[Thrawn Trilogy] - 01(51)

Leia nodded. “I believe it.”

The transmitter crackled again. “Unidentified ship, this is Shieldship Nine. Ready to lock; please transmit your slave circuit code.”

“Right,” Han muttered under his breath, touching the transmit switch. “Shieldship Nine, we don’t have a slave circuit. Just give me your course and we’ll stay with you.”

There was a moment of silence. “Very well, unidentified ship,” the voice said at last-reluctantly, Han thought. “Set your course at two-eight-four; speed, point six sublight.”

Without waiting for an acknowledgment, the huge umbrella began to drift off. “Stay with him, Chewie,” Han told the copilot. Not that that would be a problem; the Falcon was faster and infinitely more maneuverable than anything that size. “Shieldship Nine, what’s our ETA for Nkllon?”

“You in a hurry, unidentified ship?”

“How could we be in a hurry, with this wonderful view?” Han asked sarcastically, looking at the underside of the dish that filled pretty much the entire sky. “Yeah, we’re in kind of a hurry.”

“Sorry to hear that,” the other said. “You see, if you had a slave circuit, we could do a quick hyperspace hop inward together and be at Nkllon in maybe an hour. Doing it this way-well, it’ll take us about ten.”

Han grimaced. “Great.”

“We could probably set up a temporary slave circuit,” Leia suggested. “Threepio knows the Falcon’s computer well enough to do that.”

Chewbacca half turned toward her, growling a refusal that left no room for argument, even if Han had been inclined to argue. Which he wasn’t. “Chewie’s right,” he told Leia firmly. “We don’t slave this ship to anything. Ever. You copy that, shieldship?”

“Okay by me, unidentified ship,” the other said. They all seemed to be taking a perverse pleasure in using that phrase. “I get paid by the hour anyway.”

“Fine,” Han said. “Let’s get to it.”

“Sure”

The transmission cut off, and Han poised his hands over the controls. The umbrella was still drifting, but nothing more. “Chewie, has he got his engines off standby yet?”

The Wookiee rumbled a negative.

“What’s wrong?” Leia asked, leaning forward again.

“I don’t know,” Han said, looking around. With the umbrella in the way, there wasn’t a lot to see. “I don’t like it, though.” He tapped the transmitter. “Shieldship Nine, what’s the holdup?”

“Not to worry, unidentified ship,” the voice came back soothingly. “We’ve got another craft coming in that also doesn’t have a slave circuit, so we’re going to take you both in together. No point in tying up two of us, right?”

The hairs on the back of Han’s neck began to tingle. Another ship that just happened to be coming into Nkllon the same time they were. “You have an ID on that other ship?” he asked.

The other snorted. “Hey, friend, we don’t even have an ID on you.”

“You’re a big help,” Han said, muting the transmitter again. “Chewie, you got an approach yet on this guy?”

The Wookiee’s reply was short and succinct. And disturbing. “Cute,” Han growled. “Real cute.”

“I missed that,” Leia murmured, looking over his shoulder.

“He’s coming in from the far side of the shieldship’s central pylon,” Han told her grimly, pointing to the inference brackets on the scanner scope. “Keeping it between him and us where we can’t see him.”

“Is he doing it on purpose?”

“Probably,” Han nodded, hitting his restraint release. “Chewie, take over; I’m going to fire up the quads.”

He ran back along the cockpit corridor to the central core and headed up the ladder. “Captain Solo,” a nervous mechanical voice called after him from the direction of the lounge. “Is something wrong?”

“Probably, Threepio,” Han shouted back. “Better strap in.”

He got up the ladder, passed through the right-angle gravity discontinuity at the gun well, and dropped himself into the seat. The control board went on with satisfying quickness, as he keyed for power with one hand and grabbed the headset with the other. “Anything yet, Chewie?” he called into his mike.

The other growled a negative: the approaching craft was still completely hidden by the shieldship’s pylon. But the inference scope was now giving a distance reading, and from that the Wookiee had been able to compute an upper size limit for the craft. It wasn’t very big. “Well, that’s something,” Han told him, running through his mental list of starship types and trying to figure out what the Empire might be throwing at them that would be that small. Some variety of TIE fighter, maybe? “Stay sharp-this might be a decoy.”