by Troy Denning
“Good question.” Han glanced around. “I thought Izal turned you back on.”
“If you are referring to that salt-happy Arcona whom Mistress Leia asked you to bring aboard, absolutely not!” He gestured at the portable bacta tank. “I was instructing him where to secure the gurney when . . . well, someone must have tripped my breaker.”
“You didn’t cross the medical bank data feeds?”
“Captain Solo, you know I don’t relish memory wipes,” C-3PO said. “And I assure you, I know the proper way to access a data feed. I wasn’t even near it.”
“That’s what I was afraid of.”
Han stepped over to a bunk and found what looked like a large black toenail on the covers. There were similar flakes on the other bunks, and, on the third, a pair of disassembled transmitters—the really small kind, such as a CorSec agent might hide on a portable bacta tank. Han placed his hand in the center of the rumpled covers. The bed was still warm.
“Go to the first-aid bay and stay with Leia.” Han folded the flakes and transmitters into his hand, then started for the door. “Don’t let anyone near her.”
“Of course, Captain Solo.” C-3PO clanged into the ring corridor behind him. “But how am I to stop them?”
“Comm me.”
Han was already crossing the main hold toward the cockpit access tunnel. He was not at all surprised to discover that CorSec or the spy or maybe both had planted eavesdropping devices on the bacta tank—he had intended to check for them himself—but someone had disassembled the transmitters. That in itself did not mean Izal Waz had sneaked stowaways aboard, or even if he had, that they were Peace Brigade collaborators or bounty hunters or agents hired by whoever had sent Roxi Barl. But it did raise a few questions.
Doing his best to appear nonchalant, Han stepped onto the flight deck and paused to glance at the navicomputer. According to the display, they remained on course to Commenor, so any hidden diversions the Arcona might have sneaked past Han had not yet occurred.
Han slipped into the pilot’s chair. “Everything okay up here?”
“What could go wrong in ten minutes?” Izal continued to stare out the viewport, his color-hungry Arconan eyes mesmerized by the gray void of hyperspace. “You seem distressed.”
“Distressed?” Han checked their position, reached up, and disengaged the hyperdrive. Then, as the sudden dazzle of starlight disoriented Izal, he drew his blaster and swiveled around to face the Arcona. “I’m not distressed. I’m mad. Furious, even.”
Izal did not even seem all that surprised. He merely blinked the blindness from his eyes and gestured at the blaster. “That’s not necessary. I can explain.”
“You’d better hope so.” Han opened his other hand and laid the black flakes and disassembled transmitters on a console between their seats. “When it comes to protecting my wife, I have a short temper.”
Izal grinned and did not look at the items. “So I noticed in the isolation ward.”
“You were the one in the bacta parlor?”
Izal nodded eagerly. “I helped.”
When Han did not lower the blaster, a furrow appeared in Izal’s brow, and he flicked his hand almost casually. Had Han been just any freighter captain concerned he was about to be hijacked by a rogue Jedi and his stowaway partners, the trick might have worked. As it was, Han had fought at Luke Skywalker’s side often enough to anticipate such maneuvers, and his free hand was already clamped over the barrel, holding the weapon in his grasp.
“If it’s going to come down to using it or losing it,” Han warned, “I’ll use it.”
The blaster settled back into Han’s hand.
“You’re as short on gratitude as you are on temper,” the Arcona complained. “Or maybe you just don’t know how to trust.”
“I’ll trust you when I know who you are.” Han set the blaster to stun, less to spare Izal than to avoid burning a hole through a crucial circuit board. “You own a lightsaber and you know a few Force tricks, but so did Darth Vader. As far as I’m concerned, you still look more like a bounty hunter than a Jedi Knight.”
Izal sank into the copilot’s seat like he had been punched.
“It’s the salt habit, isn’t it?” he asked. “You think no real Jedi would let himself come to this.”
“If you’re looking for sympathy, you’re on the wrong ship,” Han said. The truth was he felt a certain empathy for the troubled Arcona, but now was not the time to share shortcomings. “You must know I’m no stranger to the Jedi. If you were a Jedi, I’d know you.”
“You do.” Izal’s gaze slipped away from Han’s, and his face darkened to charcoal. “There’s a reason you recognized my name, I had some trouble at the academy. One bite of Kenth’s nerfloaf—”
“Of course,” Han said, recalling the incident. A three-month supply of salt had vanished in the space of a few days, and then so had the student who choked it all down. “But you were only there a few months.”
Han cast a meaningful glance at Izal’s belt.
Izal nodded. “Hardly long enough to build my lightsaber,” he said. “Eventually, I found a Master who taught me to accept my weakness—and who helped me find my strength.”
Han raised his brow.
“And I’m sure you don’t know her,” Izal said.
“Your story is smelling more like a Gamorrean kitchen every minute,” Han warned. He gestured at the flakes and disassembled transmitters. “And you still haven’t explained these.”
“Oh . . . those.” Izal’s slanted smile might have been one of relief or anxiety. “That’s easy.”
“So explain.”
“First, I wasn’t keeping this a secret,” Izal said. “I was going to tell you when things settled down.”
“Quit stalling,” Han ordered.
Izal swallowed hard, which was quite a sight given the Arcona’s long neck. “All right.” He picked up one of the black flakes. “This scale—”
The proximity alarm broke into a shriek. Han glanced at his tactical display and found a wall of blips taking form behind the Falcon.
“Nice trick,” Han said. He hit the reset, but the alarm resumed its screeching half a second later. The tactical display returned with even more blips. “Now cut it out. You’re testing my patient nature.”
“You think this is a Force trick?” Izal’s eyes were fixed on the tactical display, and there was enough panic in his voice that Han almost believed him. “I’m not that good.”
“So they’re real?” Han was starting to worry. There were no transponder codes beneath the blips, and vessels without transponder codes tended to be pirates—or worse. “What are they doing here?”
“I don’t know.” Izal began the ion engine warm-start procedure. “I must have missed a homing beacon.”
“Or planted one,” Han said. Homing beacons could not be used to track a ship through hyperspace, only to locate it once it returned to realspace. For a flotilla to arrive so quickly, it had to have been lying somewhere outside the Corellian system, ready to depart as soon as it learned the Falcon’s position. “This seems way too handy.”
“Or desperate.” Izal brought the ion drives on-line. “I’m not the one trying to snatch your wife.”
“I’d like to believe you.” Han fired a stun bolt into the Arcona’s ribs. “But I just can’t take the chance.”
Leaving Izal to slump over the side of his chair, Han holstered his blaster and hit the throttles. The ambushers’ rate of closure began to slow. Some of the leaders started to fire, but Han did not even raise the Falcon’s power-hungry energy shields. The ship’s sensor array computer had identified the newcomers as a motley mix of Y-wings and old T-65 X-wings, and neither of those could fire effectively at such long range.
C-3PO’s voice came over the intercom. “Captain Solo?”
“Have the stowaways got Leia?” Han asked. There was a time when his thoughts wouldn’t have leapt instantly to the worst scenario, but a lot had changed in the galaxy since then—an
d in him. “If they’ve got Leia, you tell them—”
“Mistress Leia is well and quite alone,” C-3PO said. “Aside from me, of course.”
“Keep it that way.” Han activated the navicomputer and began to punch coordinates; though the course to Commenor remained the same, transit times would have to be recalculated from the new entry point. “And don’t bother me unless that changes.”
“Of course, Captain Solo.” A distant streak of red flashed above the cockpit canopy as a cannon bolt reached maximum range and faded away. “But—”
“Threepio, not now!”
The starfighters, especially the X-wings, were still closing. Han plotted a course projection and saw what he had known intuitively: they would reach effective firing range only a few seconds before the Falcon entered hyperspace.
Han slammed his palm against the yoke. “Sith spit!”
He changed the tactical display to a larger scale. Sitting dead ahead, well beyond the range of anything less sensitive than the Falcon’s reconnaissance-grade sensor suite, was a fast-freight of 250 meters. Not large, but large enough to carry a tractor beam that would prevent the Falcon from jumping to hyperspace.
Han cursed again and canceled the calculations. He brought the Falcon around hard, and the starfighters angled to cut him off. Daggers of light began to slice the darkness to his right. Han brought the energy shields up, then felt a shudder as both sets of the Falcon’s powerful quad laser cannons began to fire.
“Leia?” he gasped. “Threepio?”
“We’re still here, Captain Solo,” the droid replied. “In the first-aid bay as you instructed.”
Han glanced over the fire-control computer to see if Izal had left the quad lasers on automatic. He hadn’t. “Then who’s on the guns?”
“Captain Solo, that’s what I was—”
A rhythmic hissing sounded from the seat behind the pilot’s, and then all Han could hear was his own scream. Paying no attention as the first pirate shots blossomed against the energy shields, he leapt up and reached for his blaster.
A clawed hand pushed him down. “Sit,” rasped a deep voice. “This one shall replace Jedi Waz.”
The claw removed itself, and Han glanced over to see a huge scaled figure in a brown Jedi robe. The newcomer lifted Izal Waz out of the copilot’s seat with one hand, then tossed him to the rear of the flight deck and slipped into his place. A thick tail flopped over the arm of the chair, and beneath the robe’s cowl, Han glimpsed a reptilian face with slit-pupiled eyes and upward-jutting fangs. An adult Barabel.
A sheet of crimson light flashed along the Falcon’s starboard side. Han’s attention remained fixed on the Barabel. With scales as black as space and a tail that forced him to perch on the edge of the seat, his jagged features made him look as dangerous as his robe did mysterious. Han only hoped the Jedi apparel was evidence of a more patient nature than most Barabels possessed.
The Barabel pointed a claw at Han’s hand, still resting on his holstered weapon. “This one will let you blast him later. For now, perhapz you fly the ship.”
“Whatever you want.” Aware that even without the Force, the Barabel could have taken the blaster—and probably the arm holding it—anytime he wanted, Han grabbed the yoke with both hands. “Where we going?”
“You are the pilot, Han Solo.” He waved a claw at the tactical display, which showed a flight of X-wings streaking in to cut them off. “Though this one thinkz we should turn burnerz and run.”
“Can’t.” Han pointed to the fast-freight’s symbol, now giving chase in the upper left corner of the tactical display. “She’ll snag us with a tractor beam. Old pirate trap.”
The Falcon’s cannons lashed out in rapid-fire sequence. The lead starfighter dissolved into static, mirrored in the darkness outside by a distant orange bloom. Han whistled, awed as much by the timing of the attack as by its accuracy. The other three X-wings swung into a front oblique attack. Again, the Falcon’s laser cannons flashed. Again, an X-wing burst into a ball of superheated gas.
When the fireball died this time, it was replaced by a pair of white dots. They were a little larger than stars and a whole lot brighter.
The white dots swelled to white disks.
“Concussion missiles?” the Barabel asked.
“Not that lucky,” Han didn’t even bother to check the tactical display for propellant trails. He had seen plenty of those expanding white dots—though usually from the bridge of a Super Star Destroyer. “Proton torpedoes.”
The white disks swelled into white circles.
Han nosed the Falcon down into a wild corkscrewing evasive pattern. Somehow, the mysterious gunners remained accurate, crippling two starfighters as the main body of the pirate fleet reached effective range. The first proton torpedo arced past so close that the canopy went white.
The Barabel sissed. “Someone wantz you dead. Really wantz you dead.”
Han blinked his vision clear and saw a Y-wing zip past the cockpit, a crazy line of laserfire chasing it along. Another X-wing came in firing, and he had to turn head-on to force it to pull up. When he could finally check the tactical display, he found a dozen starfighters circling the Falcon, with another dozen hanging back to cut off escape. The good news was that the second proton torpedo had already passed by, its propellant trail tracing a long arc away from the Falcon’s tail.
“They don’t want us dead,” Han said. The torpedoes had been fired with disabled homing beacons. “They’re forcing our hand.”
A pair of battered X-wings streaked into view, the Falcon’s cannon bolts warming their shields. They collided in front of the cockpit, and a pair of rhythmic hisses, the first sounds Han had heard from the turrets, sounded over the intercom. Then pirates were all over the Falcon, coming in close and battering its shields from every angle. Depletion warnings and overload signals beeped and buzzed.
The Barabel studied the instrument panel in helpless confusion. “Where is the load balancer?”
“I’ll handle the shields.” Han jerked a thumb at the navicomputer. “Can you use that?”
The Barabel bristled his scales. “We are good pilots.”
“Okay—I didn’t mean anything by it,” Han said. “Plot a course to Commenor.”
He pulled the Falcon out of its evasive pattern and turned toward the fast-freight. The cockpit shuddered and the lights dimmed as the starfighters landed a devastating volley, and a damage-control buzzer announced a hull breach in the number two cargo hold. Two more X-wings vanished from the tactical display. Han sealed the breached hold. Then, finally, the pirates began to stand off, keeping the pressure on but now concentrating on avoiding the deadly streams of light pouring from the Falcon’s cannon turrets.
Han shifted more power to the rear shields and looked over to check on the Barabel’s progress. The calculations were almost finished, but the final coordinates lay closer to Corellia than Commenor. Han pretended not to notice, but cursed inside and searched his memory for some hint as to who Izal Waz and his Barabel friends could be working for. Not the Yuuzhan Vong, at least not directly; the Yuuzhan Vong hated Jedi. And certainly not for whoever had hired the pirates; they had killed too many. Maybe a hidden cabal of Dark Jedi, hoping to use Leia to somehow turn the war to their advantage.
Han shifted the tactical scale so it would display only what a standard sensor suite might reveal, and the fast-freight vanished off the screen. Trying to make it appear that he was fine-tuning the data filters, Han quietly opened his own input to the navicomputer and began calculations for the trip to Commenor.
The Barabel looked over. “They will know from our initial course we are going to Commenor.” He completed his calculations and sent them to Han’s display for verification. “This rendezvous is safer.”
“Safer for you.”
“For you,” the Barabel insisted. “They are not after us.”
The fast-freight appeared on the tactical display. Han pushed the Falcon into what he hoped would look like an evas
ive climb. The starfighters closed, hammering his shields, trying to drive him back toward the freighter. Han held his turn, trying to convince the enemy pilots he really had been surprised. The turret gunners made it look good by dispersing their fire to slow pursuit.
Something popped in the life-support control panel, and an acrid stench filled the air. The Barabel pulled off the cover and smothered a burning circuit board with his bare palm, then looked over wide-eyed.
“You are trying to get us killed?”
“This needs to look good,” Han said.
The Falcon bucked as the fast-freight, still too distant to see with the naked eye, locked on with its tractor beam. Han spun them perpendicular to the direction of pull—then cut back the throttles to avoid escaping. He did not have to ease off much; the tractor beam was a powerful one.
The Falcon’s cannon turrets spun to attack their captor.
“No!” Han ordered on the intercom. “Keep the fighters away.”
There was a short silence, then a voice rasped, “Tesar?”
The Barabel—Tesar—studied Han, then said nothing and started to tend damage alarms.
“Listen,” Han began, “I’m the—”
The turrets spun back toward the starfighters. Another pirate vanished from the tactical display, and the rest began to stand off again. They continued to pour fire at the Falcon, though they seemed more interested in keeping the deadly laser cannons occupied than approaching close enough to cause damage. The Falcon continued to slip toward the fast-freight.
Han returned to his calculations. Tesar watched for a moment, then tapped a claw on his own coordinates.
“This is better,” he said. “Trust me.”
Han did not even look up. “Where have I heard that before?”
“Your enemies are well organized. Even if we escape this—”
“I have a plan,” Han assured him.
“—they will have someone waiting on Commenor.”
“Better the enemy I know than one I don’t,” Han retorted.
The Falcon slipped faster toward the freighter. Han added power, but the slide continued to accelerate.
