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“Where do we take ’em?” asked Lando, as he guided the bucking, heeling freighter up through the insanity of the atmosphere again. Han stood slumped for a moment in the doorway of the bridge, almost too tired to move. It was one of the few times he’d seen his friend shocked out of his cockiness, quiet in the face of catastrophe. Then he crossed to the auxiliary controls, stumbling with fatigue as he walked. “Hey, I can do this, man,” added Lando, looking up quickly. “You go back there and lie down. Some of those guys in the holds look better than you do.”

Han gave him a universal gesture and dropped into the chair, but beyond this he made no attempt to help in liftoff. It had taken nearly ten hours to transfer all the survivors, and he knew he was far too tired to be at the controls of anything more complicated than a self-conforming chair. Battered as he felt, it itched him to see anyone handling the Falcon but himself.

“Bagsho is probably our best bet.” He shut his eyes, leaned his forehead on his fists in an attempt to block out the memory of the reactor core, the huddled shapes of the bodies pressed against one another in the small pockets of heat from the coils. Most of those who’d survived were the ones who’d had time to put on some kind of protective clothing, but there were over a dozen in radiation suits who’d died anyway, blind, burned husks of flesh. There’d been no chance, none whatsoever, that Leia had been anywhere on or near that vessel since she’d snipped the ceremonial ribbons at its maiden launch. His near-hysterical desire to double-check every corpse in the reactor chamber, every corpse in the ship, was, he knew, only that: hysteria.

But he couldn’t stop seeing her there: flesh burned purple and slick, hair gone, eyes gone …

He pulled a deep breath and made himself continue, fairly casually, “The sector medical facility’s there, and a small base. At least we can check in about enemy movements in this sector. I didn’t see signs of really heavy artillery but it takes more than just a couple of planet-hoppers to put out a cruiser.”

“Enemy?” Lando didn’t turn his head—he was concentrating hard on keeping the Falcon from being flipped into eternity by the tearing forces of the stratosphere—but there was a world of gesture in his voice. “What enemy? The partisans in Durren? That crazy wildcat pirate fleet or invasion or whatever it is that’s supposed to be hitting Ampliquen? The palace coup that’s going on in Kay-Gee? There isn’t …”

Something hit the Falcon like the zap of a live wire.

Solo gave a yelp of protest and was diving for the control panel even as the lurch of impact hurled him off his feet. Behind him down the corridor he heard Chewie roar. Lando yelled, “What the …?” and Solo scrambled to hands and knees, almost made it to his feet when another impact jolted him halfway across the bridge.

“Where are they coming from?”

“There’s nothing out there!” screamed Lando, slamming the controls into a straight-up dive that took them out of the final whirling shrouds of the atmosphere and into the black of space. Another laser beam caught the shields and overload lights went on like a red-and-amber Winterfeast display over the main console. Han was already piling up the ladder to the gunnery turret, cursing and wondering if this had anything to do with Leia’s disappearance, with the dying battlecruiser on the planet below, or if this was just some little dividend from bored galactic gods who thought Solo had had it too easy lately.

There was nothing on the targeting screen.

Another laser bolt hit them and the readout showed a thin patch the size of a sabacc table in the port underside shield.

Solo cursed and hit the recalibrate switch. At the same moment Lando’s voice yelled in his earjack, “You see ’em?”

Solo saw.

They were like microscopic dust on the monitor—Blast it, those things couldn’t be more than a couple of meters long! Each was about the bulk of a laser cannon, barely