13

Lara put everything into acceleration, hurtling toward the Falsehood as fast as she could travel. She shouldn’t have been able to outstrip the other TIE interceptors of the combined units, but most of them dropped slowly back. In a matter of moments, she was at the fore with three other TIEs—her wingman and two interceptors of the 181st.

One of them communicated. “Anxious for battle, Lieutenant?” It was Baron Fel’s voice.

“Anxious to show you what I’m made of,” she said.

“Never let it be said that I’m not gallant,” Fel said. “The first strafing run is yours.”

She managed to project gratitude and excitement into her voice. “Thank you, sir.” But the words were like bile to her.

She knew what was happening. It was a test. If she was seen to offer less than her best effort toward the destruction of the ersatz Millennium Falcon, they’d know she was not trustworthy.

Well, she’d show them something. She’d hit the Falsehood again and again.

•    •    •

“Millennium Falcon,” came the woman’s voice, “this is the former Wraith Two. Prepare to die.” The source of the transmission, the lead TIE interceptor, opened fire.

The voice was Lara’s. Donos stiffened. He’d been tracking the incoming TIEs, aiming at the lead starfighter, but now he let his aim drift off her.

Green laser fire streamed from the interceptor. It was the only one of the four TIEs to fire. The first few linked bursts missed, then Lara began connecting, and the Falsehood rocked under the impact of her hits.

The first pair of TIEs roared past the Falsehood and immediately looped around for a second pass. The second pair came on, and a new voice crackled across the comm waves. “I believe I address General Solo. You can spare the lives of your crew by surrendering now.”

Donos had heard that voice before, at the Implacable fight. Baron Soontir Fel. He twisted to look up the access tube at Wedge. His commander had some sort of personal relationship with Fel, doubtless something that had come about during the brief time Fel served with Rogue Squadron, though Donos didn’t know what it was. And sure enough, Wedge had stiffened in his seat, his aim faltering.

Donos almost smiled. It was good to know that he wasn’t the only one caught off guard by the forces confronting them.

Then came another voice over the comlink. Han Solo’s.

Solo’s voice said, “Baron Fel. They still say you’re the best Imp pilot since Darth Vader. When you were a Rogue, I didn’t want to hurt your feelings, but now I can tell you, I flew against him—and you’re not fit to shine his helmet.”

“We’ll never know,” Fel said. “I’m certainly pilot enough to put an end to you.” He and his wingman came on, firing, with twenty TIE interceptors in their wake.

Donos’s aim was thrown off as the Falsehood suddenly began spinning along its bow-to-stern axis. He recognized the maneuver’s intent, to change the sight profile of the Falsehood so incoming attackers would have an irregular target.

Fel and his wingman blasted by, their laser fire hitting the bow and forward mandibles. The ship’s lights dimmed as its shields strained to hold up under the assaults. Donos’s return fire missed both TIEs, but he was able to swing back in line and tag the second interceptor of the next pair. His shots chewed through a solar wing array and sent the interceptor spinning off into the blackness of space. On his sensor screen, the second interceptor vanished; streaks of debris exploded away from its last position, then faded.

And more TIEs came on as, in the distance, the bow of the Dreadnaught grew larger and larger.

Squeaky watched with fascination as the universe spun crazily before him. He switched back to his normal voice. “I say. If I were human, I imagine I’d be throwing up all over your control panels.”

Chewbacca turned and grumbled something.

Squeaky turned to look in amazement at the Wookiee—what he could see of Chewbacca, anyway, through the holes in the absurd, oversized mask Squeaky was wearing. “Why, that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me. Did I really sound like him?”

Chewbacca grumbled an assent.

Squeaky sat back, suddenly delighted. All the work he’d done with General Solo, recording his voice, analyzing and parsing appropriate phrases and recurrent remarks, might have paid off. It had not only fooled Baron Fel, it had finally gained him Chewbacca’s admiration.

The Falsehood rocked, accompanied by noises of hardware and systems leaping from their wall brackets and crashing around against the walls, as it sustained more incoming fire. “Chewbacca, can’t we do all this without the participation of enemy forces?”

The Wookiee spared a moment to glare at him.

“What did I say?”

The last of the TIEs finished their first pass. Behind the Falsehood, they began looping around for a second run. The squadron of TIE fighters that had escorted them out of the planet’s atmosphere was on an approach back toward the planet, doubtless ordered away so the Reprisal and the interceptors could have all the glory arising from the Millennium Falcon’s destruction. Donos watched his sensor board with concern. The Falsehood had been lucky to survive one run through that gauntlet.

First to return would be Lara and her wingman. They were only seconds from optimal firing range. “Commander?” Donos said. “Opinions about Lara?”

“When we do the breakaway move,” Wedge said, “when we vector away from the Dreadnaught’s bow, she may overshoot us. Try for one of her wings. Disable instead of kill.”

The next voice was Squeaky’s. “If you’ll pardon me, sirs, I think you should let Flight Officer Notsil continue shooting us.”

Laser fire from Lara’s interceptor and her wingmate’s began pouring down on the Falsehood again. Out of the corner of his eye, Donos saw a hydrospanner rocketing down the access tube toward him. He tried twisting up and out of the way; it slammed into his rib cage instead of his head, and he grunted from the sudden pain.

“What?” Wedge’s voice suggested the frown Donos could easily imagine him wearing. “Squeaky, have you shaken loose your logic circuits?”

“No, sir. It’s rather complicated. It will take too long to explain. Just trust me.” The droid’s voice was surprisingly confident. “This is something I know about. What? Oh. Chewbacca says thirty seconds to release-and-turn.”

Donos twisted and swept his arc of fire across Lara’s TIE, but didn’t begin firing until his crosshairs were just past her wing. His series of blasts flashed between her and her wingman, then one grazed the second TIE. It jumped up, gaining relative altitude, and was suddenly out of sight.

Then it was a bright, expanding ball as Wedge’s shot hulled it.

On the bridge of Iron Fist, Zsinj and Melvar watched with interest the holocomm broadcast from the bow of the Reprisal. It showed the Millennium Falcon’s suicidal charge, the horde of TIE interceptors converging upon the Corellian freighter.

“Come on, come on,” Zsinj breathed. “Bring in Mon Remonda. You’ll die if you don’t.”

“Ten seconds to breakaway,” Squeaky said. “Nine … Eight …”

Chewbacca rumbled at him.

“You want me to do the jettison? Very well.” Squeaky’s metal hands sought out the large switch that had been bonded to the main console earlier today. “Four … Three …”

Chewbacca ceased the freighter’s spinning motion. The Falsehood shuddered as a vicious shot from Fel’s interceptor slammed into its top hull.

“One …” Squeaky threw the switch.

All along the starboard side of the Falsehood, seals holding the new extension, the mock-up that made the ship better resemble a YT-2400 freighter, opened with little flashes of explosive charges. The extension drifted half a meter from the Falsehood’s hull.

Chewbacca yanked the controls hard to port. The freighter’s inertial compensators shrieked as they tried to accommodate the nearly ninety-degree maneuver. TIE interceptors, their pilots caught momentarily off guard by the surprise move, overshot the Falsehood. The jettisoned portion of the ship continued on, laser-straight, toward the bow of the Reprisal.

Squeaky said, “Flight Officer Konnair, you are free to detach when ready.”

Lara and Fel looped back quickly, getting back into position behind the Falsehood. They continued their erratic, side-to-side motion, which made it all but impossible for the ship’s gunners to target them.

Lara heard Fel report, “There’s something attached to the Falcon where that piece of debris just detached. It’s—oh.”

Lara saw the “something” break free of the Falsehood. It was an A-wing fighter. It drifted free of the freighter with the puff of small explosive bolts detonating; then its engines lit off and it vectored away at the kind of speed only an A-wing could manage.

“Don’t be distracted, Petothel,” Fel said. “Stay with the primary target.”

“Don’t worry about me,” she said, and opened up again on the Falsehood.

Fel’s wingman veered away in pursuit of the A-wing.

On the bridge of the Reprisal, the captain and crew watched the Falsehood’s movements.

“He’s vectoring to sweep around us,” the weapons operator reported. “He’ll probably return to his primary course when he’s clear of our guns.”

“Order the TIEs to herd him back in toward our side,” said the captain, a burly man who could not return to his home on Coruscant until Rebels like Han Solo were purged from the galaxy. “We can’t keep Fel from firing on her, but maybe we can steal the kill. What’s the status of that debris?”

“On a collision course with us,” the sensor specialist said. “But its speed and tonnage are insufficient to do us harm. Our shields will repel it.”

“Very well,” the captain said.

Lara and Fel continued to pour laser fire into the Falsehood’s stern, all the while dodging with the mad speed and maneuverability of which only TIE interceptors were capable. The remaining TIEs swept out ahead of the Falsehood, forming up in her path, dictating a run through their gauntlet or a turn—either toward space, along the Dreadnaught’s flank, or back toward the planet.

But Dorset Konnair in her A-wing flashed along behind the line of TIEs, firing her blaster cannons continuously, vaping two of the TIEs before she emerged from the other side. Fel’s wingman pursued her, firing at maximum range, unable to overtake the starfighter.

Donos kept up ineffectual fire at Lara whenever she was under his sights, while trying with all his skill to tag Fel whenever that pilot came within view. He had no more success hitting the pilot he wanted to kill than he did the one he wanted to miss. And shot after shot from the pursuing TIEs rocked the Falsehood, sounding alarms as shields threatened to fail.

Chewbacca veered back toward the escape course short of the gauntlet of TIEs. His maneuver left them too close to the Dreadnaught; the Falsehood would be running under the guns of the Reprisal. Donos shook his head and stayed focused on his more immediate problems. If the Reprisal hit them, he’d be dead before he felt anything.

Zsinj watched the Corellian freighter’s run. He rapped his knuckles against a bulkhead, trying to bleed his nervousness away with activity. “Why isn’t Mon Remonda jumping in?” he said. “Petothel said that these Millennium Falcon missions had cruiser support.”

Melvar said, “Maybe she was wrong. Or they changed tactics.”

“No, it makes sense. He just isn’t calling in his cruiser. Why isn’t the Reprisal dealing with that debris?”

Melvar glanced at the data feed from the Dreadnaught. “It’s not real ship’s construction. Too light. Their shields will handle it.”

Zsinj glanced away from the transmitted view from the Reprisal’s bridge to the data feed. Cold suspicion clawed at him. “Contact the Reprisal! Tell them to blow that debris now!”

The tumbling piece of space junk that had been attached to the Falsehood made contact with the Reprisal’s bow shields.

Inside, a sensor attuned to sudden shocks and gravitational variances registered impact. It triggered the large cache of explosives fastened within the debris’s hull.

The bomb, originally intended for a drop onto one of Zsinj’s production facilities on the surface of Comkin Five, exploded with far more force than the Dreadnaught’s shields could withstand.

A bright glow washed over the Falsehood from the side. Donos glanced away from Lara’s TIE interceptor to look.

The entire bow of the Reprisal seemed to be awash in bright light and flame.

His comm unit crackled. Squeaky said, “We have good news to report. The Wraiths are incoming.”

Squeaky turned off the comm mike and glared at Chewbacca. “You didn’t tell me it was a bomb.”

Chewbacca rumbled a reply.

“No, now is the time to talk about it. You’ve made me a participant in this fight! I’ve actually done damage to other beings! I’m not allowed to do that. I don’t know if I can cope.”

Face brought the seven X-wings of Wraith Squadron, including Kell in Donos’s snubfighter, around the Reprisal’s stern along its starboard side, putting them on the same side of the conflict as the Falsehood and her pursuit. The X-wings were already in attack position, their S-foils spread and locked. “Fire One,” he said.

Fourteen proton torpedoes launched toward the mass of enemy TIEs. As close as the Wraiths were to their targets, the torpedoes crossed the intervening distance almost immediately. As tightly packed as the TIEs were, when those on the leading edge were able to veer out of the way and break a torpedo’s targeting lock, the TIEs behind them were not. Ten kills registered on Face’s sensor screen, then the TIE force was spreading, scattering, breaking by twos and preparing to engage the Wraiths.

“That won’t work twice,” Face said. “Change Target Two to the Dreadnaught’s bow. Fire Two.” Fourteen more proton torpedoes leaped away. Face saw detonations all around the Reprisal’s bow, couldn’t determine if they were penetrating the damaged Dreadnaught’s shields. “Break and engage by pairs.”

On the bridge of Mon Remonda, Han Solo sat in his command chair, his stomach threatening to knot ever tighter, while he watched the holocomm broadcast from the Falsehood. The sensor-display portion of the broadcast showed the Falsehood on her outbound flight and all the vehicles around her.

At the moment, only two TIE starfighters assailed the Falsehood. The Dreadnaught was not firing, its command crew obviously thrown into disarray by the detonation of the bomb.

“They’re going to escape, Zsinj,” he said, his words intended for no one’s ears but his own. “You can’t have that. Jump in. Bring Iron Fist in. Come on, Zsinj.”

“Sir,” Squeaky said, “do we tell the Wraiths about Lara?”

Wedge hesitated. If they broadcast an encrypted message telling the Wraiths that one of the TIEs was Lara and she was conceivably an ally, the message would eventually be broken. A voice signal like that simply offered too much data. “Tag her as a friendly on the sensor board and transmit only that information, and only as data,” he said. That might do it—a tiny data update was much less likely to be intercepted by the enemy or decoded.

“Yes, sir.”

“Me up, you down,” Kell said.

“We’re your wing,” Runt responded.

They aimed straight for the Millennium Falsehood, Kell approaching above the level of the freighter’s top hull, Runt beneath her keel, both firing at the TIEs pursuing the freighter.

Kell kept his fire a little high so no slight deviation in his progress would bring his lasers down onto the Falsehood. But his target’s erratic motion brought it up toward his field of fire …

And then, on his targeting computer, his target changed color from red to blue. Kell swore, took his finger from the trigger, and the Falsehood and its pursuit blasted past underneath him. He began as tight a turn as was possible to come up behind the Falsehood again. Below him, Runt was doing the same.

The Falsehood rocked more violently than before and suddenly air was howling through the freighter. Wedge’s ears popped as the air pressure changed.

Squeaky’s voice, for once, contained alarm. “We are breached! Shields are down on the keel!”

“Chewbacca, roll her!” Wedge shouted.

Outside his viewport, the universe rotated 180 degrees. Fel was abruptly in his gunsights instead of Lara. He opened fire on Fel. “Donos, lock down that hull breach. Chewie, keep our good shields between us and Fel. Maybe Lara won’t vape us.”

What a thing to have to count on. Squeaky’s assurance that they shouldn’t destroy Lara—and now, with the Falsehood’s unprotected keel exposed to her guns, she could vape them with no effort.

Lara saw the Falsehood rotate, exposing its belly, and her sensors showed its shields there were gone.

She could fire, or she could reveal herself to Zsinj to be a traitor to his cause.

Or she could—

She deliberately twitched the pilot’s yoke a little too hard and her maneuver carried her forward, right into the Falsehood’s keel. Suddenly she was spinning out of control, and there was an ominous cracking noise as a jagged line appeared on her viewport.

“Petothel?” It was Fel’s voice. “Petothel, are you hurt?”

She didn’t answer.

Zsinj watched, his mouth slack and expression disbelieving, as the holocomm display from the Reprisal continued.

The bridge view was gone, of course. It had vanished when the bridge was destroyed. But sensor data continued to pour in.

The Reprisal was breaking up. The initial explosion had breached her hull, smashed her bow shields, and temporarily deprived her of effective command. The proton torpedoes that followed had inflicted massive structural damage on the old Dreadnaught.

Now she continuously vented atmosphere into space, her crumpling bulkheads preventing airtight doors from sealing. Her captain had sent her into a turn just before the bomb’s impact, doubtless to track the Millennium Falcon with her guns, and the stress of the maneuver was cracking the mighty old ship open like a nut.

Zsinj sagged against the bulkhead. “I can’t kill him. I can’t kill Han Solo. I don’t know the formula. I don’t have the plan.”

Melvar, in his ear, said, “The One Eighty-first is disconnected. I’ve ordered them to break away from the attacking force. But we can send in another capital ship and get them coordinated again.”

“No. Throw good money after bad? Besides, Solo will be in hyperspace before another ship can get into proper position. This assault is over.”

Melvar saluted and moved over to look down into the crew pit, where his starfighter director was. “Send the starfighters down to a planetary base.” His voice was heavy with regret.

Zsinj knew that regret.

He knew frustration, too. Nothing was working. Nothing was working.

The TIEs were still swarming, but abruptly they were swarming in another direction, back toward the planet.

With no TIE fighters close enough to see in the cockpit viewport, Squeaky dispensed with the human-face mask he wore. It served merely to conceal the gold tone of his face and was only effective against distant or fast-moving observers. At Wedge’s direction he returned to his Han Solo voice and activated the comm unit. “Wraiths, form up, prepare for hyperspace. Polearm Seven, it’s time for you to return to dock with the Falcon.”

“Coming in, General.”

Wedge leaned in over Squeaky’s shoulder. “Now say, ‘Good shooting out there.’ ”

“Doesn’t she know she shot well?”

Wedge glowered. “Just do it.”

“Good shooting out there, Konnair.”

“Thank you, General.”

Dorset Konnair’s A-wing sidled in toward the Falsehood’s starboard. Delicately, she maneuvered it alongside the docking station temporarily installed where one of the freighter’s escape pods should be. A moment later, Squeaky felt the thump of contact. “All ready,” he said, in his own voice.

“Go back and help Donos patch that leak, would you?”

“If I must. One minute a general, the next minute a sheet-metal worker.”

Wedge smiled at him. “That’s life in the armed forces.”

“Petothel, come in.”

Lara stirred, trying to convey with body language that she was dazed. She stared out the forward viewport. Fel’s TIE interceptor cruised there, mere meters from her. It seemed to be spinning, though she knew that it was her own interceptor that was rolling. “What? I, what?”

“Are you injured? We can bring in a shuttle with a tractor to get you out of there.”

“No, I’m good to fly.” That was the pilot’s automatic response, whether Imperial or New Republic, whether truth or self-delusion. She sat upright. “Did—did we get him?”

“Almost,” Fel said. “Come along, you’re my wing.” He vectored away and moved planetward, away from the burning wreckage of the Reprisal, only a few kilometers away.

She’d spent her time “unconscious” productively. The datapad that had transmitted its unusual commands to her laser weaponry was now back in a pocket. She’d hammered her helmeted head against the side of the cockpit until it really was sore, until she was almost as dizzy as she claimed to be—she’d need the telltale physical signs of injury when she got back to Iron Fist.

She’d done it. She couldn’t keep a smile off her face as she followed in Baron Fel’s wake.

Captain Onoma stood before Solo. “We have found the position Iron Fist held throughout the engagement. A wingpair from Mon Delindo detected her a few minutes ago.”

Solo came upright. “Alert Rogue and Nova Squadrons, tell them to stand ready. Communicate with Mon Delindo. We’ll converge on Iron Fist’s position—”

“Sir, Iron Fist has already jumped out of system.”

Solo sagged into his chair. “Abandoning his pilots? Not even bothering to pick up survivors off the Reprisal?”

Onoma nodded in the awkward Mon Calamari fashion. “Doubtless he’s relying on planetary forces for rescue, and will send a freighter back for his TIE squadrons. He’s gone, sir.”

Solo offered him a disbelieving shake of the head. “He just won’t come in close enough to a system for its mass shadow to delay his departure. He’s that spooked.”

“You should be honored, General. You’re what’s ‘spooking’ him.”

“Failures don’t get honored, Captain.” He shook his head, looked away from the captain. “I have to think about this.”

The crew of the Millennium Falsehood—two Corellian men, a Wookiee, and a 3PO droid in a general’s uniform—descended the loading ramp more hastily than usual, as though they expected the battered craft to burst into flame, and turned to look at the freighter.

She had new laser scoring all over her hull. Smoke drifted from beneath the keel and rose to the hangar’s ceiling.

“Not bad,” Wedge said. “I’ve flown worse.”

Squeaky said, “You are joking, I hope, sir.”

Wedge turned his attention to the droid. “And now that we have a moment or two, Squeaky, would you mind telling me why you said we should allow Lara Notsil to blow holes in our hull?”

“Well, I thought she was trying to tell us something.”

Wedge blinked. Then he turned to the Wookiee. “Chewbacca, go ahead. Pull his legs off and hit him with them.”

“Wait!” Squeaky threw up his arms as if to ward off the blows to come. “Let me explain.”

And he did.

General Solo, Captain Onoma, and Wedge were already in the briefing room when Donos arrived. Within a minute, they were joined by Shalla and Face.

“This meeting concerns Lara Notsil,” Wedge said. “Each of you is here for a different purpose. General Solo and Captain Onoma are here because this pertains to mission planning. Shalla, because of your knowledge of Imperial Intelligence techniques … and mentalities. Donos, because of your familiarity with Lara. Face, because of your training as an actor; we assume that you can recognize your own kind.”

Face managed a smile. “From time to time,” he said.

Wedge said, “Earlier today, the Falsehood was fired upon by Lara Notsil, who was acting as a TIE interceptor pilot for Zsinj’s forces. Squeaky, acting as communications officer, noticed that every time she hit us with laser fire, our comm unit stored fragments of a transmission.”

Donos frowned. “Her attacks were also transmissions?”

“That’s right. She had apparently rigged one of her laser cannons to pulse in the fashion of a line-of-sight laser communicator. She had also, according to what we can determine, reduced the strength of her lasers somewhat—else we would have suffered more damage than we did.”

Shalla said, “This is sort of what Donos did with his laser rifle at Halmad.” Above that world, needing to trigger an explosive device but prevented from doing so by comm jamming, Donos had modified the output of his laser sniper rifle to transmit the detonation signal.

Wedge nodded. “That may have been what gave her the idea. Here’s the message. It’s voice only.” He reached over to the terminal keyboard beside the conference table and pressed a button.

First, a hiss suggesting a low-quality recording, then Lara’s voice emerged from the air around them. “This is Lara Notsil, transmitting to Wraith Squadron and Mon Remonda.”

Donos tensed. Knowing that the message was from her hadn’t prepared him for actually hearing her voice; he felt almost as though he’d been physically struck. Then he became aware of Shalla’s gaze on him. Face’s, too. They were evaluating him, his reaction.

Once, he would have washed all expression away from his face, giving them nothing to read. But he didn’t care about that anymore. It hurt to hear Lara. It didn’t matter if they could see the bleakness of his expression. He closed his eyes to listen more carefully.

“I was the one who suggested to the warlord that he’d encounter you at Comkin Five. If you did show up there, I hope it’s because it’s part of your mission plan—that you were hoping to engage him. I told him you might also appear at Vahaba. You might want to keep that on your schedule. You should be able to engage him there as well.”

Donos opened his eyes to glance at Solo and Wedge. They were exchanging a look, and Solo shook his head, a trace of confusion to his expression.

“I’m working on a plan now whereby I might be able to transmit you Iron Fist’s location, just as we did with the Parasite plan.” That mission, in which Wraith Squadron had planted a program in the computer of a new Super Star Destroyer, Razor’s Kiss, had led to the new ship automatically sending its location to Solo’s fleet. Ultimately, it had resulted in the ship’s destruction. “If I die, the plan might be able to continue in my absence, so don’t just give up on it if someone manages to shoot me down. Attached to this message is a data package showing what I’ve done, what conclusions I’ve reached. I hope you can use them.

“Please tell the Wraiths that I’m holding faith with them.” There was a long pause, the distinct sound of Lara swallowing with difficulty. “The rest of this message is for Myn Donos.”

Wedge tapped a key on the terminal and her voice cut off. He looked apologetically at Donos. “I’m sorry. I’ve heard it already, and it does pertain to her state of mind. We’re all going to have to hear it.”

Donos nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

Wedge tapped the key again.

A little background hiss returned to the air, but Lara didn’t speak for several seconds. Then, “Myn, it’s not likely that we’ll ever see one another again. So I wanted to take this opportunity to say good-bye. Well, more than that. I wanted to explain. About what I did.

“I was fighting a war, the way I’d been trained, and that involved infiltrating the enemy and getting their secrets back to my superiors, or sabotaging the data the enemy possessed. There was never a time I saw a file labeled ‘How to Destroy Talon Squadron’ and thought to myself, ‘Oh, that’s what I want to do.’ To me, it was just data about occupied territories and interplanetary borders.

“Then I infiltrated Wraith Squadron, just a ploy to make myself more valuable to prospective employers, and things started happening. All the furniture that made up the way I’d thought and felt about things all my life started coming loose in my head. Nowadays it slides around and breaks into pieces and I have no idea what parts of it are real and what aren’t.” There was a waver to her voice now, a suggestion she was having trouble keeping it under control. “It hurts, and a lot of the time I don’t know who I am anymore.

“But I know what I have to do. Whoever I am, I’m staying here, like a vibroblade right next to Zsinj’s vitals, and when the right time comes I’m going to stab him deep. That’ll probably be the last thing I do.

“I don’t have any friends here, except one droid, and I don’t have any where you are, or anywhere else in the galaxy, so when I’m gone there isn’t going to be anyone to remember me kindly. So I was just sort of hoping you wouldn’t hate me anymore. I really can’t stand thinking that’s the only way I’ll be remembered.”

There was a long silence, the sound of a sniffle. Her voice finally returned, quieter than it had been. “I wish I’d been someone else. To give you that chance you wanted.

“Lara Notsil out.”

Donos felt his eyes burning. He put his hand over them. He felt tears under his fingers.

They were silent a long moment. Then Wedge, regret in his voice, said, “All right. Opinions. Shalla?”

Shalla cleared her throat. “Tough call. At a certain level, I think Corran Horn was right. Mentally and emotionally, Lara’s not all together. But she seems to be sticking to her plan, to her perception that Zsinj is the enemy. And if I read her words right, she’s resigned herself to death in this effort. That makes it more likely that her words can be trusted.

“Add to that the very interesting way she transmitted data. It was complicated, it was unreliable. It was a desperation measure. If she really was an agent of Zsinj’s, she could have just shot us a tight-beam transmission from her interceptor’s comm system. We would have known that there was very little chance of such a message being detected. The approach she actually used suggests to me that she’s afraid that her interceptor’s comm system is tapped, recording, something, and she wanted to get around whatever measures had been taken that way.”

“All right. Face?”

“She’s a pretty good actress,” Face said. “In her line of work, she’d have to be. But there was a lot of what seemed like very genuine strain in her voice. I’d lean toward the side of her telling the truth.”

“Donos?”

Decorum demanded that he look at them when he answered. To do that, he’d have to put his hand down. If he did that, they’d see his tears. They’d know he wasn’t in control of himself. They’d know—

Well, to hell with what they knew, with what they thought. He slammed his hand down on the tabletop. Shalla and Solo jumped. He looked around the table, defying all to say anything about the tears on his cheeks. “She was telling the truth,” he said.

“I need a little more than that,” Wedge said. “Your reasons?”

“That final bit … if she’s luring us into a trap for Zsinj, what was that last bit for? To make me feel bad? What good would that do?” He took a deep, shuddery breath. “If she had wanted to manipulate me, to make me come in on her side, she’d have said, ‘If I get out of this alive, I’ll come back to stand trial.’ That gives me everything, puts everything on me. If I just want justice, I win—she stands trial. If I want her, I win—I stand beside her at her trial, and I can dream that she’ll get off light. That’s the way to swing me over, but she didn’t do that. She just said good-bye.”

Wedge nodded. “All right. There you go, General. Three opinions, all in the same direction, for different reasons.”

Solo asked, “Why did she think Vahaba would be on our list?”

“I looked at the data file she’d appended to the audio,” Wedge said. “She had done a good job of calculating the criteria we were using, except that she thought that the planets our false Han Solo would be visiting would all be former trading partners with, or recipients of regular trade goods from, Alderaan.”

Solo leaned back. “That makes sense. It does. One of the factors we used was choosing worlds that produced certain types of matériel that are valuable in times of war and times of peace. That would correspond to a certain degree to the types of goods Alderaan was importing after it banned all its weapons. Can you run the numbers on our projections again, substituting trade with Alderaan for what we had?”

Wedge gave him a smile. “Already did. And guess which system, discounting the ones we’ve already visited, jumps to the top of the list? Vahaba.”

“Vahaba.” Solo smiled. “If we can get the Falsehood repaired fast enough, we can dangle it like bait for Zsinj again. All right, Nelprin, Donos, thanks for coming. Loran, I need you for a moment more.”

Donos rose, offered a salute, and was the first one out the door.

When the three pilots were gone, Solo turned to Wedge. “If Zsinj wouldn’t come in at Kidriff to get me, he won’t come in anywhere. He’s just too conservative. Protecting Iron Fist all the way. So if we can’t get Iron Fist close enough to a gravity well to trap it for a while, we need to bring a gravity well to Iron Fist.”

Wedge frowned. “Meaning what? An Interdictor cruiser?” Those vessels, uncommon even in the Imperial fleet where they were most prevalent, possessed gravity-well generators that, when activated, could keep all vessels within range from entering hyperspace.

“That’s right.”

“Does Fleet Command have one available for you?”

“No,” Solo said. He turned to Face. “That’s where you come in.”

“Uh-oh,” Face said.

“I’m going to set up an appointment between you and your Imperial admiral buddy. I want you to go ask him for an Interdictor.”

Face said, “Begging your pardon, sir, but you’re crazy enough to be a Wraith.”

Solo grinned. “Until you’ve crewed with me for a few years, kid, you have no idea what ‘crazy’ means.”