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Nick only shrugged as he belted himself in. “It’s not the worst idea these guys have had today,” he called back.

Luke got himself buckled, as well. With a flick of the Force, he reinitialized the circuit that had deactivated the ventral turret. “Nice friends you have.”

“She’s not a bad person,” Nick insisted as he twisted the control yoke back and forth, checking the turret’s servo response. “She just doesn’t have a lot of patience for the little things.”

“Little things like laws and justice and other people’s lives?” The turret’s tactical screen lit up with unfriendlies. “Here they come!”

Nick hauled on the control yoke and triggered the guns even before the turret swung into line, stitching a curving stream of cannon bolts up the inner wall of the caldera just as a flight of a dozen or so TIEs whipped over the rim and streaked down on strafing runs. The lead TIE flew right into Nick’s fire and its cockpit viewscreen shattered; it plowed straight on down into the cinder pit at full speed and exploded, but the rest of his shots glanced off armor and collector panels. “This is gonna be a problem,” Nick said through his teeth. “Got one, though.”

Luke was holding down the triggers in his own turret. “It wasn’t starfighters that set this whole crater on fire. Watch out for bombers.”

“Copy that.”

TIEs swooped down upon them and cannon blasts rocked the ship; Nick caught another one right in the eyeball, then one more. He let out a whoop. “That’s three! How many you drop so far, Skywalker?”

“None,” Luke said tightly.

“What, I’m outshooting you?” Nick poured enough fire into another TIE’s collector panel that it lost control and crashed into its wingman. “Shee, they don’t make Jedi like they used to.”

“Nick, be quiet.”

“Hey, I’m not gloating—well, maybe a little—”

“I know. I need to concentrate.”

“On what?” Nick twisted around so he could look up at Skywalker and out through the dorsal turret, which was when he understood why Skywalker hadn’t shot down any ships. He wasn’t shooting at the ships. Nick also understood why it was that no missiles or bombs or cannons were blasting the Falcon to tiny bits.

Because that’s what Skywalker had been shooting: the missiles and bombs and cannon fire raining down from the swarm of enemy ships.

“Oh,” Nick said softly. He went back to shooting. But he couldn’t stop looking at the flames licking upward from the burning cinder pit, and he couldn’t help noticing that while Skywalker’s blasts were intercepting the cannon bolts and missiles that would actually hit the Falcon, all the near-misses were splashing so much molten rock around that it’d probably be melting through the ship’s hull armor any second now anyway. Just as he realized this, the turret’s tactical screen showed blips for six TIE bombers inbound, and when he pointed all this out to Skywalker, the young Jedi’s only response was to key the cockpit channel on the intercom. “Hey—” He glanced over at Nick. “What’s her name again?”

“Aeona.”

“Aeona, this is Luke. I hope you got some thrusters hot.”

“We’re a long way off full power—”

“We’ll take what we’ve got. Full ahead. Angle the attitude jets for extra boost.”

“Skywalker?” Nick said. “You just ordered her to bury this ship in a river of molten fraggin’ lava.”

“Yes. Reset your turret to default position and fire on my order.”

“Um, you do know that default is forward? Which is down.” Desperation sharpened his voice. “You do know that’s the opposite of up, which is where the bad guys are coming from?”

“Nick,” Luke said, “you’re arguing with a Jedi again.”

Nick’s response was a snarl of frustration that contained, as its only intelligible words, nikkle-nut Jedi ruskakk as he jabbed toggles on the turret’s fire-control board.

Luke no longer looked at his own tactical screen. He didn’t even glance outside the turret. He didn’t need to see outside; he was paying attention to inside.

Inside his head. Inside the Force.

He felt the Falcon’s quad turrets swing into line;