• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“I’m sorry for the inconvenience, Captain, but we aren’t returning to ground.”

“I’m authorized to use force, Master Skywalker.”

“This ship will defend itself,” Luke replied reluctantly. “Let us go, Captain.”

“I’m sorry. I can’t.”

Luke shrugged. “Then we really have nothing else to discuss.” He switched off the comm.

“Can we outrun them?” he asked Mara.

“It’ll be tight.” She eyed her instruments again. “Probably not. They must have been on to us almost from the beginning. Two of the ships are coming in from a high orbit.”

“Right. Waiting for us. I was more than half expecting that.”

“So much for Fey’lya wanting us to escape.”

“They have to make an effort,” Luke replied. “As efforts go, this isn’t a big one.”

“No, but maybe sufficient,” Mara replied. “We’ll at least have to fight them, which won’t make us look any better.”

Within moments the approaching ships were in sight.

“Military-grade shields,” Mara remarked. “Hang on, Skywalker.”

A moment later she began to fire.

If we weren’t outlaws before, we are now, Luke thought. How could it have come to this?

Jaina couldn’t believe what she was seeing. The Jade Shadow was under fire from four security interceptors. What was going on?

Not that it mattered. She powered up her weapons and dived in, ignoring the hails from the security ships but sending her own signal to the Shadow. It was Uncle Luke who answered.

“You two look like you could use a hand,” she said. “What did you do to irk the sky cops?”

“Stay out of this, Jaina,” Luke told her.

“Yeah, right. That’ll happen.” She was close enough to fire now, and fire she did, rolling between the trailing interceptor and spearing it with her lasers as she went past. The heavy shield took the shots easily, but she achieved the desired effect; the interceptor had noticed her now. It tried to lock on to her tail, but she was having none of that. Leaning on the stick, she circled tight and planetward. A few lucky shots grazed her shields, but they had a long way to go before they could bring her down. She nosed back up and had her pursuer in her sights again. She held the beak-to-beak collision course long enough to put a few more into its shields, then yawed starboard, missing the oncoming craft by a few meters. She eyed her proton torpedoes speculatively. She could take them out with those, but she still wasn’t sure what was going on here, and it was probably a bad idea to kill someone in Coruscant’s security force. For all she knew, it might even be a friend of hers. That meant she needed to cripple, not kill.

Both ships turned tight, trying once again to pick up the other’s tail. Jaina had the more maneuverable ship and soon found herself flying up the interceptor’s exhaust. She stuttered laser fire, following her opponents’ attempts to shake her, until finally their shields failed. She cut the drive off as neatly as a gardener pruning a tree, then came around to disable their weapons.

By this time, the Jade Shadow only had two pursuers left, and one of them was in bad shape. She wished she could have seen what tricks Mara had pulled out of her sleeve to achieve that. The Shadow’s shields were starting to get a little shaky, but between the two of them, Jaina was certain the remaining interceptors didn’t have a chance.

A moment later, a cloud of blips appeared on her longrange sensors. Twelve starfighters, maybe more. And the Jade Shadow was flying right into them.

NINE

C-3PO yelped as he lost his handhold, but at the same instant something fastened onto his wrist.

“Artoo! Thank the maker!”

The ship made another violent turn, and C-3PO felt his insides try to escape into space through the soles of his metal feet. R2-D2 lurched forward, but only so far. C-3PO noticed with relief that his companion had secured himself with a cable of some sort.

“Clever Artoo! Don’t let go of me!”

Jacen swung around in the laser turret, tracing lines of deadly light through the vacuum, walking them across the nearest coralskipper. Points of absolute darkness swallowed most of the beams before they could strike