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Cort led Gavin from the apartment he’d been given and out into one of the subterranean corridors running toward the chasm. Screaming people had begun to fill the corridor, but the small man deftly cut through them. Gavin shouldered his way through the thickening crowd and caught up with Cort as they reached the walkway across the chasm.

Gavin grabbed the back of Cort’s cloak and yanked him back out of the way of a green laser bolt. More of them played out in a line across the walkway, chasing down and burning the legs from a running man. The man’s screams were swallowed by the whine of a TIE Interceptor as it streaked past and he rolled from the walkway to fall to oblivion.

“Now, go!” Gavin’s shout carried above the screeching of the other Interceptors strafing the chasm. Gavin started running, letting his long legs devour the distance. He let every ounce of panic he felt fuel his run, and he knew he was running faster than he ever had before. His lungs burned and his breath steamed, but the echoed whines of Interceptor engines wouldn’t let him stop until he reached the far side and the safety of the tunneled corridor.

Cort arrived two steps after he did, adrenaline having lent him speed enough to almost match the taller man’s pace. Cort moved into the lead, cutting and weaving through corridors and down ramps until they came out into a huge subterranean cavern with a huge steaming lake, two bacta-storage cylinders, a variety of old Zenomach and other tunneling devices, and Gavin’s X-wing.

His fighter had been painted gold, with light red-orange crescents creating a scalelike pattern. Near the front of the fighter, a mouth had been painted with large, white, daggerlike teeth; the proton torpedo launching ports had become the pupils of eyes. When asked how he wanted his X-wing decorated, he’d chosen to make it over in the image of a krayt dragon, the most fearsome predator on all of Tatooine.

He turned back to Cort. “Look, this is my fault. They’re here after me. I’ll take off and lead them in a chase away from here. Get your people into defensible positions and hold out. These tunnels will make it tough on stormtroopers, so they’ll withdraw when I’m gone.”

Cort shook his head. “We have no weapons.”

The plaintive tone in his voice punched Gavin straight in the heart. “I never should have come here.” He drew his blaster and pressed it into Cort’s hands. “Take this, do what you can. I’ll do something.”

Gavin ran to his X-wing and clambered up on a mole-miner to boost himself into the cockpit. Cort disconnected the refueling lines, then backed away and tossed Gavin a salute. Gavin returned it, then pulled on his helmet and fastened his restraining straps. He left his life-support gear on the floor of the cockpit, disdainful of the time it would take to pull it on. If I go down out there, I’m dead anyway, so it doesn’t much matter.

He cut in the repulsor-lift generators, retracted the landing gear, and feathered the throttle forward. The X-wing headed toward the retracting metal doorway built into the mouth of the cavern. Beyond it, Gavin saw a translucent glowing wall of white that he realized was snow that had drifted in against the door. He thumbed his fire-control to lasers and linked them for dual fire, then hit the trigger. The snow barrier evaporated, so Gavin kicked his throttle forward and shot out into the Halanit sky.

Keeping the X-wing low enough to skim the drifts, he headed out in a long loop through a valley that curved around to the north. Three kilometers out from the cavern he rolled up on the starboard S-foil and began to climb. As his sensors began to pick up Imp fighters, he reached up and flipped the switch that brought his S-foils into attack position and locked them.

A glance at his fuel indicator told him he had ten minutes for fighting before he made his run out of the system. Halanit itself created a fairly insignificant gravity shadow in hyperspace—he needed to get away from the gas giant around which it orbited. No problem—ten minutes is more