“Oh no you don’t,” Han muttered, shoving the engines into high gear and blasting forward as the trash around them disintegrated into smoke. “Good looking, Peekpa. That maneuver got us off to the side enough that Gor had to ignite his engines a few seconds before he could attack. Saved our asses.”
They hurtled through the debris, Han dipping and spinning the craft to avoid the larger shards and smashing directly through the smaller ones. The Vermillion fell into a hard dive behind them, lighting up the Remnants with another barrage of laser fire.
“Hold on tight,” Han warned. “This ain’t gonna be pretty.”
Debris exploded around them. The Chevalier rumbled as a few shots lit up its tail end and then Han gunned it, blowing past the smoking wreckages directly into a smoky cloud and out the other side as more fire rained down from the Vermillion.
“Kinda wish Taka hadn’t been so good at arming that thing, in retrospect,” Han grumbled.
“We need a plan,” Lando said. “We can’t keep running like this.”
“Speak for yourself,” Han snorted, pulling them down below the lines of debris and into a more open area between ice asteroids. “I could do this all day.”
Two proton torpedoes blitzed out of the Vermillion and flashed toward them. “Incoming,” Lando advised as the sensor screen lit up with warning messages.
“I see ’em, I see ’em.” Han pulled into a tight upward swing, sliding between two charred transport frames. One of the torpedoes smashed into an ice asteroid, scattering it into an explosion of dust. The other was tight on their tail.
“Like I said,” Lando growled.
“Peekpa,” Han said, leveling them out suddenly and then breaking to the right. “Can you slice into the Vermillion? Is that how you found them before?”
Peekpa nodded excitedly but then waved to get Han to look at her.
“What is it?”
She extended her arms all the way to either side. “Feeba? Chudo ba.” The Ewok shook her head sadly. Then she brought her little furry paws closer together and nodded with enthusiasm. “Kala kala? Shakti bata!”
Lando looked at Han. “Guess you gotta get us closer.” He winked. “Want me to drive?”
“Not a chance,” Han said. “But I do want you to suit up in case Peekpa’s slice can’t get through and you have a chance to make it on board.”
Peekpa snorted something and shook her head, but kept typing away on her datapad.
“Read my mind,” Lando said, already making his way out the door.
“Stay ready,” Han said.
“Clear skies.”
HAN SPUN THE CHEVALIER INTO a wide spiral, weaving in and out of the junk field. The torpedo smashed into a fluid converter off to the side, splattering the windscreen with smoke and debris. “Get ready, Peekpa,” Han said. “You’re not gonna have much time, the way this guy’s guns are blazing.”
“Cheeba,” Peekpa said haughtily.
“Fair enough.” What the Chevalier lacked in weaponry, it made up for in kick, Han had to admit. They sailed in a high arc above the Vermillion, easily evading Gor’s splatter attack of ion fire, and looped around behind it.
Before the Vermillion could spin to face them, Han had slid beneath it and then shot up again, only catching a scattering of shots across his wings.
Peekpa was muttering to herself, chewing on something, and clacking away in a fury.
“You’re hungry?” Han yelled, banking left to avoid a spinning ice shard and then pulling up behind it for cover as more fire burst past from the Vermillion.
Peekpa muttered something rude, he was pretty sure of it. But then she yelled frantically, moving her hands closer and closer together in front of his face again.
“All right, all right,” Han said, zipping out from behind the asteroid and immediately getting smacked full-on by a raging thunderblast of laserfire. The Chevalier shuddered and groaned. “But we can’t take much more of this, so…”
Peekpa’s datapad shrieked excitedly and so did Peekpa.
“Oh?”
The Ewok whacked Han’s shoulder and opened and closed her paws in his face.
“Ow! What?” The ship rumbled again as more lasers battered them.
“Freebee toosasno! Freebee toosasno!”
Han turned back to the steering wheel and shoved the Chevalier out of the way as a torpedo slung past. “One of us is going to have to learn to speak the other’s language, Peekpa, because—”
“Frizkrit!” Peekpa snorted, rolling her eyes. She slammed her paw on the comm button. The firing from the Vermillion stopped.
“You hailed him?” Han gawked.
Peekpa scooted down to the floor with her back to the console and started typing away on her datapad and crunching something.
Fyzen Gor’s flickering image appeared in front of Han. His already narrow face was framed by that dark-green cowl, and Han recognized the dim glint from the transparent guard of his oxygen helmet. The Pau’an leaned forward, black eyes squinting.
“You…” Gor seethed.
“I get that reaction a lot actually,” Han admitted.
“The silly little smuggler from Freerago’s.”
“I get that one, too, to be honest.”
Gor sat back, satisfied. “You have aged very poorly, human.”
“And you still look like an emaciated stick of cheese that someone shoved rat teeth into and left out in the sun to rot.”
“It couldn’t have been you whom I had the run-in with in these very Remnants two years before that night at Freerago’s, could it? That opponent seemed more…worthy, somehow.”
“Now you’re just being rude.”
“Why have you hailed me?”
That was a great question. Han nudged Peekpa with his boot, because whatever it was she was trying to do, she’d better do it soon. She swatted him and kept typing. Probably for the best. “Well,” Han said.
“Did you wish to witness the face of the one who is about to send you to your fiery death and bring a new order to the galaxy?”
“Funny you should mention that,” Han said, grateful for the encouragement. “I was wondering what exactly the deal is with this whole droid apocalypse you and your little buddies keep going on about.”
“Ah…”
“We visited that quaint mountainside resort you’ve got, and I gotta be honest with ya—”
“Freema freema,” the staticky sound system suddenly blared into Han’s ears. “Bara bara freema freema!” At first, he thought Taka had sneaked aboard the Chevalier; then he realized Gor was cringing and frantically pushing buttons on his console.
“What is this?” Gor yelled.
“Freema leema chucka chucka freema bola freema!”
“Wait.” Han got real close to the comm to make sure his voice came through clearly. “Are you trying to tell me you’ve never heard of Snograth and the Mogwars?”
Peekpa was still typing, paying no mind to the music. Which meant she was working on something else entirely. And that meant that somewhere in that ship, Taka was alive and messing with Gor. Han felt suddenly lighter, as if he’d been carrying around a whole space station’s worth of worry on his back since the Vermillion had gone missing, and now at least some of it had drifted off into the atmosphere.
“Chucka freema sava bola bola freema freema!”
“Turn this infernal noise off!” Gor yelled as Han danced a little jig to the thrashing riffs and manic screams.
“Faka deebo lub lub!” Peekpa yelled, and pushed a button. Han looked down at her. He’d never realized the extent to which Ewoks could smile until that moment; usually their little mouths were kind of lost under all that bushy fur. Peekpa’s stretched wide, her pearly teeth glinting out at him.
“Freema bara freema chucka freema bata freema freema!”
&n
bsp; “What did you—?”
She pointed out at the Vermillion just as Gor yelled something unintelligible. The lid of the cockpit sprang open and the ship itself seemed to hock him out like a giant Pau’an snotball. Han opened fire, but Gor had already slung a scatterblaster out from over his shoulder and was spraying the damaged Chevalier.
Han swung them out of the way, his own shots going wide and destroying a passing moon remnant instead.
And then Gor was gone.
“Dammit,” Han muttered, accelerating toward the Vermillion. “And nice work, Peekpa!” He reached down, not taking his eyes off the empty space where Gor had just been, and high-fived the Ewok.
“Han!” Lando said over the comm. He sounded out of breath. “Get to the Vermillion and make sure the others are okay. I’m going after him!”
“Copy, Lando,” Han said. “Be careful out there.”
He watched as Lando’s space-suited form burst out from the Chevalier and jetted after Gor into the Mesulan Remnants.
SILENCE.
The galaxy felt so huge, and Lando felt so very tiny within it. There was nothing like floating out in the empty with only a couple of layers of superstretch durafiber, a jetpack, and an oxygen helmet to make you miss being nestled in the gentle womb of a thousand tons of steel and ion shields.
Some distant sun swung slightly higher in its infinite cycle, sent a dazzling splash of illumination dancing across the tops of slowly turning ice asteroids all around him. Beyond the Remnants, a nebula shifted and writhed in its slow-motion space waltz. In systems all across the galaxy, droids went about their business with the organics who trusted them, yet at any moment they could be transformed into psychotic murder-bent war machines.
Blaster rifle primed and steady in his hands, Lando let his jetpack thrusters simmer to a low burn as he came up on the shadowy side of an ice asteroid. Gor had blasted off between this one and the one spinning nearby, and then he’d vanished.
Which meant he was probably lying in wait somewhere. Lando had a dagger strapped to his boot, a second blaster on his hip, and a whole clip of detonators clipped to his belt. He would end Gor and end this mess, destroy the damn Phylanx and be free of this whole situation for good.
But first he had to find Gor before Gor found him.
“So,” a raspy voice whispered into his comm. “You have done as I asked, Mr. Calrissian. And I expressed my gratitude by letting you walk away from the Gravan Monastery in one piece.”
Lando glanced out into the Remnants, saw nothing, ducked back into the shadows. “Yeah,” he said, trying not to sound out of breath. “That was awful nice of you.”
“And yet you repay me with this? Charging after me like a crazed maniac with your scruffy maniac friend?”
Lando chuckled and shook his head. “Did you really think, Fyzen Gor, that I was going to just roll over and let you turn a bunch of droids into killers? Did I seem like that kind of guy?”
“I thought you might, to be honest,” Gor hissed. “But since I wasn’t sure, I did take precautions.”
Lando edged around the side of the asteroid, rifle-first. A series of shots blasted the wall beside him and he ducked back behind the cover.
“Oh, and another thing,” Gor said. “As you know, I paid a visit to your little floating city on Bespin…”
“That was you,” Lando growled, making his way around to the other side. “Not some droid.” He pushed off the ice wall and ignited his jetpack, blasting into a hard-driving rush toward the next asteroid and letting off a spray of shots as he went.
Something flickered off to the side. A tall figure stood on a floating chunk of metal. Lando caught only a glimpse before Gor let off shot after shot from his two hand cannons. And then Lando was safe behind the next asteroid and panting.
“Fast,” Gor commented wryly. “Anyway, I’m sure my friends on Grava explained exactly what it is that’s about to happen.”
“Your droid murder party? Oh yes. Sounds marvelous.”
“Oh, it will be. And you get to be a part of it now, more so than you ever could’ve imagined.”
Lando, still catching his breath, felt a glimmer of something very, very bad churning through his mind. A possibility. But…“And how are you going to do that?” he scoffed. “With your special magic powers?”
“Ahh, you spoke with Seven-Seven Dirgeos, then. Lovely. A strange character, that one. He tried so hard to crack me, and ended up cracking himself, I’m afraid. It’s almost a shame. Someone that unsteady, they’re liable to believe anything you say and you don’t even have to bother making up an explanation for it—they’ll do that themselves. No, it’s much simpler than that, really, as the truth usually is.”
“Go on,” Lando said, peeking out again. Gor wasn’t on the asteroid anymore. He was nowhere that Lando could see. Probably lurking around behind another one. Or…sneaking up on this one. Lando swung around, rifle ready. All that met him was the endless churn of the Remnants and the distant stars beyond.
“While I was lurking around the renowned home city of Calrissian Enterprises, I managed to get ahold of your system-wide operational data.”
Lando’s chest felt tight. He tried to steady his breathing. Failed.
“So, as I’m sure you understand, that means all I have to do is feed that information to my dear Phylanx, which you so kindly helped me find, and boom…”
“All the thousands of droids we’ve built over the past two years will go homicidal.”
“And the ones that the company constructed before you took over, too, of course, back when it was Vylar Tech.”
“That’s tens of thousands of droids.”
Lando closed his eyes, trying to take in the sheer, staggering death toll that was about to take place.
“So you see, my plan is a thorough one, and the massacre will be complete.”
Every droid in Cloud City, save a few ancient relics, was a product of either Calrissian Enterprises or Vylar. The city wasn’t prepared to withstand an attack from the inside like that. No city was. Chandrila…the entire New Republic might very well collapse beneath the weight of this massacre. The one they’d fought so hard to bring into existence. Not to mention Han’s family, his son Ben, who was probably within a meter or two of that damn caf-happy culinary droid…
“Astounding, when you stop and truly ponder what we’re on the verge of, isn’t it?”
Lando looked up just in time to glimpse something flash past and disappear over the top of the asteroid. He swung hard to the side, then pointed himself upward and gunned the jetpack, blasting fast up and over the asteroid and letting loose a spray of cover fire as he rose.
“You…” Fyzen’s voice went staticky. “…What you’re…”
A figure was zooming away from Lando. He could barely make it out in the shattered light of the distant sun, but it wasn’t Gor. It looked bulkier somehow, and misshapen. He spun around just in time to throw himself out of the way as a storm of blasterfire sizzled toward him from another figure jetting past above.
What was that thing?
Two more sped toward him through the Remnants. They weren’t shaped right at all. Each had huge hairy arms and a small metallic head. Not helmets but…they were medical droids. Or their heads were, anyway. The rest of them was made up of what looked a mutant combination of various droids and…Wookiee parts!
“That’s what you were doing haunting the forests of Kashyyyk,” Lando growled.
The reply came through as only static-laced laughter and then just faded out entirely.
Fyzen Gor was out of range.
Which meant he was making a dash for the Phylanx.
This would be an excellent time for Han and Chewie to show up with the full artillery of the Vermillion blazing bright.
Another Wookiee-enhanced droid blasted past off to the far end of the Remnants.
Lando pushed off from the ice asteroid he’d been standing on and tore along the dwindling path of debris.
HAN BROUGHT THE CHEVALIER ALONGSIDE the Vermillion and took a long hard look. Nothing stirred on the battered transport vessel. The secret outer compartments that concealed those gun turrets hung open, their artillery cannons dangling out like gargoyles. The cockpit hatch had closed back up and the sharp lights illuminated just the two empty seats and the worn bench behind them.
Han shuddered. Something about the whole thing just felt off. He knew he should probably zip over there as quickly as possible and snatch everyone off and then get out of there, but something held him back. Gor could’ve rigged up an explosive trap in the air lock, but it didn’t seem likely: The Pau’an probably wouldn’t have had time for such extensive preparations, and for all Gor knew, he himself would be the only one using it.
“You’re always rushing into things, Haan,” Han said to himself in a rough butchery of Lando’s voice. “Try slowing down for once.”
Easy advice to give when you weren’t worried about a bunch of people you cared for being trapped on a ship that had been taken over by a killer-droid-obsessed maniac. Still…it resonated somehow in a way it didn’t usually. Usually, blasters blazing felt like not only the right but also the singular option available. Lying never worked, not for long. And what were negotiations if not extended, overcomplicated lies?
Han pulled the Chevalier around so the two ships were nose-to-nose, then leaned forward and peered over the front.
A flare of light went up at the rear of the Vermillion—its rear propulsors. Han barely had time to shove the steering apparatus to the side before the Vermillion lurched forward, skidding its front end along the starboard flank of the Chevalier. Han hit the thrusters and pulled up and out of the way of another lurching attack. He glared into the cockpit but it was still empty. A direct head-to-head crash could’ve easily shattered both ships.
The Vermillion banked hard toward Han and then blasted at him again, missing his portside wing by fractions of a centimeter.
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