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“Twin Suns, this is Control. Launch at will. Best of luck.”

Jaina led the Twin Suns and their pipefighter up in a gentle ascent through Borleias’s atmosphere. No one was entirely sure how much stress the experimental pipefighter could endure. After every test mission, mechanics descended on the cobbled-together vehicles, with their space station angle segments and their old Y-wing cockpit and engine components, and managed to patch them together for yet another launch. No one was yet suggesting that this was a losing battle, but Jaina knew the experimental vehicles were soaking up a lot of repair and maintenance resources. She hoped the project would be successful enough to warrant the effort.

The squadrons reached high planetary orbit and went their separate ways, each navigating to a different point in the Pyria system—all but the Falcon and the vehicles with her, which remained behind in orbit.

Tam Elgrin scrambled into his quarters on the shuttle and fumbled with his concealed villip. Pain made his fingers clumsy; it took several tries for him to get the device open, to stroke the villip surface itself so that it would correctly expand into the shape of his controller.

“Speak,” the woman said.

“Jaina Solo has just taken off,” Tam said. With every word, his headache eased just a bit. “With her entire squadron. I was able to fling that thing, that bug, at her X-wing as she was flying out of the docking bay. It stuck to the side. As ordered.” He was getting very good at following orders. Not long before, he’d walked to the limits of the kill zone permitted to civilians and used his holocam to record the bleakness of that destroyed landscape, waiting there long enough for Yuuzhan Vong warriors at the kill zone’s edge to throw a packet to him. It was a jellylike gob of transparent material, wiggling, filled with bugs and worms and things that couldn’t escape except when he jammed his fingers into it to pry them free, and subsequent communications over the villip had told him what all the various creatures within it were for.

“Excellent. You’re doing very well, Tam.”

His controller’s words of praise, her encouraging tones, made Tam feel better. He hated himself for it.

“Was there anything else? ” his controller asked.

“Nothing,” he said. His headache was gone now.

“Contact me when you’ve had a chance to evaluate the morale of the garrison once Jaina Solo is taken,” the woman said. Then the villip inverted.

Tam closed its container. He stood in place, shaking.

He now had an idea of how the leash that had been put on him worked. When he failed to carry out his orders, the pain began. It worsened as his failure continued. When he was able to report success, it diminished. But since his controller couldn’t know, until he reported, how successful he was, the only stimulus for the pain could be his own knowledge of failure. Some portion of his brain that lit up when he felt guilt, some hormone discharged into his bloodstream when he was under a specific kind of stress, triggered the headaches.

He had no doubt that the pain, if allowed to grow too great, could kill him. He’d been told so. He’d felt it grow to the point that he believed it signaled an imminent explosion in his head, a fatal aneurysm or other deadly failure within him.

If only he could find some way to think himself around the pain, to feel no guilt or acknowledge no failure, so that the pain never came … but even with that thought, throbbing began in his temples and the pain returned.

He slumped, defeated. He wasn’t even allowed to think such things.

He was a slave and he would always be a slave.

He left the shuttle, head down, to return to his duties.

Han slouched in his pilot’s seat and stared, in unaccustomed contentment, at the stars.

“What are you thinking?” Leia asked from the copilot’s seat.

Han glanced at her. She looked far more comfortable in the Leia-sized seat they’d installed for her. At the very least, she wouldn’t be slipping back and forth during high-performance maneuvers. “You know me,” he said.