• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

He glanced at the controls and grimaced. Every screen was out of commission. Experimentally, he waggled the yoke and found it unresponsive. This would be tricky, if not downright impossible.

Unless—

He turned. There, in the circular slot behind the cockpit, rested a gray and red R2 astromech.

“Hey, there. Can you pilot this thing?”

The R2 tweetled, ending on a sorrowful note.

“Forget steering. Can you kill the thrusters but leave the repulsors running?”

The R2 offered a series of notes that sounded quizzical. Luke heard starfighter systems dip and rise in power, fluctuations that lasted a fraction of a second each, then the R2 tweetled an affirmative.

“Do so. Execute. Problem solved.” Luke turned to port. Ben was still there, a few meters away, pacing him with considerable skill.

Luke leapt back across, settling into the passenger seat. “Did you keep track of Valin?”

“Up thirty degrees, port twenty, three hundred meters.”

“Strap in and take us there.”

Leia shook her head as she watched Luke abandon the X-wing. “I'm not sure how, but he thinks he has it solved.”

“Probably drafted the astromech. Took me a second to think of that myself.” Han did not look away from the silver-gray speeder, which had, moments earlier, matched the netted Jaina's precipitous fall; then the pilot had gestured, drawing Jaina into the seat beside him with an exertion through the Force, and pulled out of his dive. Han glanced at his wife, who, watching Luke, hadn't seen any of it.

He shook his head. Jaina must not even have been alarmed, since Leia had not even detected her brief emergency. He put the Falcon into a tight curve, aiming it toward the news speeder that now bore Valin away and the lumbering cargo hauler chasing it. “That YVH droid could be bad news. Want to take the belly lasers?”

“I do.” Leia was unstrapped and up in an instant, headed aft toward the laser turret access shaft.

Jaina, helpless, spasmed again as another electrical shock coursed through her. “Get this thing off me.”

“I'm driving here, and that's Get this thing off me, please, Master Katarn.”

She offered a very Han Solo–ish growl in response.

Dropping almost to parked-speeder level, Kyle set his vessel in pursuit of Valin's conveyance and the cargo hauler. The hauler now seemed to be towing something at the end of a cable. It took him a moment to recognize the Quarren. A cable stretched between his weapon and the tail of the hauler, and the Quarren held on to his weapon with both arms as if to save his life. As the hauler picked up speed, the Quarren was towed along behind at a more shallow angle.

Absently, barely looking, Kyle took his lightsaber from his belt, lit it, and lashed out against the metal cylinder attached to Jaina's net where it lay bouncing on the back of the speeder. His blow sheared through the object without scarring the speeder's paint beneath. “Better?”

“Actually, yes.” Jaina lay there a few more moments, then began struggling with the net. It had relaxed, no longer constricting or clinging to itself, and she was able to unwrap it within moments. “Electrical shocks.”

“Interfering with your control over the Force. Which turns you from a Jedi into a rather weak gymnast with a spasming problem.”

“That's one way to put it.”

The Galaxy 9 News speeder reached the edge of the business district before any of the vehicles pursuing it caught up. It shot through the cleft between skytowers that constituted the end of the spaceport zone and dropped toward lower traffic lanes.

The bounty hunter cargo hauler followed, descending at an angle not recommended for such a big, ungainly vehicle, still trailing the Quarren, who looked increasingly frantic. Then came Jaina and Kyle in their speeder, the Falcon, Luke and Ben, and finally a stream of speeders with Jedi, spaceport security, press, and more bounty hunters intermixed.

“Whoa.” Kyle put the speeder into a side-to-side evasive maneuver an instant before the YVH droid in the cargo hauler opened fire. Streams of blasterfire flashed beside his