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With his thrusters holding his widely set feet against the outer
bulkhead of the vagabond, Lando pointed the cutting blaster down
between his legs and squeezed the actuator. A perfect circle of hull
vanished in a puff of gray smoke, which was instantly sucked out
through the opening.
The limpet had been floating freely, tethered to Lando's left wrist.
Now it strained at the end of a taut line, rocking as the compartment's
air rushed past it.
Pocketing the blaster, Lando let the line play out through his gloved
fingers until the limpet slipped through the opening. Only the cord on
Lando's wrist kept it from escaping completely into space.
Then he simply waited, watching the hull breach knit closed. When the
opening had shrunk enough to prevent the limpet from being pulled back
inside, Lando took up the slack and pulled the limpet back against the
hull. Reaching through, he pressed the dual switches that activated
the limpet's sensors and armed its attachment system.
Letting a little line play out again, Lando waited until the hole had
closed to the size of a peephole, then yanked the limpet toward him.
There was an audible thwack as the crisscrossing anchor spines fired
and drew the limpet flush against the hull. For insurance, Lando
knotted the cord around the safety tab that had cover ed the limpet's
switches, pulling it snugly against the inner face. Lando hoped that
even if the ship was somehow able to slough off the limpet's barbed
anchor spines, the harness and improvised stop would keep it in
place.
That job accomplished, Lando turned away to examine for the first time
the compartments he had crashed through en route to the outer hull.
Unlike in the accumulators, where the entire face of the passage itself
gave off a pale yellow glow, the only light in the outer compartment
came from the twin "ear lamps" located on either side of Lando's
helmet. When he swept their beams through the dark volume that
enclosed him, a great emptiness swallowed the light forward, aft, and
around the circumference of the ship. It was as if he were alone in
the darkest corner of space.
Only when he looked up, away from the outer hull near which he hovered
and back the way he had come, did the light catch and reflect to him
any of the substance of the ship. And what the light revealed there
made Lando shiver with a chill no warmer could drive away.
For the lamps showed that the inner wall was covered with alien
faces--a collage, a portrait gallery, a mural, a memorial, stretching
as far as the light could carry, and likely beyond. There were
thousands of different faces, or thousands of variations on the same
face, each gazing out from its own hexagonal cell. The faces were
unlike any Lando had ever seen, and yet he keenly felt the intelligence
in the large, round eyes that seemed to seek him out.
More than by any other gift, Lando had found his way by reading the
faces of strangers and knowing them better than they knew themselves.
He read in the sculpted, deeply lined faces of the Qella both strength
and surrender, a settled wisdom and a thwarted curiosity, and most of
all a terrible knowledge of the impermanence of life. The beings who
had sat for these portraits, and the artisans who had created them, had
known when they did so that these images might be all that survived
them, and they had held nothing back.
There was a circular gap in the mural where Lando had burned his way
through it from behind. The supporting wall had healed, but the
overlying portraits had not--four were damaged in varying degrees, one
obliterated forever. Lando fought off sharp pangs of guilt as he
jetted up toward the mural and reopened a hole at that same spot.
"I'm sorry," he said to the surviving faces as he left them behind.
"But this is your tomb--your memorial.
I'm trying to keep it from becoming mine. I like to think that if life
meant this much to you, you'd be rooting for me to succeed."
Lando found the others where he had left them, still tending to
Threepio. The golden droid was the only one to react strongly to his
return, turning his head toward Lando and greeting him cheerfully.
"Master Lando!" he said in a crackly voice. One glowing eye
flickered. "What are you doing on Yavin Four? Why are you wearing
that costume? Do you know, you look rather like a droid?"
"Threepio, take a look around," Lando said. "Do you recognize this
place?"
The droid's head swiveled. "Oh. Oh, yes, I see. The Qella
vagabond.
I seem to have had an accident." He turned and clanged Artoo on the
dome with his good arm. "And it's all your fault, you good-for-nothing
sabo teur. You belong in a waste compactor, along with all the
other--" "No," Lando said sharply. "It was my fault. I gave the
orders. I made the mistake. I'm sorry, Threepio. I promise you,
we'll get you put back to specs as soon as we get home."
"It is I who should apologize, Master Hambone," said Threepio. "I am
sure that my clamminess was the approximate corpse of my mishop."
"Don't try to talk, Threepio," Lando said. "Just keep running your
diagnostics. Your parser will map the damaged regions and relocate
those functions."
"Fairy wall, monster lambda." The droid's head returned jerkily to the
neutral position.
Lobot shook his head in sympathy. "Lando, the test charge--if that is
what it was--has been around four more times. I could see it weaken
when it passed your new hole, but other than that, it did not seem to
lose any strength at all. I expect that it would still be circulating
if the panel had not reabsorbed it the last time it passed."
Lando acknowledged the report with a nod. "These passages are a nearly
perfect energy bottle," he said.
"This explains a lot about the power of their weapons. It must get
pretty exciting when they're running a capacity charge through here."
"I believe our consensus is that we have had enough excitement for
now."
"You're right--we need to get out of here. But there's something that
has to be done first," Lando said.
"Artoo, I was able to place the limpet on the outside of the ship. I
need you to pick up its signal and make it available to Lobot."
The little droid turned its dome away from Lando and remained mute.
"Artoo, we need to find out where we are. Step two of our plan,
remember? I don't know how long we can count on getting data from the
limpet. And we don't know how long we'll be in realspace."
Still the droid was silent.
"Lobot?"
Lobot cleared his throat. "Ah--Artoo just said something rude to me
about your leadership ability.
Then he told me to tell you that he's on strike."
Working to restrain a flaring temper, Lando said evenly, "Artoo, you're
the only one of us who can receive the data from the limpet. If we [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]