hunger for something, hunting. She found herself hurtling toward something as complex and alive as herself, but the two of them couldn’t exist in the same world—she knew that more surely than anything at that moment—and one had to die. The black velvet changed instantly to searing white-hot light. She thought that was the end of it, but she made the journey again and again, each time with more certainty.
It was bliss. It was unimaginable freedom. It was—
She was jerked out of the silent idyll. She thought she fell a long way. The world around her was suddenly confused, soft, imperfect, dirty, noisy. And she was… flesh and blood again. A head, four limbs, weighed down and sluggish.
Already, she missed flying in that perfect infinity.
“Wow!” The voice was very distant. “I’ve never seen anything like that in my life! Hey, are you okay? You did it! You did it!”
She was almost sure she was Callista now, and she thought of a kelp farm. Maybe that was why the voice was muffled; she was underwater. No, she was looking up into two faces—a young man and the vividly marked face of a nonhuman.
“That’s very… weird,” said a female voice. It wasn’t her own. “I thought I was never going to get you out of that trance. You look terrible.”
Ahsoka. Yes, that was Ahsoka, and the man was Derel, and she was Callista Masana.
“Where’s Geith?” she asked. Geith! How could she have wanted to fly alone when Geith was still here? “Can we get out of here now?”
“No hurry,” Derel said. He slapped her back enthusiastically. “You took out seven Sep ships. The last two aren’t big enough to tackle us, even with half our systems down. Nice job, ma’am.”
But she wasn’t herself yet, not fully. She could still feel a sense of ship in her, of being a totally different shape and size.
Something was different; she felt as if she had water in her ears, as if her f
ine-tuned senses had been dulled a little. She wasn’t sure what it was, but she knew she was different somehow.
Ahsoka had hold of her shoulders, eyes wide and anxious. “Are you okay?”
“Just a little groggy.” Callista got to her feet. Now she knew what the problem was. She could barely sense anything in the Force. Even Ahsoka, standing right next to her, felt so muted that Callista had to concentrate hard to feel her as a Jedi at all. It was as if she’d been deafened by a blast. “Did I get hit by something?”
Ahsoka took her arm. “No. You just blanked out. You were just—right in with the targeting computer. I could see it. I don’t know any Jedi who can do that with a machine. Nobody.”
She said it as if it was a dark art that scared her. At that moment, Callista had no recollection of the meld at all other than a wonderful clarity, an answer for everything when she reached for it, the most crisply detailed images of stars, and ships right down to their rust streaks, tiny meteor pocks and flaking livery. That intense clarity had gone now, leaving her with an unsettling fuzziness. Perhaps that was all it was. She’d moved from machine perspective back to a fallible human one again, and it was simply the contrast that made her feel she’d lost her Force senses.
Like reading a holozine with the text magnified, and then going back to a regular page. It looks blurred for a moment. That’s all it is.
Isn’t it?
If it had scared Ahsoka, it had terrified her. She tried to work out what she needed to worry about.
“Is everyone okay?” she asked, still not sure who everyone was. “Someone was hurt.”
“Ince,” Ahsoka said. “Come on. Let’s go to medbay and see how he is.”
Callista had been to only a few areas of this huge ship, but somehow she now knew her way around without even looking for the stenciled numbers that identified the decks and sections. She headed for the medbay. If anyone had told her where it was, she couldn’t have equated those directions with what she could feel somewhere in her brain.
So I do have a little of the ship left in me.
It wasn’t the first time. She’d immersed herself in machines before, and they hadn’t been anywhere near as complex or intense as this. But she’d always felt slightly altered afterward in ways she found hard to define.