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“The navicomp’s not working,” Luke said.

“Well, fix it!”

Luke had already dashed around the bend in the corridor to pry off the access panel to the Falcon’s navicomputer. He glanced at the boards, feeling his heart sink into a black hole as deep as the Maw. “They’ve pulled the coordinate module. It’s not here.”

Lando groaned. “Now what are we going to do?”

In response to Lando’s concussion missiles, the Kessel fighters formed into tighter battle groups, striking at the Falcon with a firestorm of blaster bolts. Luke had to shield his eyes from the blinding flashes of near misses and deflected hits.

“I don’t know, but we’d better do it as fast as we can.”

“They’re from the New Republic!” Moruth Doole fumed in his rage, stomping up and down. “They’ll go back and report everything!” He straightened his mussed yellow cravat to regain his composure, but it didn’t work. He wanted to squash the escapees like a pair of bugs to eat. Spies and traitors! They had led him along, lied to him, taunted him.

“Send out every ship we have!” he screamed into the open channel that broadcast to his forces. He had managed to make it to the command center on the garrison moon. “Surround them, crush them, smash into them. I don’t care what it takes!”

“Sending out every ship might not be a good strategy,” responded one of the captains. “The pilots don’t know the formations, and they’ll just get in each other’s way.”

Doole’s mechanical eye lay in pieces scattered about the top of the console, and he could not see well enough to put it back together. With the blurry focus of his one half-blind eye, Doole could not identify the dissenting mercenary.

“I don’t care! I don’t want to lose these like we lost Han Solo!” He pounded his soft fist on the console, jarring the pieces of his mechanical eye. The primary lens bounced, then slid off the edge to shatter on the floor.

The Falcon ran straight toward the Maw, leaving Kessel behind.

“We’ll be all right,” Luke said. “I can use the Force to guide us through on a safe path.”

“If there is a safe path,” Lando muttered.

Sweat stood out on Luke’s forehead. “What other choice do we have? We can’t hide anyplace else, we can’t outrun all those fighters, and we can’t go into hyperspace without a navicomp.”

“What a great selection of options,” Lando said.

Finally mobilized, the capital ships came after them, firing ion cannon blasts powerful enough to clear a path through an asteroid field. The two big Lancer frigates made a deadly web in front of the Falcon with their twenty quad-firing laser cannons; but the Lancers were sluggish, and the Falcon increased its lead.

Somehow the other capital ships anticipated their run to the black hole cluster and converged ahead of them as Lando pushed the Falcon’s engines. “Come on, come on! Just squeeze a little more speed out.”

Ten system patrol craft, originally designed for maximum speed to combat smugglers and pirates, surged past the Falcon and lined up in a blockade. But in the three-dimensional vastness of space, Lando managed to slip under their grasp. Laser blasts erupted all around them.

“Our shields are edging the redlines,” Lando said.

Three Carrack-class light cruisers—midway in size between the Lancer frigates and the larger Dreadnaughts such as the ones in Bel Iblis’s lost Dark Force—formed a triple-pronged pincer, right, left, and top.

In hot pursuit behind the Falcon came the jagged ovoid of a Loronar strike cruiser, the largest ship in the Kessel fleet. As the chase plowed through the net of system patrol craft, the strike cruiser harmlessly took stray fire meant for the Falcon.

Lando stared out the viewport windows at the horrifying spectacle of the Maw and the giant battleships moving to meet them. Artoo bleeped something that even Luke could not translate.

“Only a complete idiot would go into a place like that,” Lando said. He squeezed his eyes shut.

“Then let’s just hope they’re not idiots, too,” Luke said.

27

Admiral Daala stood in the bridge tower of the Star Destroyer Gorgon, looking out at her fleet and