Authors: Troy Denning
“Nice try, Princess,” Darklighter said. As the
Falcon
drew away from the
Mon Mothma
, the comm antenna was able to stay focused in one direction, and the signal grew stable again. “I won’t let you stall your way out of this. You have ten seconds to kill your drives.”
Leia glanced over at Saba. The Barabel was already on the intercom, warning the Noghri to be ready with the repulsor beam again.
“This is about Luke and Han, isn’t it?” Darklighter asked. “They’re still on Woteba. That’s why Chief Omas can’t reach Master Skywalker.”
Apprehension filled the battle-meld. Darklighter’s conjecture had been made over an open fleet channel, so there could be no doubt that it would be on Chief Omas’s desk by this time tomorrow. Returning Luke to Alliance space had just become a bureaucratic race against Chief Omas.
“Commodore Darklighter, can we go to secure channel?” Leia asked. “In private?”
“I’m sorry, no.” Darklighter’s tone was sincere. “This is a matter of record. You have five seconds to kill your drives, Princess.”
“Thank you for the warning, Commodore,” Leia said. “No hard feelings.”
Darklighter’s voice grew genuinely alarmed. “Leia! I can’t protect—”
Leia closed the channel, then slipped the
Falcon
out of her spiral pattern and returned to jinking and juking. It was just as hard for starfighter cannons to target, and she would make a lot more forward progress.
“Jedi Solo?” Saba asked. “What did Commodore Darklighter mean when he said this was a matter of record?”
“Just that he can’t help us, I think,” Leia said. “Admiral Bwua’tu must be aboard.”
“
Nek
Bwua’tu?” Saba growled. “The Bothan who beatz the Thrawn simulator?”
“He
is
in command of the Fifth Fleet,” Leia said. “But it doesn’t matter. They’re bluffing.”
“And if they are not?”
“They
are
,” Leia said. “And, anyway, there’s a big difference between simbattle and the real thing. Don’t worry.”
“This one is curiouz, not worried.” Saba’s tone was even, but her irritation was pouring into the battle-meld. “She is
never
worried.”
“Right—sorry.”
The lock-alarms chimed, and the shield display flared yellow as they took an aft-port laser cannon hit.
“Still bluffing?” Saba asked.
“Yes, Master,” Leia said. “We’re still in one piece, aren’t we?”
An instant later the
Falcon
gave a little jolt as the Noghri activated the repulsor beam, and a string of curses came over the comm scanner as the last pair of XJ3s tumbled away out of control. The battle-meld grew still and electric; the relationship between the Jedi and the Galactic Alliance had just changed in a way no one could foresee.
Leia checked the tactical display. The
Mon Mothma
was bleeding more squadrons into the Choke, while those that had been onstation were moving into screening formations in front of the StealthXs’ last-known position. No one was coming after Leia and Saba, but the combat controllers were being careful to leave a clear firing lane between the Star Destroyer and the
Falcon
.
Mara reached out through the battle-meld, urging Leia and Saba to run for it. The StealthXs would have to hang
back and sneak through later. They would rendezvous at Woteba.
Leia wished her good luck, then the canopy’s blast-tinting went black as the first turbolaser strike blossomed ahead. Her shoulders hit the crash webbing as the
Falcon
bucked through the shock wave, then space around them erupted into exploding clouds of color as the gunnery crews began to refine their targeting.
“Jedi So-o-lo!” Saba’s voice jumped as each shock wave shook the
Falcon
. “Next time, you wi-ill listen to your Maaster!”
“Trust me!” Leia said. “They’re just trying to make us believe they’re serious.”
“They are doing a good job,” Saba said.
Leia swung the
Falcon
toward the blue giant. “We’ll run for the big guy. The EM blast will interfere with their targeting sensors, and the gravity well will give us some acceleration.”
Saba nodded her approval. “Go-od! You have done this before.”
“Only forty or fi-if-ty times.” Silently, Leia added,
Just never without Han
.
The ride smoothed out for a moment as the
Falcon
slipped out from under the Star Destroyer’s firing pattern. The canopy tinting went black as the face of the giant sun slid across the forward viewport, and still its boiling mass shined through the transparisteel, warming their faces and stabbing at their eyes. Their sensors and comm units quickly fell victim to the star’s electromagnetic blast, and even the ship’s internal electronics began to flicker and wave.
Then the
Mon Mothma
’s gunnery crews found them again. A curtain of a turbolaser strikes erupted ahead, circles of red and orange so pale against the star’s glare that they were barely visible. Leia pointed the
Falcon
at the
closest blossom and surrendered her hands to the Force. The shields crackled with crimson energy as they passed through the dissipation turbulence, then the
Falcon
shuddered as they bounced through the shock waves.
The pilot’s console lit up with damage indicators and critical warnings. There were broken seals, leaking ducts, misaligned gyros.
“Will you look at that?” Leia complained. “Han’s going to kill me!”
Another blast bounced them sideways, and Saba said, “This one only hopez we last long enough to give him the chance.”
Judging they had descended about as deep into the star’s gravity well as they dared, Leia pulled up and started around the curve of its massive blue horizon. The
Mon Mothma
continued to pour turbolaser fire in their general direction, but the electromagnetic camouflage had finally confused their targeting sensors, and none of the strikes hit closer than within a kilometer or two of the
Falcon
.
The turbolaser strikes soon faded altogether, and Leia knew they had rounded the horizon and vanished from the
Mon Mothma
’s line of sight. She rolled the cockpit away from the blue giant and started to pull out of its gravity well.
The canopy grew clear enough that the red orb of the blue giant’s tiny satellite star shined through the bottom of the forward viewport. The other binary set, the orange and yellow stars, were shining through top of the canopy, and the blue veil of the Utegetu Nebula was barely visible directly ahead.
Leia glanced down at her tactical display, silently urging the sensors to come online so they could plot their jump to Utegetu. There was no reason to be anxious—neither the
Mon Mothma
nor her fighters could catch the
Falcon
now—but something still felt wrong. She had a cold, queasy feeling in her stomach, and she could not escape the feeling that someone was watching.
“Saba, do you—”
“Yes,” Saba said. “It feelz like we have raced into the shenbit’z den.”
The nacelle temperatures were already 20 percent beyond specification, but Leia grabbed the throttles and began to push them even farther beyond the safety locks … and the
Falcon
decelerated as though it had hit a permacrete wall.
“What the—”
The last of Leia’s exclamation was drowned out by the sudden screeching of proximity alarms and system alerts. The nacelle temperature shot past 140 and started toward 150, and the
Falcon
continued to decelerate.
Leia pulled the throttles back, then activated the intercom. “Cakhmaim, Meewalh, get into the cannon turrets and see—”
“Star Destroyer,” Cakhmaim rasped. The
Falcon
began to slide sideways toward a point between the blue giant and its smaller satellite. “One of the new pirate hunters.”
Leia used the attitude thrusters to spin the
Falcon
around, and saw that they were being drawn toward the distant wedge of a new version of the venerable
Victory
-class Star Destroyer. Mounted on its upper hull, in a turret nearly as large as the bridge itself, was one of the huge asteroid-tug tractor beams that Lando Calrissian had started selling the Defense Force to combat pirates and smugglers.
“Simbattle or not,” Saba rasped, “this one thinkz maybe Admiral Bwua’tu
is
as good as they say.”
Han sat in his new quarters holding the model of the
Millennium Falcon
in his lap, running his thumbs over its silky surface, peering into the dark holes of the cockpit canopy, hefting its substantial weight in his hands. Sure, the workmanship was good, and there was something hypnotic about rubbing your fingers over the spinglass. But he could not imagine where the Squibs were going to sell a billion of these things. The stuff was hardly art—and with the galaxy still struggling to recover from the war against the Yuuzhan Vong, there were only so many people with credits to throw away on kitsch.
Someone
was definitely being played here. But was the Colony playing the Squibs, or the Squibs playing the Colony, or both of them playing someone else?
Luke entered from his quarters, his eyes closed and his hands pressed to the iridescent spinglass, using the Force to search for a stress point in the exterior wall of their two-room prison. He did the same thing every hour or so, stopping in a different place and having R2-D2 use his utility arm to scratch a small x in the hard surface.
A few minutes later, they always heard a crew of Killiks scurrying over the same spot, reinforcing the outside of the wall with more spinglass. The barrier had to be close to a meter thick in places, but Han did not suggest that the xs
were a waste of time. If Luke wanted to mess with Saras’s mind, that was his business.
They both knew that Luke could break them out of their prison anytime he wanted—and Han suspected that Raynar knew it, too. Escape would be the easy part. But it would do them no good until they thought of a way to find the Dark Nest, and so Han and Luke were being patient—being patient and thinking hard and doing their best to look very bored.
Han flipped the model of the
Falcon
over again. There was no shift of weight inside, but that didn’t mean anything. He had known a smuggler once who had molded his entire cargo of contraband explosives into landspeeder dashboards and walked them through Imperial customs with all the proper documentation.
Without opening his eyes, Luke said, “She’s all right, Han.”
“I know she is.” Han put his ear close to the model and shook it, but heard nothing. “I still worry about her. It’s not easy for her to be away from me this long.”
“Is that so?”
“Yeah,” Han said. “She has trouble sleeping if my snoring’s not there to drown out the banging in the climate control lines.”
Luke smiled. “Thanks for clearing that up.” He returned to running his hand over the wall. “I’ve been wondering what she sees in you.”
Though Han had not been dwelling on how much he missed Leia, he saw now that he had been thinking of her without realizing it—that he was
always
thinking of her, half expecting her to be there every time he turned around, imagining her voice in the distance whenever the tunnel-house fell silent, reaching out to her when he rolled over at night. And Luke had
known
all of that was going
on in the back of Han’s mind—just as Han knew that something similar was going on the back of Luke’s.
Han spun around on his stool. “Did you just use a Jedi mind-reading trick on me?”
Luke stopped and looked puzzled. “We can’t really do that, Han.” he said. “Well,
most
of us can’t.”
Without having to ask, Han knew that Luke had been thinking of Jacen when he added that last bit. “I was afraid of that.”
“Afraid of—” Luke stopped, then shook his head. “I don’t think we’re reading each other’s minds, Han. We haven’t been here long enough to become Joiners.”
“Yeah? Then how come
I
know what you want for lunch today?”
“I don’t see how Master Skywalker can be hungry already,” C-3PO said from his place in the corner. “He just had breakfast.”
“Threepio’s right,” Luke said. “It’s too early to think about—”
“A nerfburger and hubba crisps,” Han interrupted. “With a lurol smoothie to wash it down.”
Luke furrowed his brow. “You’re right, that
does
sound good. But I wasn’t thinking about it until you … or was I?”
“It wasn’t me,” Han growled. “I hate hubba crisps.”
Luke’s face fell. “Raynar is trying to make Joiners of us.”
“You think so?”
Luke was so upset that he failed to notice the sarcasm in Han’s voice. “The Dark Nest must think the Colony will be able to dominate me and take control the Jedi order.”
“Dominate
you
, Master Skywalker? Why, that’s a perfectly absurd idea!” C-3PO cocked his head at the look of alarm on Luke’s face. “Isn’t it?”
Instead of answering, Luke went back to searching for
stress points. “They’ve just been playing for time, Han. We’ve got to get out of here.”
Han flipped the model over. “And do what?”
“You know what,” Luke said. Find the Dark Nest.
Han remained on his stool. “How, exactly? The bugs know every move we make. The second we step outside our quarters, Saras is going to come running with about a thousand Killiks—and we don’t have any weapons. We’re better off just waiting until Leia and Mara get back.”
Luke frowned. “Are you feeling all right, Han?”
“Fine,” Han said. Actually, he was feeling great, now that he knew how they were going to find the Dark Nest, but he could not tell that to Luke. The walls had ears—well,
something
did. “Just in no mood to hear any ronto-brained escape plans.”
He rose and went over to the door membrane. It was opaque and bonded shut by some gooey fiber the bugs had spun over the outside, but the spinglass surrounding it was so thin and translucent that Han could see the silhouette of their Saras guard standing watch outside.
He waved an arm to get the guard’s attention. “Hey, open up! I need to talk to you.”