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“Can’t this ship go any faster?” Kyp asked. The lights dimmed as Chewbacca reinforced the shields.

“Like you said, kid, we stole a cargo shuttle. This isn’t a racing ship, and it sure isn’t the Falcon. Get ready for a jump to hyperspace as soon as this fossilized navicomputer gives an answer.” He stared at the readout, then pounded on the panel. “It’ll be another ten minutes before it coughs up a safe trajectory. Damn! The black hole cluster is screwing up the calculations.”

Chewbacca interjected a loud, bleating comment.

“What did he say?” Kyp asked.

“He said our shields are going to fail in about two minutes. I wish I had weapons—I’d even settle for a rock to throw out the window!” His eyes were wide and suddenly empty of hope. “There’s no way we can last long enough, and Doole sure won’t take prisoners a second time. Sorry I got you into this, kid.”

Kyp bit his lip, then turned to point out the front windowport. “Go there.”

The Maw.

Swirling clouds of gas looped into the bottomless pits of black holes, making space look like a tangled skein of incandescent yarn. Gravity waited to tear apart any ship that came too close. The inexorable Maw cluster was destined to swallow up the Kessel system itself in only another thousand years—but Han didn’t want to feed its appetite any sooner than that.

Chewbacca roared something that needed no translation. “Are you crazy?” Han asked.

“You said we’re dead anyway.”

Four Y-wings fired simultaneously on the port side of the shuttle, rocking it. A shower of sparks blasted from the comm unit, and Chewbacca struggled to reroute the circuits.

“There are supposed to be safe paths through it,” Kyp said. “There must be.”

“Yeah, and about a million paths that are sudden death!”

“It’ll be flying a razor’s edge all the way through.” Kyp’s young eyes looked immeasurably old as he stared at Han. “Do we have a better chance staying here and fighting?”

The enormous gravity wells of the Maw made a maze of all the hyperspace and normal space paths through the cluster. Most of the routes were either dead ends or went right down the gullet of a black hole. “We’d never find the right course,” Han said. “It’d be suicide.”

Kyp gripped Han’s shoulder. “I can show you the way.”

“What? How?”

A TIE fighter looped overhead, rotating in flight and firing at the hijacked shuttle. Cruisers from the moonbase approached, closing the gap. Against the capital-ships’ turbolasers, the escapees would be vaporized within moments. Chewbacca groaned as their rear shields weakened and failed.

Han scrambled with the controls; both he and Chewbacca tried to reinforce weak points by draining the stronger shields up front. Lights in the cabin dimmed as the shields gulped more power.

“I helped you navigate through the dark spice tunnels when we were running from Skynxnex, didn’t I?” Kyp said. “I knew when Doole was going to switch on the energy shield! I can find the right path into the Maw.”

“That still doesn’t tell me how, kid!” Han shouted.

Kyp wore an embarrassed expression for a moment; then he spoke quickly. “This is going to sound like a hokey old religion—but it works! An old woman who spent part of her sentence in the spice tunnels told me I had some sort of tremendous potential. She showed me how to use something called ‘the power’ or ‘the strength’ or something.”

“The Force!” Han cried in relief. He wanted to grab Kyp and hug him. “Why didn’t you say so? Who was this woman?”

“Her name was Vima-Da-Boda. Down in the spice mines she taught me only a few things before the guards hauled her away. I never saw her again, but I’ve been practicing what she taught me. It’s helped a few times, but I don’t really understand how.”

“Vima-Da-Boda!” Han said, remembering the withered fallen Jedi he and Leia had found on Nal Hutta. During her guilt-ridden hiding, Vima-Da-Boda had somehow spent time in the spice mines, long enough to train Kyp in a few essential skills. Han hoped that would be good enough.

“I don’t like this,” Han said. Another