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Han threw him a sidelong glance. “Don’t be fooled by age, partner.”

Despite the high setting of the inertial compensator, the Falcon’s sudden increase in velocity nearly pinned Droma to the seatback. His rakish cap flew from his head and his eyes opened wide in astonishment. He loosed a raucous cry.

“Yee-ha, what a ship! What a beauty!”

Han merely grinned. “When you catch your breath, tell me about that shuttle.”

“Still closing on the enemy vessel,” Droma said through his thrill.

“Come on, come on,” Han urged his ship.

Unexpectedly, the comm board crackled to life. “Millennium Falcon, this is the Thurse. Ambassador, I thought I asked you to keep out of this.”

“Ambassador Organa Solo is presently aboard the Queen,” Han said toward the console’s audio pickup.

“Is that you, Han? It’s Mak Jorlen.”

“Mak!”

“What are doing out there, Han?”

“Chasing down a shuttle that has something the New Republic needs. Mak, once I grab it, I might need support on the way back in.”

“Affirmative, Millennium Falcon. And, Han, welcome back to the cause. Now I know we’ve got a fighting chance.”

Han felt Droma’s eyes on him.

“This gets more and more curious,” Droma said.

Han enabled the autotracking fire controller for the Falcon’s aft warship-rated quad laser. Bracketing the fleeing shuttle in the display’s targeting reticle, he moved his right hand to the trigger joystick.

He was about to fire when, without warning, the Falcon seemed to plunge through a gravitic anomaly. Han barely had time to hit the reverse thrusters to keep the ship from pouncing on its quarry in the worst of ways.

In fact, though, the shuttle had slowed drastically and was all but drifting in space. “It’s like it hit a repulsor field,” Han said as he made rapid adjustments to the controls.

Droma nodded. “She looks dead.”

When the distance between the Falcon and the shuttle had decreased to a few kilometers, Han unfastened his seat harness and stood up.

“Take over,” he told Droma. “Maneuver us alongside. Use the tractor beam if you need to. I’ll ready the portside grapple and cofferdam.”

“You’re planning to board?” Droma blurted, gawking at him. “The Yuuzhan Vong must know what it’s carrying. What if that ship draws a bead on us?”

Han glanced out the viewport. Still some distance away and illuminated by brilliant spherical explosions, the frigate sat at the center of a swirling firefight.

“Guess I’ll have to work fast,” Han said, and rushed from the cockpit.

On the bridge of the Yuuzhan Vong frigate, Nom Anor studied the villip’s enhanced view of the droop-winged shuttle the onboard dovin basal had repulsed and evidently traumatized. The same saucer-shaped ship that had destroyed the remote dovin basal had linked itself to the drifting shuttle, and those aboard—whether or not Jedi—were surely in the process of reclaiming the priestess the Peace Brigade had reclaimed earlier.

With the decimation the coralskippers were undergoing and the pounding Commander Malik Carr’s personal ship was taking, Nom Anor found it challenging to fix his attention on a single aspect of the battle. But as Harrar had made abundantly clear, there was no more significant aspect than the recapture of Elan.

To the subaltern, he said, “Allow the New Republic ship a few moments with the shuttle before giving chase. We must convince them without overtaking them. By then, our coralskippers will have been all but annihilated and our final jump from this farce will at least appear credible.”

He glanced out the viewport at the maelstrom. “All glory to you warriors,” he sent quietly to the coralskipper pilots.

Suited up for EVA and armed with a blaster rifle, Han floated through the extensible vapor-tight tube that magnetically linked the Falcon’s portside docking arm to the shuttle’s starboard airlock. Making use of the cofferdam’s rigid-ring handholds, Han propelled himself along.

He stopped at the shuttle’s hatch to communicate with Droma over the helmet comlink a final time. “Any reply?”

“Nothing,” Droma told him once more. “The shuttle must have taken a hit without our