Star Wars: Shadow Games Read Free Page A

shuddered as if caught in the throes of a seizure.
    “Our port engine is approaching failure,” said Eaden quietly, his dark gaze on the internal sensor display. Unlike the tactical readouts, those were working just fine.
    Blast. Why couldn’t it have at least been the central drive? That could go belly-up without causing instability, even if they lost some thrust by using just the peripherals. Cursing steadily, Dash wrenched at the yoke, flipping the ship over by ninety degrees and—he hoped—increasing their arc.
    “Port drive intermittent.”
    He could feel that as a series of tiny bumps punctuating the trembling of the ship. There was a moist tickle between his shoulder blades. He was sweating. The realization made him sweat harder. Perspiration stood out on his forehead and began to trickle from his hairlinedown the sides of his face. He didn’t dare spare a hand to whisk it away—and if they didn’t pull out of this climb into free space in the next several seconds it wouldn’t matter. The drive would fail and they’d go into a spin. But if he cut the drive they’d be sucked into the Maw.
    Unless …
    “Kill the failsafes. We’re going to hyperdrive.”
    “We are too close—”
    “I know!
Do
it!”
    “We are headed into Wild Space.”
    “I
know
!
Do it
!”
    Eaden cut the hyperdrive’s failsafes. Dash activated the drive. Nothing happened.
    Dash glared at the Nautolan. “I said kill the failsafes!”
    “I
did
.”
    “Then what the hell is—”
    “Clearly, we have sustained damage.”
    “Great. Go to secondary drive.”
    Eaden shunted the power to the backup hyperdrive. It ramped up quickly—more quickly than was strictly safe, especially in this situation—but it still felt like a long, miserable year to Dash. He felt his navigator’s gaze on him.
    “We are in jeopardy of—”
    “I
know
what we’re in jeopardy of,” Dash snarled, his own eyes never leaving the power-up gauge on the console. The second the drive came fully online, he activated it.
    The ship seemed to hesitate for an instant—an illusion, but terrifying nonetheless—then the stars blurred comfortingly and they leapt out of realspace and away from the Maw and into the Wild.
    “We-e-e-ell,” said Leebo’s voice through the com. “That was a
lot
of fun. Please tell me we won’t be doing it again in the near future. Or, for that matter, the far—”
    “Hey! A moment of congratulations is in order, okay?” Dash relaxed back on the steering yoke andtook a moment to wipe sweat from his forehead and brush his hair back. “We just foiled an Imperial ambush, escaped certain death and …” He checked the chrono. “
Hah! And
cut point-three-three-three parsecs off the Kessel Run.”
    “Except,” said Eaden, “that we are headed
away
from Kessel … and Nal Hutta.”
    Dash made a dismissive gesture. He felt exhilarated and lightheaded. “No problem, we’ll drop out of hyperspace as soon as we’re out of this bad neighborhood, then set course for Nal Hutta. We’ll be ahead of schedule
and
earn enough to get the drive fixed twice over.”
    Eaden was staring morosely at the control console. “Alas, I think not.”
    “And why is that?”
    As if in response,
Outrider
dropped suddenly and emphatically out of hyperspace, stranding them at the edge of the Wild.
    “Because,” said Eaden, “our secondary hyperdrive has also expired.”
    A cursory examination of both drives showed that there was no hope of swiping enough working parts from one to repair the other. In the end, they were left with no choice but to patch up the ion engines and make the nearest port at sublight speed, which would take—
    “Thirty-two-point-six Standard hours,” Eaden announced after consulting the bridge navicomp. “But there is no repair facility there.”
    So much for the nearest port. Dash stared, unfocused, at the sparse points of light beyond the viewport. “And Nal Hutta?”
    “Forty-four-point-seven.”
    Dash did some quick