"Yeah. Just get us away from Kessel."
Han spun around to the shuttle"s controls. "Chewie, contact the New Republic. No waiting this time. They"ve got to learn what"s going on here, just in case we don"t make it back."
The Wookiee bent over the comm controls as Han struggled with the navicomputer. Han gawked at the task in front of him. "d.a.m.n! This thing"s an old five-hundred-X model! Haven"t seen one of these outside a museum.
I hope they gave us a scratchpad to do backup calculations. That might be faster and more accurate!"
Chewbacca moaned and pounded his hairy fist on the console with enough force to buckle the panels. Han flashed a sidelong look at him.
"What do you mean we"re being jammed? Who"s jamming us?"
Kyp turned to the side viewport, said in a low voice, "Here they come."
The garrison on Kessel"s moon spewed fighters, dozens of rejuvenated battle craft, armored freighters, slim and heavily armed X-wings, and TIE fighters. Many of the ships must have been damaged during the recent war and then salvaged. Now Doole had also gotten his planetary defense shield running again. Kessel would be a veritable stronghold against any attack.
Streams of X-wings and Y-wings coursedout, flanked on either side by a squadron of TIE fighters. They roared through the wispy tail of atmosphere in Kessel"s...o...b..tal wake, leaving a glowing window of ionized gas from their sublight engines.
"Strap yourselves in," Han said. "This is going to be a h.e.l.l of a ride." He reached for the controls, preparing to fight, then felt a boulder drop in his stomach. "What? This ship is unarmed!" He frantically scanned the console. "Nothing! Not a single laser! Not even a slingshot!"
Kyp held the back of Han"s pilot chair, bracing himself. "We stole a supply ship, not a fighter. What did you expect?"
"Chewie, pump everything into our shields--and I mean everything, including life support. We"ve got enough air in here to last longer than this ship is likely to hold. Boost shields until they"re off the scale. We"re going to have to outrun them."
The first wave of TIE fighters soared in, their Twin Ion Engines howling over the c.o.c.kpit"s feedback speakers. Laser spears shot out, pummeling the shuttle, but the shields held. X-wings attacked from the rear.
"Can"t this ship go any faster?" Kyp asked. The lights dimmed as Chewbacca reinforced the shields.
"Like you said, kid, we stole a cargo shuttle. This isn"t a racing ship, and it sure isn"t the Falcon. Get ready for a jump to hypers.p.a.ce as soon as this fossilized navicomputer gives an answer." He stared at the readout, then pounded on the panel. "It"ll be another ten minutes before it coughs up a safe trajectory. d.a.m.n! The black hole cl.u.s.ter is s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up the calculations."
Chewbacca interjected a loud, bleating comment.
"What did he say?" Kyp asked.
"He said our shields are going to fail in about two minutes. I wish I had weapons--I"d even settle for a rock to throw out the window!" His eyes were wide and suddenly empty of hope. "There"s no way we can last long enough, and Doole sure won"t take prisoners a second time. Sorry I got you into this, kid."
Kyp bit his lip, then turned to point out the front windowport. "Go there."
The Maw.
Swirling clouds of gas looped into the bottomless pits of black holes, making s.p.a.ce look like a tangled skein of incandescent yarn.
Gravity waited to tear apart any ship that came too close. The inexorable Maw cl.u.s.ter was destined to swallow up the Kessel system itself in only another thousand years--but Han didn"t want to feed its appet.i.te any sooner than that.
Chewbacca roared something that needed no translation. "Are you crazy?" Han asked.
"You said we"re dead anyway."
Four Y-wings fired simultaneously on the port side of the shuttle, rocking it. A shower of sparks blasted from the comm unit, and Chewbacca struggled to reroute the circuits.
"There are supposed to be safe paths through it," Kyp said. "There must be."
"Yeah, and about a million paths that are sudden death!"
"It"ll be flying a razor"s edge all the way through." Kyp"s young eyes looked immeasurably old as he stared at Han. "Do we have a better chance staying here and fighting?"
The enormous gravity wells of the Maw made a maze of all the hypers.p.a.ce and normal s.p.a.ce paths through the cl.u.s.ter. Most of the routes were either dead ends or went right down the gullet of a black hole.
"We"d never find the right course," Han said. "It"d be suicide."
Kyp gripped Han"s shoulder. "I can show you the way."
"What? How?"
A TIE fighter looped overhead, rotating in flight and firing at the hijacked shuttle. Cruisers from the moonbase approached, closing the gap.
Against the capital-ships" turbolasers, the escapees would be vaporized within moments. Chewbacca groaned as their rear shields weakened and failed.
Han scrambled with the controls; both he and Chewbacca tried to reinforce weak points by draining the stronger shields up front. Lights in the cabin dimmed as the shields gulped more power.
"I helped you navigate through the dark spice tunnels when we were running from Skynxnex, didn"t I?" Kyp said. "I knew when Doole was going to switch on the energy shield! I can find the right path into the Maw."
"That still doesn"t tell me how, kid!" Han shouted.
Kyp wore an embarra.s.sed expression for a moment; then he spoke quickly. "This is going to sound like a hokey old religion--but it works!
An old woman who spent part of her sentence in the spice tunnels told me I had some sort of tremendous potential. She showed me how to use something called "the power" or "the strength" or something."
"The Force!" Han cried in relief. He wanted to grab Kyp and hug him. "Why didn"t you say so? Who was this woman?"
"Her name was Vima-Da-Boda. Down in the spice mines she taught me only a few things before the guards hauled her away. I never saw her again, but I"ve been practicing what she taught me. It"s helped a few times, but I don"t really understand how."
"Vima-Da-Boda!" Han said, remembering the withered fallen Jedi he and Leia had found on Nal Hutta. During her guilt-ridden hiding, Vima-Da-Boda had somehow spent time in the spice mines, long enough to train Kyp in a few essential skills. Han hoped that would be good enough.
"I don"t like this," Han said.
Another pair of fighters soared by, firing repeatedly. "But I like it better than our other options right now."
He altered course, swinging around and heading straight toward the seething cl.u.s.ter of black holes. He hoped the shuttle"s weakened shields would last long enough to get them there.
The first of the capital ships reached them and fired, looping overhead, then returning, as if to ram them. The shape of the attacking freighter made Han"s blood turn to water, and he stared in silent dismay for a full second before he managed to cry out. "That"s the Millennium Falcon! That"s my ship!"
The Falcon came straight at them, firing again and again as the shuttle"s forward shields tried to compensate for the pummeling. At the last moment Han wrenched the stolen shuttle into a steep dive so the Falcon sc.r.a.ped by overhead. One of the shots pa.s.sed through the wavering shields to scar the armor of the shuttle.
"That does it!" Han said. "Now I"m mad. Chewie, at my order drop shields and dump everything into thrust. Pump every last erg into our engines and take us straight into the Maw." He glanced down at his readouts. "Shields are failing in less than a minute anyway, and the navicomputer needs another six to finish its calculations. Blasted five-hundred-X models!"
Another wing of fighters strafed them, then roared by, leaving a gap to their rear as a huge Lancer frigate closed the distance. A wave of system-patrol craft and Carrack cruisers followed, ready to bring a full armada of turbolasers to bear. Moruth Doole was taking no chances this time.
"Go, Chewie!" Han said.
The Wookiee dropped shields and channeled all power to the sublight engines. The shuttle burst forward in an unexpected spurt of speed, startling the pursuing ships.
"Surprise is only going to help us for a few seconds," Han said.
"Then we"re on our own."
"By that time we should be in the grip of the Maw," Kyp whispered.
"If you"re not right about this, kid, we"ll never know it."
Curtains of incandescent gas blazed in front of them, swirling residue heated by friction as it spiraled in complex orbits through the Roche lobe of one black hole and down the gullet of another. Deadly X-rays filled s.p.a.ce, forcing the transparisteel to dim itself to protect the eyes of the pa.s.sengers.
"Only a complete idiot would try something like this," Han said.
Chewbacca agreed.
The Kessel ships poured on additional acceleration, desperately trying to catch the escapees before Han could reach the Maw cl.u.s.ter. Han hunched over the controls, white-knuckled, as if to increase their speed by sheer force of will.
The fighters unleashed a laser firestorm, but the Maw"s huge gravitational distortions spread out their focus and sent them on long arcs away from the target.
"Let"s just hope these guys aren"t idiots too!" Kyp said. Han drove toward the blazing shreds of hot gas.
The Kessel ships pursued until the last instant, then peeled off at full thrust with their maneuvering engines, letting their prey go to certain death.
Han"s ship plunged into the gravitational jaws of the black hole cl.u.s.ter.
Leia suppressed a dignified smile as she led Gantoris into the projection chamber. The dark-haired man stared in his puppet-like way as he tried to gawk at everything at the same time.
Gantoris was resplendent in a new uniform, tailored to match the generations-old pilot suit he had worn as leader on Eol Sha. Leia had loaded a tailor droid with patterns from the archives and presented the uniform to Gantoris as a gift. He had been delighted, puffed with admiration.
Even after getting to know him, Leia felt uncomfortable around Gantoris. Though Luke a.s.sured her of the strong Jedi potential in the man, Leia did not like the thought of the deadly "tests" Gantoris had given Luke before he would agree to leave Eol Sha. Gantoris had lived a h.e.l.lish life, she admitted, but he seemed too intense, his dark eyes fiery pits of contained fury. He had the look of a man accustomed to power suddenly shown how small he is in the grand scheme of things.
But the other side of Gantoris intrigued Leia. She watched him flick his eyes back and forth, craning his head to stare at the tall building spires rising to the fringes of Coruscant"s atmosphere. He gaped in astonishment at the sparkling audience chambers, at the minor personal amenities in the quarters Luke had obtained for him. He had never before seen or even imagined things that Leia considered commonplace.
Now, as they entered the projection room, Gantoris stared at the giant windows that filled the walls with broad vistas of Coruscant and the centuries-old buildings that girdled the world. The two of them were not really high enough for such a view, Leia knew; the projection room was actually a deep internal chamber, and the "windows" were high-resolution screens displaying images from cameras mounted at the top of the Imperial Palace.
"What is this place?" Gantoris asked.
Leia smiled, folding her arms over her robe. "Right now this is just a room. In a moment, though, I"ll give you a new world."
She stepped to the control dais in the middle of the room and called up images she had compiled from the archives, records left over from Old Republic surveys and the dossiers compiled during the Alliance occupation.
The window screens flickered, and the images changed, startling Gantoris. He whirled as the landscape suddenly showed a completely different planet. His eyes grew wide and panicked, as if Leia had just transported him across the galaxy.
"I"m showing you a new home. This is Dantooine, the place we have chosen for the people of Eol Sha."
Around them the window screens displayed vast plains of gra.s.sland and spiky trees. Purplish hills rolled across the distant horizon. A herd of small, hairy beasts roamed across the savanna; in the air a cl.u.s.ter of bright balloon-like things, either plants or rudimentary animals, drifted about; a few had snagged on pointed branches of the spiky trees. Two moons, one lavender and one greenish, soared overhead.
"We established one of our first Rebel bases on Dantooine. It has a mild climate, abundant life-forms, plenty of water. A few nomadic tribes roam up and down the coasts of the ocean, but for the most part the planet is uninhabited."
Leia had used Dantooine as a decoy when Grand Moff Tarkin interrogated her aboard the Death Star. To save her beloved planet of Alderaan, Leia had divulged the location of the old Rebel base on Dantooine rather than naming the real base on Yavin 4; but Tarkin destroyed Alderaan anyway, because Dantooine was too remote for an effective demonstration of the Death Star"s power. Now, though, Dantooine could be put to use again, as a home for the refugees of Eol Sha.
"Do you think your people would like to live on a place like this?"
Leia raised her eyebrows.
Gantoris, who had so far seen only his own blasted world, the gas planet of Bespin, and the city-covered surface of Coruscant, seemed impressed. "This looks like a paradise. No volcanoes? No earthquakes?
Plenty to eat, and no sprawling cities?"
She nodded. Before Gantoris could say anything else, the door to the projection room opened. Leia turned, surprised to see the Chief of State, Mon Mothma, coming to join them.
The auburn-haired woman walked with a sure step that made her glide across the floor. The leader of the New Republic extended a hand to Gantoris. "You must be one of Luke Skywalker"s first Jedi trainees.
Please let me welcome you to Coruscant and wish you the best of success in becoming part of a new order of Jedi Knights."
Gantoris took Mon Mothma"s hand and nodded to her with a slight bow; but Leia caught a fleeting impression that he considered himself a leader meeting an equal.
"Mon Mothma," Leia said, "I was just showing Gantoris some images of Dantooine. We are considering moving the refugees from Eol Sha to our old base there."
Mon Mothma smiled. "Good. I"m aware of the plight of your people, and I would like to see them safely on Dantooine. I always thought it was one of our most pleasant bases, not quite as rigorous as Hoth or Pinnacle Base, without the dense jungles of Yavin 4." She turned to Gantoris. "If this world meets with your approval, I"ll direct Minister Organa Solo to begin the relocation work immediately."
Gantoris nodded. "If these are representative pictures, this place Dantooine would be a perfect new home for my people."
Leia felt a surge of relief. "I was thinking of putting Wedge ... I mean General Antilles in charge of the relocation duties. He"s been supervising the reconstruction of the lower city levels for months, and frankly, I think that"s a waste of his talents."
"I agree," Mon Mothma said.
Though buried under more diplomatic entanglements and bureaucratic decisions than Leia could imagine, Mon Mothma somehow maintained a calm energy. "Also, my calendar just reminded me that the Caridan amba.s.sador will be arriving in two days. Are all the preparations going smoothly? Can I offer my a.s.sistance in any way?"
"Just plan to be there. That"s the most I can ask of you. I have decided to move the reception to the Skydome Botanical Gardens, rather than holding it here in the Imperial Palace. Since Amba.s.sador Furgan seems hostile to our cause, I didn"t want to exacerbate his reactions by receiving him in the former seat of the Emperor"s government. In fact, the amba.s.sador is trying to disguise his mission here as a mere pilgrimage to visit the site of various Imperial landmarks."
Mon Mothma nodded slightly but gave a smile. "At least he"s coming.
That"s the best signal of all."
"I suppose." Leia remained skeptical.
"By the way, I never received your report on Han"s mission to Kessel. That was a brilliant idea to send him instead of a formal amba.s.sador. Han can speak to those people in their own language, and reopening the spice channels away from the black market might do wonders for the new economy. Did he have any success?"
Feeling awkward, Leia dropped her gaze to the floor. "He has been delayed, Mon Mothma, so I don"t have any information at the moment. I"ll give you a full report as soon as he gets back. Let"s hope his mission is a success."
"Agreed." Mon Mothma"s expression hinted that she suspected there was more to Leia"s story, but she asked no further questions. "I have to go debate with the Ugnaught representatives about salvage rights for the wrecked ships in orbit around Coruscant. I"m afraid it"s going to be a long afternoon, and I just wanted to greet you while I had the chance.
Gantoris, it was a pleasure."
Mon Mothma turned to go but flashed a glance back at Leia. "By the way, you"re doing a fine job, Leia. Too often in government we get inundated by so many dissatisfied interest groups, so many complaints, that we forget the things we"re doing right. You are doing a lot of things right."
Leia couldn"t cover anembarra.s.sed smile. If only she hadn"t lost her husband, she might have been a lot happier.