by Troy Denning
Saba hissed, and Leia felt the same frustration rising in Mara and the other StealthX pilots that was welling up in her. She started to make a sharp reply—then realized what Darklighter was trying to do and remained silent.
“He is trying to provoke you,” Saba agreed. She closed the channel, then set the comm unit to burst mode to prevent the Mon Mothma’s tractor beam operators from riding a comm wave back to the Falcon. “Do you still believe Commodore Darklighter is bluffing?”
“If he weren’t, he’d be shooting by now,” Leia said. She opened the channel to Darklighter again. “Nice try, Commodore. But if Chief Omas is claiming that the Jedi have betrayed the Galactic Alliance just because he can’t reach Luke—”
“What’s . . . supposed to assume?” Darklighter interrupted. “And now . . . only proving him right. Kill your drives or . . . open fire.”
Leia hesitated. Darklighter was really raising the stakes this time. If she refused to obey, he would either have to make good on his threat, or admit that it was a bluff. She reached into the battle-meld, urging Mara and the others to keep their fingers away from their triggers, then took a deep breath and activated her microphone again.
“I guess you’ll have to open fire, Gavin. This is too important.”
A long silence followed in which even the comm crackles seemed to be growing sharper. Leia angled back toward the center of the Choke, placing the last pair of XJ3s between her and the Mon Mothma, and the Star Destroyer’s tractor beams flickered off. She felt a flash of approval from Mara and the StealthX pilots, then Darklighter’s voice came over the comm again.
“Blast it, Princess! I’m not bluffing.”
“Neither am I,” Leia returned. Now that she was past the Mon Mothma and heading straight toward the blue curtain of the Utegetu Nebula, she was happy to keep talking. Every second carried her farther down the narrow alley between the two sets of binaries, closer to making that final jump to Utegetu. “Gavin, you know Luke. He would never betray the Galactic—”
“Nice try, Princess,” Darklighter said. As the Falcon drew away from the Mon Mothma, the comm antenna was able to stay focused in one direction, and the signal grew stable again. “I won’t let you stall your way out of this. You have ten seconds to kill your drives.”
Leia glanced over at Saba. The Barabel was already on the intercom, warning the Noghri to be ready with the repulsor beam again.
“This is about Luke and Han, isn’t it?” Darklighter asked. “They’re still on Woteba. That’s why Chief Omas can’t reach Master Skywalker.”
Apprehension filled the battle-meld. Darklighter’s conjecture had been made over an open fleet channel, so there could be no doubt that it would be on Chief Omas’s desk by this time tomorrow. Returning Luke to Alliance space had just become a bureaucratic race against Chief Omas.
“Commodore Darklighter, can we go to secure channel?” Leia asked. “In private?”
“I’m sorry, no.” Darklighter’s tone was sincere. “This is a matter of record. You have five seconds to kill your drives, Princess.”
“Thank you for the warning, Commodore,” Leia said. “No hard feelings.”
Darklighter’s voice grew genuinely alarmed. “Leia! I can’t protect—”
Leia closed the channel, then slipped the Falcon out of her spiral pattern and returned to jinking and juking. It was just as hard for starfighter cannons to target, and she would make a lot more forward progress.
“Jedi Solo?” Saba asked. “What did Commodore Darklighter mean when he said this was a matter of record?”
“Just that he can’t help us, I think,” Leia said. “Admiral Bwua’tu must be aboard.”
“Nek Bwua’tu?” Saba growled. “The Bothan who beatz the Thrawn simulator?”
“He is in command of the Fifth Fleet,” Leia said. “But it doesn’t matter. They’re bluffing.”
“And if they are not?”
“They are,” Leia said. “And, anyway, there’s a big difference between simbattle and the real thing. Don’t worry.”
“This one is curiouz, not worried.” Saba’s tone was even, but her irritation was pouring into the battle-meld. “She is never worried.”
“Right—sorry.”
The lock-alarms chimed, and the shield display flared yellow as they took an aft-port laser cannon hit.
“Still bluffing?” Saba asked.
“Yes, Master,” Leia said. “We’re still in one piece, aren’t we?”
An instant later the Falcon gave a little jolt as the Noghri activated the repulsor beam, and a string of curses came over the comm scanner as the last pair of XJ3s tumbled away out of control. The battle-meld grew still and electric; the relationship between the Jedi and the Galactic Alliance had just changed in a way no one could foresee.
Leia checked the tactical display. The Mon Mothma was bleeding more squadrons into the Choke, while those that had been onstation were moving into screening formations in front of the StealthXs’ last-known position. No one was coming after Leia and Saba, but the combat controllers were being careful to leave a clear firing lane between the Star Destroyer and the Falcon.
Mara reached out through the battle-meld, urging Leia and Saba to run for it. The StealthXs would have to hang back and sneak through later. They would rendezvous at Woteba.
Leia wished her good luck, then the canopy’s blast-tinting went black as the first turbolaser strike blossomed ahead. Her shoulders hit the crash webbing as the Falcon bucked through the shock wave, then space around them erupted into exploding clouds of color as the gunnery crews began to refine their targeting.
“Jedi So-o-lo!” Saba’s voice jumped as each shock wave shook the Falcon. “Next time, you wi-ill listen to your Maaster!”
“Trust me!” Leia said. “They’re just trying to make us believe they’re serious.”
“They are doing a good job,” Saba said.
Leia swung the Falcon toward the blue giant. “We’ll run for the big guy. The EM blast will interfere with their targeting sensors, and the gravity well will give us some acceleration.”
Saba nodded her approval. “Go-od! You have done this before.”
“Only forty or fi-if-ty times.” Silently, Leia added, Just never without Han.
The ride smoothed out for a moment as the Falcon slipped out from under the Star Destroyer’s firing pattern. The canopy tinting went black as the face of the giant sun slid across the forward viewport, and still its boiling mass shined through the transparisteel, warming their faces and stabbing at their eyes. Their sensors and comm units quickly fell victim to the star’s electromagnetic blast, and even the ship’s internal electronics began to flicker and wave.
Then the Mon Mothma’s gunnery crews found them again. A curtain of a turbolaser strikes erupted ahead, circles of red and orange so pale against the star’s glare that they were barely visible. Leia pointed the Falcon at the closest blossom and surrendered her hands to the Force. The shields crackled with crimson energy as they passed through the dissipation turbulence, then the Falcon shuddered as they bounced through the shock waves.
The pilot’s console lit up with damage indicators and critical warnings. There were broken seals, leaking ducts, misaligned gyros.
“Will you look at that?” Leia complained. “Han’s going to kill me!”
Another blast bounced them sideways, and Saba said, “This one only hopez we last long enough to give him the chance.”
Judging they had descended about as deep into the star’s gravity well as they dared, Leia pulled up and started around the curve of its massive blue horizon. The Mon Mothma continued to pour turbolaser fire in their general direction, but the electromagnetic camouflage had finally confused their targeting sensors, and none of the strikes hit closer than within a kilometer or two of the Falcon.
The turbolaser strikes soon faded altogether, and Leia knew they had rounded the horizon and vanished from the Mon Mothma’s line of sight. She rolled the cockpit away from the blue giant and started to pull
out of its gravity well.
The canopy grew clear enough that the red orb of the blue giant’s tiny satellite star shined through the bottom of the forward viewport. The other binary set, the orange and yellow stars, were shining through top of the canopy, and the blue veil of the Utegetu Nebula was barely visible directly ahead.
Leia glanced down at her tactical display, silently urging the sensors to come online so they could plot their jump to Utegetu. There was no reason to be anxious—neither the Mon Mothma nor her fighters could catch the Falcon now—but something still felt wrong. She had a cold, queasy feeling in her stomach, and she could not escape the feeling that someone was watching.
“Saba, do you—”
“Yes,” Saba said. “It feelz like we have raced into the shenbit’z den.”
The nacelle temperatures were already 20 percent beyond specification, but Leia grabbed the throttles and began to push them even farther beyond the safety locks . . . and the Falcon decelerated as though it had hit a permacrete wall.
“What the—”
The last of Leia’s exclamation was drowned out by the sudden screeching of proximity alarms and system alerts. The nacelle temperature shot past 140 and started toward 150, and the Falcon continued to decelerate.
Leia pulled the throttles back, then activated the intercom. “Cakhmaim, Meewalh, get into the cannon turrets and see—”
“Star Destroyer,” Cakhmaim rasped. The Falcon began to slide sideways toward a point between the blue giant and its smaller satellite. “One of the new pirate hunters.”
Leia used the attitude thrusters to spin the Falcon around, and saw that they were being drawn toward the distant wedge of a new version of the venerable Victory-class Star Destroyer. Mounted on its upper hull, in a turret nearly as large as the bridge itself, was one of the huge asteroid-tug tractor beams that Lando Calrissian had started selling the Defense Force to combat pirates and smugglers.
“Simbattle or not,” Saba rasped, “this one thinkz maybe Admiral Bwua’tu is as good as they say.”
ELEVEN
Han sat in his new quarters holding the model of the Millennium Falcon in his lap, running his thumbs over its silky surface, peering into the dark holes of the cockpit canopy, hefting its substantial weight in his hands. Sure, the workmanship was good, and there was something hypnotic about rubbing your fingers over the spinglass. But he could not imagine where the Squibs were going to sell a billion of these things. The stuff was hardly art—and with the galaxy still struggling to recover from the war against the Yuuzhan Vong, there were only so many people with credits to throw away on kitsch.
Someone was definitely being played here. But was the Colony playing the Squibs, or the Squibs playing the Colony, or both of them playing someone else?
Luke entered from his quarters, his eyes closed and his hands pressed to the iridescent spinglass, using the Force to search for a stress point in the exterior wall of their two-room prison. He did the same thing every hour or so, stopping in a different place and having R2-D2 use his utility arm to scratch a small X in the hard surface.
A few minutes later, they always heard a crew of Killiks scurrying over the same spot, reinforcing the outside of the wall with more spinglass. The barrier had to be close to a meter thick in places, but Han did not suggest that the Xs were a waste of time. If Luke wanted to mess with Saras’s mind, that was his business.
They both knew that Luke could break them out of their prison anytime he wanted—and Han suspected that Raynar knew it, too. Escape would be the easy part. But it would do them no good until they thought of a way to find the Dark Nest, and so Han and Luke were being patient—being patient and thinking hard and doing their best to look very bored.
Han flipped the model of the Falcon over again. There was no shift of weight inside, but that didn’t mean anything. He had known a smuggler once who had molded his entire cargo of contraband explosives into landspeeder dashboards and walked them through Imperial customs with all the proper documentation.
Without opening his eyes, Luke said, “She’s all right, Han.”
“I know she is.” Han put his ear close to the model and shook it, but heard nothing. “I still worry about her. It’s not easy for her to be away from me this long.”
“Is that so?”
“Yeah,” Han said. “She has trouble sleeping if my snoring’s not there to drown out the banging in the climate control lines.”
Luke smiled. “Thanks for clearing that up.” He returned to running his hand over the wall. “I’ve been wondering what she sees in you.”
Though Han had not been dwelling on how much he missed Leia, he saw now that he had been thinking of her without realizing it—that he was always thinking of her, half expecting her to be there every time he turned around, imagining her voice in the distance whenever the tunnel-house fell silent, reaching out to her when he rolled over at night. And Luke had known all of that was going on in the back of Han’s mind—just as Han knew that something similar was going on the back of Luke’s.
Han spun around on his stool. “Did you just use a Jedi mind-reading trick on me?”
Luke stopped and looked puzzled. “We can’t really do that, Han.” he said. “Well, most of us can’t.”
Without having to ask, Han knew that Luke had been thinking of Jacen when he added that last bit. “I was afraid of that.”
“Afraid of—” Luke stopped, then shook his head. “I don’t think we’re reading each other’s minds, Han. We haven’t been here long enough to become Joiners.”
“Yeah? Then how come I know what you want for lunch today?”
“I don’t see how Master Skywalker can be hungry already,” C-3PO said from his place in the corner. “He just had breakfast.”
“Threepio’s right,” Luke said. “It’s too early to think about—”
“A nerfburger and hubba crisps,” Han interrupted. “With a lurol smoothie to wash it down.”
Luke furrowed his brow. “You’re right, that does sound good. But I wasn’t thinking about it until you . . . or was I?”
“It wasn’t me,” Han growled. “I hate hubba crisps.”
Luke’s face fell. “Raynar is trying to make Joiners of us.”
“You think so?”
Luke was so upset that he failed to notice the sarcasm in Han’s voice. “The Dark Nest must think the Colony will be able to dominate me and take control the Jedi order.”
“Dominate you, Master Skywalker? Why, that’s a perfectly absurd idea!” C-3PO cocked his head at the look of alarm on Luke’s face. “Isn’t it?”
Instead of answering, Luke went back to searching for stress points. “They’ve just been playing for time, Han. We’ve got to get out of here.”
Han flipped the model over. “And do what?”
“You know what,” Luke said. Find the Dark Nest.
Han remained on his stool. “How, exactly? The bugs know every move we make. The second we step outside our quarters, Saras is going to come running with about a thousand Killiks—and we don’t have any weapons. We’re better off just waiting until Leia and Mara get back.”
Luke frowned. “Are you feeling all right, Han?”
“Fine,” Han said. Actually, he was feeling great, now that he knew how they were going to find the Dark Nest, but he could not tell that to Luke. The walls had ears—well, something did. “Just in no mood to hear any ronto-brained escape plans.”
He rose and went over to the door membrane. It was opaque and bonded shut by some gooey fiber the bugs had spun over the outside, but the spinglass surrounding it was so thin and translucent that Han could see the silhouette of their Saras guard standing watch outside.
He waved an arm to get the guard’s attention. “Hey, open up! I need to talk to you.”
The guard came over to the wall and pressed its orange thorax to the spinglass. A muffled thrum reverberated through the wall.
“Saras says she can hear you through the wall,” C-3PO said, clunking
over to translate. “And she is reluctant to open the door, since Master Skywalker was just talking about escaping.”
Han shot an irritated look over his shoulder.
Luke shrugged. “It’s not like they couldn’t figure it out on their own.”
“Yeah, okay.” Han raised the Falcon model up. “Can you get in touch with the Squibs who are buying these?”
“Mooroor oom.” The bug’s rumbling was so softened by the wall that the words seemed mumbled. “Oomoor ooo.”
“She seems to be saying that the Squibs aren’t purchasing the line—they’re handling it on consignment.” C-3PO turned to Han. “I don’t think that’s wise. From what I recall, the Squibs we met on Tatooine weren’t very trustworthy.”
“Ooorr?” Saras demanded. “Ooom?”
“Don’t worry,” Han said, addressing the bug through the wall. “They won’t pull anything on Raynar—”
“OoomoMoom.”
“Right, UnuThul has trading in his blood,” Han said. “Besides, with the idea I’ve got, we’re all going to make so much money the Squibs won’t want to cheat you.”
“I can’t believe this, Han,” Luke said, coming over to the door. “You’re thinking about money at a time like this?”
“Yeah,” Han said. When it came to money, Squibs could do the impossible. But he didn’t say that aloud—he tried not to even think it.
Luke rolled his eyes, and Han scowled at him, hoping he would finally get the message. “Why don’t you go input those code sequences Alema gave you or something?”
The anger that flashed in Luke’s eyes suggested their minds were not all that connected. “That was low, Han, even for you.”
“Sorry—didn’t mean to rattle your cage,” Han said. “Just let me make my deal. I’m trying to make the best of a bad situation here.”
“Fine.” Luke scowled at him, then stepped back shaking his head. “Don’t let me stand in your way.”
“When have I ever?” Han turned back to Saras. “Now, how long will it take you to get in touch with the Squibs?”
The bug drummed something short.
“She wants to know what your idea is,” C-3PO said.
