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Leia laughed despite herself and hugged him fiercely. “Let’s go home.”

“Can’t think of one good reason not to,” Han said, bending to pluck his flight bag from the ground. “Don’t make too much of it, hon, but I kinda missed you.”

Twenty-three hours out from Polneye, Plat Mallar turned on the cockpit recorder of the TIE interceptor. His face was pale and slick with perspiration. His voice was weak, and his eyes wandered as he tried to force his blurred vision to clear.

Designed without hyperdrive, the interceptor had never been intended for the kind of journey Mallar had attempted—across realspace from one star to another. He had fled Polneye, eluded the Yevetha, and left Koornacht Cluster behind, but he could not escape the cold equations of time, energy, and distance.

Mallar had run the fighter wide open for as long as the solar panels and the capacitors had allowed, accelerating the little ship to a straight-line speed well above that any pilot could use in combat. He had even persuaded the autopilot, designed for simple in-system navigation problems, to accept Galantos as a destination.

But the engines had been cold for hours now, and only emptiness surrounded his hurtling craft. The nose of the fighter was pointed directly at Galantos, but it would not reach that system for—he calculated—nearly three years. And Mallar did not expect to live another three hours.

The ship’s small oxygen reserve was gone. His re-breather could no longer cleanse the breaths he drew well enough to end the agonizing headaches. The recirculators were keeping the air dry, but he was slowly suffocating on his own waste gases.

Memory had deceived him. The images from his childhood, of Polneye as a bustling port, as the hub of the region’s spacelanes, were too strong to be shaken by facts. Those images offered what had proved a false promise—that he would find another ship to offer help or transport.

Dirtbound his whole life, he found it was beyond him to imagine how empty space was, or to believe how deserted that region had become. In twenty-three hours, not a single vessel of any size had been detected by the interceptor’s targeting system. He knew he was going to die, and he was going to die alone.

He cleared his throat, an uglier sound than his rasping breaths. “My name is Plat Mallar,” he said. “I was born in the city of Three North, on the planet Polneye. My mother was Fall Topas. She was a plant biologist, and quite beautiful. My father was Plat Hovath, a droid mechanic. I was their only son. We lived in Ten South, on blue level, near the algae pool.

“Yesterday was the fortieth day of Mofat. Yesterday warships attacked Polneye without any warning—without any cause. Unidentified ships. Imperial designs. They destroyed most of Polneye—killed my parents—killed most of us. I think the survivors are hostages now—there was a transport—”

He paused, heart pounding, to try to catch his breath. His voice had become frail and wheezy.

When he could continue, Mallar said, “The combat recorders of my ship contain evidence of this attack—of the destruction of my home. They murdered my people, thousands and thousands and thousands. Please help us. Please—if any are still alive—try to save them. Whoever sees this—you must find these monsters and punish them. It’s wrong. It’s terribly wrong. I beg—I beg for justice for the dead. For my parents. For my friends. For me.”

Mallar sagged back into his seat, exhausted by the effort of speaking. But the recorder kept running—he could not manage to raise an arm to stop it. It kept on, faithfully capturing Mallar’s image, for as long as he moved or made a sound at turns.

But it stopped when at last he slipped into unconsciousness.

He was still unconscious, barely clinging to life, when the crew of the Fifth Fleet prowler 5P8 stumbled on his hurtling ship.

Chapter 15

The first early-morning rays from Coruscant’s sun were throwing long shadows down the east-west streets of Imperial City when Admiral Ackbar reached the family