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Anet smiled mischievously, her brown eyes sparkling. “You’re not going Jedi on me, are you? The Force tells you about this raid?”

“No, I’m far more practical than the Jedi, and more dangerous, too.” He spread his arms. “We’ve nearly nine hundred crew on this ship—nine times the number of Jedi in the whole of the galaxy. And while they have the Force to aid them, I have two powerful allies with me: greed and arrogance.”

“Oh, your plan was good.”

“Correction, my plan was brilliant.” Xhaxin laughed. “We let a couple of ships go free because they’re traveling together, then I set up a guy who says he can organize convoys through deep space to the Remnant. We had people demanding positions in our convoy. In fact, they paid well for the privilege of traveling safely.”

“But no refunds, correct?” The doctor smiled. “The credits they’ve spent are just a down payment?”

“Exactly. They gathered at Garqi, have headed out, and the last of them should be hitting the rendezvous point in ten minutes. We’ll round up what’s already there, then pick off the last one and go.” Xhaxin smoothed his mustache with his flesh-and-blood right hand. “It’s been a grand run. This last raid—it will be remembered. I would have had history recall me in other ways, but this will be good enough, especially if all of you can be rewarded for your hard work.”

Anet Karl looked at the various humans and aliens busy at their duty stations on the bridge. “We had no love lost on the Empire either, Captain. We owe you our thanks for keeping us alive and allowing us to pay them back all these years. We’d keep going, too—”

“I know, but the New Republic has made peace with the Remnant.” Xhaxin sighed. “One cannot underestimate the allure of peace. I think, perhaps, we’ve finally earned some ourselves.”

“Ten seconds to reversion, Captain.”

“Thank you, Khwir.” Xhaxin waved a hand toward the viewport. “Behold, Doctor, our destiny.”

The tunnel of light shattered into countless stars of varying hues. They’d come out into the middle of nowhere, literally—a point in space that had been selected only because gravitational forces made it perfect for speeding the way from Garqi to Bastion in the Imperial Remnant. This place is supposed to be empty.

Empty it was not. Aside from the burning wreckage of a twisted freighter spinning madly, life pods and yachts darting about, a large object hung there in space. Xhaxin thought at first it had to be an asteroid because of its appearance, uneven surface, and torpid pace. Other smaller asteroids seemed to orbit around it, then streaked out on attack runs on the yachts.

And now they’re orienting on us! Xhaxin spun away from the viewport. “Full shields up, now! Deploy the fighters. I don’t know how some fool managed to fit a hyperdrive core to an asteroid, but he’s not stealing our ships! Gunnery, get a firing solution on that big rock and open it up.”

“As ordered, Captain!”

Even as he issued orders and pondered making a planetoid somehow mobile, Xhaxin knew that that line of reasoning did not explain the smaller rocks that moved like starfighters. “Sensors, what’s going on out there?”

A Duros looked up through holographic displays of data, his long face wearing an expression that was even more morose than usual. “Gravitic anomalies, sir, everywhere.”

“Tractor beams? Gravity-well generators?”

“Different, sir.” The Duros frowned as a wash of data filled his holograph with overlapping spheres of color. “Focused, tighter beams, more powerful.”

The Free Lance’s turbolaser batteries opened up, sending long streams of sizzling red bolts at the asteroid. The shots looked to be on target, then deviated sharply in their flight. The bolts sharpened their angle of attack, coming together nearly half a kilometer before they hit the asteroid. Xhaxin expected the beams to flash through that new focal point and still hit the target, but instead they vanished.

“What happened? Guns, sensors, what happened?”

His gunner, an Iotran named Mirip Pag, shook his head in disbelief.