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Solo saw red areas creeping through the engine compartments of the data screen labeled Flash Fire. The captains of his own ships Tedevium and Etherhawk began concentrating their fire on the stern of the Dreadnaught and the redness spread even faster.

That engagement was visible through his starboard viewport. Ahead was the glorious color pattern that was Selaggis Six. Below was the debris field that, from a distance, was just a ring, an attractive ornament for the planet.

“We’re above Iron Fist now,” the navigator said.

“Very well,” Solo said. “Make your course straight for Iron Fist. Bow shields to maximum. Sensors, relay data to gunners on all asteroids in our path that could conceivably harm us. All other ships in the group are to line up behind Mon Remonda. We’re going to drill a hole straight to Iron Fist, and we’re going in fast.”

Wedge and Tycho whipped across a massive stone ridge on a city-sized asteroid; the instant they knew the pursuing TIEs had lost sight of them, they decelerated.

Their pursuers came around at full speed, hugging the asteroid’s surface more closely than they had, and overshot the two X-wings. Wedge fired, saw his twin-linked lasers hammer the side of his target. The TIE, not penetrated, struggled to return to its original course, but the blast had sent it tumbling too close to the asteroid surface. It veered straight into a hill-sized projection and detonated.

Wedge glanced at Tycho, then at his sensor board. His wingman was intact; the other TIE was a ball of orange-and-yellow gases half a kilometer back. The other starfighters of his group were holding up well in spite of the sudden arrival of several TIE fighter squads—and not all the new arrivals were enemies. Some were friendlies off Skyhook.

Wedge looped back around toward Iron Fist for another strafing run—or another head-to-head with TIEs.

A new cloud of TIEs, two squads of interceptors, rose from the destroyer’s belly and veered off into the asteroid field. All wore red horizontal stripes on their solar wing arrays.

Wedge checked their course. It took the interceptors away from Iron Fist, away from Solo’s engagement, toward Selaggis Six’s once-occupied moon.

“Leader, Two. I don’t like the sight of that.”

“Me either, Two.” He switched his comm unit to the group frequency. “Group, this is Leader. Polearm One, take command of the group. Rogues, Wraiths, form up on me. We have something to check out.”

Lara pushed open the access hatch just a few centimeters and peered out into the corridor beyond. It was empty, echoing with a radiation alarm, flashing with the red lights appropriate to such a dangerous condition. Opposite the hatch was the door into the hangar bay she wanted.

She stepped out and helped haul Tonin over the hatch lip. “Give us a minute to get the door open,” she told the nonhumans crowded into the access shaft. “Then look both ways to make sure no one is coming, and join us.”

They nodded, a little excited but confident, like a roomful of businessfolk just before an important meeting. She was left with the unsettling impression that she was leading a horde of humans dressed up for no particular reason in humanoid suits.

The hangar door opened to their approach. She breathed a sigh of relief; she and Tonin wouldn’t have to run a lengthy bypass on the door controls. She toggled the control so the door would remain open for the humanoids following; despite their human-level, or genius-level, intelligence, they might still be startled by the suddenness with which ship’s doors tended to shoot up into their housings.

Within the hangar, only three vehicles remained: Lara’s X-wing, a Lambda-class shuttle, and a larger shuttle of similar design, an Imperial landing craft. “We’ll give them the landing craft,” she told Tonin. “I’ll get it prepped for launch. You still have the file on my X-wing?”

Tonin tweetled an affirmative.

“Open it up, disable all transponder systems, and disengage whatever else the file says they’ve done to it.