by James Luceno
The X-wing’s layered S-foils were closed now, giving it the appearance of a two-winged starfighter. Luke did a quick check of all systems, then called back to Mara, offering the coordinates for his run.
Then he put it straight for the Helskan sun, as they had agreed.
“You got that planet tracked?” he asked R2-D2.
The droid’s replying whistles seemed as much annoyed as affirmative, and Luke, despite his fears, managed a grin.
“Let me know when you’re getting too hot,” he said, and he opened up the throttle a bit more, his speed mounting, as well, from the gravitational tug of the flaring sun.
Luke felt the press on his chest and dialed up the inertial compensator to 99 percent. In his screen, the sun grew and grew, but he knew what he was doing, and held complete faith in R2-D2’s navigational abilities.
As they neared, the hull temperature and R2-D2’s complaints both beginning to rise dramatically, Luke veered to the right and cut around the sun in close orbit, then vectored out at tremendous speed along R2-D2’s designated coordinates, a nearly straight line toward the fourth planet, and one that would keep the sun right at the X-wing’s back all the way. If there were any enemies on the fourth planet, they might not detect his approach right away—and that approach, given the tremendous boost in speed afforded them by the sun’s gravity, would be fast.
In just a few moments, Luke spotted the planet, growing from a speck, to fist-sized, to fill his viewscreen. He scissored the wings and broke right again, whipping into orbit, dropping down, down, to where he could visually examine the icy planet’s surface.
He felt it all around him: an energy field. He could feel the tingles in the roots of his hair, could hear them in the crackles over his comm system, and could see them in the fuzzy lines breaking across all of his instrumentation panels.
R2-D2 whistled something out at him, but that sound, too, broke up among the energy interference.
Luke shut down most of his instruments, flying on eyes and instinct, and went down even more. He had already completed his first full orbit, but his speed was decreasing fast, and so this second round promised to reveal more to him.
“Luke,” came a crackle, Mara’s voice. She continued to talk, but only a few words came through. “There’s … back side … dots.”
“Play it back internally,” he instructed R2-D2. “Filter out the static and try to figure out what she’s saying.”
He brought the X-wing down even lower, skimming the surface, using his eyes and his mind to try and figure out what might be going on here. Something was definitely amiss, he knew, he sensed. Some nagging feeling of danger.
And then it hit him, a sudden jolt that dipped the nose of his X-wing and dragged the ship as if he had suddenly entered water.
Behind him, R2-D2 shrieked, and all the rest of Luke’s instruments, particularly his navigational assist controls, just shut down.
And the icy, barren surface seemed to be rising up to meet him.
They limped away from Sernpidal, a line of freighters and shuttles and every other type of ship as could be found on the Outer Rim, a line of bedraggled, horrified refugees, of men and women who had just seen their homes destroyed, of men and women who had just lost family and friends to a tragedy so inexplicable and devastating that they simply could not even begin to make any sense out of it.
Behind them, Sernpidal, a spinning dead sphere, its atmosphere torn away, continued its orbit, an altered course now for the power of the impact and the huge cloud on one side of the planet, a clear bruise.
Sernpidal was a dead thing, oblivious to the pain and the destruction. It would go on through the eons, devoid of life.
Han Solo stared at the wobbling planet for a long, long time, his eyes registering the truth that his heart could not.
“We’ve got a hundred and eleven ships in the convoy,” Anakin said, coming up behind his father nervously, not really knowing what to say or do, whether to hug Han or run away from him.
Han turned to face his young son, his face blank as if he had not heard.
“A hundred and ele—” Anakin started to reiterate.
“You left him,” Han said quietly, calmly. The accusation hit Anakin as hard as any punch ever could.
Anakin stuttered over several replies; he wanted to shout out at his father for even saying such a thing. He had saved the Millennium Falcon and the scores of people crammed aboard her. “We had to get out of there,” he finally managed to reply. “The moon was coming down—”
“You left him,” Han said again, more sharply.
Anakin swallowed hard in the face of that glare. He had been given no choice on Sernpidal, he reminded himself, and surely his father had to know that logically. They were too far from Chewie, with the moon too close and falling fast. They could not possibly have reached Chewie and gotten him aboard. Anakin wanted to say all of that, wanted to rush back and get the logs of the incident, certain that they would back up his reasoning.
But he couldn’t. He couldn’t give any answer at all, other than to stare helplessly against the reality of the most despairing, empty expression he had ever seen on the face of his father. Always his father had been his hero, the great Han Solo. Always his father had been his strength and his answer.
And now …
Now the great Han Solo seemed a pitiful, broken thing, an empty shell.
“You left him,” Han said again, and though his tone had gone back to quiet and calm, this third time he uttered the accusation, with the element of surprise gone, it cut Anakin even more deeply. “You turned and ran away while Chewie stood his ground and died.”
“I couldn’t—” Anakin started to reply, and he was biting his lip now and blinking back the tears.
“Chewie, who had just done everything to save you,” Han said with a growl, poking his finger into Anakin’s chest. “You left him!”
Anakin turned and ran off.
Han looked all around, as if conscious only then of the fact that a dozen sets of eyes had been on him and his son the whole time.
Offering nothing more than a scowl in explanation, he stormed back to the Falcon’s bridge and took his seat.
How alone he felt when he turned and saw the empty seat beside him.
“Artoo, what is it?” Luke cried, his X-wing spiraling down. But the droid had no answers. Luke flipped the sensors back on, but neither a tractor beam nor a possible power source registered.
Luke found a level of calm and clearheadedness, calculating the time he had left. Mara’s frantic voice came over the communicator, but it was too broken up and Luke just shut the thing down. He noted a lump on the planet’s otherwise smooth surface, but he had no time to investigate further.
He turned the X-wing up and put out full throttle, going head-on against the pull, more to try and determine the strength of the beam than with any hopes of breaking away from it. To his surprise, he did make some progress.
“Put the shields up full,” Luke ordered R2-D2 as soon as he understood that he could not hope to break free with pure power.
The shields went up and were almost instantly torn away—but in that moment, as if the beam had suddenly focused just on the shields and not on the X-wing, Luke’s ship shot up. But not out—the beam was back on it in a moment, grabbing hard, and the energy cost of bringing up those shields had been taxing on the drives, so much so that Luke quickly deduced that he dared try that tactic only one more time.
But now he had a plan.
With R2-D2 shrieking in protest, Luke turned the X-wing about, nose down, and kept the throttle hot. The planet rushed up to swallow them.
“Ready the shields,” Luke instructed the droid.
R2-D2 beeped and whined in protest.
“Just do it,” Luke said. He searched for the source, but could see nothing, could read nothing on his instruments. He could tell where it was, though, for it was obviously pulling him straight in. He backed off the throttle suddenly, reversing engines, h
oping the abrupt change would buy him enough time, and he emptied his three banks of three proton torpedoes. Nine missiles swooped down ahead of him.
They hit the ice pack hard, one after another, and with the X-wing rushing right behind.
“Shields now!” Luke cried, and he pulled hard, leveling out of the stoop and punching his throttle out full.
The X-wing shuddered from the concussions of the torpedo blasts, from the tractor beam ripping the shields away yet again, but Luke was betting that the beam was concentrated, and he was right, for the ship rushed out of the pull, breaking clear and running away, barely twenty meters above the icy surface.
“Check the damage,” Luke ordered. He banked around, giving the area of devastation a wide berth in case the source of that devilish beam remained, and headed for the mound he had spotted.
He knew instinctively that this was no normal mountain, and when he looked deeper with his insight, he hit a wall, an empty space in the Force.
Luke clicked on the communicator in the hopes that Mara, from her high vantage point, might give him some insight, but then he saw the planetary rim beyond the structure come alive with buzzing specks that could only be ships.
He zoomed in at the mound and turned to go about it, firing his repulsors to get a jump away from it. He turned, turned, the g’s pressing his face to the side, 180 about and then up, and at full throttle. That’s when he first understood the toll his evasive maneuver from the tractor beam had taken. His right drive sputtered and died, and when he tried to close his wings again for deep space flight, he found them locked into position.
And the specks appeared larger now, closing fast, and Luke was out of torpedoes.
* * *
I’m going back, Han told himself. Chewie found a way to get off planet.
Logically, it seemed impossible. Han had seen the Wookiee standing resolute, the moon descending, and there was no doubt that Sernpidal itself had died only a moment later.
But logic could not play here, in Han’s emotional turmoil. Chewie had escaped, somehow, he told himself repeatedly, and so he believed.
He called to the next ship in the long line, a freighter, and offered the coordinates for Dubrillion, then he brought the Falcon about hard, turning back for Sernpidal, turning back for Chewie.
“… need help!” came a distress call, screaming across all channels from one of the convoy ships before Han had gone halfway through the maneuver. “Now!” the ship’s pilot called out. “They’re coming through! Giant bugs!”
Han grumbled and muttered a stream of curses, but he could not ignore that call, and so he brought up the coordinates of the call and put the Falcon on course for the hailing ship, a shuttle far back in the line and off to the side.
“Insects,” he muttered sarcastically, but even as he said the word, his skepticism faded in the face of what his eyes were plainly showing him.
Insects. Large ones, huge turfhopper creatures, boring through the titanium-alloy hull of the shuttle as easily as if it was soft dirt.
“Breach! Breach!” came the desperate cry from the ship.
Han brought the Falcon in fast, and brought his shields up to full, and even cranked off a shot with his forward laser cannon, blasting one hovering insect into a million pieces. But there was little he could do for the doomed shuttle. He saw a pair of insects boring into the ion drives, and tried to call out a warning to evacuate.
All that came back were sounds and cries of battle joined within the shuttle’s hull.
And then … the shuttle exploded, disappearing in a blaze of sparks and a puff of flame.
Han flew the Falcon all about the area, seeking any remaining enemies. He called to the convoy and set up an open line of communication, a calling tree, so that every ship remained in constant contact with at least two others. He ordered them to close ranks, and moved them along with all speed, as fast as the slowest ship in the line could go.
Then he had to decide. His heart longed for Sernpidal, for Chewbacca, but how could he abandon these helpless people now, with some strange enemy apparently in the region?
Han’s instruments noted another ship a long way off and not moving very quickly. It was too far for him to get any identification, type, or call signal. Figuring that if he could see it, then it certainly could see the convoy, he opened a channel to it, calling out.
No response.
Han called again, then put his communicator through a search of all frequencies.
“Kyp … damage … aid,” came the call back.
Han answered, guessing from the familiar ring of the voice that it had come from Kyp Durron, and the same message played back to him again, and again. It had been recorded and put on automatic send, he understood, and he feared that Kyp Durron might be already dead.
Han called to the lead ship in the convoy. “You got that ship on your instruments?”
“That’s affirmative,” came the reply. “And we’re picking up a distress call, probably automated.”
“Yeah, I got it, too,” Han said. “You keep your line and your course. Get some of the quicker ships running a watch line along both flanks. Bug things.”
“Is that what got the Juliupper?” came the reply, referring to the shuttle that had just exploded.
“Bug things,” Han said again. “I’m going out to that other ship—I think it’s a friend of mine. You hold the line and I’ll be back soon enough.”
He clicked off the external communicator, then, after a moment’s pause, turned on the ship’s internal intercom. He sat staring at it for a long, long while, then blew a sigh. “Anakin,” he called. “I could use a copilot up here.”
A few moments later, his son walked tentatively into the control room and quietly slipped into the seat beside him.
“We’ve got a distress call,” Han explained, his tone cold and calm, offering no clue if any forgiveness was being extended, or if the interaction was just pragmatism. “I think it’s Kyp. Got himself into some kind of trouble. Maybe with the bug things.”
Anakin looked at him quizzically.
“If you’d been up here, you’d have seen them,” Han replied, his words as much as his tone reminding his son that his childish tantrum had cost the Falcon a copilot for the last hour.
Anakin wanted to yell back, to tell his father again that he had flown off Sernpidal to save the Falcon, that they had run out of time, that there was nothing they could have done to save Chewbacca. Even to determined Anakin, those words seemed hollow indeed in light of the reality, in light of the fact that Chewie was gone, was dead, and that the Wookiee had died saving him.
The burden of that awful truth bowed the boy’s head.
It didn’t take Luke very long to determine that the approaching flight of these strange-looking starfighters were enemies. They came at him hot and angry, firing small, molten projectiles.
Luke didn’t have any shields.
He dived and rolled, went into a loop, but broke out of it before he had gone halfway through it, recognizing that any predictable course would get him blown to pieces.
Sure enough, as he barrel-rolled out of the loop, a swarm of projectiles flashed past, intercepting his previous course.
Luke leveled out, R2-D2 screaming behind him, all four of his laser cannons firing away. He didn’t score a hit on any enemy ship, but his volley took out a line of projectiles flying his way. Still, a couple got through, and Luke had to put the X-wing into a snap turn to the right, and then another immediately after it. He wasn’t sure the ship could even take this beating, and R2-D2’s cries indicated that the droid might not survive the jostling, either.
He executed a third snap turn and broke out of it back to the left, locking fast on two enemy ships along the same line and firing away, blowing the first into bits and then pounding through to take a huge chunk off the second, sending it spinning away.
Luke sensed the danger from the side and behind, and went through the only open avenue, back to the right yet again,
punching the X-wing to full throttle.
The remaining ion drive screeched in protest and could not deliver the full desired thrust.
Luke was running, but the enemies were catching him, closing in from all sides.
“It is Kyp,” Han noted as the familiar, and obviously wounded, XJ X-wing came into clearer view. “Oh, no,” he added, for the instruments were screaming at them, and a glance to the side told him why.
A swarm of insects, zooming in for the X-wing and for the Falcon.
“They baited us,” Han insisted. “They used Kyp to lure us in.”
“You think they’re intelligent?” Anakin asked skeptically.
“I think it worked,” was all that Han replied. “Get ready for some hot flying, kid!”
Anakin set to work with his instruments.
“Get to the top guns,” Han instructed, referring to the pod of quad laser cannons atop the Millennium Falcon. The old ship had two such pods, one above and one below, along with a single gun on the front that could be controlled from the cockpit.
As he started to rise, Anakin heard his father quietly add, “Be alive, Kyp.”
Anakin rushed out into the hall, around the corner. He had to push several people out of the way to get to the gunnery seat—he thought of asking if anyone else knew how to operate cannons, so he could send them to the second pod down below. But he quickly reversed his thinking. If his father wanted someone else on the other guns, his father would make the request.
He scrambled up the ladder and squeezed in, settling and strapping into the swiveling chair, feeling the trigger and stick in each hand. Anakin loved this place, considering the fast swiveling chair and the thumping guns as a test of his reaction and skill, and even more than that, given the speed of targets, a test of his intuition, his bond with the Force. Now he had a chance to use the guns in a real setting, and despite the very real danger, he could not deny his excitement.
That feeling didn’t last long, though, not with the events of Sernpidal so pressing on his thoughts.