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His cockpit panels insisted that both wings had deployed properly, yet his own vision told him otherwise.

Ackbar jabbed the controls again, trying to straighten the wing, to regain control. The bottom half of his body felt cold and tingly as he channeled reserves of energy into his mind and his hands on the control levers.

“Something is very wrong here,” he said.

Leia stared out the viewport. “We’re heading straight for the cathedral!”

One of the aileron struts buckled and snapped from the plasteel hull, dragging power cables as it tore free. Sparks flew, and more hull plates ripped up.

Ackbar strangled an outcry. Suddenly the control lights flickered and dimmed. He heard the grinding hum as his main cockpit panels went dead. He hit the second auxiliary backup he had personally designed into the B-wing.

“I don’t understand it,” Ackbar said, his voice guttural in the confines of the cockpit. “This ship was just reconditioned. My own Calamarian mechanics were the only ones who touched it.”

“New Republic shuttle,” the voice on the radio insisted.

On the crystalline Cathedral of Winds, multicolored Vors scrambled down the sides, fleeing as they saw the craft hurtling toward them. Some of the creatures took flight, while others stared. Thousands of them were packed into the immense glassy structure.

Ackbar hauled the controls to the right, to the left—anything to make the craft swerve—but nothing responded. All the power had died.

He couldn’t raise or lower the ship’s wings. He was a large deadweight falling straight toward the cathedral. Desperately he hit the full battery reserves, knowing they could do nothing for the mechanical subsystems, but at least he could lock in a full-power crash shield around the B-wing.

And before that, he could break Leia free to safety.

“I’m sorry, Leia,” Ackbar said. “Tell them that I am sorry.” He punched a button on the control panel that cracked open the right side of the cockpit, splitting the hull and blasting free the tacked-on passenger seat.

As it shot Leia into the clawlike winds, Ackbar heard the wind screech at him through the open cockpit. The crash shield hummed as he hurtled toward the great crystalline structure. The fighter’s engine smoldered and smoked.

Ackbar stared straight ahead until the end, never blinking his huge Calamarian eyes.

Leia found herself flying through the air. The blast of the ejection seat had knocked the breath out of her.

She couldn’t even shout as the wind caught and spun her chair. The seat’s safety repulsorlifts held her like a gentle hand and slowly lowered her toward the whiplike strands of pale-hued grasses below.

She looked up to see Ackbar’s B-wing shuttle in the last instant before it crashed. The starfighter smoked and whined as it plunged like a metal filing toward a powerful magnet.

In a frozen moment she heard the loud, mournful fluting of winds whistling through thousands of crystalline chambers. The breeze picked up with a gust, making the music sound like a sudden gasp of terror. The winged Vors scrambled and attempted to flee, but most could not move quickly enough.

Ackbar’s B-wing plowed into the lower levels of the Cathedral of Winds like a meteor. The booming impact detonated the crystalline towers into a hail of razor-edged spears that flew in all directions. The sound of tinkling glass, the roar of sharp broken pieces, the shriek of the wind, the screams of the slashed Vors—all combined into the most agonizing sound Leia had ever heard.

The entire glasslike structure seemed to take forever to collapse. Tower after tower fell inward.

The winds kept blowing, drawing somber notes from the hollow columns, changing pitch. The music became a thinner and thinner wail, until only a handful of intact wind tubes were left lying on their sides in the glassy rubble.

As Leia wept with great sobs that seemed to tear her apart, the automatic escape chair gently drifted to the ground and settled in the whispering grasses.

3

The polar regions of Coruscant reminded Han Solo of the ice