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At the last second he shed almost all his speed and threaded in through the girderwork support. It wasn’t a particularly hard maneuver; the thick girders were widely spaced, and his speed was, by then, comparatively low. The pursuers, closely grouped behind him, chose to follow rather than detour around the support tower. They were determined not to lose him as he broke out the other side. That wasn’t, however, his plan.

He pulled at the handlebars and went into a vertical climb, straight up the central well of the support tower, hoping that this station followed standard design.

It did; he shot between two catwalks and directly out into the cavernous emission cylinder, a gridwork with open squares some meter and a half or so on a side. The emission cylinder was 150 meters long, less than a third of that in diameter. He swung down toward one end of the slowly rotating cylinder, orienting himself and figuring out just which way the station was pivoting.

He turned back to see the three pursuers soar into the cylinder in determined chase. They were moving a good deal slower than Han; they had never played this game before.

“Stay gripped,” he shouted over his shoulder and swung back toward the others. The cylinder was more than spacious enough for them to scatter and avoid him, thinking he was trying to ram. Then they dropped in on his tail again, following him down toward the far end of the cylinder where, they were sure, they could trap and halt him.

Until he speeded up again. The engine pod blared its power. The far end of the emission cylinder was still swinging and Han had to compensate carefully for its movement. He crouched forward, sighting carefully through the fairing, lining up the swoop precisely. The openings in the gridwork were frighteningly small.

The woman saw what he was about to do and burrowed her head into his back. The opening he had selected expanded before him. There was a terrible moment of doubt, far too late to change his mind.

The gridwork passed him like a shadow. And he was in the open, pointed more or less toward the city, the swoop’s engine howling. He took a quick look behind. Pieces of wreckage were raining slowly to the ground and some lengths of gridwork stuck out jaggedly; one of his pursuers had tried to emulate him and failed.

The woman’s face was pallid.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Just fly this thing, you psychopath!” she shouted back.

He faced forward again with an arrogant smirk. “Deft hands and a pure heart triumph again! You were never in any—” He gulped as he saw that the top edge of the fairing had been neatly sheared away. He’d been spared by no more than millimeters.

“—danger,” Han Solo finished in a much more subdued voice.

V

CHEWBACCA, still some distance from the Millennium Falcon, smelled a strange odor and knew something was wrong. Black nostrils flaring in a futile effort to identify the aroma, he approached the starship as quietly as he could. Despite his great size and weight, the Wookiee, a veteran hunter, moved with total stealth.

After leaving the lounge, Chewbacca had made only a cursory check of the Falcon, eyeballing her to make sure no one on any of the grounds crews had attempted to move the freighter or block her in. Then he had begun a round of inquiries at the portmaster’s headquarters and guild hiring halls. But the Falcon’s first mate had turned up nothing of use.

His errand had caused him to miss both the abortive attempt to break into the ship and Han’s subsequent appearance and departure. But now he had discovered still another threat to the starship. Silently easing up to the foot of the ramp, he saw an unfamiliar form hunched over and working busily at the freighter’s main hatch lock. Next to the figure was an open tool bag containing a fusioncutter, some probes, a drill, and other instruments of illegal entry. The intruder’s ears were covered with some sort of headphones.

Chewbacca ascended the ramp like a wraith, reached out, seized a broad handful of the nape of the intruder