by Troy Denning
“Then at least I won’t be walking on corpses.” Leia started her chair down the corridor. “Han, have you forgotten who I am? Do you think I want to walk at the cost of someone else’s life? Would you want me to?”
Han shook his head weakly. Then tears began to escape his eyes, and he hurried up the corridor. Leia did not follow. She still understood him well enough to know when to leave him alone. He could face no more loss, and Leia was coming to comprehend—or was it fear?—that when he looked at her in the repulsor chair, he saw another loss, something else taken by the Yuuzhan Vong.
And, Leia was astonished to realize, she saw the same thing in him. After Chewbacca’s death, he had shut himself off from his family and disappeared into the galaxy to grieve alone. She had believed he just needed room, and she had given it to him. But now she realized he had left for another reason as well, to shield her and the children from a fury he could not control. Would he have gone, she wondered, if she had tried harder to reach him, just kept pushing and weathered the storm when he finally unleashed his anger? Would he still feel like such a stranger now?
Deciding only a fool makes the same mistake twice, Leia started up the corridor. This time, she would not let him suffer in private.
“Ship incoming,” Izal Waz announced.
A vast sense of relief came over Leia, and not only because she knew the bacta had arrived. She steered her chair quickly into the main hold and was overtaken by the three Barabels, the two Hara sisters rushing for the cannon turrets and Tesar for the cockpit. She paused at the engineering station to send C-3PO to watch over Eelysa, then went to her new post behind the flight deck bulkhead. Han and Izal were already sitting in their chairs. Tesar loomed behind their seats, blocking Leia’s view of almost everything.
“The transponder’s on,” Han said. “That’s a good sign.”
“The Star Roamer,” Izal Waz reported. “Damorian medium freighter, armed. Registered to CorDuro Shipping.”
“Out here?” Han asked. The rendezvous was taking place at the edge of the Corellian sector, in a never-to-be-surveyed system consisting of little more than a few asteroids, a dust ring, and the core of a collapsed star. “What’s CorDuro doing in a place like this?”
“They are the ones we have been waiting for,” Tesar explained. “That is where we are getting our bacta tankz.”
“From CorDuro?” Leia asked, disappointed. At the least, CorDuro Shipping was guilty of appropriating supplies intended for refugees. “Master Saba has an arrangement with them?”
“Yes, but CorDuro does not know it yet.” Tesar turned to face her, and a pinhead of crimson brightness—the collapsed star as seen from inside its dust ring—appeared outside the cockpit. “They will learn soon.”
“Are you guys spacesick?” Han demanded. He looked from Tesar to Izal Waz. “You can’t buy bacta tanks from CorDuro! They’re collaborators. They might even be a front for the Peace Brigade.”
Izal Waz shared a grin with Tesar, then asked, “Does anyone have proof of that?”
“Jacen sent a report to New Republic Intelligence,” Leia said. “But it outlined a circumstantial case. There isn’t anything solid.”
Tesar sissed, then said, “There will be soon.”
As Leia puzzled over the Barabel’s remark, the CorDuro freighter slowed and entered an unconcealed orbit in the dust ring. A few minutes later, the proximity alarm sounded. Han silenced it and frowned at his display, but Izal merely activated the Falcon’s data recorders.
“I’m getting nothing but mass readings.” Han buckled his crash webbing. “That new ship’s Yuuzhan Vong!”
Tesar sissed again, then looked back at Leia. “Not long now, this one thinkz.”
He moved aside to give her a better view of the displays. Leia smiled her thanks and started to palm her hold-out blaster—this could still be a trap—then decided against it and left the weapon in her sleeve. The Barabels’ insistence on total comm silence had prevented her from confirming even a small part of their story with Luke, but the feelings they had shared in the crew quarters had contained no hint of deception.
Han and Izal Waz quickly identified the Yuuzhan Vong vessel as a corvette-analog picket ship, then they all waited while the Star Roamer maneuvered into docking range.
“The Yuuzhan Vong want to know about bacta,” Tesar explained. “Before Master Eelysa was injured, she told Master Saba about this rendezvous.”
“And Master Saba decided you need a set of your own bacta tanks,” Han finished.
Tesar bared his fangs in a smile. “It seemed fair.”
“What if something goes wrong?” The worry in Han’s voice was so foreign to the Han Solo that Leia remembered that she thought for a moment someone else was speaking. “Eelysa’s the one who will pay the price.”
“And Leia, too, you’re thinking,” Izal Waz said.
“The thought had crossed my mind,” Han admitted.
Tesar covered Han’s shoulder with a black-scaled claw. “Han Solo, you worry too much. What could go wrong?”
Leia had to smile. “At least Jacen will feel better,” she said, trying to take Han’s mind off all the things that could go wrong. “His report was going nowhere without solid . . .”
Leia let the sentence trail off, for her thoughts were whirling through her mind like hawk-bats above a thermal exhaust vent. Why would someone contract an assassin to kill her? Why bribe a CorSec guard to steal her datapad? Why send an entire combat flotilla to prevent her from returning home?
“Proof!” she gasped. “Someone thinks I have proof.”
“Proof?” Han turned in the pilot’s seat. “Of CorSec’s collaboration?”
Leia nodded. “That’s what they’re afraid of.”
“It makes sense,” Han said. “Hard to be sure, though.”
“What else have I been doing over the last year?” Leia asked. “And no one was trying to kill me before Jacen’s report—at least no one on our side.”
“CorDuro’s not exactly on our side either, dear.”
Han opened a tactical feed to the navicomputer display so Leia could watch events unfold from her seat behind the bulkhead. A minute or so after the corvette and freighter had merged into a single blip, Izal Waz opened a subspace channel and announced the coordinates of the rendezvous.
“I thought we had to maintain comm silence,” Han said.
“Close enough,” Tesar said.
A few seconds later, a nervous voice came from the Star Roamer. “Who was that?” When no one answered, it said again, “Unidentified transmitter, respond and explain yourself.”
They did not, of course. A minute later, the electronics began to hiss and spit as the freighter went to active sensors and probed in their direction. Leia felt confident the Falcon would remain hidden. The asteroid they sat upon was only a few times larger than the ship itself, but Han had set them down beside a ten-meter pressure ridge where standard sensors would find it impossible to distinguish the ship’s silhouette.
The hissing faded away, and another minute passed. The tactical display went briefly blank as the asteroid’s rotation hid the two ships from view, then it turned to static as the sensors pointed toward the tiny sun. When the static cleared, the Roamer and the Yuuzhan Vong corvette were separate blips again.
Tesar hissed in frustration. “They will get—”
He was interrupted by the shriek of proximity alarms. A new handful of blips appeared on the display, streaking in from five sides, already firing laser bolts and even a couple of long-range proton torpedoes. The Yuuzhan Vong turned to meet the assault, as Yuuzhan Vong ships nearly always did. The Roamer ran in the only direction left to it, toward the Falcon.
Han and Izal began a warm start-up, while Leia occupied herself trying to guess whether they would intercept the freighter before it jumped to hyperspace. Identifiers began to appear beneath the blips on the tactical display, revealing a motley assortment of old T-65 X-wings, even older Y-wings, and a pair of Skipray blast
boats. Some of the newcomers’ transponder codes were already blinking to show damage, and the Yuuzhan Vong had not even fired.
“That’s the saddest pirate band I’ve seen in some time,” Leia said. “Who did Master Saba hire for this assignment?”
“No one. That is our squadron, the Wild Knightz.” Tesar smiled proudly. “I fly a very fine Y-wing.”
Any need to apologize was forestalled by a proximity alarm. Another vessel, this one a fast-freight tagged the Jolly Man, emerged from hyperspace to block the Roamer’s line of escape. The CorDuro ship continued on course and began to fire, lacing the darkness outside with tiny needles of light. A trio of ancient Z-95 Headhunters dropped out of the Jolly Man’s belly and moved to meet it. The Roamer started to turn away—then suddenly changed its mind and ran toward the tiny sun.
“He’s going down the gravity well! On a white dwarf!” Han engaged the ion drives—still a little cold—and launched the Falcon. “He must be crazy.”
“No,” Tesar said. “He is frightened.”
The reason grew apparent an instant later, when a blip in hot pursuit emerged from behind an asteroid. A tag naming the vessel the Sureshot appeared, along with a legend identifying it as a CEC YT-1300 stock light freighter—the same ship as the Falcon.
“She’s not as fast as the Falcon,” Izal Waz said proudly. “But . . . well, she still flies.”
The Roamer quickly started to pull away from the Sureshot, but its abrupt change of direction had given the Jolly Man’s Headhunters time to catch up. They took a few passes, taking out the energy shields and forcing the captain to waste time maneuvering or have a hole burned through his bridge. Finally, the Sureshot activated its tractor beam and caught hold of the target.
The Roamer stopped maneuvering and continued to accelerate, firing at the Sureshot and dragging the smaller freighter after it. The Headhunters took care of the cannon fire in two passes, but they could not target the drive nacelles without getting caught in the tractor beam. The Sureshot turned ninety degrees in an attempt to change vector, but the course did not vary noticeably. Its engines could not match the combination of the larger freighter’s power and the white dwarf’s gravity.
“Smart,” Leia said. “He’s giving the Sureshot a choice—release or be dragged into the sun.”
“Tesar,” Han said, “how long before they reach the point of no return?”
Tesar had already done the calculations. “Ten minutes,” he said. “We will reach tractor range in five.”
Han opened a comm channel. “Hold tight, Sureshot. Help’s on the way.”
“Just don’t be all day about it,” came the reply.
Leia spent the next few minutes scarcely breathing as the Falcon closed. The Headhunters continued to harry the Roamer, though it was just harassment and everyone knew it. On Leia’s recommendation, they opened a channel to the captain and promised to broker a lenient sentence in return for cooperating with New Republic Intelligence. The captain responded by promising not to drag the Sureshot into the sun in return for shutting off the tractor beam, then closed the channel. Izal Waz suggested offering the crew freedom in exchange for the bacta tanks, but Leia overruled that idea. If the captain knew what they were really after, there was a good chance he would destroy the tanks out of vindictiveness.
So they waited and watched on the tactical display as the other two flights of Wild Knights used the Yuuzhan Vong picket ship for target practice. Though the vessel was hurling an amazing amount of plasma and magma into space, the ancient starfighters always seemed to be where the enemy attacks weren’t, or to angle their shields at just the right time, or to take the Yuuzhan Vong gunners by surprise. The corvette analog disintegrated bit by bit, slowly at first, then more rapidly, and finally it simply flew apart and became indistinguishable from the dust ring.
Han whistled. “Where were they when the Yuuzhan Vong attacked Ithor? The New Republic could use a few more pilots like those.”
“This one does not think Master Luke would have approved,” Tesar said. “We are given to understand he does not want the Jedi to hunt as soldierz.”
“You’re all Jedi?” Leia asked.
“All of the pilotz, yes.”
The blocky silhouette of a Damorian freighter eclipsed the tiny sun ahead, its glowing ion drives sliding across the cockpit canopy as Han brought the Falcon in behind it. The smaller disk of a YT-1300 appeared below them and a little off to one side, its back painted in a patternless kaleidoscope of the primary colors so favored by the Arcona. The Headhunters were barely visible, a trio of tiny black crosses chasing the bolts of their laser cannons up the Roamer’s half-kilometer hull.
Han spoke over the intercom. “Ladies, we’re counting on you to take out the drive nacelles. Izal, why don’t you handle the tractor beam?”
“On my way.”
The Arcona unbuckled his harness and rose. The mere sight of the massive hull ahead was enough to convince Leia they could not change its vector in time.
“Han,” she said, “this isn’t the way to do it.”
Han half turned in his seat. “I’m listening.”
“Won’t there be an escape hatch above the bridge?”
“Yeah—locked from the inside,” Han said.
“Doesn’t matter,” Leia said. “We have Jedi.”
Han frowned. “The CorDuro crew will be waiting.”
“So?” Tesar asked. “We have Jedi.”
For some reason even Izal Waz did not seem to understand; this sent Tesar into a fit of sissing. Leia waved the back of her fingers at Han.
“We have five minutes,” she said. “I can handle the cofferdam.”
“Four and a half minutes,” Izal Waz corrected, stepping to the back of the flight deck.
“Two will do.” Tesar began to siss again. “We have Jedi.”
“Right.” Han drew his blaster and passed it to Leia. “I just hope we still have Jedi when this is done.”
Leia led the way to the port docking ring, where Bela and Krasov were already waiting in their brown Jedi robes. They were a terrifying contrast to Izal Waz, who if the truth was told, looked rather comical in his ragged flight tabard.
Han set the Falcon on edge and brought it into position over the docking ring. The Roamer attempted to slide out from under them, but Han was too good a pilot to let such a cumbersome ship outmaneuver him. Leia put the cofferdam over the docking ring on the third try, then activated the magnetic clamp and pressurized the passage.
“Three minutes,” Han warned. “If you can’t—”
Tesar opened the hatch—and promptly hissed as a blaster bolt caught him in the shoulder. From her chair, Leia glimpsed a charging crew member in a CorDuro uniform and squeezed off two shots, then the two Hara sisters were leaping through door with lit lightsabers. The human gurgled and thumped to the floor. A pair of blaster rifles opened up from the opposite hatch. The tunnel filled with flashes and hums and zings for about two seconds, then the sounds began to recede as the Barabels carried the battle into the Roamer.
Izal Waz followed, stepping over two bodies in the cofferdam and kicking another out of the way as he boarded the freighter. Tesar was slower to react, pulling the cloth away from his shoulder to reveal the smoking hole and scorched scales beneath.
Leia moved her chair forward. “Tesar, how bad?”
“Bad,” he growled. “My best robe.” He stuck a claw through the hole. “This really burnz me.”
Then, sissing with hilarity, he leapt through the hatch and followed his companions into the Star Roamer.
Leia stared after him in dumbfounded silence. When the hatch at the other end of the cofferdam closed, she sealed the Falcon’s hatch and withdrew the cofferdam, then checked her chronometer.
Two minutes.
She activated the intercom. “Han, we’re clear. Maybe we can buy a little time if we use the—”
“Don’t need to,” Han replied. “The Roamer has cut her throttles and is turning outbound.”
“They’re surrendering?” Leia asked. “Good. Maybe now we can find out who wants me dead.”
“Uh, maybe not,” Han said. “They’re not exactly surrendering.”
“Not exactly surrendering?” Leia double-checked the hatch seal, then started for the main hold. “What are you talking about?”
“Sensors are showing two escape pod deployments.”
“Here?”
Leia reached the main hold and went straight to the engineering station, where she saw the image of two escape pods arcing away from the Star Roamer. At escape pod speeds, it would have taken them over three years to reach the nearest habitable environment. But that was not going to be a problem. From the way it looked to Leia, both pods were already well down the white dwarf’s gravity well.
Izal Waz’s breathless voice came over the speaker. “Star Roamer secure,” he said. “With enough bacta to fill a lake.”
“Izal,” Leia asked, patching through the intercom. “What about the crew?”
“You mean survivors?”
“Yes, survivors,” Leia said.
There was a moment of silence, then Izal Waz’s voice fell to a whisper. “Well, what would you do if you saw three angry Barabels coming your way?”
Chapter 6
Impossible as it was to ignore the stunning cascade of liquid metal outside the transparisteel walls of the Cinnabar Moon Retreat, Han tried. He sat in the natatorium of the abandoned spa the Wild Knights were using as a base, trying to concentrate on the two datapads before him, listening to Leia’s leg braces whir and clunk as she walked circuits around the empty pool. C-3PO was standing behind the covered bar, using a portable HoloNet hookup to access databases across the galaxy and add yet more entries to the catalog Han was studying. It was maddening work, if only because CorDuro had so many employees, and so many of them had at one time or another been affiliated with illicit organizations. Han wondered what his own dossier would have looked like in this light, or even Leia’s. Smugglers, insurrectionists, Hutt-killers . . .
The name of a woman who had once served as a clerk in Thrackan Sal-Solo’s Human League appeared on a display. Han transferred it to the scrutiny list on the second datapad, then used a electronic stylus to bring up the next entry. Somewhere on this list he would find someone who knew Roxi Barl, and that would give him a thread he could follow to the person who wanted his wife dead. Or so he hoped. In the week since their capture of the Star Roamer, it was the best plan they had devised, and time was running out to develop a new one. The Wild Knights had spotted a mysterious task force sniffing around a nearby system; like the flotilla that had jumped the Falcon outside Corellia, this one operated with deactivated transponders and included Lancer-class customs frigates.
