The little droid jetted down to the center of the chamber and illuminated a band across the inner bulkhead with a beam of orange light from his holographic projector.
“Got it. Threepio, give me a report on your progress.”
The golden droid cocked his head. “Sir, so far I have hailed the masters of this vessel in eleven thousand, four hundred sixty-three languages, offering our abject apologies and asking for their assistance. There has been no reply on any band I am capable of detecting.”
“Do those six million languages of yours happen to include the Qella?”
“Alas, Master Lando, they do not.”
“Do you have any information at all about the Qella language? Maybe it’s related to some other language you are fluent in—the way that if you know rock, you can almost get along in Thobek or Wehttam.”
“I’m sorry, Master Lando. I am completely at a lOSS.”
“What about matching up geographically?”
“Sir, it is a standard first contact procedure to attempt contact with regional languages when the native language is unknown,” Threepio said with a note of indignation.
“I began with the eight hundred seventy-three languages spoken in the sector where Qella is located, and continued with the three thousand, two hundred seven languages with direct links to those linguistic families.”
“And now you’re just going A to Z on the rest?”
“I am continuing by astrographic proximity.”
“How long will it take you to try them all?”
“Master Lando, by reducing the wait time to the minimum specified by my protocols, I will be able to complete the initial series in four-point-two standard days.”
“That’s about what I figured,” said Lando. “Lobot, dig out the cutting blaster. We’re going to have to make our own door.”
With a grim expression on his face, Admiral Hiram Drayson sat on the edge of his desk and studied the final contact report from Colonel Pakkpekatt at Gmir Askilon.
The recordings from the spotter ships were dramatic and alarming.
Moments before the vagabond broke away, a ring of six rounded bumps— accumulator nodes or beam radiators, Drayson thought—appeared at the forward end of the ship. A fierce blue light began to dance over the bow.
Moments later, twin beams of energy shot out from two of the nodes and scissored back through the gap between the vagabond and Lady Luck, slicing them apart. Another pair of beams knifed out from two other nodes and carved through the interdiction generator on the underbelly of the picket Kauri. The blowback surge from the fully charged generator destroyed Kauri’s power compartment and left the ship afire and dead in space.
The instant Kauri was neutralized, the vagabond began to move, turning away from Lady Luck and accelerating out past the disabled picket’s position, well clear of the remaining interdictors. Just forty-two seconds after it began, it was over, the vagabond vanishing into the center of a hyperspace cone.
The final tally for the contact: One drone ferret destroyed.
One interdiction picket disabled and
abandoned,
with
twenty-six casualties, including six fatalities in the power compartment.
One yacht recovered and returned to a mooring on Glorious’s hull, undamaged except for the primary airlock.
One successful boarding of the target.
One successful escape by the target.
One expedition armada scattered across space, with four ships in pursuit of the target and the others pulling ambulance or cleanup duty.
And, most troubling of all to Drayson, one contact suit gauntlet recovered in the debris—right hand, in Lando’s size.
The report contained some positive information as well. It was beyond dispute now that the vagabond’s weapons were compound—the intersection of two or more beams did the damage, probably through some sort of harmonic resonance. Unless there were more weapon nodes concealed amidships, it seemed as though six targets were all the vagabond could handle. Possibly as few as four ships, properly spaced, might overwhelm its defenses.
But first Pakkpekatt would have to find the vagabond again—a task that had taken two years the last time.
Drayson called up the chart of the pursuit and studied it closely.
Three ships were racing for search stations along the vagabond’s last heading: Lightning ten light-years out, Glorious twenty, and Marauder thirty. The improvised plan called for them to drop sensor buoys with hypercomm repeaters at those entry points and then begin making short jumps out to the limits of sensor range, hoping to catch a glimpse of their quarry.
The precision of the plan did not mask its weakness—its slim chance of success depended on the vagabond’s making a single short jump. If it followed a short jump with a second jump on another heading, where there were no eyes to see or sensors to track—or if it carried the first jump out fifty, a hundred, five hundred light-years, beyond the borders of the New Republic and into the chaos of the Core-Drayson knew that Colonel Pakkpekatt had addressed an urgent appeal for more ships to both New Republic Intelligence and the Fleet Office before Glorious jumped out from Gmir Askilon. He also knew the likely answer to that appeal.