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Han activated his throat mike. “Trouble!” He pulled a thermal detonator off his vest. “We’ve got armor out—”

The muted shriek-crack of cannon bolts began to reverberate up from below, and the air grew acrid with the fumes of molten metal. Han set the detonator fuse to three seconds and, with his free hand, reached into the corridor.

“Out of the way!” He grabbed C-3PO by the wrist and pulled him out of the corridor. “Run for it!”

“Run? I’m afraid my servomotors aren’t made for—”

C-3PO’s foot caught on the bottom edge of the doorway, and his objection came to a crashing end. At the other end of the corridor, the troopsled had shoved the hoverscaf completely out of the way, bringing the forward canopy and the driver’s hatch into view. A couple of meters above the hatch hung the tip of a blaster cannon, already turning toward the corridor. Han planted a foot in the middle of C-3PO’s back and squared off in front of the doorway.

“You, too, Artoo!” Han used a full-windup underhand pitch to sling the detonator down the corridor and, with his free hand, waved the little astromech toward him. “Let’s go!”

R2-D2 retracted his interface arm and whirred toward Han. In the corridor behind the droid, the detonator dropped twenty meters short—and continued to bounce toward the troopsled.

The front edge of the cannon turret came into view, and the barrel continued to swing toward Han. Unsure whether he was actually strong enough to lift an astromech droid over the lip in the doorway, Han stooped down to grab R2-D2.

“Hey!” he called over his shoulder. “How about a little—”

The corridor erupted into a screaming flash of heat.

An instant later Han found himself rolling off C-3PO onto the balcony’s deck grating. His ears were ringing and his eyes were filled with dancing spots, and his arms were empty.

A white glow flared inside the corridor, and Han heard a distant crackle that had to be the thermal detonator going off. He rolled to his knees and spun around to see Zekk pressed to the wall on the opposite side of the doorway. C-3PO was between them, pushing himself to his hands and knees, and R2-D2 was nowhere to be seen.

Expecting another volley of cannon bolts at any instant, Han grabbed C-3PO with both hands and spun away from the doorway, dragging the droid down beside him.

“Stay down!”

C-3PO clattered to the grating beside Han. “Very well,” he said. “May I inquire why?”

“No,” Han said, realizing by the lack of cannon bolts that he had overreacted. He glanced back toward the door and found Zekk cautiously peering around the corner into the corridor. “Is he … is he gone?”

Zekk nodded and stepped fully in front of the doorway. “You got him. Nice throw.”

“I meant Artoo,” Han said, standing. “Is he … you know?”

“Artoo is gone?” C-3PO scrambled to his feet with surprising grace and clanged past Han into the doorway. “They melted Artoo?”

A sharp whistle sounded from the atrium behind him. Han turned and was relieved to see R2-D2 racing across the catwalk bridge toward the storage bunker. The rear half the droid’s outer shell was scorched and pocked with melt-circles, but any damage he had suffered had certainly not affected his mobility functions.

At the other end of the catwalk, Leia and Jaina were kneeling in the bunker’s open hatch, ready to provide covering fire. Fifteen meters below them, Kunor Bann was standing guard for Squad Saav’etu—which meant Yaqeel and Natua were already inside the storage bunker looking for the Horn kids. Seff, he knew, would be on the balcony three levels below, protecting the route through which Squad Saav’etu had entered the facility. Judging by the lack of cannon fire down there, he had also been successful in taking out the vehicle attacking them.

“Artoo, what are you doing out there?” C-3PO inquired. “You were stationed at the data interface.”

R2-D2 replied with an irate tweedle, then extended a third tread and bumped over the hatch threshold, entering the bunker.

“There’s no need