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“I know nothing of his reasons, Mistress.”

R2-D2 rotated his domed head in a full circle, chirping and chittering, in a mix of rebuke and concern.

Leia narrowed her eyes at her brother. “So Han wouldn’t do anything rash, huh?”

“Threepio,” Luke said, “you said that the ship issued a distress call?”

“According to the newsnet reports, yes, Master Luke.”

Luke looked at Leia. “Help is probably on the way.”

Leia shook her head in anger. “Who’s going to care enough about the lives of a few thousand refugees—especially if they’ve fallen into Yuuzhan Vong hands?”

“We could go,” Luke said.

Mara threw him a dubious glance. “Even if we used the Namadii Corridor, we’d never make it in time.”

Leia shot to her feet. “You’re forgetting one thing. We’ll be flying the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy!”

TWENTY-THREE

“You mustn’t let them find us!” Elan wailed into Han’s ear as they threaded and shouldered their way through a mixed-species mob jamming the passageway.

Han angled his head just enough to throw her a warning look. “Either you pipe down or I turn you over to them myself!”

Elan’s eyes became hooded.

Han snorted in response. “That the best you can do?”

“You’d do well to fear me,” she told him.

“Save the threats for someone who cares, sweetheart. I’m only doing this because Showolter took a blaster beam for you, which means he thinks you’re pretty important.”

“More important than you know.”

“We’ll see about that. But right now you’re my charge and you’ll do as I say, got it?”

She allowed a defiant nod.

The captain’s request for calm notwithstanding, disorder reigned. Reports of raiders were seldom greeted with enthusiasm, but the fact that most of the Queen’s passengers had experienced the Yuuzhan Vong firsthand had only made matters worse. Most were searching out places of concealment in utility lockers, ventilation shafts, cargo containers, and the narrow closets of lower deck cabins. As a consequence, crowds of passengers and crewmembers swarmed the corridors and clogged the interdeck transfer chutes. Many had made frantic dashes for escape-pod bays only to find them locked down; others had stormed the upper decks only to be repelled by armed contingents of ship’s officers and vendors. Clearly intent on ignoring the time-proven dictum that surrender was the best survival strategy against pirates, the Queen’s refugees had turned the starliner into a seething catacomb.

In spite of everything, Han and company had succeeded in making their way to the docking bay deck, where if nothing else, the crowd was more dispersed and acquiescent. The worst that could happen, Han had told himself, is that he would end up in the same fix as Roa and Fasgo.

From a portside blister it was possible to observe the approach of the raiders’ ship, from relatively below and slightly aft of the starliner. Running lights suggested a long, cylindrically shaped vessel, equivalent in size to an old Blockade Runner.

As it maneuvered within range of the Queen’s outboard illumination arrays, Han saw—much to his initial bafflement—that the ship was in fact an old Corellian corvette, though heavily modified and anodized a non-reflective black. In addition to the standard aft and ventral turbolaser batteries, the vessel’s barrel-shaped bow boasted side-mounted Taim & Bak H9 cannons, and the dome that usually supported the communications array had been elongated to house either a formidable interdiction field generator—or the Yuuzhan Vong dovin basal that had tugged the Queen from hyperspace.

A trio of twenty-year-old Martial-class shuttles dropped from a retrofitted launch bay in the corvette’s belly and made for the Queen’s own ventral docking bay deck. As the corvette’s steering thrusters fired to bring her into alignment with the liner’s portside airlock, Han got a good look at the starboard side, where just aft of the cockpit module the matte hull was emblazoned with the clasped-hands insignia of the Peace Brigade.

The words of Big Bunji’s Aqualish lieutenant rushed to mind. They have an operation