Showdown at Centerpoint by Roger MacBride Allen Read Free Book Online

between competing disasters.
    Han checked the altitude and acceleration displays. The coneship was gathering speed, terrifying speed, with every second. Even if he got the engines lit, there might not be time to slow the ship before piling it in.
    “Honored Solo! Hull temperature suddenly increasing!” Salculd cried.
    “Atmosphere’s here a little early!” Han said. “Hang on! We’re going to jump this thing and see what happens.”
    One chance,
Han told himself.
Exactly one chance
. For a fleeting moment he thought of Leia, watching from the
Jade’s Fire
and unable to do anything. He thought of his three children, off somewhere in the care of Chewbacca and Ebrihim the Drall. No. No. He could not die. Not when they all needed him.
One chance
. The ship bucked and shuddered as the atmospheric buffering shook it hard enough to get past the inertial dampers.
One chance
.
    Han waited as long as he dared, then one moment longer, then one more. And then—
    He slammed down the relay reset switch as hard as he could, dumping all of the feedback energy directly into the engine start manifold. He stabbed down on the engine start button—and felt a horrifying lurch, just as a low, rumbling explosion shook the ship from base to apex. That would have to be the repulsors blowing. For a long, sickening moment, nothing else happened. But then the ENGINES NOW CERTAINLY ARE INITIATED FULLY indicator came on, and Han had three good engines.
    Three? Not four? One of them must have been blown out by that LAF fighter. Han had been afraid of that. But even if he had one less engine than he had hoped for, that was three more than he had expected.
    Ignoring all his own advice on the subject, he brought the throttle up fast. There wasn’t time to nurse the engines. There was a distant bang and sudden flurry of violent vibrations that faded almost before they started, but the engines were holding. At least for now. At least for now.
    Han watched the acceleration meter, the velocity gauge, and the none-too-reliable altitude meter. For a wonder, the displays were all in standard units, and not some obscure Selonian format he had never seen before.
    But what he was seeing was by no means reassuring. He had flown enough reentries to know at a glance that they were far from out of trouble. The best theywere going to manage was a controlled crash. Han risked a glance out the viewport and saw that the
Jade’s Fire
was still staying close, somehow. Mara was some kind of pilot.
    Now if only he had a view that would show him the direction he was going. Unfortunately, the ship was flying stern-first, and the stern holocam, which might have shown him at least a vague idea of where he was heading, had given up altogether at some point in the proceedings.
    On the bright side, air friction was slowing down the ship’s axial spin. Finally it stopped altogether, which at least made piloting the coneship that much easier. It was about time
something
got easier.
    Han watched his velocity and altitude gauges, and knew just how much trouble he was still in. He had to shed some more speed. He had no choice in the matter. There was a way to do it, but it had its own drawbacks. And making it work without maneuvering thrusters was not going to be easier. He would have to do all his steering by playing with the thrust of the main engines—not simple when he was already juggling their thrust vectors to compensate for the missing engine. Still, it was doable. Maybe.
    He eased back just a trifle on the thrust to number three engine, and the coneship slowly pitched back, until it was flying at about a forty-five-degree angle of attack. It was still falling straight down, but now its nose was pointed an eighth of a turn away from the vertical. If Han had it figured right, that ought to start the coneship developing a bit of aerodynamic lift, in effect causing it to work like an airfoil. The coneship began to move sideways as well as down, and every millimeter of lateral