“You know what! If we don’t get inside the ship before the jump into! hyperspace!?”
“At best, we will see a flash of light, and be fried to a crisp in the plasma flare of the hyperspace warp.”
“That’s best? What’s worst?”
“At worst we won’t feel a thing or even see a flash of light. We will just look around and see no ship. It will be gone. And we will drift here all alone, endlessly, until we die.”
The alert siren still wailed but they heard it only when they touched the hull, through their hands or the soles of their boots.
At the steepest part of the wing, Garr missed a step, and spun off into space. Boba grabbed a seam and held on for dear life. The safety line snapped tight - yanking Garr back into Boba.
000MMPPHHHFF!
“Careful,” Boba said. He wanted to say “slow down” but he knew he couldn’t. If they slowed down, they were lost.
“You idiot!” said Boba as he untangled the line and started down, over the rear of the wing.
“I’m sorry!” Garr said. “I missed a hold.”
“I was talking to myself!” Boba said. “This whole thing is my fault. It was a stupid idea!”
I lost track of what was most important. A bounty hunter never does that.
Through the window Boba could see crew members running, security droids clearing the halls, and clone troopers scurrying in formation.
How much time left? Three minutes? Two?
The airlock was still at least five minutes away…
“This way!” Boba said. It looked like a shortcut.
He plunged down into a dark “canyon” - a slot between the rear boosters and the ventral hull fin - making his way hand over hand.
It was dark, and the handholds were far apart. Garr belayed Boba, and then Boba belayed Garr, so that one of them was always secured to the hull of the ship.
Boba grinned when he emerged at the other end of the slot. His gamble had paid off. There was the lighted airlock door, still open, waiting for them - only a hundred meters away!
Two hundred meters if they went around on the hull. One hundred if they took a chance and floated straight across.
“Let’s try it,” Boba said. “This last jump can be made in one leap if we both let go.”
“But what if we miss?”
“Then we’re dead. But we may be dead anyway if we don’t try it. We’re running out of time.”
Boba looked at his friend. He wondered if he looked as frightened to Garr as Garr did to him. Probably!
“Well, then,” said Garr, giving a brave thumbs-up, “what are we waiting for? Let’s try it!”
The airlock door a hundred meters away looked tiny.
Boba gathered the rope into a coil, took Garr’s hand, and said, “On three. One… two…”
He didn’t remember saying “three” but he realized he must have said it, for they were floating free in space, unbelayed drifting slowly, hand in hand, toward the lighted square of the airlock door.
Both were silent. Boba was hardly even breathing. It was as if a word, a breath, might make them miss their target, and spin them off into space.
Thirty meters, twenty, ten
As they got closer, Boba saw that the target was even bigger than he had thought. The airlock door had handholds on either side, so he didn’t have to hit it dead center.
And at the end of the hull, just past the door, there was an antenna.
At the last minute a slight spin turned Boba and he saw that he was, in fact, going to miss the airlock door.
No sweat. “Your move, Garr. Just grab at those handholds as we go by.”
“Got it!” said Garr. “Well, almost…” Another spin had pulled Garr back, just short of the handholds. Now they were floating on toward the end of the hull.
Luckily the antenna was right in reach. Boba let go of Garr’s hand and uncoiled the rope. He reached out and grabbed the antenna as he floated past.
“Got it!” he said aloud, to himself and Garr. Just as it broke off in his hand.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“O000ph!”
The safety line went tight, jerking Boba and Garr together, then setting them spinning, like a kid’s toy - a giant kid’s toy that had been thrown away, down the deepest darkest hole in all the universe.
The deep dark hole that is the universe.
For they were spinning away from the ship, attached to each other but to nothing else doomed to float on forever while the Candaserri disappeared into hyperspace.
They both were moving, falling, tumbling, head over heels away from the ship, toward the emptiness of space.
Deep into the Big Isn’t.
Realizing the worst made Boba feel calmer. His panic was gone. His fear was gone. He remembered something his father had said: The worse things are, the calmer you need to be.