[Black Fleet Crisis] - 02(21)

What’s the shortest way to the outer hull?”

Artoo’s reply was a squawk.

“Point out the direction—I can’t understand you!”

“He’s not answering you,” said Lobot. “He’s asking me why I’m not back with the tools yet.” He closed his eyes. The lights on his interface blinked at a furious rate.

“Through there,” he said. “Eighteen meters. But I don’t know what’s between here and the hull.”

“I’ll tell you when I get back,” Lando said. He drew his blaster, burned a hole in the direction Lobot had pointed, and was gone.

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 covered 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?”