by Troy Denning
“Mara’s … coming,” he gasped. “She’ll try to save you—”
“Maybe not.” Mara came up behind him and took one look at Lumiya, then said, “In fact, not a chance.”
She grabbed Luke and tried to pull him away, but—still fighting his pain—he pulled back and remained where he was.
“Mara, we can’t leave her—”
“Yes, Luke, we can.” Mara leaned down and pulled open Lumiya’s robe, revealing—aside from the blaster wounds and life-support girdle—a black combat vest with a sensor pad over the heart. The diodes were blinking weakly and erratically. “In fact, I think we’d better run.”
chapter twenty-two
With a swarm of pincer-winged Miy’tils nibbling at the forward shields and a Nova-class battle cruiser chewing on the stern, Leia was jerking the pilot’s yoke around at random, just trusting to the Force and blind luck to get the Falcon through the storm of enemy fire. How Han had done this for forty years without getting them blasted to atoms—or at least developing a nervous stomach—was beyond her imagining. She only hoped she was a good enough pilot to see them through until the Alliance’s rescue fleet arrived … and that she had not been wrong about it coming.
Golden shimmers of dispersal energy began to appear a few meters ahead, a sign that the Falcon’s shields were overloading. Leia ignored the flashing maelstrom long enough to glance at the copilot’s seat, where Han sat hunched over a disassembled shield-adjustment panel. C-3PO stood next to him, trying to hold the panel steady against the control board while Han worked.
“How are those shield repairs coming?”
“Even I can’t splice a moving target,” Han complained. “Hold still, Threepio!”
“It’s not my fault,” C-3PO replied. “Holding still is quite impossible while Princess Leia continues to evade enemy fire. The Falcon’s inertial compensators are simply inadequate for this kind of maneuvering.”
The Falcon lurched forward as a turbolaser struck the rear shields, and then an alarm chime sounded from the control board, announcing a desperate need to redistribute the shield power.
“I’m trying,” Han muttered to the chime. “I’m trying!”
Leia swung wide to avoid a flight of concussion missiles. The Falcon shuddered as the Noghri, operating the cannon turrets, cut loose with the quad cannons. The Miy’til that had launched the attack erupted in a boiling sphere of flame.
C-3PO squawked in alarm. “That’s my hand, Captain Solo!”
“Stop whining,” Han ordered. “It didn’t even burn through.”
“I’m still going to require a new metacarpal covering,” the droid complained. “Perhaps we wouldn’t need to evade so wildly if Princess Leia were to travel in a direction opposite the enemy.”
“I can’t, Threepio,” Leia said. At the moment, she was flying away from the usurpers at a right angle, doing her best to keep the Falcon pointed toward the growing yellow crescent of Hapes’s third moon, Megos. “We’ll get caught in the crossfire.”
“Crossfire?” C-3PO asked. “Between whom? I didn’t see a friendly fleet exit hyperspace behind us.”
“It will be here,” Leia said.
“Sure, any day now,” Han added.
Leia could hardly blame Han for his skepticism. The Alliance rescue fleet should already be attacking, and the brief brush of Force contact she had felt earlier was hardly confirmation of its existence. But nothing else made sense. She had sensed Jaina and Zekk watching as the Falcon departed the Kiris Asteroid Cluster, which could only mean that the Galactic Alliance had been waiting for the right opportunity to pounce on Corellia’s secret assault fleet.
So why weren’t they pouncing?
A turbolaser strike erupted close to port, throwing the Falcon sideways and slamming C-3PO into the back of Leia’s seat. The droid bounced off and crashed to the deck, leaving a tangle of broken wires sparking in an empty control board socket.
“Oh, dear,” C-3PO said from behind Leia. “I seem to have pulled the shield-adjustment panel away from the control board. Now it’s going to take Captain Solo twice as long to make repairs!”
“Forget it, Threepio.” The fusing pen gave a soft snap as Han deactivated it. “We never had a chance.”
The resignation in Han’s voice worried Leia more than any amount of yelling or cursing would have. It almost seemed as though he did not believe they would get out of this—as though he did not think she was a good enough pilot to save them.
“Sorry I missed your signal about the message thing,” Han said to Leia. “Getting the control board shot up is going to cost us.”
“No, Han, I’m sorry,” Leia replied. With the tactical display still showing no sign of the Alliance Fleet, she was beginning to wonder if she had been right to urge Tenel Ka to stand firm in the first place. “But I’m not giving up.” She put one hand on the throttles. “Do you see any reason I shouldn’t push the engines hard?”
“You mean aside from the leaking coolant line and the number four vector plate getting sticky?”
“Yeah.” Leia almost took her hand off the throttles—she hadn’t noticed the sticky vector plate. “I mean aside from those two problems.”
“Well, then—no, I don’t.” Han sounded a little more hopeful, as though taking a desperate gamble with their lives on the line was all he ever needed to cheer him up. “Let her rip, sweetheart.”
Leia pointed the Falcon’s nose straight toward the dark interior of the crescent moon, then pushed the throttles past the overload stops and kept pushing until they would go no farther. She felt herself sink in her seat as the vessel’s acceleration tested the already overburdened inertial compensators, and they shot forward into the swarm of Miy’tils that had been harassing them.
As the Falcon careened through their midst, the star-fighters took close-range snap-shots, and space exploded into a wall of energy blossoms. The Noghri answered with the quad cannons, taking out four starfighters in half as many seconds. Then the Falcon was through the formation, with nothing but the crater-pocked sickle of Megos swelling rapidly in the forward canopy.
The Miy’tils launched a desperate volley of concussion missiles and turned to give chase—placing themselves between the Falcon and the Nova cruiser, exactly as Leia had hoped they would. Han activated the decoy launchers and the Noghri kept the quad cannons chugging, and the missiles started to vanish from the tactical display two and three at a time.
Fearful of hitting her own starfighters, the Nova quieted her turbolasers, and there was a moment of relative peace as the Miy’tils struggled to bring themselves back into cannon range and reacquire target locks. Leia kept their nose pointed straight ahead, adding gravitational pull to the ship’s acceleration, and the gap between the Falcon and Megos began to close more quickly than the one between the Falcon and the Miy’tils.
“Trying the old Solo Slingshot?” Han asked.
“A partial, anyway,” Leia said. “Seems like a good time to learn it.”
“Sure, why not?” Han replied. “You do know that it’s a pretty tricky maneuver at full acceleration, right?”
Leia nodded. “I thought it might be.”
“And if that vector plate sticks at the wrong time, you know the crater we drill is going to be about three kilometers deep?”
“I hadn’t actually done the calculations,” Leia admitted.
“I don’t think Captain Solo has, either,” C-3PO said from the deck behind her. “At our current acceleration and mass, the crater will be closer to five kilometers deep—assuming our nacelles don’t overheat and vaporize us first, of course.”
Leia was still digesting that cheery thought when a cold prickle ran down her spine. She glanced at the tactical display and saw that the Miy’tils were swinging hard to port, trying to open a clear firing lane for the Nova. She swung the yoke in the same direction, trying to keep the star-fighters behind them and banking toward the center of the moon—in the wrong direction for the Slingshot maneuver.
“Uh, honey?” Han’s voice was nervous and high. “That’s—”
A boiling cloud of brilliance erupted to starboard, engulfing the position they had just abandoned.
“—a nice save,” Han admitted. “Probably would have done the same thing myself.”
“If you say so, dear.”
Leia glanced at the tactical display and saw that the Nova had raised a wall of turbolaser fire alongside the Falcon, cutting off the route she needed to follow to complete her maneuver. The Miy’tils were still close behind, steadily closing the gap. Leia cursed the competence of the enemy commander and pulled back the yoke. The number four vector plate did not respond, putting the entire ship into a dangerous, weld-cracking oscillation.
Leia reached over to back the throttles off.
“Too late!” Han warned. “Can’t let them close the distance. We’ll have to do a partial Reverse Slingshot.”
“A partial Reverse Slingshot?” Leia asked. The bright side of the moon was slipping out of view, and now there was nothing but the pitch blackness of Megos’s dark side ahead. “Never heard of it.”
“ ’Course not,” Han answered. “It’s new.”
“New?” Leia had a sinking feeling. “Han, that vector plate is sticking again. Can’t you feel the vibration?”
“Just keep the nose up,” Han said. “You’re doing great.”
Doing great was no guarantee of survival, Leia knew, but hearing Han say it made her feel better about their odds. She continued to hold the yoke back, vibrating in her seat so hard she couldn’t even read the nacelle temperature gauge—which was probably just as well, given the coolant leak and how long they’d been flying at maximum acceleration.
Too large and cumbersome to follow the Falcon, the Nova had to break off and turn in the opposite direction. But the Miy’tils continued to close the distance, and soon they began to pound the rear shields again. Leia could do little to stop them. With the Falcon shaking like a Neimoidian under interrogation and the moon’s dark surface coming up rapidly, she had to concentrate all her efforts on simply retaining control of the ship.
Finally a sliver of star-dappled velvet appeared along the top of the Falcon’s canopy. Leia continued to hold the yoke back, her relief growing as the sliver slowly became a twenty-centimeter band of open space hanging above a dark and undulating horizon.
“Couldn’t have done it better myself!” Han exclaimed, even more relieved than Leia. “Okay, now you can level off.”
A staccato rumbling sounded from deep in the ship as the Miy’til laser cannons finally broke through the shields and began to hammer at the hull armor, then Megos’s horizon suddenly grew jagged and stretched toward the top of the Falcon’s canopy again.
“A mountain range!” C-3PO cried. “That will certainly complicate our escape.”
“Complicate?” Han turned to glare at the droid. “If it were me flying, you’d be back there yelling, We’re doomed, we’re doomed!”
“Quite likely,” C-3PO admitted. “But Princess Leia is a Jedi.”
Leia would have thanked the droid for his vote of confidence, except she was pretty sure it would seem misplaced in about three seconds. She continued to hold the yoke back, trying to will the Falcon to pull up faster—then noticed a jagged notch of starlight showing through the mountains ahead. She pushed the yoke to center position. The vector plate came unstuck, and the ship finally stopped vibrating.
“Uh, Leia,” Han said. “That part about leveling off? You can forget—”
“Too late!” Leia swung the Falcon toward the notch, coming in at an angle so the nose pointed at the mountain on the far side. “Launch missiles!”
“Missiles?” Han looked forward and saw the gap opening before them, then reached out and flipped an arming switch. “Why not?”
He depressed a pair of LAUNCH buttons, and two blue circles appeared in front of the cockpit, then rapidly shrank as the missiles raced away. Leia rolled the Falcon up and banked into the notch with their pursuers still close behind. She was too busy flying to see what happened next, but by the time the Falcon reached the starfilled wedge at the other end of the gorge, the hammering on her stern had stopped.
As they shot out of the canyon, the moon’s surface fell away, and Leia finally had time to risk a glance at the tactical display. The Miy’tils were gone, either destroyed when the missiles filled the gorge mouth with debris or momentarily outmaneuvered. Leia stayed within a kilometer of the surface for a few seconds to be certain no Miy’til survivors were going to pop up from behind the mountain range, then pulled the yoke back and pointed their nose away from the moon.
They had just started to climb when space ahead broke into crooked snakes of iridescence. The proximity alarm blared to life, and the viewport was suddenly packed with blue halos—all growing steadily larger.
“What the blazes?” Leia gasped.
“I think your fleet showed up,” Han said. “And in the wrong place!”
Leia glanced down and found her tactical display growing more crowded by the moment. Frigates, cruisers, and Star Destroyers were reverting from hyperspace at the rate of two or three per second, all pouring starfighters into space and accelerating toward Megos at full power. The name ADMIRAL ACKBAR appeared under a Star Destroyer at the rear of the formation, and suddenly Leia understood why it had taken the Alliance so long to attack.
“That’s Bwua’tu!”
“Figures,” Han grumbled. “What Bothan makes a straightforward attack when he can try something tricky like coming out from behind a moon instead?”
“Well, at least they cared enough to send the best.” Leia pushed the Falcon’s nose down and started back toward the moon. Continuing to approach a reverting fleet at this velocity was not an option. Even if Bwua’tu realized they were not on an attack run, the chance of a head-on collision with one of his capital ships would still force him to blast them to atoms. “What do you think? Find a crater to hide in?”
“At this velocity, we’d make a crater,” Han said. “No time to decelerate.”
“You mean—”
“Yeah,” Han said. “We have to do the whole Slingshot.”
“Back through the battle?” Leia asked. “With no rear shields?”
“Relax,” Han said. “At this speed, we’ll be on the other side of the fighting before the gunners get a lock on us.”
“Which means they’ll be firing at our stern,” Leia pointed out. “Where we don’t have any shields!”
“Well, yeah,” Han said. “Got any better ideas?”
Leia had to admit she did not. They were in a bad spot. Of course, they had been in bad spots a hundred times before. But this time, she was sitting behind the pilot’s yoke instead of Han … and he had never let her down.
Leia looked out the viewport and saw that they were already coming up on Megos’s light side. “How are our nacelle temperatures doing?” she asked.
“Not bad,” Han said. “We’re only thirty-seven percent over spec.”
“And you’re sure we can go to forty?”
“Sure,” Han said. “I just don’t know how long we can stay there.”
Leia considered reducing the throttles, but by then they were already crossing between Megos and Hapes, and a full view of the battle convinced her they would want all the velocity they could achieve. Space ahead was one big sheet of turbolaser fire, dotted by crimson knots of energy and the tiny slivers of distant ships jetting flame, vapor, and lives.
As the Falcon left the moon behind, a tightly packed screen of Battle Dragons—looking like stacked dashes at this distance—began to appear inside the conflagration. They were clustered in front of two thumb-sized eggs, slowly falling back toward Hapes and putting up such a wall of fire that the Corellian Dreadnaughts had been forced to abandon their penetration tactic and simply try to punch it out from short range.
“Looks like Tenel Ka trusted us.”
“Yeah—I just hope it didn’t get her killed,” Han said.
“Bwua’tu took too much time getting here. There are a lot of broken ships floating around out there.”
Leia was too busy flying to check the display, but she felt certain the Bothan would disagree with Han’s assessment. From a strategic viewpoint, saving Tenel Ka would be a secondary goal to destroying the Corellian fleet, since the latter would be such a crippling blow that it might well end the revolt. But Leia did not point this out to Han; it would only make him feel angry and betrayed—and the truth was, she already felt angry enough for both of them.
Seeing that it would be impossible to slip past the battle outside turbolaser range, Leia swung the Falcon around behind the usurper fleet and watched in horror and fascination as the combat grew larger and brighter. Within seconds the inferno filled Han’s side of the canopy entirely, flashing and boiling so brilliantly that it was impossible to see the planet behind it.
The brilliance began to slip toward the back of the canopy, and still no one fired on the Falcon. Leia began to hope the usurpers were simply too busy to notice one little transport zipping past behind them—until her entire spine began to prickle with danger sense, and she knew they weren’t that lucky.
“Seal the hatches!” she ordered.
Leia rolled them up on their side, and the ship began to vibrate violently as the sticky vector plate caught again. A meter-wide shaft of blue fire stabbed past beneath the Falcon’s belly, then another shot by just an arm’s length above the canopy.
She pushed the yoke forward and felt it catch about halfway. The Falcon began to buck—then abruptly stopped when a turbolaser bolt hit the stern with a deafening clang.
Leia drew what she feared might be her last breath and turned to say good-bye to Han—then felt the yoke obey and saw stars whirling in front of them. A flurry of turbolaser bolts stabbed past harmlessly, growing thinner and more distant until they ceased altogether, and the sound of damage alarms filled the cockpit—which meant they still had air.
