• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

A fighter made a pass at the larger ship as she lifted, her thrusters glowing blue-white.

Lando made life hell for him.

The Falcon soared into the multicolored sky, two of the fighters harrying her like angry hornets. They were fast, maneuverable, and good. Too good: Lando hadn’t any easy dodge available there, as he had at the fissured asteroid. Nor was he experiencing much success smoking his tormentors. But his steady, accurate, occasionally inspired shooting kept them from having very much luck, either.

Another frantic pass, another exchange of energy-bolts, to little effect except in generating adrenaline on both sides.

Oseon 5792 dwindled rapidly beneath them.

Then somebody manhandling a fighter made a mistake, zigging when he should have zagged. Aboard the Falcon, crosshairs rested firmly on his midsection, waiting for exactly such an error. They were still on him as Lando mashed both triggers, tracking all the while, following through.

The fighter burst into a tumbling ball of sparks and greasy smoke.

Vuffi Raa rolled the Falcon, skidded, bringing Lando’s guns to bear again. He poured her fury into the remaining fighter as it swerved to avoid the fate of its companion.

Freighters weren’t supposed to be able to do that!

The unnaturally agile saucer suddenly performed a maneuver that, in another place and time, would be called a Luftberry circle, placing her smack on the fighter’s back again. Her quad-guns pounded.

The enemy wriggled off the hook once more, but this one made an error, too: he got sore. Veering in a wide, angry, predictable loop, he came back to have his vengeance. Instead, he got four parallel pulsed beams of raw fusion-reactor output straight in the helmet visor.

And exploded, showering space with incandescent atoms.

Beneath them, there was a sudden streak of light.

Something left the asteroid faaassst!, headed for interstellar space. At very nearly the same instant, the surviving three fighters, having reconnected themselves with their battleship engine, bored directly for Bohhuah Mutdah’s miniature world, fanatically intent on taking their victim with them—and unaware that (whoever it was) he was gone. Detaching themselves at the last second, they slung the giant, throbbing power plant at Oseon 5792.

One of them had a mechanical failure. His cable wouldn’t release. He was pulled down with the engine into hell.

The other two sheered off frantically.

Vuffi Raa raced tentacle tips over the Falcon’s keyboards. The resulting acceleration could be felt by her captain even through her powerful inertial dampers. His gun seat slewed around violently, slamming itself and its occupant hard against the stops as the guns swung wildly. The asteroid dwindled to a pinprick—

—and blossomed into a glowing cloud, consuming one of the fighters who thought he’d gotten away, tumbling the other. Even the Flamewind paled momentarily as the ravening fireball expanded, growing brighter, brighter.

Then, from the inside out, it began to dim.

Lando took a deep breath—discovered he’d already taken one he didn’t remember—and let it out.

“Brace yourself, Master!” screamed the intercom beside his ear.

BLANG! ZOONG! GRAT!

It was like being inside a titanium drum being beaten by a tribe of savages. Debris showered past the Falcon, mostly ricocheting off her shields, some pieces actually getting through at a reduced and harmless velocity.

The freighter shook and danced, then steadied.

Lando released a second breath he didn’t recall taking, unstrapped himself from the quad-gun chair, rubbed a couple of sore places on his back, and shambled forward to the cockpit.

Deep in interstellar space, far from the Oseon and getting farther by the nanosecond, a brand-new one-seat fighter, bruised and battered by the Flamewind and the destruction of a world, took its badly shaken pilot home.

Rokur Gepta laughed bitterly. The best deception is the one that first deceives the deceiver. Blood stained the voluminous gray robes he wore, and agony pulsed through his ruined eye—another debt he owed Lando Calrissian. Yet Rokur