by James Luceno
“Could be better,” Wedge said. “We have the planetoids aimed to keep the process self-sustaining, but we’ve still got who knows how many TIEs out there hitting us whenever we make a move. Our best estimate has periodic windows starting to open within eighteen to twenty hours.”
“That’s not too bad.”
“It’d be better if the star wasn’t gonna start massively flaring in less than three—and we can’t tell exactly when, and we don’t know how massively, there’s no way to reliably predict—and those gravity bombs could still screw it all up.”
“Those gravity bombs,” Lando said slowly. “They have to be coming from somewhere. Otherwise they’d have all burned out or crashed into something by now, right?”
Tycho nodded. “General Solo did say he’d spotted a major installation planetside, sir. In the mouth of a volcano, I think; it was just about the last communication we had from him and Princess Leia before we lost contact.”
“Han and Leia are out of contact planetside?” Lando shook his head disbelievingly. “What are they doing there?”
“Um … they went to rescue General Skywalker. Sir.”
“And what is Luke—ahhh, never mind. I don’t want to know.”
“Master Luke is in danger?” C-3PO sounded horrified. “Oh, General Calrissian, you can’t just leave him—what about Artoo?”
“Nobody’s leaving anybody,” Lando said. “We’re getting scan-bounce from the atmosphere: heavy metals and an intense magfield. What do you have on it?”
Wedge shrugged. “It’s breathable enough, if you don’t mind coughing. But it’s so charged that nothing we’ve got will penetrate very well—you want to really see what’s there, the only way is to go down and have a look.”
“If our scans won’t get through it, it’ll block just about any kind of radiation, right?”
“Well, yeah, but—” Wedge’s frown deepened. “General Calrissian, I have to tell you I don’t much like the direction this conversation’s going. We don’t really know their defenses—General, we don’t even know how many troops they have!”
“Good.”
“Good?”
“Like an old friend of mine says sometimes …” Lando grinned fiercely. “Never tell me the odds.”
Han Solo had never been much in favor of staring into the business end of a blaster’s emitter. Staring into the emitter of his own blaster was no improvement at all. Doing it while he was standing in the cargo hold of his own ship …
He decided not to think about it. Getting crazy wasn’t going to help the situation any.
“Okay,” he said, letting her KYD dangle from his finger through its trigger guard. He threw a Get behind me! glance over his shoulder at Leia, because a whole bunch of the Mindorese in the cargo hold had suddenly produced a whole bunch of hold-out blasters from cavities in their Lava Gear armor. Chewbacca was still on one knee between the two wounded men he’d been treating, but those massive Wookiee hands were becoming massive Wookiee fists, while his massive Wookiee snarl was peeling back around his massive Wookiee fangs, and Han said, “Easy—easy, Chewie. No need for the hard way. We’re gonna do this the easy way, you follow?”
Chewie slowly relaxed and lowered his head, but not until Han saw the gleam of agreement in one bright blue eye.
“On the floor.” Aeona Cantor braced her other hand on her gun wrist to steady Han’s DL-44 straight at his nose. “Now.”
Han sighed. “You picked a lousy time to pirate my ship, lady.”
She shrugged at him. “Is there ever a good time?”
“What do you think you’re gonna do with it?” Han gave her a pitying look. “Where do you think you’re gonna go? Shadowspawn’s got this whole system so loaded with gravity stations that it’ll take you two days to make jump.”
“Didn’t I tell you to get on the floor?”
“Listen to me.” Han took a step toward her. “Those asteroids are about to start falling into the star. Take this ship out of atmosphere and we’ll all roast.”
“Not your problem.” She leveled the BlasTech at Han’s right eye. “Your problem is getting on the floor before I blow your brains all over Princess Kissy-Face.”
“Princess excuse me?” Leia snapped with that instantly dangerous tone Han knew so well. He put out one arm to hold her back but she ducked under it without breaking stride. “You want to put down the blaster and say that again?”
“What is it with you people?” Aeona said. “Get on the floor! Now!”
“I have a better idea.” Han hooked his thumbs behind his belt. “How about instead you give me back my blaster while my partner demonstrates what we mean by the easy way?”
Chewbacca’s demonstration was straightforward. Vast hairy hands shot out, seized the throats of the two irregulars on the deck in front of him, and knocked their heads together briskly, which made a sound very like a very large hollow tok nut landing on a very large hard rock. The two men sagged. Chewbacca didn’t. Instead he simply stood, holding his victims so that they dangled from his fists in front of him and made a pretty efficient shield.
“They’re still alive, so far. That’s what easy way translates to in Shyriiwook,” Han informed Aeona helpfully. “And before you get any ideas about trick shots, you should know he gets a little excited when people start shooting—and then people’s heads tend to pop right off their necks. Makes a heckuva mess. Now, you want to hand over my blaster, or should we start a pickup game of borgleball with your friends’ skulls?”
The blaster in her hand had never wavered. “Maybe I’ll just shoot you, instead.”
Han shrugged. “Knock yourself out.”
She yanked the trigger, and its dry click elicited from her an incomprehensible snarl that Han confidently interpreted as some sort of obscenity. He turned over his left hand to reveal the BlasTech’s power cell that he’d kept tucked in his palm. “Think I’m gonna hand over a charged weapon? To you?”
Her next comprehensible utterance was a shrill shriek of “Take them!” as she hurled Han’s blaster at his head and charged with her hands outstretched as if she wanted to rip his face off with her fingers.
Han snagged his blaster neatly out the air, thumbed open the charge compartment, and had the power cell back in place before she made three steps, though this was due less to superb reflexes on his part than to the fact that by the time Aeona had taken her second step, Leia had jumped forward and kicked the other woman’s legs out from under her, dropping her in a face-first flat-cake, then jumped on her back and pounded her head into the deck.
About this time, a preposterous number of blaster bolts began zinging through the cargo hold more or less at random, as pretty much all the irregulars with the little hold-out blasters had opened up at once, filling the air with a lethal red storm of plasma packets.
The main reason these bolts flew at random—instead of, say, detonating inside the flesh of Han, Leia, and Chewbacca—was that the Wookiee, with his customarily unsubtle approach to combat, had simply hurled both unconscious men bodily into the mass, then charged in himself right behind them, on the personal conviction, acquired over years in Han Solo’s company, that when you’re caught unarmed in a firefight, the safest place to be is right in the middle of the bad guys.
This was only partially because they couldn’t fire on him without risking shooting their friends. Mainly, it was because—as the Mindorese discovered, to their considerable dismay—once one gets within reach, there is no such thing as an unarmed Wookiee.
Han got his blaster primed and snapped off a burst at a couple of Mindorese who’d had the bright idea to aim high, thinking to blast Chewie over their friends’ heads. One ducked and darted away, but the other caught Han’s bolt square in his chest; the blast of the impact sent him toppling backward, but the spreading cloud of reddish-black smoke coming from his armor reminded Han of what Leia had said about that flippin’ Lava Gear armor of theirs.
Now that he’d thought of it, the air in the hold was g
etting distinctly thick with smoke and dust, stinging his eyes and rasping his throat as Mindorese armor absorbed ricochets from bulkheads and deck and ceiling, which reminded him of which three people in that hold weren’t wearing tough armor made of the local lava. An estimate of how long his, Leia’s, and Chewie’s luck could conceivably last before one of those stray bolts blew off an irreplaceable piece or two of their respective anatomies made the decision for him in an instant.
He whirled and put a blaster bolt into the cargo-ramp release. The panel exploded into sparks and smoke and the ramp began to descend. Leia was still kneeling on Aeona’s back with a fist tangled in her long red hair, holding her to the deck.
“Hey!” Han leapt over and grabbed her shoulder. He had to shout over the blasterfire and the ear-shattering whoops of Chewbacca’s war howl. “Playtime’s over! We gotta go!”
Leia looked up at him with a fierce grin, sparkling eyes, and high color blazing on her cheeks, and Han thought again, for the tenth or hundredth—maybe thousandth—time, that the Princess of Alderaan really was never more beautiful than when she was knocking the Sithspit out of somebody.
She leapt to her feet. “Where’s Artoo? We can’t leave him!”
“I’ll get the droid! Just go!”
“One second—”
She dropped back to one knee and snatched Aeona’s KYD-21 from the deck where Han had let it fall. Han covered her with a barrage of marginally aimed fire, blasting more and more armor smoke off every irregular he could spot in the thickening haze, while she rifled the semiconscious woman’s pockets and came up with the KYD’s power cell. “My turn!”
From one knee, she started snapping off shots into the fringes of the melee, in the middle of which a joyously berserk Wookiee was now swinging a Mindorese by the ankles, using him as a human club to batter others in all directions. “Go get Chewie!”
Han flashed her a grateful glance and charged into the thick of the fight. Leia started backing down the open ramp, still firing. Han lowered his shoulder and just dewbacked his way in, shoving and kicking and smacking a couple of guys with his blaster until he was close enough to Chewbacca that he had to duck to keep the Wookiee from flattening him with his club of unconscious Mindorese. He caught Chewie’s arm, and the battle-maddened Wookiee roared and tried to backhand Han away. Han didn’t take it personally; he just hung on and rode Chewie’s arm while he shouted, “Chewie, it’s me! Code Black, Chewie—you understand? Code Black!”
Chewbacca blinked down at him, and Han watched comprehension snap into those blue eyes. The next flick of those eyes instantly took in the situation, which had actually gotten worse as Chewbacca had battered down man after man; the more Mindorese who went down, the less there were to get in each other’s way—and now a couple of Big Brains among them had remembered the pile of weapons in the number-six hopper and were in the process of digging out blaster carbines, which meant that this situation, already ugly as a drunken monkey-lizard, was about to escalate all the way to Naked Gamorrean.
“Harrraroufgh!” Chewie said, and Han let go of his arm. The Wookiee hoisted the unconscious Mindorese over his head and hurled him into the two guys over by the hopper, then howled to Han his complete agreement with the idea of Code Blacking out of there while they still could. He whipped one vast hairy arm around Han’s waist, yanked him off the ground, and charged for the ramp as if Han were a borgleball and Chewbacca was running him in for the game-winning goal.
“Artoo!” Han shouted, still firing back past the Wookiee’s shoulder. “Where’s that flippin’ droid?”
An instant later, Han spotted the astromech, standing at the ramp-release panel Han had blasted, a manipulator arm and a data socket both shoved into the sparks and smoke sputtering out from the shattered electronics. “Hey, Stubby!” Han yelled. “Now is not the time for field repairs!”
R2-D2’s tootled reply sounded distinctly sarcastic, and when Chewie carried Han past to the ramp, the little droid retracted his tools and whirred along behind just as fast as his locomotor treads would carry him. Leia knelt at the base of the ramp, pouring fire up into the hold without bothering to aim, trusting that the ricochets would cause enough havoc to keep Mindorese heads down.
“Drop me and go get Artoo!” Han shouted, and Chewbacca complied with such unexpected alacrity that Han landed hard on that already-bruised portion of his anatomy. He scrambled to Leia’s side, adding his blasterfire to hers as Chewbacca sprang back up the ramp far enough to seize the droid. R2 squealed as Chewie lifted him; then the Wookiee spun and raced back down for the cavern through a buzzing hailstorm of energy bolts—some of which were now the thick, stretching smears of rifle blasts.
“Fall back!” Han told Leia. “Follow Chewie—I’ll hold ’em here!” Not for long, he thought, but he might be able to buy her a chance to get away.
“I’m not leaving you!” Leia said, still firing. “We go together or not at all!”
“Oh, for the love of—what happened to You’re the captain, Captain?”
“Things change,” Leia said, just before a random bolt clipped her shoulder and knocked her spinning to the cavern floor, which decided the issue, because Han leapt to her side, swept her up in his arms, and—despite her irritable insistence that “I’m fine, Han! It’s barely even a scratch!”—carried her at a dead run toward the mouth of the tunnel where Chewbacca and R2-D2 stood waiting.
“What’s the matter with you idiots?” Han cried at them. “Keep running!”
Chewie replied with a gruff “Hrrowrrh,” which was when Han realized the droid had extended his little parabolic antenna through a hatch in his dome and was now chirruping something that sounded less like his usual attempts at human communication, and more like the feedback from a high-speed electronic encryption protocol. Han skidded to a stop and looked over his shoulder.
Instead of what he expected to see—a flood of heavily armed irregulars streaming down the cargo ramp with rifles blazing—he found instead a narrowing aperture leaking smoke, artificial light, and the occasional badly aimed blaster bolt as the cargo ramp swung closed and latched itself in place.
Han blinked down at R2-D2. “Did you do that?”
The astromech rocked on his locomotors. Bee-woop!
“Not bad, Stubby—can you shut down the engines? Lock out the controls? Anything?”
Tyreepeep loo toooeee wrp! was the droid’s replay, which Han took to mean something along the lines of Maybe if you’d given me a chance to work it a little …
“Han?” Leia said. “Han, it’ll be all right. We’ll get the Falcon back.”
He didn’t hear her. He couldn’t hear her. He could only stand with her in his arms and watch.
Watch as somebody got the Falcon’s repulsorlifts engaged and lit the sublight thrusters. Watch as his ship slowly lifted from the cavern floor and rotated toward the way out. Watch as a flare from the sublights kicked his ship from the cavern.
Watch as his departing ship ripped open his chest, snatched out his heart, and took it along.
He set Leia on her feet. She stayed close against his chest and slid one arm up around his neck. “Han?”
He didn’t react. He only stood staring at the cavern’s empty mouth.
Chewbacca stepped over and draped a hand over Leia’s shoulder. “Rowowr,” he said softly. She nodded and let Han go, then followed Chewie and R2-D2 a little way off into the tunnel.
Han stood there for a long time, with an icy fist clenched inside his chest where his heart should be.
Finally, he took one deep breath and released a long, long sigh.
“Well, that could have gone better,” he said, and turned to follow his friends.
Starfighters filled space around the Remember Alderaan, streaking and looping and whirling so fast that in visible light they became mere smears of motion; even the cruiser’s sensor suite could distinguish friend from foe only belatedly, and by ratios of probability rather than certainty. The battle seemed to intensify by an ord
er of magnitude with every light-second closer to the planet the cruiser moved.
Lando stood at the bridge’s forward viewscreens, hands folded behind him, his face entirely blank, expressionless—only the quick flicker of his eyes from starfighters to cruisers and back again betrayed the level of his concentration. Fenn Shysa had been pacing the deck behind him, faster and faster, becoming more and more agitated as starfighter after starfighter exploded, so many now that hurtling debris from their destructions had overloaded the Alderaan’s particle shields and now rattled the hull and starred cracks into the transparisteel viewports.
Finally Shysa couldn’t take it anymore. “Lando—General Calrissian—we can’t just stand here!”
“I’m standing,” Lando said. “You’re pacing.”
“I have to scramble my men. We should be out there!”
“You can join the battle if you feel that’s best; I’m the last man in the galaxy who’d presume to give orders to Lord Mandalore. But the commandos aren’t your men. Not right now, anyway. They work for me.”
“But—but—” At a loss for words, Shysa could only wave expressively at the battle outside. “We’re cut off already—they’re gonna pin us against the planet—”
Lando turned to him with, astonishingly, a broad smile on his face. “You think?”
“General!” the ComOps officer interrupted, staring into his screen. “We have visual verification—a substantial mass of asteroids inbound for the star. Coronal entry in … three minutes, sir!”
Lando nodded. “Flare activity?”
“Already begun, sir—sensor analysis indicates that we’re about twelve minutes away from a spike in intensity high enough to take down every deflector shield in the system. Then we’ll have maybe an hour, probably less, before we’re all cooked …”
“Okay, you heard the man,” Lando said generally. “Send out an all-ships: disengage and make for Mindor’s nightside, then launch escape pods. Tell the Rogues to take two more squadrons and cover the pods—”