STAR WARS: Fugitive

Chapter 19

Chapter 19

I think I’m getting stiff, thought the Zeltron, as he lay curled up around the form of T3-D4. They were squished into the mini-cargo compartment of Peri’s pod drifting through space near the edge of the asteroid field of the Roon system. Shortly after their departure from Roon, several armored spacecraft launched from various random locations on Roon and immediately vectored upon intercept courses with Peri’s ship.

His ship came under intense attack. Between the Zeltron’s expert flying skills, Peri’s technological enhancements – everything except the confounded automatic weapons system... still...  – and T3-D4’s precision power routing to maintain continuity of propulsion, shields and weapons, they managed to last through the engagement until they reached the very edge of the asteroid field. There a lucky shot punched through the waning shields and struck a structural hub. Peri, having stumbled upon this structural vulnerability once before – purely accidental, but I’ll never admit to that... – began working on back up measures, which included this pod they now occupied.

Though the pod appeared anything but spaceworthy, it supplemented the regular escape pods, which he never intended to use for himself, except as decoys so he could escape in his more obscure pod. The pod had an exterior sublight engine that would attach via an energy binder, but the power portals between the pod and the engine had to be aligned properly. Peri purposely didn’t store them aligned so that he could jettison the pod and engine with his other equipment in the airlock, so it would look less like a manned vessel and be more easily disregarded by would-be pursuers, while the normal recognizable escape pods would be in danger of being hunted down and destroyed, especially deep within the Outer Rim territories of the Sith Empire. He modified a remote controller to fire off small repulsorlift boosters to help him align the power ports to bring the energy binder online once he knew he was safe.

Only now he was having trouble, because he never had an opportunity to practice with this sort of thing. He murmured to himself in between curses each time he miscalculated his repulsorlift burns.

...And they all thought I was crazy... ‘That stuff never happens, Peri,’ they said... ‘Your mission won’t make a difference,’ they said... ‘All of that extra security won’t matter, you’re just paranoid...’ yeah, unless you’re going deep into Sith space, harboring stowaways... idiots... “Blast it!” shouted Peri, “I almost had it!”

“You know, Peri,” piped the Zeltron, “You sure managed to pick out every weakness you could possibly exploit on that ship, and then draw every weapon you’ve encountered...”

“Quiet!”

T3-D4 beeped.

“You, too!”

T3-D4 let out a short sad tone.

“I almost got it,” said Peri deep in concentration, mostly to himself.

“Wait! Did you hear that?” whispered the Zeltron.

“Hear what?”

“Shh!”

Finally Peri could hear distant explosions, much like the ones they heard before abandoning ship. He felt his heart pounding, wondering if his survival ploy would very soon be cut short. His makeshift pod would have the barest of propulsion capabilities, hardly comparable to a landspeeder in both maneuverability and speed, even in the vacuum of space. If one of those bounty hunters carried a meticulous streak, they weren’t going to last much longer.