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Chewbacca stepped over and draped a hand over Leia’s shoulder. “Rowowr,” he said softly. She nodded and let Han go, then followed Chewie and R2-D2 a little way off into the tunnel.

Han stood there for a long time, with an icy fist clenched inside his chest where his heart should be.

Finally, he took one deep breath and released a long, long sigh.

“Well, that could have gone better,” he said, and turned to follow his friends.

STARFIGHTERS FILLED SPACE AROUND THE REMEMBER ALDERAAN, streaking and looping and whirling so fast that in visible light they became mere smears of motion; even the cruiser’s sensor suite could distinguish friend from foe only belatedly, and by ratios of probability rather than certainty. The battle seemed to intensify by an order of magnitude with every light-second closer to the planet the cruiser moved.

Lando stood at the bridge’s forward viewscreens, hands folded behind him, his face entirely blank, expressionless—only the quick flicker of his eyes from starfighters to cruisers and back again betrayed the level of his concentration. Fenn Shysa had been pacing the deck behind him, faster and faster, becoming more and more agitated as starfighter after starfighter exploded, so many now that hurtling debris from their destructions had overloaded the Alderaan’s particle shields and now rattled the hull and starred cracks into the transparisteel viewports.

Finally Shysa couldn’t take it anymore. “Lando—General Calrissian—we can’t just stand here!”

“I’m standing,” Lando said. “You’re pacing.”

“I have to scramble my men. We should be out there!”

“You can join the battle if you feel that’s best; I’m the last man in the galaxy who’d presume to give orders to Lord Mandalore. But the commandos aren’t your men. Not right now, anyway. They work for me.”

“But—but—” At a loss for words, Shysa could only wave expressively at the battle outside. “We’re cut off already—they’re gonna pin us against the planet—”

Lando turned to him with, astonishingly, a broad smile on his face. “You think?”

“General!” the ComOps officer interrupted, staring into his screen. “We have visual verification—a substantial mass of asteroids inbound for the star. Coronal entry in … three minutes, sir!”

Lando nodded. “Flare activity?”

“Already begun, sir—sensor analysis indicates that we’re about twelve minutes away from a spike in intensity high enough to take down every deflector shield in the system. Then we’ll have maybe an hour, probably less, before we’re all cooked …”

“Okay, you heard the man,” Lando said generally. “Send out an all-ships: disengage and make for Mindor’s nightside, then launch escape pods. Tell the Rogues to take two more squadrons and cover the pods—”

“Lando, you have to commit my men! It’ll be a slaughter.”

“No, it won’t.”

“Three squadrons’ll never cover that many pods, and these marauders don’t take prisoners!”

“Doesn’t matter,” Lando said crisply. “Let ’em blow up the pods. It’ll keep them busy.”

“What?”

“All we’re launching is pods, get it? Empty pods.” Lando shook his head. “Think I’m about to set up my forces halfway around the planet from the bad guys? Not this general, my friend.”

“Then—” Fenn stared out through the forward screens, suddenly thoughtful. “Yeah, I get it: from nightside, you have the planet as a shield against the stellar flares … then we come in low-level, through the atmosphere … but if you’re planning to bring capital ships close to that volcano base of theirs, first you’ve got to take out their ground-based artillery—turbolasers, ion cannons … and especially that gravity gun. How do you figure on doing that?”

“Might be a problem.” Lando was still smiling. “You wouldn’t happen to know where I could lay my hands on, say, five or six hundred Mandalorian supercommandos, would you?”

Fenn blinked, blinked again, and then discovered that he was starting to smile, too.

CHAPTER 12

THOUGH HE WAS FAR FROM CONSCIOUS, LUKE KNEW something was wrong.

He felt … cold.

Unbelievably cold. He’d been cold before—a couple years earlier, on Hoth,