He took a step backward, toward the canyon. Another F-99 came into view behind the first one. Both roared toward them with astonishing speed; within seconds the whole world thrummed with their calamitous rage.
“Kill!” Fyzen howled. “Move in tight with them!” And his droids sprang to action, closing with the line of Wandering Star in seconds and unleashing brutal mayhem in their ranks.
By the time Fyzen realized Cli Pastayra was gone, it was too late. The gunships hovered on either side of the unfolding massacre. Then they opened fire, laying down a blinding barrage of laser cannon blasts that shredded everyone on the tiny battlefield in front of the transports, droid and organic alike.
And then, just like that, the pounding cannons stopped, and all that could be heard were Fyzen Gor’s howls of rage and sorrow.
Cli Pastayra was smiling down at him when he opened his eyes.
The tall, muscular gangster showed no sign that his own gunners had just been shredded in front of his very eyes. He looked serene somehow, a man out for a stroll. “Didn’t see that one coming, did ya?”
Fyzen frowned up at him. Four droids gone. Completely ripped apart, obliterated. What had they thought of, just before those cannons had let loose on them? Were those final moments tinged by regret? They’d put their bodies on the line for an organic, a frail, pathetic man, and sure he’d repaired most of them, but what was that worth? What did it matter now?
“You have more of these…monsters you’ve created,” Cli said. It wasn’t a question.
Fyzen closed his eyes.
“You have more of these monsters, and you will tell me where they are and how you made them.”
“Never,” Fyzen croaked, but he knew, deep down, that he’d been defeated. For now.
“Let’s not waste each other’s time, Dr. Gor. We both know what will happen next, yes?”
No, Gor thought. We both know how this little interlude will end. But no one knows what’ll happen next. No one knows what I will unleash on this sinful, broken world.
“My gunships will carpet-bomb this entire sector. They will level it entirely. Not a snitmouse will be left unannihilated. Do you understand? Your monsters will be pulverized. They will cease to exist.”
Fyzen felt a scream rising up inside him, suppressed it.
Not yet.
Even he wasn’t fully sure where all this would lead, but he understood he had been spared, and more than half his droids had been spared, and it wasn’t an accident. None of it was an accident. And just like the droids, he had learned. Every defeat was a victory if you survived and learned. He would never be out-ruthlessed again. He would make this ridiculous pauper gangster’s cutthroattery look like a quaint children’s game.
“They are in a bunker beneath us,” Fyzen said in a wrathful, choked whisper.
“Good,” Cli sneered. “I knew you’d come around. And now”—he signaled someone off to the side then crouched down so his face was very, very close to Fyzen’s—“let’s talk about what you are going to build for me.”
“THIS IS VERY BAD,” HAN said as the debris field spun before them in that maddeningly slow dance of deep space.
“Very,” Lando agreed. They both leaned forward, squinting at the emptiness where the Vermillion should’ve been. “See anything that might’ve been part of the ship out there?”
Han shook his head. “Probably, he—”
“Got on board somehow and then took it over.”
“And then got the info from Peekpa and—”
“Took off to find the Phylanx,” Lando finished, closing his eyes.
“All right,” Han said. “I’m always rushing off into things without thinking enough first, so let’s recap what we know and—”
“You recap what you know,” Lando huffed, standing and swishing out of the room with that ridiculous cape of his flowing behind him. “I’m going back to see if I can figure out the missing piece in the equation from that droid’s head.”
“Great!” Han called after him. “Teamwork!”
“I’m almost there!” Lando yelled from the cabin. “And anyway, what else are we going to do?” The door slid shut.
“What indeed,” Han muttered, swooping the Chevalier into a glide directly above the debris field. Various chunks of space detritus floated in a narrow line stretching off into the infinite galactic neverlands. Gor has a device that can turn droids into homicidal maniacs. Star cruiser engine turrets, a huge rusted industrial fan, scattered rock formations, the power distribution trunk of a Corellian corvette. Gor wants access to the information we retrieved from Substation Grimdock. There’s no way he can single-handedly take on a Wookiee, a New Republic agent, and a badass Twi’lek military strategist, right? The charred skeleton of a giant conveyer belt system, more space rocks, a steering rudder, a gangplank. The coordinates we came to were the last known point of transmission from the Phylanx. The Phylanx traveled through the galaxy for ten years while Gor rotted in an Imperial prison moon.
“What if,” Han said, eyeing the ongoing debris field. “…What if…” He hit the thrusters, shoving the Chevalier into a rumbling dash that skirted the top edge of all that junk. “What if…”
Bleep bleep bleep! The comm system blurted out an incoming transmission alert, and Han slammed on the brakes.
“Kriff!” Lando yelled from the other room. “What’s going on up there?”
“Something trying to contact us.” Han opened the channel. “Uh, hello?”
Lando walked in rubbing his head. “Coulda warned me…”
“Fripraktz chubba jamjam!” a high-pitched voice yelped in Ewokese.
“Peekpa!” Han and Lando yelled together.
Han looked at Lando. “Uh…any idea what she said?”
“No, but—” He pointed at the blinking light on the sensor screen.
“I know, I know,” Han said, gunning it. “I’m on it.”
The escape pod would’ve been easy to miss amid all that debris. Peekpa had probably shut down the power to avoid detection while she waited for the Chevalier. Han grabbed it with the tractor beam, and then he and Lando walked to the air lock to greet Peekpa. The Ewok tumbled out of the pod, panting and whimpering, and handed Lando two datacards. “Kata kupa.”
“Are you hurt?” Han asked, checking her little furry body for blood.
Peekpa shook her head and then wrapped her stubby arms around Han’s neck and squeezed.
“I mean,” Han said. “I…” Then he just shook his head and squeezed her back, patting lightly. “Okay.”
“We love you, Taka,” a scratchy voice said. Han gently untangled himself from the tiny embrace and turned to see two figures smiling out of the holoprojector. “We always will, no matter what happens.”
“This is an old recording,” Lando said.
Han snapped his fingers and got up close to the holos. “That’s what Taka was watching the day we took off from Chandrila.” The two figures were middle-aged and dark-skinned. The man wore a tall elegant hat, and the woman had her hair in gem-adorned braids that she’d wrapped into two graceful strands and twisted above her head.
“We’ll see you after the summit in Aldera,” the woman said. “We think about you every day and we know you’ll do wonderful at the training camp.”
“Estay safe, Taka,” the man said. He sounded worried. “Please.”
The woman wrapped her arms around him. “We’ll see you soon.”
And then the message cycled back to the beginning. “We love you, Taka.”
Lando shut it off. “They’re Alderaanian.”
Han felt a familiar sadness open in him. It was the same one that rose whenever something happened to Leia that reminded her of watching her home planet explode into a million particles from the deck of the Death Star. She would perform and perform, smiling and pretending everything was
okay, and only Han would know she was slowly falling to pieces inside. And then they’d finally make it home and she’d collapse, stare at nothing for hours, and slowly, grudgingly, let Han comfort her and bring her tea. And then the tears would come, and Han would hold her as she heaved and released, and that’s when, inside, he’d be breaking, too, piece by piece, with no idea how to put himself back together, let alone his grieving wife.
Han sighed. “We gotta…”
“I know,” Lando said. “Let’s see what’s on this other datastick.”
Kaasha’s image flashed over the holotable, her dimly lit face creased with determination and, somewhere deeper, fear. Lando took a step back, as if he’d been struck. “Lando,” she said, “someone’s trying to get on the ship. It must be Gor. Our controls are down and Taka’s trying to manually reboot the system, but it’s been sliced somehow. We’re putting Peekpa into the escape pod along with this holo and uh, hopefully you’ll figure out where…we…” Kaasha looked around the dark area surrounding her then yelled as a loud bang sounded, then the whine and moan of metal being wrenched apart and deformed.
Kaasha turned back to the holocam. “Lando, I’m…I know this isn’t the time for this, but I’m sorry. I’m sorry I’ve been so…abrupt. I just…I was protecting myself. I didn’t see you as the settling type—I mean, you’re not, to be fair—so I just, I closed off. I just didn’t know.” She shook her head, staring off into the darkness. “I didn’t know which Lando would show up at any given moment, you know? The Lando that ran around the galaxy for decades being reckless and never tied down or the Lando that shared his heart with me when I held him in my arms. The Lando that was only out for himself or the Lando that risked his life to take out the Death Star. Everything I knew about you told me to stay away, not get too attached, but everything I felt…feel…whenever I’m with you screams the opposite. Yes, ever since Pasa Novo. And yes, on Bespin, yes on Chandrila, all along this journey, yes, yes, yes. And now I don’t even know if I’ll get to see you again, and I admit I still wonder, I still don’t know who you are, but I want to find out…”
Lando stepped forward, his eyes bigger than Han had ever seen them, mouth open. He reached up just as Kaasha extended her slender fingers outward. “Ma sareen,” she whispered. From somewhere behind her, Chewie could be heard roaring, then blasterfire screamed out and the feed cut.
“No,” Lando whispered.
“Kibi kibi shan,” Peekpa said, shaking her head.
“Lando,” Han said. “Get back to what you were working on. Peekpa will help.” He caught the Ewok’s shiny black eyes; she nodded once and then leapt to work, pulling out the datacard and bringing up Lando’s galactic holomaps.
Lando closed his eyes, seemed to delve deep in himself to find some hidden reservoir of strength. When he opened them, the fire was back. “On it.”
“And I’ll…” Han tilted his head, fastwalking back toward the cockpit. “I’ll see what else I can find in this highway of junk.”
Not much, it turned out. Eyes still scanning the never-ending river of space garbage, Han sent a holocall out to Leia. It didn’t go through. Idly, he punched the HAIL button again.
It beeped twice, then nothing.
“Dammit.”
Was that a gun turret? Half of one anyway? Sure looked like it.
An idea nudged its way through the clutter of Han’s mind.
The laser-charred S-foil of an X-wing. A ramp of some kind. A turbine fan.
What if…
Leia’s flickering image popped up on the small holoprojector beside the control panel. Han exhaled. “Ha—” Her voice dissolved into a storm of static. “—at all costs—”
“Leia?”
“—and Taka. Can you hea—”
“Leia? No, I can’t—”
“Ha—”
Han sighed and rubbed his eyes. “This is ridiculous.”
“I know, love,” Leia’s voice said, suddenly clear. “But it’s all we’ve got right now.”
Han perked up. “Leia? Listen to me! Gor has a device that will turn thousands of droids into killers. Do you hear me? I don’t think it went past Chandrila but still, get…can you hear me? Make sure…”
Static.
Han punched the holoprojector and Leia’s shimmering image vanished completely.
They were in some faraway armpit of the galaxy, parsecs from any system with any worthwhile comms, and for the first time Han could remember, the hugeness of it all felt suffocating, a heavy blanket, blotting out the world, not the wide-open road it usually seemed like.
Road.
He glanced down at the trash highway beneath him. Took the Chevalier into a glide even closer to the floating mess. It did look like a road, didn’t it? But where did it lead?
If he had been trapped on the Vermillion with the comms dead and grid down and that maniac closing in, he would’ve done just what they did: sent someone out in an escape pod with a message and then fought like hell. Barring that, he would’ve tried to leave something behind—to leave a trail to where he was so someone could come get him.
There was no way the Vermillion crew could’ve dumped all this behind but…hadn’t Peekpa said the Phylanx was a collector of some kind? What…if…
Han gunned the engines again, blasting along the junk path. It twisted in an ever-shifting helix through space, winding suddenly off to the left and then dropping off, picking back up again a little farther on.
“What…if…” Han said out loud. And then he pulled the Chevalier up and over the crest of a long stretch of gears and wheels.
“We got it!” Lando said, running into the cockpit with Peekpa close on his heels. “The…whoa!”
A field of slowly turning ice asteroids opened up before them, each one glinting dimly with the light of some faraway sun.
“The Mesulan Remnants,” Lando said. “We found them!”
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN WE?” Han demanded. “I found it. And what’re the Mesulan Remnants?”
Lando rolled his eyes and slid into the copilot’s seat. “Team effort, if we’re being honest about this. But nice work, ol’ buddy. The Remnants are shards of the ice moon Mesula, which shattered eons ago. Elthree and I visited here more than a decade ago, looking for this same maniac.”
“Oh yes,” Han said. “That time you tried and failed to get your hands on the device that I got punched out for actually capturing.”
“If you’d been able to keep your grubby hands on it,” Lando growled, “none of us would be in this mess, though, would we?”
“Beside the point.”
“Is it?”
“Taba grata, bosheentrak,” Peekpa warned.
“See, she agrees with me,” Han pointed out.
Lando narrowed his eyes. “I’m tired of you.”
“Are you tired of me finding exactly what you just came running in here looking for?”
Lando scowled, eyes scanning the field of floating ice. “I’m gonna ignore you for the sake of finding these folks and getting this handled. When Elthree and I came the last time, the Remnants were in an entirely different sector of the galaxy. What I didn’t realize is that, somehow, the Remnants migrate around the galaxy to no pattern any astronomer has been able to determine, and Gor programmed the Phylanx to move within the shards of ice to keep it from being detected.”
“Chubba bucha,” Peekpa added sagely.
Han and Lando looked at each other, both hoping whatever she said wasn’t too important.
“Right,” Lando said. “He also had it send transmissions at regular intervals, but as we suspected, the transmissions were set to hold until the Phylanx had already cleared the area before sending, so only someone with the coordinates to match the transmissions would be able to decipher where exactly the Phylanx would be. Gor had the code but not the transmission data.”
“Until he hijacked the Vermillion,” Han finished.
“Right, but…” Lando nodded at the scattered debris that still floated around them amid the floating ice shards.
“Something else is trying to leave a trail to the Phylanx,” Han said. “That’s all I can figure. Because it led us right to it. Or…to here anyway. We still don’t know where the Phylanx is.”
“Or the Vermillion,” Lando pointed out.
“No…” Han glanced out the cockpit window. “But whenever Gor shows up he’s probably gonna come shooting.”
Lando punched up the front and rear shields, increased them to full power. “Thing is…”
“I know, I know,” Han said. “We can’t blow him out of the sky. We’re gonna have to try to get aboard somehow or…”
“Get to the Phylanx before he does?” Lando suggested. “And break it.”
“Don’t know how well that’ll go over for our folks still on board the Vermillion if Gor has nothing left to lose, though.”
They jetted along among trashed ion engines, a tailpipe, more gun turrets, the Mesulan Remnants spinning their silent, luminous revolutions in the space around them. The sensor stayed eerily quiet. Peekpa had pulled out her datapad and was tapping away furiously, muttering to herself.
“Sbatki!” she chirped insistently. “Shakti bata bata cho!” A small furry paw reached over Han and shoved the steering mechanism sharply to the side.
“Easy!” Han snapped. “That’s my job.”
“What does she see?” Lando said, glancing out at the Remnants. “Where are they?”
“Shaktiiiba,” Peekpa urged, waving at Han like the landing crew at a docking station. “Pika! Pika!”
“That way, I guess,” Han said, banking off to the left. “But I got a ba—”
The sensor erupted with a high-pitched beep and dueling, frantic burps. “There!” Lando yelled. The Vermillion lurched out from behind a large ice chunk above them, laser fire blazing from its turrets.
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