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This was tricky. He put the ungainly, disintegrating freighter into a slow port turn, bringing its starboard side around to face the sunny side of the planet below. “Ready yourself, One-One-A.” Then he tripped the newly installed switch labeled GO.

The ship’s inertial compensator kicked off. Though he tightly gripped the arms of his chair and was strapped into place, Lando felt himself yanked to the right, heard the post his seat was bolted to creak from the sudden pressure.

All around the forward section of the ship, explosives attached to the outer hull would be going off. They weren’t high explosives; they had just enough detonating power to fire chaff and thick smoky residue out in all directions. From outside, it would look as though Record Time were experiencing a series of internal explosions.

The smoke and chaff concealed the starboard cargo bay door, which should have been slung open by the maneuver and loss of artificial gravity. Lando saw that its gauge registered that it was open, that its atmospheric pressure was approaching zero, that its own temporary inertial compensator had activated.

He looked out the starboard viewport. There, a cloud of debris was tumbling away from the freighter, directly toward Coruscant’s surface far below.

He keyed his helmet microphone again. “Survivor Cell Thirty-Eight, this is the final transmission of Rescue Two. Sorry we couldn’t get to you. Hope you have better luck next time.” That message, he knew, would be picked up by a New Republic scout ship at the edge of the Coruscant system and relayed to Wedge Antilles; it meant that Luke and his party were safely away.

He turned to 1-1A. “All right, let’s get—”

A blast of plasma from the frigate analog hit the center of the span joining the two sections of Record Time. The span parted, and the ripple from the impact shook the length of the ship. This time, Lando’s chair post did break, bouncing him, still strapped into his chair, into the air. With the ship’s artificial gravity dead, he rose until he banged into the bridge ceiling, bounced off, and began drifting toward the fist-sized hole in the forward viewport.

“Oh, I have a really good feeling about this,” he said.

Luke felt abrupt weightlessness, then sudden acceleration as he was punched out of the cargo bay and, he hoped, toward the planet.

He checked the sensor readouts glued to the pod surface before him. They showed course—correct. Number—correct; all of his comrades were with him still. As he watched, the inertial compensator in the unit at his feet activated, rotating him so that he approached Coruscant feet-first. Minor repulsor bursts would be keeping him in close proximity to the others.

He shook his head, dissatisfied. He didn’t like to be in any small vehicle when he wasn’t at the controls. And this was a vehicle only by a very generous broadening of the definition of that word.

Lando got himself unstrapped from his chair and kicked against the viewport. The move carried him away from it, but also caused cracks to appear where his heel had struck, cracks that reached the plasma hole and radiated in other directions as well.

One-One-A pushed himself free from his seat, a trajectory that carried him past Lando and toward the door out. He caught Lando around the waist as he traveled, Lando’s mass barely causing a change in his direction, and reached the door recess. He clamped his feet down at the bottom of the recess and, with his free hand, sheared through the metal door.

Atmosphere behind it poured through, tugging Lando, but 1-1A merely shoved his way through the ruins of the door and into the passageway beyond.

“Good work,” Lando said.

“Is that more taunting, or a compliment?”

“Neither, really. In this case, it stands in for a ‘thank-you,’ which is what it really means. Now can you get us into the bay? Because that last blast seems to have pushed us toward the atmosphere, and we’re going to be carbon dust in a few seconds to a minute.”

“You’re welcome.” One-One-A kicked again, and they were floating weightless down