Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 21_ The Unifying Force - James Luceno [49]
Hurry, she said to herself. Hurry!
The detonation nearly threw Leia out of her seat harness. Han’s hands were white-knuckled on the yoke. Cinched into the cockpit’s high-backed rear chairs, Cracken and Page extended their arms to keep themselves upright. The other rescued officers were packed into the forward cabin and wherever else they could fit.
“How much more of this can the Falcon take?” Page asked.
“As much as she needs to,” Han growled, without meaning to.
Leia thought she heard uncertainty beneath the bluster.
Han adjusted his headset mike. “Cakhmaim, Meewalh, don’t ease up on those guns! I don’t care if they are overheating! Right now they’re the only things keeping those skips away from us!”
Han sent the Falcon on edge to evade a trio of enemy ships, escaping with only a bone-rattling hit to the freighter’s midsection. Streaking past the wraparound viewport flew two dual-piloted coralskippers.
Han’s jaw dropped slightly and he looked over his shoulder at Cracken. “Pash, what kind of skips are those? I’ve never seen anything like them. Have you guys seen anything like them?”
Cracken shook his head.
“Never too late in the game for surprise, is it?” Page said.
Han blew out his breath. “Guess not.”
The muffled report of an explosion reached the cockpit from aft.
“That didn’t sound good,” Leia said.
Han’s eyes darted to the display screens, then widened. “It’s worse than it sounded. But we’re not done yet.” He reached forward to toggle switches, reallocating power to the rear shields.
“Can we make lightspeed?” Cracken asked.
“While I have a breath in me.”
Away to starboard, punched by an enemy fighter, a Peace Brigade freighter cracked open, belching fire, atmosphere, and a whirlwind of debris.
Han pounded the console with his fist. “Nice shooting, Cakhmaim.” He paused, then said, “All right, all right, the kill’s yours, Meewalh.”
He pivoted in his chair and smiled lopsidedly. “They think this is some kind of—”
The cockpit turned blinding white. Han’s words swirled to nothingness, and time slowed for an indeterminate period.
A second explosion of intense light followed. A wave of concussive sound barreled into the cockpit through the sliding hatch, and Leia’s ears popped. C-3PO let out a wail from somewhere aft.
“Shields are down to forty percent,” she said when she could.
Han could scarcely hear her. He reached over his left shoulder, his hand knowing precisely where to go, like that of a musician at a keyboard. Finished with whatever adjustments he had made, he smiled for show.
Leia heard him mumble, “Come on, baby, hold together just twenty seconds more …” He caught her watching him. “Don’t worry.”
She shrugged. “Who’s worrying?”
The Falcon took her worst hit yet. A tangle of blue energy danced over the navicomputer. A single rivulet of sweat coursed from Han’s hairline to his set jaw.
Leia faced forward, staring straight ahead. “Now I’m worried.”
Without looking at her, Han counted down. “Ten, nine, eight …”
“… seven, six, five, four—”
Three was on the tip of Jaina’s tongue when the Falcon was hit hard from behind, the force of the enemy projectiles practically kicking the freighter forward. The ion drives failed for an instant and pieces flew from the stern, one of them streaking across the nose of Jaina’s X-wing.
Her mother’s distress was palpable.
Then the Falcon was gone, propelled into hyperspace, but with four enemy skips following suit. As the Yuuzhan Vong had first demonstrated at the Eclipse base, years earlier, they were capable of tracking ships through hyperspace by means of a self-heating, vacuum-hardened fungus that forced tachyons from a ship in faster-than-light transit.
“All pilots, did anyone get a bearing on the Falcon?”
“Negative, Twin One,” came a chorus of replies.
The operation rally point was Mon Calamari. But Jaina recognized that the Falcon’s jump to lightspeed had been desperate, and she doubted that the navicomputer had had