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“I copy, Hunter Lead,” came the replies.

“Corran, I caught that, too.” Wedge’s voice paused for a moment. “Winter shows no activity in your vicinity and we look pretty secure here, too. Head in and hurry back.”

“Will do, Wedge. Horn out.” Corran brought his Headhunter around in a vast circle, letting the others fly in on a more direct route toward their hangar. First up, last in. He smiled. He knew the others didn’t need him to provide a good example. The fact was that the five of them had accounted for over a dozen Imperial starfighters and Interceptors, proving the Rogues had not lost their edge and that Asyr Sei’lar was a good pilot in her own right.

He punched his sensors over to long range and immediately picked up a number of signals on his scanner. Corran keyed the comm unit. “Pash, I’m picking up nine or ten hits.”

“I copy, Corran. Looks like small civilian vessels. The exodus is beginning.”

Corran ruddered his ship to port and dove down to do a flyby on one of his sensor contacts. It did in fact appear to be a luxury yacht, with gentle flowing lines and a gaudily painted hull. Like the other ships it was heading northeast to slip beneath the edge of the Rebel umbrella. The ships would sail around to the daytime side of the planet and head out into hyperspace from there, using Coruscant’s mass as a shield to prevent the Rebels from attacking them.

Corran was certain the vast majority of the people heading out firmly believed the Rebels would steal their wealth, dispossess them of their treasures, defile their sons and daughters, torture, maim, and kill resisters, and commit any number of other crimes against them. He didn’t think plunder and raping were foremost in the minds of most Rebels, but here at the core of the Empire the belief in lies used by the Emperor to justify his dictatorship ran deep among some folks. And even those who knew better than to believe such lies did truly feel they had something to fear since the idea of bringing Imperials to justice had always been one of the Rebellion’s more appealing tenants.

He found himself of two minds about the fleeing people. Part of him wanted to bring them to justice. He could easily have sideslipped his Headhunter and blasted the hyperdrive engines from the hull of the yacht. That would trap its occupants on Coruscant and force them to face retribution for their crimes against their fellow citizens.

The other part of him sympathized with them. The Empire had forced him to flee from Corellia, carrying with him little more than a change of clothes. He even had to surrender his identity, as would these refugees, for to remain who he was would have left him vulnerable to the Empire’s hunters. He had been forced to change who he had been and had been forced into an entirely different lifestyle just to preserve his life. Because of the constant fear of discovery, of being made to run again, that life seemed more punishing than any prison term or even execution. Better no life at all than one lived in constant fear.

He didn’t know if he’d heard those words before or composed the line himself, but it struck him that those words embodied the nugget of Rebel opposition to the Empire. Mon Mothma and the other leaders had enough foresight to look ahead and plan out the course of the campaign against the Empire, but for people in his position, the fight was one to defeat the forces who made them fear. The fact that after each battle, each victory, there was just that much less to be afraid of became almost tangible and served as a very sweet reward indeed.

Corran nudged his stick back and climbed up away from the fleeing yacht. Run, but always know you cannot run far enough.

He started to bring the Headhunter around on a course to the hangar, but he saw an anomalous blip on his sensor screen. He initiated an identification program, but the contact faded and returned, depriving the computer of enough solid data to make a match. It seemed to settle on an unknown fighter and a Super Star Destroyer. “Pash, what have