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He dropped to the ground and began firing.

Luke, Mara, and Corran took a high-speed run over the base area, giving them a split-second view of the Yuuzhan Vong building, of the Record Time, of the tremendous beast hurling plasma into the transport’s side.

Luke sighed. The last time he’d faced one of these creatures, which Jaina Solo had nicknamed “ranges,” and later was known by its Yuuzhan Vong name, a rakamat, and saw the tactic he’d used to destroy it had knocked him out for hours. He couldn’t afford to do that now. “Let’s do what we can to distract the thing from the ground troops,” he said. “Two Flight, Three Flight, Four Flight, whenever you get through playing with those skips back there, we can put you to work up here where the fight is.”

He led Mara and Corran in a tight loop back toward the engagement zone. All three X-wings began juking just before they cleared the jungle canopy, and plasma danced up through the air all around them. He fired linked lasers at the enormous beast and saw his blast and those of his flightmates swallowed by the creature’s void defenses. Then they were over jungle again.

Lando elbow-crawled forward, chanting, “I’m too old for this, I’m a businessman, I’m too old for this, I want a drink.” The rhythm of his own words kept him from being fully aware of the sweat dripping from him, of the fear radiating from him as plasma fire flashed by mere meters over his head and into the side of the Record Time. Return fire crossed from the other direction, heavy laser cannon blasts that would evaporate him if they grazed him. His droid kept pace, walking slowly so as not to leave Lando behind.

He’d crawled into a circle of troops before he knew it—six of them, five humans and a Twi’lek, only three of them with shoulder arms. “Where are your blasters?” he asked.

The Twi’lek, a red-skinned female, huddled against the mound of her pack. “We’re engineers.”

One of the others, a long-faced male with a blaster rifle, said, “They’re engineers.” He fired at the legs of the giant creature lumbering in their direction.

“Engineers?” Lando asked. “With explosives?”

The woman nodded.

“You’re hiding behind your explosives?”

She nodded again, her dismayed expression suggesting that she understood the insanity of it.

“Dig,” Lando said. “A shallow hole. Large enough to put all those explosives in.”

“No,” said the trooper with the blaster. “We’ll just leave them behind and get clear of them.”

“No, we’re digging.” Lando glanced at the Twi’lek woman, who was frozen, her hand halfway to her field shovel, looking between him and the trooper.

The trooper gave Lando an ingratiating smile. “I’m only a noncommissioned officer, but that beats a civilian on the battlefield. We leave.”

Lando grabbed him by the collar of his tunic and dragged him close. The trooper had to be younger than twenty, despite his apparent poise. “Listen to me, bantha fodder,” Lando said. “I blew up a Death Star before you were born. In twenty seconds I can conclude a conversation with General Antilles, who blew up that Death Star with me, and I’ll be General Calrissian again, and and you’ll spend the rest of your military career cleaning refreshers on Kessel. Or you can dig. Which is it?”

The trooper looked at him for one long moment, during which streaks of plasma began to look like solid lines in the air above them. “I guess we dig, sir.”

“Right.” Lando released him. He looked at the Twi’lek engineer and gestured at the trooper. “Give him your shovel.”

“Yes, sir.”

Lando stretched out, took up his blaster rifle, and took the trooper’s place at the perimeter. He fired a few times at distant Yuuzhan Vong warriors and once at the creature. Then he turned to his bodyguard and smiled. “You know, that’s the kind of worker negotiations I really love.”

The droid nodded. “Yes, sir.”

The latest flyby of Luke and his wingmates, during which some of their shots were again absorbed by the rakamat’s voids and others hit the side of the Yuuzhan Vong building, showed one party of soldiers in a circle directly ahead of the oncoming