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Thorsh and the Bith watched in bafflement as the tsik vai veered off course, one wing blown off, and spiraled out of control. It struck the sea with a loud splash, skipped twice on the waves, then crashed nose-first and began to sink. Out of the eastern sky, dazzled by sunlight, something large and dull-black was approaching at supersonic speed.

Another Yuuzhan Vong vessel, Thorsh decided, whose pilot had just shot down one of his own craft to get to the swoop.

Twitching the braking thrusters, he spun the swoop around in midair, hoping to race away from the mystery vessel before it could draw a bead on him. Even so, he waited for the fireballs to start falling. When they didn’t, he glanced over his shoulder in time to see a twin-mandibled old freighter come streaking out of the cloudless sky. Thorsh felt crackling heat wash over him as the ship made a low, earsplitting, teeth-rattling pass, its dorsal laser cannon loosing green hyphens of energy at a trio of pursuing coralskippers.

The freighter signaled the swoops with a rocking motion, then banked into a long sweeping turn to the south.

“Looks like our ride’s here!” Thorsh said.

“And in worse trouble than we are!”

A flurry of well-placed bursts from the freighter’s top gunner caught the lead coralskipper head-on and sent it boiling into the sea.

The other two enemy craft continued to pummel the freighter with plasma missiles. Perhaps frustrated by the ship’s seemingly impenetrable shields, one of the skip pilots took aim on the Bith-piloted swoop. Caught in midair by a single lava-hot projectile, the machine disappeared without a trace.

Thorsh clenched his jaws and steered the swoop for deeper water. The swoop was grazing the white crests of five-meter waves when something enormous rose from beneath the heaving surface.

“Cakhmaim’s getting to be a pretty good shot,” Han said over the sound of the reciprocating quad laser cannon. “Remind me to up his pay—or at least promote him.”

Leia glanced at him from the copilot’s chair. “From bodyguard to what—butler?”

Han pictured the Noghri in formal attire, setting meals in front of Han and Leia in the Falcon’s forward cabin. His upper lip curled in delight, and he laughed shortly. “Maybe we should see how he does with the rest of these skips.”

The YT-1300 was just coming out of her long turn, with Selvaris’s double suns off to starboard and an active volcano dominating the forward view. Below, green-capped, sheer-sided islands reached up into the planet’s deep blue sky, and the aquamarine sea seemed to go on forever. Two coral-skippers were still glued to the Falcon’s tail, chopping at it and holding position through all the insane turns and evasions, but so far the deflector shields were holding.

His large hands gripped on the control yoke, Han glanced at the console’s locator display, where only one bezel was pulsing.

“Where’d the other swoop go?”

“We lost it,” Leia said.

Han leaned toward the viewport to survey the undulating sea. “How could we lose—”

“No, I mean it’s gone. One of the coralskippers took it out.”

Han’s eyes blazed. “Why, that—which one of ’em?”

Before Leia could answer, two plasma missiles streaked past the cockpit, bright as meteors and barely missing the starboard mandible.

“Does it matter?”

Han shook his head. “Where’s the other swoop?”

Leia studied the locator display, then called up a map from the terrain sensor, which showed everything from the mouth of the estuary clear to the volcano. Her left forefinger tapped the screen. “Far side of that island.”

“Any skips after it?”

A loud explosion buffeted the Falcon from behind.

“We seem to be the popular target,” Leia said. “Just the way you like it.”

Han narrowed his eyes. “You bet I do.”

Determined to lure their pair of pursuers away from the swoop, he threw the freighter into a sudden ascent. When they had climbed halfway to the stars, he dropped the ship into a stomach-churning corkscrew. Pulling out sharply,