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“Friendlies ahead,” Leia said. She had to shout to be heard over the continuous firing of the Falcon’s guns.

Han glanced at his sensors and made a minor adjustment to their course—minor, but so abruptly executed that it slammed Leia rightward. If not for the copilot’s harness, she would have been hurled from her seat. He grimaced. He still needed to get that seat replaced with something made to human scale. “Sorry,” he said.

The friendly signal ahead broke into four smaller signals, each of them made up of three blips—shield trios, meaning it was probably an X-wing unit. As the Falcon neared them, they spread out in attack formation, but not very far apart, and then opened fire.

Their lasers flashed close enough to the Falcon, Han thought, to peel paint from her hull. Then the X-wings were gone, and so were four of the pursuing coralskipper signals.

Five. The Falcon’s upper gun turret scored a kill, and suddenly pursuit was down to three coralskippers. “Who was that?” Han shouted.

“Me!” The voice was female. So it was Alema in the top turret, Ganner in the bottom.

“Three we can handle,” Han said. This time he remembered to shout, “Hold on!” Then he set the freighter into a painfully tight loop upward. He was pushed hard back into his pilot’s couch as the acceleration compensator failed to keep up with the maneuver.

In the midst of the maneuver, when the acceleration forces were at their height, he glanced at his wife, expecting her to be crushed motionless against the back of her chair, but she was actually sitting forward against the tremendous acceleration. She gave him an amused, even superior, look.

A Jedi technique, it had to be, something on the order of levitating rocks. He tried to keep jealousy from his expression, and called over his shoulder, “Alema, wait for the booms before firing, one-two-three.”

“Understood!”

As the three remaining coralskippers came back into view, Han saw that they were only just beginning to rise in pursuit of the Falcon—his maneuver, executed so soon after the Rogues had cut their numbers in half, had confused and delayed the Yuuzhan Vong for a fatal moment.

Han armed the Falcon’s concussion missile launcher and fired at the foremost coralskipper. At this distance, he could fire again at the second and once more at the rearmost before the first missile hit.

Then it did, an explosion that should have shattered the skip into flinders of yorik coral but was instead sucked into the void projected by the vehicle’s dovin basal.

But Alema Rar’s shot with the turret laser flashed past the void and sheared through the skip’s coral armor. The coralskipper exploded as its internal mechanisms were superheated, their fluids converted instantly to steam and gas.

The second missile detonated, with the same result, and Alema’s second shot punched through the amber-colored canopy. The canopy blew out as though the pilot were about to eject, but Han knew the skips didn’t have ejection seats. There was no pilot left behind, just a blackened crater where his body and seat had been.

The third skip pilot, fast on the reflexes, turned and dived away from the Falcon, presenting a narrower profile to aim at, maneuvering to be below the top turret’s angle of fire. The concussion missile’s explosion flooded into the void at the skip’s rear … and then Ganner’s laser shot penetrated the skip’s lower hull, shearing through the vehicle, emerging through the top hull amidships. Amazingly still flyable, the skip accelerated away, trailing cloudy debris that had to be body fluids flash-frozen by exposure to vacuum.

“The Rogues?” Han asked. He felt out of breath.

“Reaching Lusankya,” Leia said. “We have a friendly ahead.” Indeed, there was another Imperial Star Destroyer in their path, an older model than Mon Mothma; it was maneuvering around from an outbound course to turn toward Lusankya.

“What say we tuck into her launching bay and rest for a minute?”

She smiled. “You’re the captain.”

“I notice you never say that to me when you disagree with something I’ve said.”

As they