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“Hug the deck straight in to the right-hand canyon. Once we’re below ground level, there are side canyons and caverns and all kinds of places to hide. Blast some rocks, kick up some dust, and you won’t have any trouble losing these guys. There’s too many places to look, and they’ve got bigger problems than us.”

Han gave a slow nod as he nosed the Falcon into a screaming dive toward the canyons through the storm of intersecting cannon and turbolaser fire. “Not bad,” he admitted grudgingly. “You do seem to know your way around.”

“What do you think kept us all alive out here? Good looks?”

“Nah,” Han said. “I figured it was your winning personality.”

A HUNDRED-SOME PLANETARY DIAMETERS FROM MINDOR, the Slash-Es were moving.

Asteroid clusters had been drifting toward them, accelerating as they came, following lines of gravitic interaction between the Slash-Es’ gravity-well projectors and the thousands of gravity stations scattered through the asteroids. This effect had been clearly visible on the heads-up displays of the Lancer’s starfighter pickets, which was what had sparked the idea in Captain Tirossk, who, as the senior commander still active in the theater, was now unexpectedly in command of the entire RRTF.

As he explained it to Wedge and Tycho in encrypted transmissions, the combined effects of the inbound asteroid clusters and the gravity wells would produce semicoherent planetoids. With seat-of-the-pants reckoning, Wedge and Tycho had guesstimated that a dozen of these planetoids, moving in the proper orbits, would be enough to clear a brief hyperspace window that might allow some of the task force to escape. The Lancer’s navigational computer had put the minimum number at close to eighteen hours … and the window would open only briefly and unpredictably several times until it finally stabilized, if all went well, in about twenty hours.

However, all was not going well. Very little was going well.

Asteroid impacts on Taspan’s stellar sphere had already begun, owing to the ongoing perturbation of the asteroids’ unstable orbits, and radiation levels were rising. The Imp officers directing the TIE fighter wings had known what was up the instant they detected the Slash-Es moving out of planetary interdiction configuration—and they had a seemingly limitless supply of interceptors piloted by an equally seemingly limitless supply of suicidal psychopaths, which meant that the Slash-Es were doing their best to perform this delicate and intricate set of maneuvers while plowing through clouds of enemy fighters that swirled and spat plasma blasts as if somebody had armed a swarm of Gamorrean thunder wasps with laser cannons.

For the original model of CC-7700s, this would have been a suicide mission, and a brief one at that. The Slash-E series, however, was clad in the latest carbon-nanofilament armor to supplement their six shield generators; they had eight quad turrets each, and their power output had been upgraded to nearly the level of a Clone Wars–era turbolaser. Further improvements included a pair, dorsal and ventral, of 360-degree proton torpedo turrets and a staggering number of anti-starfighter cluster bombs—essentially shaped charges set into the hull that would explode outward into clouds of bomblets when they sensed the approach of enemy fighters—all of which meant that the only way TIE fighters could have a serious shot at taking out a Slash-E was to swarm it in enough numbers to overload its defenses so that a few could slip in for full-speed headers. But even a direct impact wouldn’t generate enough kinetic energy to take out a CNF-armored frigate unless the TIE was traveling at very close to its maximum realspace velocity.

Making sure no TIE reached that cataclysmic velocity on an intercept course with one of the Slash-Es was the job of the X-wing pilots.

Though the RRTF fighters were outnumbered hundreds to one by the TIEs, they had a few advantages that shaved the odds a bit. First, the Imperial forces could not make a full-commitment assault, because that would have required