• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“Cynner, he went belowdecks!” he yelled down the corridor. “There's another access in the main hold. Hurry!”

Poste stumbled through the Falcon's unlighted cargo areas, tripping over tools, slamming into engine parts, and flattening toys that squeaked when he stepped on them. Above and behind he could hear muffled calls. Hands extended in front of him, he kept moving forward, feeling his way around bulkheads and obstacles impossible to identify. He reasoned that he had to be beneath the main hold when sudden light poured in from above and he caught a brief glance of the Nautolan, silhouetted against the ceiling illuminators.

“He just passed me!”

“I'll get him!”

Poste heard eager footsteps behind him, then the sound of Cynner landing on the deck of the central cargo area. Throwing caution to the wind, he propelled himself into the forward freight-loading room, which Han Solo had turned into a bunker housing an array of concussion missiles. Feeling along the slightly curved forward bulkhead, his hands found the opening to a maintenance burrow that provided access to the deflector shield generator, landing jets, and passive sensor antenna housed in the port mandible.

Poste pulled himself up and into the pitch-black tunnel, then began to worm his way forward over greasy components and through puddles of leaked lubricant to the mandible's top-side maintenance hatch, which he prayed wasn't secured from the outside.

The light of a glow stick danced around him.

“Any sign of him?” the human called.

“I don't see him. He could be anywhere. I'll try to find the lights.”

“Don't bother. Let him rot down here.”

“Good enough for me. I'm heading back up.”

Bellying forward, Poste found the circular hatch and sprang it. Hauling himself out onto the forward tip of the mandible, he rolled to one side. Then with his fingers hooked around the right-angle edge, he dropped to the duracrete floor and squatted behind the forward-most of the port-side hardstand disks.

Arriving in the cockpit, Cynner found his partner seated at the instrument console. “Fancy me, sitting in Han Solo's chair.”

“I see the droid's gone.”

“We don't need either of them.” Swiveling to face front, Remata flicked the repulsorlift toggles and scanned the instruments. “Not all that different from the Two-thousand series.”

“Should I check in?” Cynner said as he slid into the copilot's chair.

Remata nodded and threw a switch. “Secure your harness.”

Comlink out, Cynner heard the boarding ramp retract. “We have the ship,” he said into the comlink's speaker. “We're raising it now.”

“WE WORKED FIRST-LIGHT-TO-ABSOLUTE-DARK FOR TWO STANDARD weeks retrofitting that hyperdrive,” Jadak said, “the Verpine, the Jawas, and me. The days were so hot we were frying nogull eggs on the hull, and some nights it got so cold we'd wake to find our drinking water sheeted with ice. Took another two weeks to install the laser cannon. When we finished, though, the YT was sporting in the neighborhood of a Class One hyperdrive and a dorsal turret and battery. The Verpine, the Sullustan, and I piloted her through her first jumps to lightspeed, and let me tell you, we could hardly believe how fast she was. That's when I came up with the name, right after the initial series of test flights.”

“She has a point-five now,” Han said proudly, “thanks to an outlaw tech I knew in the Corporate Sector. After that was when I set the record for the Kessel Run. There's still nothing to compare to her. Even the hyperdrives of these new Mandalorian ships are only rated point-four.”

“Ratings don't matter. A skilled pilot in a point-four could outfly an average pilot at the helm of a point-five.”

“No way,” Han said.

“I've seen it happen,” Jadak said. “In sublight races, anyway.”

“Well, sublight, sure. Now you're talking about something completely different.”

Jadak worked his jaw. Each time he tried to stick to the script and relate the tale in Quip Fargil's vocal cadence, Solo would jump in with a question or a comment. His competitive