Showdown at Centerpoint Read Free

well, Honored Solo,” Salculd replied. “At least until the next subsystem flips out.”
    “Wonderful,” Han said to himself. “Everything be well, Honored Dracmus?” he asked in Selonian.
    “Fine, fine, all is fine, until we crash and die,” Dracmus replied.
    “Glad we have a consensus,” Han muttered to himself.
    “It is
good
to plan ahead like that,” Salculd said. “Here I was just going to land the ship the regular way. Now I am knowing that I will fail and we will crash. It is most comforting.”
    “That is enough, Pilot Salculd,” Dracmus snapped. “Concentrate all attention on your duties.”
    “Yes, Honored Dracmus,” Salculd said at once, her tone of voice most apologetic.
    Salculd was a fairly experienced pilot, and knew her ship at least reasonably well, if not as well as Han would have preferred. Dracmus, on the other hand, was trained to deal with humans, and incompletely trained at that. When it came to ship handling, she had no experience, no knowledge, and no skill. Even so, she commanded the ship—not just in deciding where itwould go, but down to the last detail of every maneuver. Salculd could not, or would not, overrule her. Dracmus was of higher status, or seniority, or something, relative to Salculd, and that was that, insofar as either of the Selonians was concerned. Neither seemed much concerned by the fact that Dracmus had only the slightest understanding of space operations, or by the fact that during the raid on Selonia she had repeatedly ordered the ship to do things it could not, and come alarmingly close to getting them all killed.
    Salculd might have a smart mouth, and an irreverent attitude, but she followed all of Dracmus’s orders—no matter how boneheaded—with alarming dispatch. It took some getting used to.
    Han took his own place in the control seat next to Salculd. He had done his best to adjust the padding to fit a human frame, but the seat would never be comfortable. Han lay back and looked up.
    The view out the transparent nose of the coneship was nothing less than spectacular. The planet Selonia hung big and bright in the sky, filling the middle third of the field of view. Selonia had smaller oceans than Corellia, and the land mass was broken up into thousands of medium-sized islands, more or less evenly spaced across the face of the planet.
    Instead of two or three large oceans and four or five continental landmasses, Selonia’s surface was a maze of water and land. Hundreds of seas and bays and inlets and straits and shoals separated the islands. Han remembered reading somewhere that no point on land anywhere on Selonia was more than one hundred fifty kilometers from open water, and no point on the water was more than two hundred kilometers from the nearest shoreline.
    But there was more to the view than the spectacular planet. Mara Jade’s personal ship, the
Jade’s Fire,
hung in space a kilometer or two away, her bow hiding a bit of the planet’s equatorial region. She was a long, low, streamlined ship, painted in a flame pattern of red andgold. The ship looked fast, sleek, strong, maneuverable—and Han knew she was all of those things. He wished, not for the first time, that he was aboard her, and not just because the
Fire
was a better ship. Leia was aboard the
Fire,
along with Mara Jade.
    After Dracmus had managed to blow out nearly every system on board the coneship, the
Fire
had rescued them and provided Han with the spare parts he needed to repair the craft. Now the
Fire
was preparing to see the coneship to a safe landing.
    Han did not like Leia being on one ship while he was on the other, but the arrangement made too much sense. Mara, not yet completely recovered from her leg injury, still needed some looking after, and she needed a copilot, at least until she recovered. Space knew the Selonians, Dracmus and Salculd, needed all the help
they
could get. Besides which, Leia spoke Selonian—spoke it better than Han, for that matter—and given