Star Wars - Lost Tribe of the Sith 02 - Skyborn

had perished. “He’s a long way from the Tapani sector.”
    “Assuming that
was
Qwallo.” Ben extended his Force awareness behind them, but did not sense any hint of the Jedi’s presence. “Should I make another sweep to see if we can recover him?”
    Luke thought for a moment, then shook his head. “Even if he’s still alive, let’s not give him another shot at the
Shadow
. Before we start taking those kinds of chances, we need to figure out what’s going on here.”
    “Yeah,” Ben agreed. “Like how come he didn’t need a helmet.”
    “And how he got here in the first place—and why he’s shooting at us.” Luke clicked out of his crash webbing, then added, “I’ll handle the damage. If you see anyone else floating around with a missile launcher and no pressure suit, don’t ask questions, just—”
    “Open fire.” Ben deployed the blaster cannons, then checked the damage display and saw that they were bleeding both air and hyperdrive coolant. To make matters worse, the yoke was sticking, and that could mean a lot of things—none of them good. “Got it. We’ve taken enough damage.”
    Ben switched his threat array to the primary display. At the top of the screen, the gray form of a mass shadow was clarifying out of the darkness. A yellow number-bar was adding tons to the mass estimate faster than the eye could follow, but he was alarmed to see that it was already into the high five digits and climbing toward six. There was no indication yet of the object’s overall shape or energy output, but the tonnage alone suggested something
at least
as large as an assault carrier.
    Unsure whether it was better to slow down to prevent a collision or accelerate to avoid being an easy target, Ben started to weave and bob. There was just a vague hint of danger tickling the base of his skull, but that only meant nothing had set its sights on the
Shadow
yet.
    On the third bob downward, the yoke jammed forward and wouldn’t come back. Ben cursed and tried to muscle it, but he was fighting the hydraulic system, and if he fought it too hard, he would break a control cable. He hit the emergency pressure release, dumping the control system’s entire reservoir into space, and then checked his threat array again.
    The mass ahead was no longer a shadow. A silvery, elongated oval had taken shape in the middle of the display, the number-bar in its core now climbing past seven million tons. The oval was slowly drifting toward the bottom of the screen and shedding alphanumeric designators, indicating the presence of a debris field
and
the danger of an impending collision with the object itself. Ben hit the maneuvering thrusters
hard
, and the
Shadow
decelerated.
    He heard a toolbox clang into the main cabin’s rear bulkhead, and his father’s alarmed voice came over the intercom speaker. “What did you hit?”
    “Nothing yet.” Ben pulled back on the yoke, using his own strength to force the vector plates down. “The control yoke’s power assist is gone, and we’ve reached a debris field.”
    “What sort of debris?” his father demanded. “Ice? Rock? Iron-nickel?”
    Ben thumbed the SELECT bubble active and slid it over to one of the designators: OBJECT B 8. An instant later a density analysis offered a 71 percent probability that O BJECT B 8 was a medium transport of unknown make and model.
    But Ben did not immediately relay the information to his father. As the
Shadow
’s nose returned to its original plane, an enormous, gray-white dome was slowly coming into view. Dropping down from above and upside down relative to the ship, the dome hung at the base of a large, spinning cylinder ringed by a dozen small, attached tubes. Floating between the cylinder and the
Shadow
were nearly twenty dark flecks with the smooth lines and sharp corners suggestive of spacecraft, all drifting aimlessly and as cold as asteroids.
    “Ben, you’re worrying me,” his father admonished. “How bad is it?”
    “Uh, I don’t really know yet.” As Ben spoke, the
Shadow
’s lamp beams continued to slide up the spinning cylinder, to where it joined a gray metal sphere that looked to be about the size of one of Bespin’s smaller floating cities. “But maybe you should come back to the flight deck as soon as things are secure back there.”
    “Yeah,” Luke said. “I was just thinking the same thing.”
    As the lamp beams continued to reveal more of the station—at least that’s what Ben
assumed
he was looking at—he