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“Boy was getting deck fever,” Booster said. “He went with Corran for supplies.”

“They took Tahiri with them?”

“I don’t know about that,” Booster said.

“He did,” Kam said.

Booster’s eyes narrowed in anger. “Without asking my permission? Who’s captain here, anyway? When that CorSec whelp my daughter married gets back, I’m going to teach him who is, that’s for sure.”

“I’m sure Corran knew what he was doing,” Luke said.

“Oh, I wouldn’t go that far,” Kam averred. “He took Anakin and Tahiri, together? No, I doubt he has any idea whatsoever what he’s doing.”

EIGHTEEN

The Lucre was a Codru-Ji sword dancer gone mad, gyring, whirling across a stage of plasma bursts and coralskippers flying as thick as swarming insects.

“Twenty kilometers down, another thousand to go before clearing the fleet,” Corran said coldly.

Anakin didn’t answer as the Lucre dropped into a sudden, hard-out sprint, a bid to close that impossible gap.

It wasn’t going to happen. Coralskippers contracted around the ship in a sphere, and the shields flared with the effort of absorbing the energy of the constant plasma bombardment. All too soon, the shields failed, and the next round of hits were to the drive.

“So long,” Corran said. Then the Lucre was an expanding fury of superheated helium and metal fragments.

“Wow,” Tahiri breathed. Her voice sounded tinny in the helmet of Anakin’s vac suit. “That didn’t take long.”

“No,” Anakin said. It had only been minutes since they set the ship off on its preprogrammed suicide course and launched themselves from the hatch under cover of a barrage of laser and missile fire. In the five minutes it had taken them to reach the asteroid’s surface, the Lucre’s brief solo career had begun and ended.

“No gawking,” Corran said. “There’s a fissure over there. Let’s move toward that. They might get the bright idea to search here at any moment.”

Tahiri took a step in the desired direction and was suddenly floating away from the surface. She yelped, flailing her arms.

Corran caught her foot, and her momentum pulled him off his feet. Anakin grabbed them both with the Force and brought them back to the asteroid’s surface.

“Don’t walk,” Corran advised. “The gravity here is negligible, just enough to give your inner ear a sense of up and down. Don’t let it fool you—the escape velocity of this rock is about five kilometers an hour, if that. Pull yourselves along.” He maneuvered himself so his body was parallel to the surface and began doing just that, grasping at the uneven stone. Tahiri and Anakin followed his example, as silly as it felt. Anakin glanced often at the space around them, but none of the Yuuzhan Vong ships seemed to be moving in their direction.

They reached the fissure, a cleft that dropped slantwise into the asteroid for about twenty meters. Because of the angle, at the bottom of it they could see only a narrow slice of starscape. That was good, because it meant only a small slice of the starscape could see them.

“Now what? Anakin asked.

“Now we wait.” Corran carefully shrugged off the metal case he’d worn like a backpack. “With the survival kit, we can hold out for maybe three days. Hopefully the fleet will move out before then, and we can activate the emergency beacon. Given considerably more luck, a ship will happen by and pick us up.”

“That’s a lot of luck,” Anakin remarked.

“Well, if nothing else, maybe this will teach you that luck isn’t the bottomless well you seem to think it is,” Corran said.

“We might have tried to run for it,” Anakin said peevishly.

“You saw what happened.”

“I can fly better than a computer.”

“Not that much better,” Corran said.

“But now we’re stuck here. This fleet must be the danger Kelbis Nu was trying to warn us about. If we wait for it to leave, it’ll be too late to warn Yag’Dhul.”

“Well, you have a blaster and a lightsaber,” Corran said dryly. “Given your opinion of yourself, you might as well take on the fleet with those.”

Anakin felt Corran’s sarcasm