• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“No need—it’s not me that will be going EV.” Jaina ascended the short access ladder and climbed into the cockpit. As she buckled herself in, she asked, “ByTwoBee, have you seen any new droids around here lately?”

“No,” the droid said. “Not since departing Klatooine.”

“Klatooine?” Jaina’s stomach began to grow cold and heavy. “Then you did see a new droid before we left for the Maw?”

“Indeed, I did,” BY2B replied. “A Rebaxan MSE-Six.”

“A mouse droid?” Jaina gasped. “And you didn’t report it?”

“Of course not,” BY2B said. “Captain Calrissian had warned me just a few minutes earlier to expect a courier shuttle carrying a new utility droid.”

Jaina groaned and hit the preignition engine heaters, then asked, “And I suppose he told you this over your internal comlink?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact,” BY2B replied. “How did you know?”

“Because that wasn’t Lando you heard,” Jaina said, speaking through clenched teeth. “It was a sabotage droid programmed with an impersonation protocol.”

“Sabotage?” BY2B sounded skeptical. “Why would anyone bother? We don’t even have an asteroid in tow.”

“It’s not an asteroid they’re after.” Jaina unfastened her flight suit just far enough to retrieve her comlink from her chest pocket, opened a secure channel to Lando, and demanded, “What was the last meal I ate before boarding the Exquisite Death?”

“You expect me to remember what you had for lunch thirteen years ago?” Lando replied, taking the verification query in stride. “But you didn’t have time to finish it. I remember that much.”

“Good enough,” Jaina said, satisfied that she was talking to the man and not the mouse. The meal to which she was referring had taken place aboard Lando’s yacht, the Lady Luck, shortly before he had tricked a Yuuzhan Vong boarding party into taking her and the rest of a Jedi strike team aboard their ship. “Did you buy an MSE-Six while we were back on Klatooine?”

“No … why?”

“Because ByTwoBee saw one come aboard,” Jaina replied. “Apparently, you told her to expect it.”

“I told her?” Lando fell silent while he digested Jaina’s meaning, then said, “Blast! Those aren’t Sith out there—they’re pirates!”

Jaina was skeptical. “What makes you think so?”

“Slipping a stowaway aboard is an old pirate trick,” Lando explained. “Only this time, they were creative, impersonating the captain instead of just blowing an air lock.”

“Maybe,” Jaina said, still not convinced. An alert tweetle sounded inside the cockpit, announcing that the StealthX was ready to launch. “Time to go. You handle the mouse, and I’ll take care of … whoever sent it.”

“Affirmative,” Lando said. “I’ll have ByTwoBee organize a hunt. Can you lend her your comlink?”

“Sure.” Jaina passed the comlink out to the droid. “Lando has a job for you.”

The droid extended one of her delicate tool arms to accept the comlink. “How do I know this is the real Captain Calrissian?”

“You’ll have to trust me on that.” Jaina closed her flight suit again, then added, “That’s an order, by the way.”

“Well …” A soft hydraulic hiss sounded beneath BY2B as she allowed her telescoping legs to compress. “If it’s an order.”

Jaina lowered the canopy and fired the engines, then slipped through the containment field and swung toward the stern, hanging tight beneath the asteroid tug to avoid silhouetting herself against the milky glow of Ashteri’s Cloud. With the Rockhound’s sensor suite temporarily disabled, any worthy captain would maneuver around behind the huge tug, then launch a first salvo from as close as possible, straight down the thrust nozzles.

Even at full acceleration, clearing the Rockhound took longer than Jaina would have liked. The asteroid tug was nearly two kilometers long, with a white, carbon-scorched belly pocked by rows of bantha-sized tractor beam projection wells. Around the perimeter dangled dozens of telescoping stabilizer legs, two hundred meters long even fully retracted. The stern of the ship was obscured by the glow of an efflux trail so enormous and bright that Jaina felt like she was flying into a comet’s tail.

Finally, the canopy’s blast-tinting