Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 09_ Edge of Victory 02_ Rebirth - J. Gregory Keyes [24]
“Shields are failing,” Han’s voice crackled over the comm. “Jacen, how’s it going down there?”
“Still here, Dad,” he replied, swinging his seat to follow a skip so near he could have thrown a rock and hit it.
“We’re out of the mass shadow in one minute,” Leia said.
Something in the ship shrieked, and the inertial compensators failed. The g’s they were pulling tried to smash Jacen into the ceiling. He managed to get his hands up in time to keep his skull from being crushed, but the force of impact stunned him momentarily. The dampeners went back on-line, and artificial gravity dropped him back roughly into his seat.
“That’s it for the shields,” his father husked.
Groggily, Jacen grabbed the trigger grips as a series of shudders ran through the Falcon.
“Go! Now!” Leia cried.
For an instant nothing happened. Then the stars were gone, and Jacen sagged in his couch.
“It was terrible, just terrible,” C-3PO went on. “If it weren’t for Artoo I would be just space flotsam. Master Jacen, I told you I wasn’t suited for that sort of thing.”
“You did just fine, Threepio. You saved us. Thanks.”
“Oh. Well, I suppose … you’re quite welcome.”
“Right. So run some diagnostics on yourself. Relax.”
“Do you think we’ve really escaped them?”
Han stepped into the cabin and answered that. “We left on a pretty messy vector. Even I’m not exactly sure where we’re headed. We’ll drop out soon and get our bearings, but I’m willing to bet we’re not being followed. One thing is sure—we’ll need repairs.”
“The outer bulkheads?” Jacen asked.
“Like you figured. The coupling tore, but I was able to fix it before our patches gave way. Kinda spoils the look, though. It’s gonna have to go.”
Leia entered and lowered herself onto one of the couches. Jacen noticed she was favoring her right leg more than she had the day before. Her Noghri bodyguards stood silently nearby.
“What did they hit us with?” she asked.
“Something we haven’t seen yet,” Jacen said. “It may just be a side effect of their interdiction device.”
“Or a powerful electromagnetic pulse. It shut our systems down, but didn’t really do a lot of damage to them.”
“It shut us down, too,” Leia pointed out.
“Yeah. It did at that,” Han allowed.
“So now what?” Leia asked.
“Now? Well, now we know the inner Corellian Run is hotter than novashine.”
“For now. Maybe they shift those things around. How many interdictors can they have?”
“Well, I don’t know,” Han said, shrugging his shoulders. “They grow the things, remember?”
“There’s that famous Solo charm,” Leia remarked. “I wondered where it had gone.”
Han opened his mouth to retort, but Jacen stepped in. “That interdictor had been there for a while. Remember the other ships we saw?”
Leia nodded. “True. I’d forgotten that.”
“This is nuts,” Han opined. “This whole thing. Luke’s ‘great river.’ ”
Leia frowned. “Look, we’ve had some setbacks, but—”
“Setbacks?” Han’s brows tried to jump off his head. “Did you just say ‘setbacks’?” We had to shoot our way out of the meeting on Ryloth because your ‘contacts’ turned out to be Peace Brigade—”
“Oh, like your ‘good friends’ on Bimmisaari? The ones who wanted to decorate their speeder with our heads?”
“As a matter of fact,” Han blustered, “things were going just great on Bimmisaari until you …”
They continued bickering, and Jacen listened with mixed emotions. On the one hand, it reminded him of old times, at least insofar as he could remember. They had always been like this, right up until the day Chewbacca died. Then—then they almost stopped talking at all. That silence had been one of the worst things Jacen had ever experienced. Now, they sounded like their old selves, but there was something brittle about it sometimes. As if some of the good nature at the base of it had evaporated. As though if the wrong thing got said,