by James Luceno
“The future’s what you make it,” Han hollered back, somehow managing to hold on to his pack and keep his balance through a violent quake that brought down what remained of overhead tiles and ducting.
Ahead of them a heavy metal curtain dropped, sealing off the way and forcing them to detour back to the station’s outer rim. Reaching a central passageway, they were immediately swept up in a mixed-species mob that was fighting its way toward the launch bays.
All at once the station sustained a strike of unprecedented force. Earsplitting, nerve-grating sounds of rending alloy filled the corridor as a huge arc of exterior bulkhead was simply ripped away.
And toward that dark breach the crowd was inexorably pulled.
Screams overwhelmed the metallic stridency. Waging a losing battle, people clawed at walls, deck plating, and one another in an effort to keep from being sucked into the maw.
Pressed to the inner wall of the curve, Han, Fasgo, and Roa managed to grab hold of the twisted remains of a hand railing. But even as they struggled to secure themselves—bodies lifted parallel to the deck by the vacuuming force—the railing tore away from the bulkhead.
The three of them were sucked forward several meters before the railing snagged on a section of floor grating wedged into a stairwell, but the force of the sudden stop dislodged them. Flags snapping in an incessant wind, they latched on to whatever handholds they could find, as people and droids flew past them into the breach and atmosphere roared out like an angry river.
An airborne, shoebox-size MSE-6 droid caught Fasgo square in the head and carried him shrieking into the current. Han watched him sail toward the breach, arms outstretched and flailing, as if plummeting from a great height.
Han tore his gaze away before Fasgo vanished.
“Looks like we took a wrong turn,” he shouted to Roa, who was just out of reach to Han’s left, plump fingertips curled around the slightest of ledges in the wrinkled section of bulkhead.
Roa twisted his head around. “Too bad the rejuvenation techs didn’t equip me with the strength of a young man in addition to the good looks.”
“Hang on, Roa!”
“How I wish I could. But I think I hear Lwyll calling me.”
“Don’t say that! Just hang on till I get there!”
Roa grunted in effort. “Bad luck creeps in through the hatch you leave open, Han. Fortune smiles, then betrays.”
Han spit a curse. “All right, keep talking if you have to. But just hang on.”
“I can’t, Han. I’m sorry. I just don’t have it in me.” Roa’s face betrayed the struggle. “Take care, old friend. Finish our business with Reck.” Smiling resignedly, he submitted to the flow.
“Roa, no!” Han screamed, daring to extend one arm and nearly allowing himself to be carried away.
Han shut his eyes, hung his head for a moment, then screamed in anger until his throat hurt.
When his breath returned, he secured the travel pack to his back and began to pick his way toward a rib left exposed by flayed bulkhead sheets. He had no sooner wrapped his arms around the structural member when someone hurtled past his face a hair’s breadth away and latched desperately onto his outstretched legs.
Han’s backbone stretched like a rubber band and groaned in protest. When the shock abated, he peered down the length of himself and saw that his unsolicited hanger-on was a male Ryn, arms clutched around Han’s knees and legs thrashing. This one was sporting a soft, brimless cap of bright red and blue squares, worn at a rakish angle.
“Mind if I rest here a moment?” the alien asked in melodic Basic. “If I’m too heavy, I’ll toss the cap.”
Han scowled at him. “Long as your head’s in it.”
“So you’d rather I let go.”
“If you make sure to close the door on your way out.”
“That isn’t vacuum out there,” the Ryn said, nodding toward the breach. “There’s a mouth on the other side of that hole.”
“A mouth?”
“The mouth of a Yuuzhan Vong dread weapon. For taking captives.”
Han instantly saw the logic of it. The people, droids, and objects zipping past him weren’t victims of compromised gravity; they were effectively being inhaled by whatever it was that had taken a giant-size bite out of the Wheel’s rim.
“So how do we gag that thing?” Han said.
The Ryn shook his head, long mustachios whipping about. “I don’t think we can. But there might be a way to stifle it.”
Han followed the Ryn’s gaze to a seam in the corridor ceiling, between them and the maw.
“A blast shield!”
The problem was that the mushroom-shaped button that could lower the shield was located on the corridor wall, some five meters closer to the breach.
“There’s a support strut just beyond me,” the Ryn said. “If I release my grip on you, I may be able to grab hold of it. But I still won’t be able to reach the shield activation button.”
“Finish your thought,” Han said, trying to ignore a sinking feeling.
“Then you’ll have to let go and catch hold of me. That should put you close enough to tap the button with your foot.”
“Assuming I manage to catch hold of you!”
The Ryn snickered. “Assuming also that I manage to catch hold of the strut. If I miss, well, I suppose it’s a matter of how long you think you can hold on. Otherwise …”
“Otherwise what?”
The Ryn grinned. “Otherwise, I’ll see you in hell.”
Han regarded him quizzically for a moment, then nodded grimly. “You’ve got yourself a deal. Good luck.”
The velvet-coated Ryn eased himself down Han’s legs until he was dangling from Han’s ankles, then disengaged. Han heard rather than saw him make harsh contact with the strut.
“You all right?” he called.
“Your turn,” the Ryn yelled shortly.
Han took a steadying breath. Carefully unwrapping himself from the alloy rib, he let fly. The current was even stronger than he expected. In a split second he was rushing past the Ryn, but when he reached out wildly to arrest his motion he hugged only air.
He was already imagining himself inside the Yuuzhan Vong dread weapon when something wrapped itself around his chest under his arms, yanking him to a halt. It took Han a moment to grasp that the Ryn had snagged him with his tail.
“Kick the button, kick the button!” the alien squealed in a pained voice. “Or plan on taking part of me with you into that creature!”
Han looked to his right and spied the mushroom-button, almost within reach of his right foot. “Swing me to the right!” he yelled.
The Ryn’s muscular tail spasmed just enough to set Han swaying and bring him within reach of the corridor wall. He extended his foot and caught the button with the toe of his boot.
The blast shield dropped rapidly, hitting the grooved deck with a loud and reassuring thud. At once, Han, the Ryn, and everyone left in the corridor followed suit, falling to the floor like stones.
While Han was fighting to regain his wind, the Ryn sprang to his feet and tugged his cap down on his forehead. Han took in the rest of the alien’s brightly colored outfit of vest, culottes, and ankle boots.
“What time do they switch you on?” he asked between breaths.
The Ryn laughed. “Round about your bedtime. Now what?”
Han stood up, clapping grit from his hands. “We get off this station before that thing decides it’s still hungry.”
“The launch bays are this way,” the two of them said at the same time, although rushing off in opposite directions.
“Trust me,” the Ryn said before Han could speak.
Han stared at him stonily, then waved him on and fell in behind.
Powerful spasms continued to rock the Wheel, throwing them from side to side. Han stopped to collect a pair of crying Bimm children who had become separated from their families. Other children and adults began to attach themselves to Han and the Ryn, if for no other rea
son than the two at least appeared to know where they were going.
“You’d better be right,” Han warned as he ran.
“Don’t worry,” the Ryn called over his shoulder. “I’m too young to die.”
“Yeah, and I’m too well-known.”
Ahead, the corridor swept broadly to the right, and Han began to recognize where he was. The docking bays were only a short distance away.
“Can you pilot a ship?” the Ryn asked breathlessly.
Han grinned smugly. “Don’t worry—”
“You know a few maneuvers.”
Han’s nostrils flared. “You’re some conversationalist, pal.”
“Try to stay awake, anyway.”
The Ryn skidded to a halt at the first docking bay door and tapped the entry switch repeatedly. “Security lock,” he announced.
Han shoved him aside to study the lock’s control touchpad.
“Hurry!” someone in their crowd of distressed followers said. “We’ve got to get out of here!”
Han spun angrily from the mechanism and had his mouth open to respond when the Ryn said, “He’s working on it, he’s working on it.”
Han thrust a silencing forefinger at the Ryn, then whirled and entered an override code on the touchpad. The hatch remained closed. He tried another code, then a third. “What I’d give for a loaded blaster right about now,” he mused.
“Would an R-series droid do?” the Ryn asked.
“If we had one.” Han shot him a sarcastic glance. “Unless, of course, you’ve got a droid summoner tucked away in that suit of lights.”
He had returned his attention to the touchpad, figuring to give it one final try, when from the edge of the crowd he heard the characteristic chirps, toodles, twitters, and warbles of an R2 unit. Swinging around in elated surprise, though, he saw that the sounds were coming from the Ryn, who was fingering the perforations in his chitinous beak as if it were a flute.
Han regarded the alien open-mouthed, then shook his head in a flustered way. “Do you sing and dance, too?”
“Only for credits.” The Ryn smiled in elaborate self-satisfaction. “Sometimes I amaze even myself.”
Han took a menacing step toward the alien. “Now, listen you—”
A mellifluous cascade of genuine hoots and whistles interrupted him as a red-domed R2 unit wheeled onto the scene.
“It wants to know how it can be of assistance,” the Ryn translated.
Han gazed from the alien to the droid in disbelief, then silently indicated the hatch’s security lock.
The droid extended a manipulator arm from a compartment high up on its cylindrical body, inserted it into an access port above the lock, and quickly sliced the code. The hatch raised and the crowd surged forward, almost flattening Han in the process.
“I’m certain they’ll all thank you later on,” the Ryn said as he brushed past.
Waiting on one of the docking bay launch pads was a bullet-shaped civilian shuttle, just spacious enough to accommodate everyone. Han hurried for the cockpit while the Ryn supervised the boarding; then the Ryn joined Han at the cockpit controls, slipping comfortably into the copilot’s seat and buckling into the safety harness, despite his long tail.
Han flicked the switch that enabled the repulsorlift generators and raised the ship. Rotating it through a 180-degree turn, he maneuvered the shuttle through the docking bay door and out into the launch bay.
Local space was thick with fighters and lighted by flashes of explosive light. A band of coralskippers raced past the bay’s magnetic containment window, pursued by twice their number of X-wings and TIE interceptors, lasers firing steadily.
“We’re not out of this yet,” Han said, gritting his teeth as he aimed the shuttle for the aperture.
SIXTEEN
The shuttle veered left and right, as Han wove a jagged course among the hundreds of ships moored in the Wheel’s shadow. Most of the barges and freighters remained at anchor, but some were every bit as bent on escape as Han was, and were moving out at all speed, in whatever direction seemed best.
Han twisted the shuttle to port, hugging the curve of the station’s outer rim, ascending or descending as necessary to avoid debris yanked from the interior by the Yuuzhan Vong dread weapon that had struck it. A quarter of the way around the Wheel an enormous enemy warship came into view, black as night and made more hideous by pairs of branching yorik coral arms. Retracting into an orifice in the bow was the colossal serpentine creature obviously responsible for the trio of erose breaches along the outer face of that part of the station’s rim.
“That’s gotta be the thing that swallowed Roa and Fasgo,” Han growled to the Ryn. “You and I might have been inside it right now.” Firewalling the shuttle’s throttle, he accelerated straight for the creature, oblivious to his copilot’s wide-eyed distress.
“What are you doing?” the Ryn screamed.
Han gestured with his stubbled chin out the viewport. “My friends are imprisoned in that thing.”
The Ryn’s voice abandoned him momentarily, then he exclaimed, “You can’t just break them out!”
“You just watch me,” Han said out of the corner of his mouth.
“You’re demented!”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“Okay, how about, we’re unarmed!”
Han suddenly grasped that he wasn’t aboard the Falcon, and he cursed to himself. If he was alone, or even if it was just him and the Ryn, he might have risked attacking the dread weapon anyway. But the shuttle’s passenger compartment was filled with scores of innocents who were already on the run from the war, and who definitely didn’t deserve to be taken into battle by a madman at the controls of a weaponless and unshielded craft.
It also dawned on Han that he was in the same position Anakin had found himself in on Sernpidal, forced to choose between the lives of a shipload of strangers and the life of one friend. The realization pierced Han’s heart like a vibroblade, and he swore to himself that if he made it home in one piece, he would put things right with his estranged son.
Still, Han couldn’t resist harassing the creature with a flyby. When the nose of the thing loomed all but close enough to touch—and the Ryn was half out of his seat in naked alarm—Han slewed the shuttle hard to port, hoping the slithering aberration would get a good taste of the ship’s ion exhaust.
The fact that the creature suddenly shot from the warship, nearly snagging the shuttle with its vacuuming mouth, suggested that Han’s wish had been realized.
“Nice going!” the Ryn fairly shrieked. “You certainly managed to get its attention!”
A bit wide-eyed himself, Han took the shuttle through a power climb, then a series of evasive loops and rolls while the creature continued to snap at it.
“Blasted thing’s as temperamental as a space slug!”
“Yeah, and we’re the mynock who riled it!” the Ryn said.
Han tightened his grip on the controls. Firing the braking thrusters, he shoved the etheric rudder hard to the right at the same time, then executed a nosedive that took the shuttle corkscrewing around the neck of the enraged creature and ultimately under the bow of the enemy warship.
“Who’s going to clean up the passenger cabin?” the Ryn asked when he’d swallowed his gorge.
“We’ll worry about that later.”
For the sake of the passengers, Han dialed up the gain on the inertial compensator and trimmed back their speed. The shuttle was just emerging on the far side of the bow when the instrument panel began to scream.
Han’s mouth fell open.
“What?” the Ryn asked nervously. “What?” He glanced at the indicators. “Why are you slowing down?”
Han fought with the controls. “A dovin basal has us! The ship’s drawing us back!”
The Ryn sat up in his seat and reached for the auxiliary controls. While Han struggled with the stick, the Ryn opened up the engines, rocketing the shuttle through a steep hull-hugging climb that carried them ov
er the top of the warship and down along the opposite side into an inverted dive.
“Good thinking,” Han remarked as the shuttle shot for what looked to be clear space. “Glad to be away from that thing—”
Another outburst from the Ryn erased Han’s words. Four coralskippers had launched from the underside of the ship and were already opening fire with projectile launchers.
Han broke right, angling away from the skips and soaring through a series of evasive maneuvers.
“You had to go and scare their pet!” the Ryn hollered while fiery missiles streaked past the shuttle to both sides.
Dead ahead a veritable swarm of coralskippers were making for the warship, with New Republic starfighters in hot pursuit. Han throttled down and banked, only to see the pointed bow of a Star Destroyer edge into view from behind the closest of Ord Mantell’s moons. Angry blue hyphens of energy lanced from the fortresses’ forward gun turrets, assailing the fleeing skips and very nearly impaling the shuttle. Then the Yuuzhan Vong warship responded with plasma, as blinding and wrathful as stellar prominences.
All caution forgotten, Han engaged the thrusters and veered from the thick of the firefight. But the four skips they had encountered earlier were still glued to the shuttle’s tail.
“No doubt about it,” Han muttered, “my past is definitely catching up with me.”
The Ryn glanced at him. “Then you’re not running fast enough!”
Han tightened his lips. “We’ll see about that. Plot a course for the Wheel.”
“We’re going back?”
“You heard me.”
“Would it help any to deny it?”
“Stop your squawking,” Han barked. “Give me everything the thrusters have.”
The Ryn set himself to the task, grumbling all the while. “I don’t know why your past has to catch up with me.”
“I think it has something to do with your hat,” Han said. “Besides, who asked you to latch on to me?”
“You’re right. Next time I’ll pick someone else to hang with.”
Han took the shuttle straight for the outer rim of the Wheel, but at the last moment he climbed over the top, then dived sharply and shot between two of the station’s tubular spokes. The four skips followed, but only three succeeded in matching the precarious maneuvers. The pilot in the trailing craft failed to swerve at the right moment and flew head-on into one of the spokes, pulverizing himself.
