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Port control, having noticed that the barge was preparing to lift, began transmitting to what it still presumed to be a robotized ship orders to abort liftoff. Han hit the overrides and had the barge’s computer answer by acknowledging clearance as if it had received permission to go. Port control repeated the command to hold, convinced it was dealing with a computer malfunction along with all its other problems.

Han brought the engines up. The barge wallowed up from its pit, bending aside the boarding gantry, ignoring all directions to do otherwise. As his radius of vision increased with altitude, Han spied the abandoned harvester. It was halfway to the other end of the giant port, surrounded by Espo hover-vans, skimmers, and self-propelled artillery. The harvester had been partially disabled, but still obeyed its present programming mindlessly, trying to grind forward.

As Han watched, a cannonade from all sides stopped the huge machine for good, gouging large chunks from it, turning most of the harvester’s lower chassis into wreckage. Someone no longer cared whether prisoners were taken or not. The harvester’s power plant went up in a fireball, and the harvester split in half with a force that rocked the Espo field pieces back.

As the barge rose higher, responding sluggishly under its burden of cargo, ignoring chatter from the port control, Han saw the place where Chewbacca had been captured. Other Espo vehicles were gathered near the wreck of the hovervan. Han couldn’t tell whether his partner was there or had already been taken away, but the fields were crawling with Security Police, like a pestilence among the golden-red grain, searching for possible stragglers. Rekkon had been right; going back would’ve spelled certain disaster.

The barge gave a sudden, convulsive shudder, and the Falcon’s passengers felt as if someone had caught them by the collar and given a yank. With an ominous feeling, Han punched up the rear screens. Bollux, having nearly fallen, lowered himself into the navigator’s chair, inquiring what was wrong. Han ignored him.

It had been a picket ship, in transpolar orbit, that he and Chewbacca had picked up just prior to landing. Even Rekkon hadn’t realized how security-minded the Authority was about Orron III. Moving up hard astern the barge was a dread-naught, one of the military’s old Invincible Class capital ships—over two kilometers long, bristling with gun turrets, missile tubes, tractor-beam projectors, and deflector shields, armored like a protosteel mountain. The dreadnought hailed them with the demand that the barge halt, and at the same time identified herself: the Shannador’s Revenge. She’d locked her tractors onto the barge, and compared with her raw power, the lighter’s beam back on Duroon had been a mere beckoning finger.

“Church is out,” Han observed, bringing his ordnance up to charge and preparing to angle deflector shields, for all the good it would do. The dreadnought had enough weaponry to hold and vaporize a score of ships like the Falcon. Han opened the intercom. “That shake-up was a tractor. Everybody stay cool—things could get rough.” As if we have a prayer, he finished to himself. But he had no intention of being caught alive. Better to shorten a few Espo careers, and go out in style.

There were sounds of banging, tearing metal from the barge shell, of parting supports and struts. Some of the superstructural features, weakened or loosened by alterations to the hull, had been pulled free by the tractor beam and gone flying back toward the Shannador’s Revenge.

Han took inspiration from it. He had at his side breadboarded computer overrides for the barge’s every function. His fingers stabbed at them as he shouted, “Everybody brace! We’re gonna—” and was slammed back in his seat. He’d hit the cargo release, opening the barge’s rear dump-doors. Hundreds of thousands of tons of grain were poured into the dreadnaught’s tractors, pulled toward the Shannador’s Revenge by her own brute power, fanning out in a blinding contrail,