Star Wars_ Tales From the Mos Eisley Cantina - Kevin J. Anderson [127]
Losing half their number had changed the rules, though. Now they weren’t shooting just to cripple; they were out for blood. BoShek frowned as he tried to think of a way to take them out first, but the Infinity was built for speed, not fighting.
Fleetingly, he thought of calling upon the Force, of trying to use its ancient mystical powers to throw his pursuers off, but he knew it would be useless. He’d been meditating and concentrating on the Force ever since he’d heard of it from one of the few real monks at the monastery in Mos Eisley, but he’d never yet gotten any indication that it even existed, other than a faint awareness of other people’s presence from time to time. The old Jedi might have been able to draw from it to subdue their enemies a long time ago, but the Force hadn’t protected them from the advancing Empire. No, he needed something more concrete, something physical he could do to escape.
Then he remembered a story Solo had told him once, about how he’d faked out a bounty hunter in an asteroid belt. Yeah. The same thing might work here.
He led the fighters deeper and deeper into the canyon, until its high walls boxed them in on either side. The Infinity shuddered under more and more impacts, and a flashing light on the instrument board warned of a shield about to fail, but instead of speeding up, BoShek intentionally slowed down. He rested his finger on the emergency escape-pod launch button, and just as he rounded a sharp bend, he hit it. The escape pod blew free and continued straight into the canyon wall, where its fuel supply exploded in a spectacular fireball. BoShek kept his eye on the heads-up rearview, but neither of the TIE fighters emerged from the flames. Either they’d been swallowed up in the explosion, or they’d pulled up and were circling around to examine what they no doubt assumed was the wreckage of the entire Infinity.
Smiling, BoShek pulled up out of the canyon, aimed straight east, then cut his engines completely. He had enough velocity to fly ballistic all the way to Mos Eisley if he had to, and with his engines dead the TIE fighters would never spot him.
“Solo,” he said aloud in the close control cabin, “I owe you a drink.”
BoShek knew right where to find him, too. Whenever the Millennium Falcon was onplanet, either Solo or Chewbacca—and sometimes both—would be at the Mos Eisley Cantina, trying to drum up business. After he’d dropped off the Infinity at the monastery, leaving instructions for the mechanics to modify its engine transponders immediately, BoShek headed straight there, not even taking the time to change out of his flight suit first. The monastery was south of the city’s center; he stopped for a moment at the ancient wreckage of the first colony ship, the Dowager Queen, to pass a sealed note from the abbot to one of the street preachers there, then hurried on.
The streets were lousy with stormtroopers, but they didn’t seem to be looking for BoShek. He saw four of them hassling an old hermit and a kid and two droids in a beat-up old landspeeder, but they evidently weren’t too interested in them either, because they let them go after just a few questions. BoShek ducked into the cantina before the stormtroopers could take an interest in him.
It took his eyes a minute to adjust to the dark interior, but Chewbacca was easy to spot, towering above the other beings at the bar the way he did. BoShek wove his way through the crowd and leaned up against the bar next to him.
“I beat your record,” he said without preamble.
Chewbacca grunted the Wookiee equivalent of “Get lost,” but then BoShek’s voice registered and he turned his head to ask what record BoShek meant.
“The Kessel run,” BoShek said, grinning. “I beat your time by a tenth, and I had to take out four TIE fighters when I got here to boot.”
Chewbacca growled appreciatively. He howled a long, ululating phrase that BoShek translated as “You’d better not let the customers