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Ackbar and Terpfen were having some kind of silent conflict, a wrestling of wills. Ackbar claimed he understood how the other had been manipulated. He himself had been a prisoner of the Empire, but instead of being programmed as a spy and saboteur, he had served as an unwilling liaison to Moff Tarkin. Though those times had been oppressive, Ackbar had managed to turn his close association with the cruel strategist into an advantage during Admiral Daala’s attack on Calamari. Now, he claimed, it was time for Terpfen to use his misery against the Imperials as well.

As Leia watched from the bridge of the Galactic Voyager, the blunt-ended Dreadnaught ignited its sublight engines. She closed her eyes, gripped the back of Ackbar’s chair, and sent out a tendril of thought with her mind to seek the presence of baby Anakin, hoping to find him or comfort him.

She sensed her baby across the vast distance of space, but could not pinpoint his location, feeling only his presence in the Force. She could make no direct contact, could not see him. Anakin could still be on Anoth, or he could be a prisoner aboard the Dreadnaught.

“Crippling strikes only. Fire all forward weapons,” Ackbar said in a maddeningly calm voice. “Cause only enough damage to prevent them from entering hyperspace.”

High-powered energy beams splashed against the Vendetta’s heavy shields. Residual radiation glowed from the hits, showing minor damage to the Imperial ship’s hull. But the Dreadnaught continued to accelerate.

“He’s going between two of the planetoids,” Leia said.

Terpfen leaned forward with interest, swiveling his round eyes as he concentrated. “He’s trying to use the static discharges as camouflage,” he said. “With so much ionization scramble we’ll lose him on our sensors. Then he can escape on any heading before we find him again.”

Leia breathed deeply to subdue her anxiety. They were so close—why else would the Dreadnaught run, unless they already had Anakin on board? Again she tried to sense where the baby was.

The two atmosphere-swathed fragments of Anoth’s primary body loomed ahead of the Dreadnaught, with only a tight channel between the lumps. Fingernails of lightning skittered from one atmosphere to the other as the orbiting shards built up an incredible electrostatic charge.

“Increase speed,” Ackbar said. “Stop them before we lose them in the static.”

The Dreadnaught captain still refused to respond.

“Fire again,” Ackbar said. “Increase power.”

Turbolasers struck the starboard side of the Vendetta, shoving it visibly to one side with the momentum of the blasts. Its shields buckled; parts of the Dreadnaught’s sublight engines were crippled. But the captain continued his flight. The blue-white exhaust glow increased as the engines powered up, readying for a jump into hyperspace.

“No!” Leia cried. “Don’t let them take Anakin away!” Before she could finish her sentence, the Dreadnaught passed into the narrow passage between the split planet.

A blinding blue tracery of static blanketed the outer shields of the Vendetta, like a half-formed cocoon. The glow of an ionization cone spread out in front of it as it plowed through the thickening atmosphere into spectacular storms.

Leia squeezed her eyes shut, concentrating, concentrating. If she could establish a link between Anakin’s mind and hers, she had some minuscule chance of tracking him once the Dreadnaught vanished into hyperspace.

She sensed the people onboard the Imperial battleships—but she felt no glimmer of her own son, nor of her longtime companion Winter. Leia reached out wider with her searching thoughts as the Vendetta plowed through the thin bottleneck of atmosphere.

The giant armored ship was like a metal probe between a pair of fully charged batteries. The Dreadnaught became a short circuit across the two supercharged atmospheres.

A colossal lightning bolt blasted through the atmosphere and linked across the warship like a chain of fire. A river of raw power slammed into the Vendetta from both