by Timothy Zahn
But as they approached the building, a wide door behind a partially collapsed loading dock began to ponderously roll up. The other two airspeeders were already heading in, the first barely even waiting until the opening was big enough before threading the gap with a nonchalance that bordered on the arrogant. The second airspeeder gave the door an extra couple of seconds, then followed.
Lando looked at Zerba. First airspeeder has the bodyguards, he mouthed silently.
Zerba nodded and hunched his shoulders. Where are they? he mouthed back.
Lando gave him a wink and turned away. There was, after all, no reason why Zerba should worry, too.
Because he was right. Han and the others should be here by now. Chewie should be crouched by one of those collapsed equipment sheds with his bowcaster, carefully picking off segments of their repulsorlift cluster to drive Folx into a rapid but still controlled landing. Han should be somewhere closer to the docking bay, firing away with that overrated BlasTech DL-44 of his and keeping the other two airspeeders busy. Another of their group, maybe Dozer or Kell, should be pumping out cover fire for both of them, while someone else—anyone else—should be roaring up in an airspeeder for a fast grab and a faster getaway.
But there was nothing. No one was out there shooting. No one was even visible. No vehicles of any sort, anywhere. Plenty of sheds and hiding places where someone could lurk, but none of them with the kind of quick hit-and-fade capabilities a rescue like this required.
Because a hit-and-fade was the only way this would work. Once he and Zerba were inside the building, all bets were off. Lando was no structural engineer, but even from out here it was painfully clear that launching a firefight in that place would have an even chance of bringing the whole thing crashing down on whoever was inside.
Lando looked ahead at the door still grinding its laborious way open. Was it possible that there would be no rescue because the team didn’t know where he and Zerba were?
Ridiculous. Winter and Tavia surely had witnessed the kidnapping from the suite, and Rachele surely must have been able to track the airspeeder somehow. Folx had been flying them around town for over an hour, more than enough time for Han to put together something clever.
Unless there would be no rescue because Han had decided not to bother.
Lando took a careful breath. No—that was crazy. Han wouldn’t do something like that. Yes, Lando had told him off good the last time they’d parted company; and yes, he’d mentioned something about never wanting to see Han again. But Han had invited him into this job, and Lando had already backed off of that whole never-meeting-again thing. And Han certainly had seemed to accept Lando’s apology.
Besides, even if Han wasn’t ready to forgive him, surely Chewie wouldn’t turn his back on two teammates in trouble. That wasn’t like him.
At the very least, someone in the group ought to care enough about Zerba to try for a rescue.
So where were they?
“Take a good look,” Wolv advised, waving a hand around. Lando snapped out of his dark thoughts to see that they were nearly to the open door. “It may be the last view of the outside world you ever see.”
“Don’t worry,” Lando said as calmly as he could. Men like him, he reminded himself firmly, didn’t intimidate easily. “We’ll be coming out again just fine. The question is, will you?”
Wolv just snorted.
And then they were through the doorway, heading across an impressive expanse of dimly lit open floor, the sound of the airspeeder’s engines echoing off the high ceiling. Ahead, the other two airspeeders had landed, and a half dozen large men were standing around them, blaster rifles held at the ready. Folx brought the airspeeder smoothly to the floor at a respectful fifty-meter distance, and he and Wolv climbed out, leaving Lando and Zerba alone.
“Now?” Zerba murmured. He twitched his fingers, bringing his three-prong lockpick into view.
“Not yet,” Lando murmured back as their captors strode over to the waiting group. “The other guards are watching us.”
“Right,” Zerba said, his voice shaking just a little. “We’re going to need a distraction, aren’t we?” He gave the case in his lap a significant tap. “I figure we’ve only got one. But it’s a doozy.”
“Easy,” Lando cautioned. “I’m not ready to cash in on the game just yet.”
One of the guards gestured to the second airspeeder. The door opened, and a short elderly man climbed out. The bomb expert, probably. He moved aside to make room for a second figure—
Lando stiffened. Climbing out of the airspeeder behind the old man was a Falleen.
“Lando?” Zerba asked urgently.
“Not yet,” Lando said, wondering why he was even bothering. He didn’t know if that was the same Falleen that Dozer had tangled with at the Lulina Crown, but it almost didn’t matter. He was a Falleen, he was almost certainly Black Sun, and suddenly a quick death by detonite didn’t seem all that unreasonable anymore.
But Lando was a gambler. A true gambler never folded when he still had cards left to play. “Not yet,” he repeated. “Han may still come through.”
Behind them came a sudden dull thud. Lando looked over his shoulder to see that the roll-top door had slammed shut, sealing the factory away from the rest of the universe.
Han hadn’t come through.
He and Zerba were on their own.
Across the field came the faint boom as the factory door closed. “Now?” Winter asked.
Han clicked his comlink. “Chewie? Kell? Dozer?
“Now.”
Finally, finally, the order came.
Practically before that single long-awaited syllable had finished coming through his comlink, Kell had the Z-95 in the air, the combination of repulsorlifts and main engines jamming him back into his seat, the indicator lights on his control board looking like a bleed-through of the stars above and the city lights to both sides.
The waiting was over. He was going into battle. Maybe not the intensity of combat that haunted both his dreams and his nightmares, but combat nonetheless.
And with the end of the waiting came the end of at least some of the doubts.
He’d worried that he would hesitate or, worse, freeze. He hadn’t. He’d worried that he might not be able to handle a ship that, for all his earlier confident assurances, he’d had little experience with outside of game simulators. It seemed to be working fine. He’d worried that he might turn tail and abandon the mission. So far that hadn’t happened, either.
He’d worried that he might not be able to face death for the sake of his teammates. That one, unfortunately, still lay ahead. And if and when it came down to that, he still had no idea how he would react.
But he didn’t have to know. Not yet. Courage wasn’t a matter of taking the whole mountain in a single massive leap. Courage was taking it one step at a time, doing what was necessary now, preparing for the next step, and refusing to worry about whether some step in the future would be the one that would break him.
He was in the air, flying his fighter with adequate skill, and heading in the right direction. Three steps down. One at a time to go.
He keyed the Z-95’s comm. “Chewie?”
There was an acknowledging roar, wordless confirmation that the Wookiee was in position behind him.
And maybe that was the real secret to courage, Kell realized suddenly: someone at your back, and the assurance that you weren’t facing the mountain alone.
He straightened his shoulders. Enough philosophy. He had a fighter beneath him, a set of weapons at his fingertips, and teammates who needed rescuing. “Stay with me,” he told Chewie. An order or a plea, he wasn’t sure which. “I’m going in.”
Wolv and Folx had been cleared by the Falleen’s men, and the conversation had shifted over to the Falleen himself, when a group of ground-floor windows exploded inward, and the whole factory lit up with a multiple blaze of sustained blasterfire.
“No, no, no,” Zerba moaned, hunching down as if trying
to disappear into his seat. “Lando, what’s he doing?”
“Getting us out of here,” Lando said between clenched teeth. “Here—get these off me.”
“Get us out of here how?” Zerba demanded, twisting his hands free of his binders and leaning over to work on Lando’s restraints. “In body sacks? He’s going to bring the whole place down on us.”
“He’s got a plan,” Lando insisted, peering up at the ceiling. So far the blasterfire was just tearing up the windows and flying harmlessly over everyone’s heads. Was all the noise and fury supposed to be a diversion, with Han expecting them to grab their airspeeder and make a run for it?
Because if that was the plan, it was a rotten one. None of the broken windows was nearly big enough for their airspeeder to get through. Even if it was, this particular vehicle’s design meant he or Zerba would have to get out of the backseat and go around to the driver’s-side door to get to the controls, and he doubted that Wolv or Folx or the Falleen would just sit by and let that happen.
Speaking of whom …
“Hurry it up,” Lando bit out, craning his neck to look through the airspeeder’s canopy. At the first salvo, the bomb expert and the Falleen had dived back inside their vehicle, with the rest of the group taking up defensive positions. Wolv and Folx had joined them, but now both were looking back toward their own vehicle.
And even fifty meters away, with all those flashes glinting off the airspeeder’s canopy obscuring their vision, Lando could see that they’d spotted the fact that one of their prisoners was free of his binders and the second soon would be.
“Why?” Zerba countered. “You got someplace else you want to be?”
“Yeah—anywhere but here,” Lando shot back. Wolv was looking back and forth between the different vectors of blasterfire sizzling the air above his head, probably looking for a pattern. The minute he figured out the safe timing, Lando suspected, he would be heading their way.
Across the factory, one of the building’s mid-wall supports abruptly snapped as the fire through the adjacent window sliced across its edge. The section of roof directly overhead slumped a couple of meters, the sudden change in pressure snapping two smaller supports and sending pieces of metal shrapnel arcing across the open space to rain down bare meters from the three airspeeders.
“Anywhere but here sounds great,” Zerba snarled. “Only how are we supposed to get there? This place is—” He broke off as another support snapped and scattered itself across the landscape. “Is a deathtrap,” he finished. “What’s Han trying to do, kill us?”
Lando was still trying to come up with an answer to that one when, with a deafening crash, a group of windows below the ceiling blew in. The place was coming down, all right, and while the Falleen’s airspeeders were probably armored, his and Zerba’s definitely wasn’t. He looked up toward the blast, wondering if any of the debris was coming toward them, wondering if he would see the chunk of wall or girder that would end up killing him.
The fireball of the explosion was still swirling through the cloud of smoke when a Z-95 Headhunter shot through the opening into the factory.
Kell winced as bits and pieces of the wall he’d just blown open slammed and rattled against the Z-95’s canopy. He’d definitely cut that one a bit too close. Something to remember for the next time.
Assuming there was a next time. He’d barely cleared the blast debris when he was suddenly being hammered by heavy blasterfire raking across his underside. His first reflexive assumption was that Han or Dozer had glitched their targeting, but a second later he realized that the attack was coming from the men crouched beside the other two airspeeders down there.
A heavy attack, too. Those were seriously high-powered blasters they were firing, way too powerful for civilian equipment. Even the Z-95’s armor, designed for full-bore space combat, was creaking and popping under the onslaught.
It would have been highly satisfying to zoom to the other end of the factory, spin his fighter around, and nail them all with a counterbarrage from his KX5 laser cannons. But he didn’t dare. The E-Web attack had showed how dangerously unstable the factory was. The engine backblast and flash heating required to pull off that kind of attack could bring the whole place down. It would be a pretty pathetic rescue if Lando and Zerba ended up crushed to death because they were stuck in that eggshell of an airspeeder.
Fortunately, that problem was about to be fixed.
“Bogies at sixty-five and seventy-six,” he called out, pitching the fighter a few degrees as he shot past for a better view of the factory floor. He took a moment to glance at his display, at the factory schematic that Rachele had sent and the targeting grid Chewbacca had overlaid on it. “Friendlies at fifty-eight. Drop target: sixty-seven. Repeat: drop target, sixty-seven.”
The far wall was coming up fast. The plan was for him to fire another burst, make a new hole, and get out before he got himself shot down. Instead, he pulled back on the throttle, doing a quick skid turn to kill his forward momentum and coast to a stop. It was risky, and Chewie probably would have something to say about it later if they all survived.
But Han’s plan was so insane, and the execution so impossible, that he just had to stick around and see for himself if it actually worked.
Some things in life really were worth risking everything for. The rest … well, it was always a judgment call.
Kell had blown through the wall and disappeared inside, he’d called out the targeting zone to Chewie, and the E-Web covering fire hadn’t yet brought down the whole factory. So far, things were going according to plan.
And now, from out of the gloom, blazing its way across the night sky, was the Falcon.
Han clenched his hand into a fist. Chewie was one of the best pilots he’d ever seen, but this was the sort of gamble even Han would normally dismiss out of hand.
But when you had no other choice, you had to go with it. “Come on, Chewie,” he muttered under his breath as the ship shot toward the hole in the wall Kell had made. The opening was way too small for the Falcon to fit through, of course, and there was no way any of them was going to try enlarging it, not with the shape the building was in. Even letting Kell in and out had been a calculated risk.
But Chewie didn’t need to make the hole any bigger. All he needed to do was to play a single round of the galaxy’s biggest game of hit-the-Hutt.
And he had exactly one chance to get it right.
The Falcon was gaining a little altitude now, and Han could hear Chewbacca easing back on the throttle as he fine-tuned his run. A quick surge of frustration and guilt washed through Han as he watched—by all rights, that should be him up there. He should be the one flying his ship and making this work.
But if he’d taken that job, who would he have left to organize the ground action? Dozer? Winter?
No. For better or worse, whether it made sense or not, he was the leader of this group. Down here, where the blaster bolts were flying the thickest, was where he needed to be.
Nearly there. A little more altitude … a bit less … slowing just a fraction more … shifting the approach vector just a shade …
And then Chewbacca was there, yanking up the bow with a fraction of a second to spare, the ship angling up and over the edge of the building and shooting off toward space.
And only because Han was specifically looking for it did he spot the squat metal cylinder that popped out of the rear of the ship and arced neatly through the smoking hole into the factory.
Lando’s first horrible thought was that the rumble approaching from outside was a missile, heading in to level the building and disintegrate every shred of evidence of what had happened here. But at the last millisecond the dark bulk flashed past the ragged opening the Z-95 had made, angling upward and roaring over the roof. He felt the whole place shake with the backwash, and a fresh rain of debris began falling on them. An extra-big piece of ceiling tile hit Lando’s side of the canopy, shattering it and sending bits of transparisteel flying.
Without warning, something big and solid slammed into the floor directly between their airspeeder and the Falleen’s men, the impact sending up a huge cloud of dust and duracrete chips. Lando winced back, wondering if it was in fact the missile nose cone he’d been anticipating a few seconds earlier.
It wasn’t a missile. It was a CEC Class 1 escape pod.
The kind carried aboard the Falcon.
And with that, he finally got it. “Come on!” he snapped to Zerba, forcing open the airspeeder door and rushing out into the dust and falling tiles and metal shards. Running bent over at the waist to stay out of the blasterfire still pouring through the windows, he headed for the escape pod.
He was halfway there when Zerba caught up, the cryodex case clutched tightly to his chest. “Where are we going?” he panted.
“Inside,” Lando told him. He dropped to one knee beside the pod and cycled the hatch. “It’s Han’s idea of armored sanctuary.”
“But it’s only a one-passenger pod.”
“It’ll be tight,” Lando agreed as the hatch popped open. “You can stay out here if you’d rather.”
Zerba didn’t bother to reply.
“They’re in!” Kell shouted toward the comm. “Hatch is sealed.”
“Great,” Han called back, and for the first time in hours Kell could hear some actual relief in his voice. “Kell, Dozer—take it down.”
With a suddenness that caught Dayja completely by surprise, the multiple E-Web blasterfire hammering the factory shifted from covering to demolition.
His comlink signaled. “Dayja, what’s going on out there?” d’Ashewl demanded. “Police nets are lighting up from here to Grackleton with reports of a firefight in your area.”
“Oh, it’s definitely a firefight,” Dayja confirmed, peering at the factory from what he hoped would continue to be a safe distance. “But at the moment, it’s seriously one-sided. E-Webs on the outside, a Z-95 Headhunter on the inside.”
