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THE X-WING PILOT AND HIS WINGMAN WERE LINING UP desperate deflection shots at an oncoming formation of six TIE interceptors when an ancient, battered YT-1300 freighter suddenly arrived in the middle of their dogfight, blocking those last-ditch shots.

The wingman’s demand to know what a saucer-shaped relic from Old Republic days was doing in the middle of a space battle quickly turned into a gasp of awe as the battered hulk slewed into an astonishingly precise skew-flip that turned its sublights into weapons to blast a pair of interceptors enough off-course that they slammed into a nearby asteroid. At that point, the relic in question hurtled headlong at the remaining four of the TIE flight—who were boxed together by the maze of asteroids—barrel-rolling through a storm of laserfire while unleashing a salvo of concussion missiles with either astonishing accuracy or even more astonishing luck, so that after a single pass the freighter streaked away, hurtling off through the maze of asteroids after having dusted six interceptors in under five seconds.

Inside the freighter’s cockpit, Han didn’t have a chance to celebrate his victory. Bleeding from a minor scalp wound he’d collected off the front viewport strut owing to not being fully strapped into his pilot’s couch, he was busy yanking the control yoke this way and that, thumbing fire-control switches wholly at random, and ducking and throwing his weight as though he could bodily increase the ship’s maneuverability to help dodge the meteors that kept denting his hull. All the while he kept screaming at the top of his lungs things like “Chewie, we need those deflectors! We really, really do!” and “Is that smoke? Why am I smelling smoke?” From the forward service access came half-panicked yowls of frustration and apology: in the haste of their sudden takeoff, the problem in the balky forward deflector-array control assembly had failed to get entirely repaired, which could be a seriously fatal problem in the middle of a couple of hundred enemy starfighters, a number of which were now apparently right on his tail. But he ignored Chewie’s yowls, because on top of everything else he was dealing with, something was entirely screwed up with local space: the Falcon’s navicomputer couldn’t make any kind of sense out of the trajectories of all the different rocks swirling around, and the ship was yawing and starting to tumble in a way he hadn’t experienced since his legendary race through the Kessel Run, where tidal effects from the local black holes had—

“Hey …” Han straightened up, his face suddenly clearing. It was like Kessel—exactly like Kessel! He checked a sensor; sure enough, the asteroids were clustered around a powerful mass well, almost certainly produced by a gravity mine or projector somewhere in the middle. “That’s it! Chewie, forget the deflectors! Give me particle shields forward! Now!”

Chewbacca replied with a series of growling snorts and hoots that translated, roughly, as You’d better not be thinking what I know you’re thinking!

Han grinned, remembering a vaguely similar situation some years before. He gave the same answer now. “They’d be crazy to follow us, wouldn’t they?”

Without waiting for the shields or even an acknowledgment from Chewbacca, Han slewed the Falcon through a radically tightening arc that set it rocketing full-speed into the thickest part of the asteroid field. The particle shields flared to spectacular life; radiation scatter from their disintegration of dust and the smaller rocks on the cloud made the Falcon look like it was flying within a shell of fireworks.

And he reflected, briefly, that those demented Rogue Squadron thrill-monkeys might actually be right. Once in a while.

To the pilots of the TIE interceptors in pursuit of the Falcon, the ship simply vanished. The asteroid field was dense and unpredictable; so much of the pilots’ attention had to be concentrated on staying out of the way of hurtling rocks that they were forced to rely more and more on their sensor locks as the Falcon