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He stood alone, a semicircle of security guards from several different forces blocking his path, and as she watched they opened fire. He leapt above the torrent of blaster shots, igniting his lightsaber as he rose, and came down behind his enemies. He spun, and two of them were suddenly headless. The rest fell back from him, firing as they turned.

All Alema had to do was flee from this disaster, join the throngs of actors now moving in panicky retreat toward the shuttle access chambers—

Then she felt her quarry. Leia was nearby, sending reassurance through the Force.

To Jacen. It had to be to Jacen. That message certainly wasn’t meant for her.

But now she couldn’t leave. She had to wait to see if Han was with Leia.

Veering from her escape path, she made her way to a wall and merged with the shadows there.

ZIOST

Hirrtu, the Rodian, jabbered at Dyur aboard the Boneyard Rendezvous, this time clearly surprised.

“Launch condition?” Dyur brought up the sensor display.

It showed an incoming spacecraft, its point of origin just a few hundred meters from where the Chev, Ovvit, had died. “He found a way off,” he said. “Smart kid. By the way…battle stations.”

Everything was so alien. Through the vehicle’s skin, Ben could see the ground and stars—he could even recognize some of the stars.

And he could see a blocky, awkward-looking freighter change its orbit to approach the point toward which he was rising.

His heart sank. He couldn’t possibly win an engagement in a vehicle he barely knew how to fly, one with either no weapons systems or systems older than most modern planetary governments.

“What are my weapons?” he asked.

They appeared in his mind’s eye. The arm at the vehicle’s bottom could curl around into a landing base, or could stay extended and direct a laser attack. The arm atop the vehicle could line up on opponents and fire metal balls at them.

“Cannon.” He all but spat the word out. “Physical cannon.”

To his surprise, the vehicle responded with indignation to his words. His mental view zoomed in on the top-mounted weapon. He watched as a metal ball the size of his head rolled, propelled by magnetics, from a hopper into the base of the articulated arm.

And then it was gone, emerging from the far end of the arm as a blur, with no sound of propellants accompanying the action.

He peered more closely and the sequence ran again, more slowly, in his mind. The ball was there…and the same magnetism that had rolled it into place accelerated it along the arm, building up speed with every centimeter it traveled until it left the end of the weapon.

Magnetic accelerator. Ben had heard of such a thing—a Verpine weapon, he thought, though that was a much smaller device. He’d never heard of one being built on a starfighter scale.

And maybe his enemies hadn’t, either.

His mental query told him he had less than a minute until he was close enough for those enemies to fire reliably upon him. A minute to practice.

“Dodge,” he said. And the vehicle began a forward-and-back, left-and-right shimmy that nearly hurled Ben from his kneeling position. Kiara slid around on the floor, rough as it was, until she grabbed one of Shaker’s legs to stabilize herself.

It was frustrating not to have direct control of the vehicle, but also exhilarating just to issue orders and have them carried out.

“Ready top weapon,” he said.

As if it were part of his body, he could feel a metal ball maneuvered into place at the base of the weapon. He could also sense a growing impatience within the vehicle. It occurred to him, whether the thought originated with him or his craft, that he didn’t need to say things out loud.

The freighter opened fire. Ben could see flashes of light around him—then pain crackled across his shoulders as one of those shots connected with the vehicle’s upper hull. The shock of it almost caused him to lose concentration, but anger was his friend, anger helped him keep his focus.

Fire top weapon. The ball left the weapon, hurtling toward the freighter…and grazed its shields and hull, ricocheting harmlessly