by James Luceno
Lando’s ensuing demonstration did not disappoint. He selected a section of the asteroid belt and magnified it on the rectangular screen to the point where they could see the small droid mining ships testing, drilling, and extracting, then hopping onto another asteroid.
“How much can you get from them?” Han asked. “Really?”
“Most asteroids aren’t profitable,” Lando admitted. “But every now and then …,” he added slyly, rubbing his hands together, dark eyes twinkling.
He continued the demonstration a bit longer, answered questions about volume and costs of setup, then led them out of that tower to another, up, up, to an enclosed hangar that held several small craft, with single central pilot pods, wing pylons extending from either side, connecting solar array wings that featured a top third and bottom third angled at forty-five degrees back in toward the central pod.
Lando’s guests, particularly the older ones, surely recognized the craft: TIE Advanced xl fighters, the type favored by the elite of the old Empire, including Darth Vader. The sight of the distinctive fighters clearly affected both Luke and Leia, whose expressions drooped. Han looked at Lando and scowled.
“Best design for our purposes,” Lando answered honestly.
“These are your belt runners?” Luke asked.
“It’s the adjustable shock couch,” Lando explained, leading the way to the nearest, and as they moved they noted similar, but larger, twin-pod craft, TIE bombers, farther back in the hangar. “Pilots in these things can take a real beating.”
“Don’t we know that?” Han asked dryly.
“So you fly these things through the asteroid belt?” Jaina asked, her expression and her tone showing that she was more than a little intrigued.
“Along Lando’s Folly, not through,” Lando corrected. “Against the flow of the asteroids. We’ve got a couple of particularly nasty sections mapped out.” He stared at Jaina for a long moment, matching her eager expression. “You want to try?”
She looked at her parents first, for just a moment, and then at Mara, and it was obvious that she was pleading for permission.
The prep time seemed interminable to eager Jaina, but she paid attention as Lando’s technicians explained the basic differences in flying one of their modified TIE fighters. While the foot yokes and hand controls were easy enough to pick up, the adjustable shock couch, a pivoting, bouncing contraption, was very different from the stable cockpit of an X-wing or landspeeder. And the most important difference of all, Lando’s technician explained, concerned the inertial compensator. Unlike those on the X-wings and in most other craft, the ones on the modified TIE fighters could not be dialed down. The levels were preset, designed to give a pilot a good tactical feel of the craft, and often a wild ride, but would not allow the g’s to exceed safe limits.
“Early on, pilots would strap in and dial it down to ninety-five,” the technician explained to the three kids. “They’d bounce along until that inevitable collision, and then ricochet into a wild spin. We’d go get them, to find most unconscious. One almost died.”
That last statement brought a concerned look from Leia, and Jaina knew that her mother was almost ready to cancel the runs then and there.
But then the technician assured her, and the others, that the problem had been fixed. “When you hit one now, you’ll get the spin of your life,” he explained. “But you’ll live to brag about it.”
As a final confidence booster, the technician then pointed out the repulsor shields, solid defensive arrays controlled not by the pilot and powered not by the ship’s engines, but from a floating station, Belt-Runner I.
That news widened Luke’s eyes. There were available technologies to make the TIE fighters able to withstand many asteroid hits, using combinations of shields and an enhanced repulsor system, but for many years, the militaries of both the Empire and the New Republic had been trying to perfect off-ship shielding, with greater power sources lending deflector shields to small starfighters, thus freeing the drives of the starfighters to the tasks of maneuvering, accelerating, and firing. Thus far, little progress had been made with the technique, and Luke understood that if Lando could perfect it out here, the value to the enterprising man would be many times greater than all the treasure he could leech off of all the asteroids of Lando’s Folly. Maybe that was his real purpose.
“Also,” the technician continued, moving over to pat a shining white metallic hump beside the shock couch, “these babies have been outfitted with hyperdrive.”
Luke nodded admiringly; Lando and his technicians might be onto something truly impressive here.
“We’ll keep them safe,” Lando finished for the tech, and he offered a wink to Leia.
And then Jaina and the other two Solo youngsters got their test runs in the modified TIEs, including a half-speed crash into a mountainside, where they experienced their first real feel for the collision shields.
But even that exercise didn’t sate eager Jaina. Lando showed them a posting board prominently displayed in the entry hall of the city’s main tower, which listed the top pilots and their winning durations. She didn’t know any of the names, except two: Miko Reglia, who was listed at seventh, and Kyp Durron, the current champion, with a time of eleven minutes, thirteen seconds.
Jedi Knights, the master Kyp, and his apprentice Miko.
Jaina had work to do.
She cruised within the prep coordinates in her TIE fighter now, within sight of the entry point to the asteroid belt. Jacen was in the run now, building a respectable time approaching the five-minute mark. Jaina couldn’t see him, but she heard his calls—or at least, the calls out to him, for her twin brother was keeping fairly quiet, finding a sense of calm within the meditation of the Force, she knew.
He passed the five-and-a-half-minute mark—he’d be on the board.
“Keep going,” Jaina whispered, but even as the words left her mouth, she heard her brother cry out, “Whoa!” and then just issue a long scream.
“He’s out,” came the call from Belt-Runner I. “Heck of a hit.”
Jaina caught sight of him then, of the spinning running lights as the TIE fighter careened off into space. “Jacen?” she called out, and when no response came back, she reached out to her twin with the Force, feeling him securely through their tight bond and understanding that he was shaken up, but was very much alive and well.
She let it go at that, for Anakin was just starting his run. Jaina caught flashes of his ship weaving in and out of the rocks, and she heard his breathing and occasional shouts over her comm unit. He sounded more animated than had Jacen, more consciously attuned to his physical senses. Jaina understood the philosophical fight that had been waging between her brothers, each trying to find the correct balance between Force and physiology, and she wasn’t surprised at all by the difference.
“We got him,” came the call from one of Lando’s tow ships, followed by assurances from Jacen that he was all right. Jaina could picture the look of relief on her fretting mother’s face.
“I want to do it again,” he added, and then Jaina imagined Leia’s predictable scowl.
They crossed Jaina’s line of sight then, TIE and tow ship. The modified fighter seemed perfectly fine, but still it was being towed. She took a deep breath, steadying her nerves.
Then she heard Anakin squeal with delight, and caught sight of his TIE, skimming the edge of one huge rock.
She clicked off the signal, preferring to turn her attention inward, to find the peace of the Force, the calm emptiness. Hardly conscious of the effort, she rocked the foot yokes back and forth, trying to get a better feel for the craft, and gave a quick push on the throttle, jerking her back in the shock couch.
The seconds slipped past as she fell deeper into the meditation.
She heard the call from the ground controller that Anakin had surpassed Jacen—wouldn’t that make for fun conversation later on?—and focused back in to her surroundings, tuning the comm back to Anakin’s signal in time to h
ear his boast.
“I got you, Jac—” he started to say.
Jaina saw the whole thing. Anakin stooped his TIE under a spinning rock, then pulled into a hard climb right before the face of another.
He couldn’t avoid the third, didn’t even see it until it was right in his face.
He hit head-on, the TIE fighter ricocheting straight up, spinning tail-over-front at a tremendous rate. Up, up, it went, and then it stopped spinning—Anakin must have fired a compensating blast—and just kept drifting, tilted and appearing quite dead.
“Anakin?” came the frantic call from the ground station, Leia’s voice.
No answer.
Jaina gripped her controls as Leia cried out again, thinking that she could get to her brother quickest, though what good she might do, she didn’t know. Before she fired away, though, Anakin’s shaky voice replied.
“Amazing,” he said, and he sounded sick, or as if he had just been.
“Are you all right?” came Leia’s call and Lando’s voice, at the same time.
“I think so.”
“You beat Jacen,” Jaina piped in.
“Who cares?” came the response.
Only then did Jaina understand how shaken her little brother truly was. Normally, the fact that he had beaten Jacen would be paramount in his thoughts, a sterling victory.
“That’s enough,” Leia said, apparently catching on to the same thing. “Bring it in, Jaina.”
“Ready to fire!” Jaina called, clicking to a different channel and pretending she hadn’t heard. She wasn’t about to let Anakin’s misfortune slow her down—she knew she should have gone first! “Am I cleared for entry?” she asked the air controller on Belt-Runner I.
“Fire away,” he came back.
“Jaina!” Leia’s voice came in, her mom-sense easily finding her daughter’s new channel.
But Jaina throttled up quickly, speeding for the entry point of the belt. Most pilots went in at a virtual standstill, coming against the flow of the asteroids and using their drives only for dodging maneuvers. It wasn’t a distance test, after all, but merely a duration challenge.
Jaina, though, fearing her mother would find a way to call it all off, hit the belt running … and fast.
She knew as soon as she entered that she had made a mistake. Before she could even really register any pattern to the incoming asteroids, she had to push hard on the stick, dropping the TIE into a straight stoop, then rolling out to the left desperately to avoid a long jag in the rock. Three-quarters of the way into that roll, Jaina pulled it to a halt and shot out diagonally, barely avoiding another asteroid and nearly clipping the back side of the first she had dodged. No time to take a deep steadying breath, for another pair came on, and Jaina put the TIE up on its side and somehow managed to slip between them, then rolled it over, top down, and pulled hard, dropping into another stoop. Before the warning alarm could begin to sound, indicating that she was nearing the boundary of the belt, Jaina brought the TIE about, shooting off to the side, making no headway into the asteroid course, but not losing any ground—which would have disqualified her—and buying herself a precious split second.
And in that second, she composed herself and recognized that she could not keep reacting. This was a game of anticipation, of preparing the move before you had to make it. That was why the four Jedi who had run, including two relatively green pilots, her brothers, had all climbed onto the board. Jaina ignored her blinking and beeping instruments and looked ahead at the incoming swarm, feeling their pattern as much as seeing it.
She turned “her nose into the wind,” as the old water-sailing adage went, and plunged in headlong.
Han heard a low growl escape Leia’s lips as Jaina soared into the asteroid belt. He draped his arm about his wife’s shoulders.
“She heard me,” Leia remarked quietly and coldly.
Han tightened his grip, pulling Leia closer. Of course Jaina had heard her, and of course Jaina had pretended differently, had gone after the run that had consumed her thoughts these last days. Leia would get over it, Han knew, but if Jaina had acceded to her mother’s demand, had lost the challenge she had so desperately wanted, the chill between mother and daughter would have been lasting.
“She’ll be all right,” he remarked, but even he winced as Jaina’s TIE, clearly visible on the great screens in the central control room, broke into its three-quarter roll and burst out at the very last instant. “She’s the best flyer of the three.”
Beside the pair, Mara’s green eyes glowed with excitement. “Fall into it, Jaina,” she whispered. “Let the Force be your guide.”
Behind her, Luke kneaded her neck and shoulders and smiled warmly, remembering similar advice from the spirit of Obi-Wan Kenobi, when old Ben had gone with him on his race down the channel of the Death Star. Don’t try to register all the input from your eyes and other senses. Don’t listen to your instruments at all—turn them off, if possible. Let the Force show you the patterns before you, the twists, the turns, the target.
Jaina was more into that flow now, they could all see, her turns coming hard, but less drastic, as if she was anticipating the next twist she would face.
Luke glanced at the timer clock hanging above them. Four minutes.
On she went, spinning and rolling, plunging suddenly, then swooping back up to a clearer region. But looking ahead of her, Luke recognized a seemingly insurmountable problem. Two thick clusters of asteroids were converging, the trailing group catching up to the other, and they seemed as if they would form a wall of stone the TIE simply couldn’t slip through.
“Unbreachable pattern!” one of Lando’s observing judges cried out, and those very words blinked off and on across his monitor, for the computer calculating Jaina’s flight saw no way around the forming barrier without clearing the borderlines of the asteroid belt.
“Tough luck,” Lando remarked. “Happens every once in a while.”
“She’ll get it,” Mara insisted.
“Come on, Jaina,” Leia whispered beside her.
Jaina recognized the convergence, like fingers interlocking to form a solid barrier, and immediately throttled down. Desperate, she glanced all about, looking for a seam.
There was none.
She looked to her instruments, all of them screaming and blinking, warning of impending collision. She punched her fist against her thigh in frustration, losing her composure, losing any chance.
But then she heard Mara’s plea for her to fall into the Force, and then she heard her mother’s voice, nothing distinct, but a general feeling of support and love from both of them.
Jaina steeled her gaze straight ahead and throttled up, attacking the mass. She had to buy time, nothing more, and the trailing group would surpass the first, and openings would reveal themselves.
She went in hard at the closest asteroid, spun over and down as she approached, and popped her repulsor coils, bouncing off harmlessly. Into another spin, she fired the repulsors again, ricocheting off the bottom of another asteroid. And then again, bouncing her backward—but not technically flying backward, which would have disqualified her.
And so it went, with Jaina playing like a bouncing ball, never impacting, but firing her repulsor coils at precisely the right moment to launch her sidelong, or up or down, or even backward, buying time and not distance as asteroids passed others, as some collided and went spinning at slightly new angles.
Jaina felt an opening, like a breeze finding an alley between tall buildings. She bounced away from yet another rock, barrel-rolled and dived, then reversed momentum, swooping up right before yet another asteroid, but coming around it, leveling off and shooting through the gap, waggling her wings to accommodate the angled exit.
Her eyes were half-closed as she felt the patterns; her TIE fighter swooped and turned, accelerating and throttling back before she was even conscious of the movements.
Nor was she conscious of the passing seconds, or of anything at all other than the clearest cours
e before her.
Chewie’s howl as Jaina broke through the seemingly impenetrable barrier, against the odds and against the computer calculations, very much reflected the mood of the onlookers, even Lando’s crew. The Wookiee jumped up and down, grabbed the nearest technician and gave him a shake that set his teeth to rattling, and punched his huge hairy fist into the air.
“Was that good?” C-3PO asked in all seriousness, apparently missing the point of it all.
R2-D2 howled and screeched at him in response.
Leia reached over and squeezed Mara’s hand.
“The kid can fly,” Han remarked, his voice thick with something more than pride, with awe. He glanced up at the timer clock.
Five minutes, thirty-two seconds.
Jacen, still a bit unsteady from his collision, walked into the room then. He glanced up at the clock, then moved beside the others and took a measure of Jaina’s progress. “She’s found her inner peace,” he remarked.
“Did you?” Luke asked.
Jacen nodded. “But I didn’t have the flying skills to complement it,” he admitted. “Jaina’s got the whole package.”
And so it seemed, as the screen showed her TIE flowing effortlessly through the maze of flying boulders.
The elapsed time broke the seven-minute mark, putting Jaina high on the board.
“She’ll be no lower than third,” Lando told them. “And no one’s had a tougher course to fly.” He turned to one of his techs. “Cut into all the broadcast screens,” he instructed. “Put this out all over the planet.”
“Let the betting begin,” Han whispered into Leia’s ear, and both smiled.
“I already had it piped into the other control rooms and the docking areas,” the tech replied.
“I saw it on the way in,” Jacen agreed. “Kyp Durron’s out in the docks, watching every second.”
The name reminded Luke that they had other business to attend to out here. But not now, he told himself. He studied Jaina’s flight pattern, then glanced back up at the timer clock. “Kyp’s going to lose,” he stated evenly.
