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ZIOST ORBIT BONEYARD RENDEZVOUS

Dyur looked at the helmeted face in the display and couldn’t keep from laughing. “He did what?”

The person he addressed, a man anonymous in the uniform of a TIE fighter pilot—though this uniform was bronze rather than black—sounded abashed. “He threw a rock at me.”

“And now you’re running back to us.”

“It’s not like that, Captain. He used Jedi magic to hurl a quarter-ton slab of stone at me. If I hadn’t hit the stone with my lasers, he’d have brought me down.”

“Ah. Well, that is different.”

“Orders, sir?”

Dyur’s voice turned hard, and like any Bothan who intended to sound angry, his tone became very fearsome indeed. “Keldan, you should have gone back immediately and finished him. Without wavering, without asking. Now you won’t get the chance, or the bonus for the kill. Your orders are to report back immediately. Myrat’ur will go down tomorrow at the regular time and finish the job.”

The pilot sounded appropriately chastised and resentful. “Yes, sir.”

“We don’t reward foul-ups here, Keldan. Boneyard out.”

GYNDINE SYSTEM, TENDRANDO REFUELING AND REPAIR STATION COCKPIT OF THE MILLENNIUM FALCON

Han finished the preflight checkup.

Lando’s repair workers appeared to have done a great job. All systems checked out as functioning optimally—except, of course, for the occasional fluctuations in the communications among the vehicle’s droid brains, which were so idiosyncratic, and which interfaced in what was partly a self-taught, self-programmed fashion, that the efficiency of their intercommunications varied anywhere from eerily high to catastrophically low, like Jedi triplets who could go from an undefeatable battle array to a squabbling trio in seconds.

He flexed his left shoulder experimentally. It felt good. He was healed.

Everything was fixed. But nothing was tested.

He forced a crooked smile for Leia, who was once more in the copilot’s seat. “Ready to go, sweetheart?”

She finished strapping in. “Ready.”

“Lando?”

From behind him, in the navigator’s seat, came Lando’s voice: “Oh, I suppose. It just won’t be the same, not being able to order you around.”

“Leia, remind me to get the navigator’s seat rigged with an ejector option.”

“You didn’t ask me.” C-3PO’s voice sounded just a touch petulant. The protocol droid stood in the entryway to the cockpit.

“That’s because I’m looking forward to hitting the thrusters and hearing you roll around for a while.” Han brought the Falcon up on repulsors and sent her gliding forward to the exit from the repair hangar. “Which is going to happen in about five seconds.”

“Oh. Oh, dear. Perhaps I should find a seat.”

“Two seconds.” They passed through the atmosphere containment field at the end of the hangar and emerged into gleaming starfield. Han heeled over, putting the stars to starboard and the night side of Gyndine to port, and, despite his words, began a slow, smooth acceleration into a sample high orbit.

The engines sounded sweeter than they had in quite a while. He grinned, experimentally increasing the thrust, accelerating the transport faster and sending her up into an ever-higher orbit. “Not bad, Lando.”

“One of the virtues of being rich. You can afford to hire the best.”

Gyndine’s sun came into view, no longer eclipsed by the planet, and the cockpit viewports polarized dramatically, making vision useless. Sensors showed the main cluster of the planet’s orbital shipyards—far less numerous than those of Kuat or Corellia, but well respected—at a lower orbit.

They were passing directly above those shipyards when the enemy task force appeared.

The Falcon’s threat sensors howled as a tremendous mass appeared directly in her flight path. Han hauled back on the yoke, a hard maneuver that pressed him and his crew deep into their seats, and cringed as he heard something scrape on the Falcon’s underside.

“Shields, we grazed her shields,” Leia muttered.

Their new course wasn’t much better. The Falcon flashed through a squadron of starfighters, at right angles to their course, too fast for Han to have anything