Exile

by Aaron Allston

  The trash loader pulled over until it was mostly in the traffic lane but also fully covering the sidewalk, and came down to a landing directly in front of the alley mouth. The pilot, illuminated by blue cockpit lighting, was a jowly middle-aged man; he leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes.

  “Kill the engines,” Leia said, and sagged just a bit; the effort to impose her will on someone at range, without benefit of the target being able to see her eyes or hear her voice, had taken a toll on her.

  Han and Lando obliged by aiming their blasters at the front face of the garbage loader’s underside and firing four or five times each into it. The blasterfire immediately awoke the pilot, and Han saw the man seize the controls and try to lift off, but it was too late: the multiton vehicle was dead, firmly situated flush with the alley mouth. Now Han could hear curses and hammering from where the loader blocked the alley—the CorSec agents had reached the obstacle.

  “Time to grab a speeder and run for it,” Lando said.

  Teppler shook his head. “I’ll be less conspicuous on foot and on my own. Good luck.” He turned and dashed away along the sidewalk.

  chapter eight

  ELMAS PRIVATE SPACEPORT, CORONET, CORELLIA RENTAL BAY 601208

  “Dad, something’s happening outside.”

  Instantly awake, still dressed in a jumpsuit not much improved by having been worked in for a day, Wedge rolled out of his cot and joined his daughter at the hangar’s side viewport. The viewport was mostly covered in black sheeting, in which Myri and Iella had cut strategic holes for viewing.

  The interior of the hangar was in darkness, so it took his eyes no time to adjust. Across the access way between rows of rental hangars, three people were making a hurried approach. They stopped well short of Wedge’s hangar and clustered around a personnel door two hangars down.

  “Not our problem,” Wedge said, rubbing his eyes. He’d gotten to sleep only an hour or two earlier, after a long session of performing vehicle repairs and maintenance. Myri had been right to awaken him, but he was anxious to get back to sleep.

  “I think it is.” The voice was Corran’s, from just behind Wedge, and Wedge started.

  He turned to offer Corran a mock glare. “Ex-CorSec and Jedi. Makes you twice as sneaky. What makes you think it’s a problem? You can’t even see out there.”

  “But I can feel.” Corran gestured toward the distant arrivals. “One of them is Leia Solo.”

  Wedge whipped around and put his eye to the peephole again. The three people had disappeared, presumably having gone through the door. “You’re sure.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “What’s all the noise?” Stumbling down the boarding ramp of the Pulsar Skate, her Baudo-class yacht, covering a yawn and half smothering her words with one hand, was Mirax Horn, Corran’s wife and Myri’s namesake. Wedge had known her for decades; she was the daughter of Booster Terrik, Wedge’s mentor in the smuggling trade back in the days before Wedge joined the Rebel Alliance. Round-faced, with black hair cut in a short, practical style, she retained much of the fresh-faced, blue-eyed beauty that had characterized her when she and Wedge were both teenagers.

  “Leia’s two doors down, with two strange men,” Wedge said.

  “How do you know they’re two strange men?” Mirax asked. “It might be Han and Luke.”

  “Han and Luke are two strange men.” Wedge looked around the people assembled before him. Only Iella was still horizontal; on her cot beneath the S-foil of Wedge’s X-wing, she had pulled her pillow over her head to muffle all the conversational noise. “In a couple of minutes, when they’ve had time to relax, we’ll send someone over.”

  “Me,” Myri said. “I’m the only one of us whose face isn’t all over CorSec’s or assassins’ shoot-on-sight guides.”

  Corran gave her a melancholy little smile. “It’s not going to happen, girl.”

  “Uncle Corran, if you’re going to give me the same old you’re-too-young argument—”

  Corran cut her off with a gesture and a shake of his head. “Listen.”

  Everyone did. They could all hear the rush of thrusters and repulsorlifts. Wedge found it curious that he couldn’t identify the speeder from its engine noise.

  Then he realized why. He wasn’t listening to one speeder close by, but to several farther away, their engine and thruster noises blending together and echoing off hangar walls. And the noise was getting louder, closer …

  “Iella!” Wedge called.

  His wife pulled the pillow from her face and looked at him, cross but alert.

  “Everyone, set up for immediate evacuation.”

  Iella rolled up out of her cot and began struggling into her boots. She caught Wedge’s attention, then glanced in the direction of his cot and boots.

  Up the access way, from the direction Leia and her companions had come, a stream of CorSec speeders, orange-and-blue lights blinking to signal their official status, roared toward them, each coming to a stop in front of a different hangar. CorSec officers poured out of the vehicles and immediately began moving to hangar entryways. One began banging on the door into Wedge’s shelter.

  Corran sighed. “Thanks, Leia.”

  CORELLIA CONTROL CABIN OF THE LOVE COMMANDER

  “Power coming online in two minutes,” Leia announced.

  Lando tried to keep his dissatisfaction from his face. “I hate transports with slow start-up times,” he grumbled. “If that idiot had had any sense, he’d have installed a ten-second starter.”

  “If he’d had any sense, he wouldn’t have lost his yacht to you,” Han said. “Relax. We have plenty of time.”

  Through the front viewports, they could all see the line of sparks appear at the hangar door as a laser cutting tool outside sheared through the locking mechanism. The door rolled open, and half a dozen CorSec agents charged in.

  Just outside, making the final turn to aim at the Love Commander, was an old, though doubtless still deadly, TIE crawler. The ball-shaped cockpit, familiar from TIE fighters, was mounted between two low, rectangular sets of tank treads, and Lando could see the machine’s twin blaster cannon barrels trained squarely on Love Commander’s control cabin.

  A CorSec officer with an oversized comlink held up before his face entered with his men. His words came across Love Commander’s comm board and, magnified, could even be heard through the yacht’s hull: “This is Corellian Security. Power down and exit your craft immediately for identification.”

  “Leia, stall them,” Lando ordered. “We can get our shields online in just over a minute—”

  Leia shook her head. “No, they’re serious. They’ll open fire before then. We can surrender now and escape while we’re being transported …”

  Han’s lip had twitched when the word surrender was uttered, and now he shook his head. “Princess, we—”

  There was an engine roar from outside. All the CorSec agents still outside looked to their right. Some of them ran—into the hangar and toward Love Commander, or out of sight on the access way, anywhere that wasn’t toward the TIE crawler.

  A flash of red light hit the crawler’s starboard treads—low, almost at the level of the permacrete. The shot flipped the crawler and it rolled, coming down resting on one of its treads. A starfighter flashed by outside.

  “That was an X-wing, wasn’t it?” Lando asked.

  Leia nodded. “Wedge?”

  Han shook his head. “Emerald green, with a checker-board pattern.”

  Leia smiled. “Corran!”

  Then an X-wing in standard gray with red piping flashed by.

  “Power?” Lando asked.

  Leia checked her status board. “Coming online in three, two, one … now.”

  “Shields up,” Lando ordered. “Get us out of here.”

  Leia lifted Love Commander up on her repulsors and glided forward. CorSec agents scattered out of her way. At the door into the hangar, she delicately nudged the TIE crawler aside—“delicately” in the sense that neither vehicle
was damaged by the impact, though Lando shuddered at the sound of metal shrieking and scraping as they passed—then turned in the wake of the two X-wings.

  Immediately the sensor screens lit up and began chiming. Lando activated his display screen and got a night-sight image, all in shades of green, of the holocam view from the front of Love Commander; he saw little but a line of CorSec speeders parked on the access way.

  “I read one vehicle, size suited to a personal yacht, emerging from a hangar behind us,” Han said. “Hey, I think it’s the Pulsar Skate.”

  Lando switched his display over to a rear holocam view. Emerging from a hangar door only two buildings away was a long, low yacht, shaped something like a example of gliding undersea life from the aquatic world of Mon Calamari. Essentially a flying wing with twin thruster pods at the back, it had graceful lines that swept back organically from the bow.

  Han continued, “We have one vertical takeoff from the port’s main launch area, I think it’s a ballistic transport, outbound. And—fierfek. Looks like a small vessel, corvette class at least, heading our way.”

  “Go to battle stations,” Lando said, unnecessarily. The shields were already up, and he’d seen Han power up the yacht’s weapons without authorization a moment earlier.

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “Try to open a channel to our escorts.”

  “Yes, Captain.” Han scowled at Lando then returned his attention to his boards.

  Leia lifted Love Commander off in the wake of the X-wings. Lando felt himself being pressed back into his seat as the yacht’s inertial compensators failed to keep up completely with the demands of vehicular acceleration.

  “Love Commander to X-wing escort, come in.”

  “Love Commander, this is Pulsar Skate.” It was a female voice, and one Lando didn’t recognize. “Stand by to receive line-of-sight transmission of encryption code. Three, two, one, sending. Got it?”

  “Got it,” Han said. “Implementing … now.”

  There was a burst of static, then the woman’s voice returned. “Encryption activated. Can you still read me?”

  “We hear you just fine,” Han said. “I’m going to switch you over to our captain. I’m going to have to shoot things pretty soon, and he doesn’t have anything to do.” He pressed a button.

  The holocam view faded from Lando’s display and was replaced with the face of a girl—young, pretty, with blue hair highlighted by yellow streaks. She looked familiar. “Myri Antilles here,” she said. “Impromptu comm officer for Pulsar Skate.”

  Suddenly Lando felt ten thousand years old. The last time he’d seen Myri, she’d been a little girl. He forced a smile. “Myri! It’s your uncle Lando.”

  “Lando! Hey! The white hair and beard look really good on you. Are they real?”

  “No, of course not. It’s a wig and makeup.”

  “Awww. You’ve lost all your hair?”

  “No! My hair is black. Well, gray-black. This just isn’t it. I still have all my own hair.”

  “Sure, you do,” Han whispered.

  Lando gritted his teeth. “Myri, sweetheart, does your daddy have an exit vector?”

  “Sure. First, we go shoot at the corvette—”

  “No, no, no, we need to go away from the corvette—”

  “The corvette’s all alone over the ocean, and every other direction has multiple starfighters and attack craft coming toward us. And assuming we can cripple the corvette, we should make orbit with no problem. But then we run into the Alliance blockade ships. That’s where the problem comes in.”

  Suddenly Lando felt young and useful again. “Ah, that’s no problem.”

  “No?”

  “No. A kind young blockade lieutenant gave me a pass-code the other day.”

  “Oh, good. Oops—we’re at extreme firing range in ten seconds, nine …”

  As Myri counted down, Lando switched his display view to a sensor screen.

  Their miniature task force was now away from Coronet, out over the water, still gaining altitude. There were numerous blips back over the city, small units of attack craft headed their way; mercifully, Han was screening their comm traffic and keeping it from coming over the control cabin’s speakers.

  Love Commander and Pulsar Skate were now side by side, only a couple of hundred meters separating them, and the two X-wings were a few kilometers out in advance. In the distance was the blip of a small capital ship, and as the distance closed a designation popped up for it on the screen: CEC CORVETTE 1177 SILABAN.

  Lando winced out of sympathy for Leia. When she was just a teenage Senator for the planet of Alderaan, her chief transport had been a Corellian corvette, the Tantive IV. Long and narrow, with a bow like a sledgehammer head turned sideways and a rectangular stern that was little more than stacked banks of thrusters, the Tantive IV had held a special place in her affections, and it had to be up-setting to have a near-identical vessel trying to shoot her down now.

  Myri’s countdown reached one. Lando opened his mouth to order Han to open fire, but Han opened up before he could speak. Lando saw the yacht’s lasers lance in on a distant target, joined by the Pulsar Skate’s, and saw the glow as the Silaban’s shields soaked up the laser barrage.

  The two X-wings climbed relative to the plane of battle, performing evasive maneuvering in unison, so close that they registered as a single blip on the sensors.

  Lando frowned over that. “What do they think they’re doing? They’re going to bump and then it’ll be all over for them.”

  He’d forgotten his comm channel was still open. “Bump?” The voice was that of Mirax Horn. “Come over here, Lando, and I’ll bump you.”

  “Calm down, calm down.” That was Iella. “This is why men should only be put in command of single-pilot fighters. On bigger craft, they have too much time on their hands, so they talk too much.”

  “Hey,” Lando protested.

  Love Commander rocked as beams from the corvette’s twin turbolaser cannons grazed her shields. Lando started to say something about more evasive maneuvering, but Leia abruptly put the yacht into such torturous dives and turns that Lando’s stomach flip-flopped. He clamped his mouth shut and concentrated on not losing his dinner.

  Through the viewport, he could see the corvette’s bottom turbolasers firing on the Love Commander and Pulsar Skate, and the craft’s top-side turbolasers trying to target the X-wings. As they neared the corvette, the X-wings abruptly separated, both staying above the relative plane of battle but one arcing to port and the other to starboard.

  Both sets of turbolasers initially followed the same X-wing—Wedge’s, according to the sensor screen—then both switched to open up on Corran’s.

  By this time both X-wings were past the stern of the corvette. Lando could see some bright spots at the stern of the Corellian ship, points where fire from the X-wings’ turbolasers had struck. Now both X-wings looped around to orient in on the engines, and the corvette commander, belatedly recognizing that the two snubfighters packed more firepower than the yachts still headed their way, tried to turn toward them and protect his engines.

  But the X-wings came in firing, their angry red laserfire chipping away at the stern shields, concentrating on the same area of engines, and then penetrating. Lando saw red light suffuse the corvette’s stern, and an explosion lit the ocean below.

  No, the corvette hadn’t exploded—only a portion of its engine compartment had been lost. But the vessel began to lose altitude and turned away from the conflict area. The X-wings turned back toward the space yachts.

  And finally, because he had the ticket off this world and out of this system, Lando could take charge again. “Pulsar Skate,” he said, “and X-wing escorts, form up on Looooove Commander. We’re headed for orbit.”

  “And then where?” Han asked.

  Finally Wedge’s voice crackled over the comlink. “To a gathering of old friends,” he said.

  CORUSCANT JEDI TEMPLE

  Ben’s opponent wasn’t particularly
impressive. The droid had a scrawny body, its four spindly legs just sturdy enough to allow it to walk around. Its two arms ended not in hands but in tubes about eight centimeters in diameter. And its head was huge, the size of an entire R2 unit, with two green glowing optical sensors where eyes would be and a set of speaker vents in the position of a human mouth.

  In the mirror that ran the full length of the chamber on one wall, they seemed unlikely combatants—a droid with a ludicrously large head and a friendly-looking teenage boy with bright red hair in a buzz-style haircut.

  “Last series,” it announced, its voice surprisingly human considering its alien appearance. “Ready.”

  To better test himself, Ben left his lightsaber off for the moment … and turned his back on the droid. He extended his feelings through the Force and tried to find the droid, and was mildly distressed, once again, to find that he could not. He concealed his worry. “Ready.”

  There was a ponk noise as the first foamsteel ball left one of the droid’s arm tubes. And that Ben felt, as a displacement of air; as a little tickle of worry. He could sense the direction of the ball’s travel, straight toward the back of his head …

  He swung around, sidestepping the ball’s path, igniting the lightsaber as second, third, and fourth balls shot out toward him. He swung at the first one, but his blade was only half extended and his strike was half a meter short of its target. The second ball shot harmlessly past him, but he connected with the third and fourth, sending them ricocheting away from him. Their glossy exteriors took the momentary contact with the coherent light blade without melting or deforming.

  Then more balls came pouring from the droid’s arms, ponk ponk ponk ponk ponk … The droid varied its aim, firing at Ben’s feet, chest, head, arms, aiming at positions bracketing Ben in case his dodging moved him into their path.

  He didn’t deflect all of them. One cracked painfully into his left knee. Another grazed his cheek. But his success ratio was pretty high.

  He could feel the balls moving around behind him along the gleaming apocia hardwood floor. They separated into two streams, circling around him back toward the droid, controlled by the magnetic impulses it was sending. As Ben watched and deflected two more balls, the first ones that had been sent against him reached the base of the droid, flew up to hover above the droid’s head, and dropped into the slot there. Back in the hopper, they could be fired at him again.