[Han Solo] - 03(45)

Don’t stand there tellin’ me all the stuff that can go wrong! Get movin’!”

Chewbacca made a hasty exit.

Han tried the comm unit again. “Salla … Salla, this is Falcon.

Come in.” He wondered whether Salla’s abrupt reversion to real space had caused her to be flung against the controls. She could be lying there, unconscious … or dead.

“Hey, baby, answer me. Come in, Salla ….”

He continued to call as he sped toward the apastron coordinates. The neutron star’s magnetic field was so powerful that it must have blown out every active system on Rimrunner the moment Salla came out of hyperspace.

That would almost certainly include Rimrunner’s sole lifepod, as that system was usually kept “on-line”—ready for an emergency ejection at a moment’s notice.

Salla was still moving, coasting at the same speed she had been when she’d first jumped into hyperspace, but now she had no way to brake or alter direction. Most importantly, no power to blast free of the gravity well.

She’d be pulled closer and closer in an ever-tighter orbit until her ship encountered the edge of the accretion disk, then … boom.

By the time that happened, though, Salla would have been dead for at least five minutes, from passing through that plasma particle jet ….

Not if I can help it, Han thought grimly. “Salla? Salla? Can you read me?

Come in, Salla!”

Finally, he heard a crackle of static, then a faint reply. “… Han ˇ . .

Rimrunner … engines out. Power gone … batteries dying …

can’t … goner, honey … stay away …. ” Han swore loudly.

“No!” he yelled into the comm. “Salla, listen to me and do exactly what I say! Rimrunner’s a goner, right, but not you, Salla!

You’re gonna have to abandon ship, and you’ve got only a few minutes to do it! Was your lifepod on-line when you got hit?”

“… affirmative, Han … lifepod dead … no way to eject …. ” It was as he’d thought. Her lifepod was useless, its electronic systems blown.

He wet his lips. “Yes, you can eject! We’re comin’ to get you!

Salla, you get your rear down to your aft airlock and stuff yourself into a vacuum suit! Take both suit thrust paks, hear me? When the first runs out, activate the second. Full throttle! I’m gonna try and match your trajectory, but I want you as far away from Rimrunner and that plasma jet as possible!”

“Won’t work … jump?”

“Yeah, dammit, jump!” Han made a course adjustment. “I can be there in eight minutes. I want you blasting away from Rimrunner at full throttle on the following coordinates …” He glanced at his navicomputer and gave her a string of numbers. “Copy that?”

“But Rimrunner …” was the faint reply.

“Blast Rimrunner!” Han shouted. “It’s a ship, you can get another!

Now do it, Salla! This is gonna be hard enough without you arguing!

You’ve got three minutes to get into that suit! Go!”

He keyed his intercom to Jarik’s spacesuit frequency. “Jarik, you standing by with the magnetic grapple and the winch?”

“Affirmative, Han,” Jarik said. “Just warn me when I can make visual contact. It’s hard to see in this helmet.”

“I’ll tell ya, kid,” Han said tersely. “Here’s your coordinates for the grapple.” He repeated them. “Timin’s gonna be critical here, so don’t be slow about it. Any drift, and we’ll graze the edge of the magnetic field and then we’re in the same fix as Rimrunner. Basically, we’ve got one chance to get in and get out safely. Got that?”

“I copy, Han,” Jarik said, tensely.

As Han piloted his ship toward the rescue coordinates, he worried that Salla’s thrust paks wouldn’t be strong enough to propel her far enough away from her doomed vessel. He didn’t want to risk crashing into Rimrunner. The Falcon was a freighter, not designed for tight, pinpoint maneuvering of this sort. True, Han could make his ship practically stand on her head, but picking up a tiny spacesuited human while trying to stay out of the particle jet’s magnetic field was risky enough, without worrying about having Rimrunner slamming into them.

Han carefully checked and rechecked his course. He had to do this precisely, on the first try. He had to get her before she got within range of that deadly plasma. He had a brief, hideous vision of what it would be like to bring a radiation-seared corpse aboard, and made himself concentrate on his piloting. This maneuver was probably the trickiest piece of piloting he’d ever tried ….