• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

He pulled the Falcon into a looping evasion curve, and this time he did engage the targeting computer—which promptly informed him, in no uncertain terms, that the Falcon was out of missiles. “Now you tell me.”

Han keyed the comm. “Rogue Leader, Rogue Leader. Wedge, you out there? If you’re in the area, we could use a little cover right about now!”

The speakers crackled. Faintly, through the bursts of static: “Negative on the cover, Falcon. Do you read? Negative cover! We are buried—there’s more TIEs than rocks out here! Do you read?”

“Loud and too damn clear,” Han muttered. “Can you pry open a window for us?”

“No joy starside, Falcon. Do not attempt! Hostiles have you under the blanket. Find a hole and pull it in after you. We’ll be back as soon as we round up some friendlies.”

“Negative that. Stick to Leia’s plan; we’ll make our own way. We’ll find Luke and meet you on the far side of the jump point.”

“Copy that. Clear skies, Falcon.”

“See you soon, Wedge.”

“Copy, Han. Take care of the pretty lady.”

“I always do,” Han said, and only after a second or two did it strike him that Wedge had been talking about Leia, not the Falcon. “Uh, yeah, her too,” he muttered, and keyed the inboard comm. “All right, kids, we have to do this the hard way. Belt up—this ride’s about to get bumpy!”

The targeting computer shrilled an alert: MISSILE LOCK DETECTED.

“Missile lock? They don’t even have—” But even as he was arguing with the computer, Han had kicked the Falcon into a high-g sideslip, and before he could finish the sentence a pair of concussion missiles screamed past so close the cockpit rattled. “Who’s shooting at us now?”

“Incoming!” Leia sang out over the sudden thunder of the quad turrets.

“I saw them alrea—oh.” Han stared out through the forward viewport at a swarm of missiles that looped toward them from the general direction of a giant wall of billowing dust, which had been kicked up by a skirmish line of four or five dozen heavy assault gunships that skimmed the hills a few kilometers away, angling for envelopment. “You have got to be kidding me!”

“Arroowerrhowoo!”

“Sure, laugh it up,” Han snarled as he yanked the Falcon back into an intercept course with the strafing TIEs. Trust a Wookiee to find this funny. “Chewie, target the fighters! We need to break their formation. Princess—hey, wait …”

From down among the rocks at the crater’s rim, at every impact point of every laser bolt from every one of the strafing TIEs, rose a billow of reddish-black cloud: dust and smoke, thick enough to completely shroud the ground beneath.

Han found himself grinning. “Princess! Aim for the ground!”

“What?”

“Just do it! Angle the turret forward and hold down the triggers!”

“You’re the captain, Captain.” He could hear in her voice her skeptical shrug, but an instant later she opened up the belly quad and hosed the lava ahead with a nonstop stream of laserfire.

And even as Han kicked the Falcon into a dive that speared straight into the billowing wall of red-black dust kicked up by Leia’s laser blasts, he was contemplating, with mild astonishment, that for very possibly the first time in her life, Leia had just done as she was told without a word of argument. Must be the captain thing. Why hadn’t he thought of that before? His mouth quirked upward in a slight, lopsided smile.

He was still smiling when the Falcon roared up from the cloud into open sky and was instantly clipped across its starboard mandible by the collector panel of a TIE interceptor whose astonished pilot never even had a chance to blink before his starfighter was transformed by the impact into a flaming ball of wreckage tumbling toward the all-too-close lava below.

The glancing impact knocked the Falcon into a flipping whirl like a cred chip spinning on a sabacc table that sprayed the surrounding area with molten chunks of titanium from the gash in its armor plating. The TIE fighter collector’s leading edge missed the front viewpanel of the Falcon’s cockpit