26

The Millennium Falcon’s subspace engines flared white hot as the ship blasted away from Kessel’s garrison moon. A swarm of fighters streamed after it, peppering space with multicolored blaster fire. Large capital ships began to nose into the Falcon’s flight-path like sleeping giants roused by stinging insects.

Lando Calrissian did his best to dodge the concentrated blaster fire. “The sublight engines are still optimal. Either Han’s been maintaining her with a real mechanic for a change, or Doole reconditioned her for his fleet,” he said. “Let’s see how well the weapons systems work.”

A pair of wasplike Z-95 Headhunters streaked after them, shooting fire-linked banks of triple blasters; close behind followed three battered Y-wing long-range fighters.

Luke spun around and whistled in surprise. “Headhunters! I didn’t think anybody used those anymore!”

“Doole couldn’t be choosy, I guess,” Lando said.

The Falcon rocked with several direct blaster hits; the fresh and fully charged shields held, though, for the moment.

Lando dropped the blaster cannon through its ventral hatch, then fired back at the pursuers. After five prolonged shots, Lando managed to hit the exhaust nacelle of a Y-wing, forcing it to break formation and peel off for repairs.

“One down—only about a thousand more to go,” Lando said.

The Z-95 Headhunters pummeled them with repeated blaster fire, as if to punish the Falcon.

“Go down close to the planet and skim the atmosphere,” Luke said. “Let’s burn them up in the energy shield.”

Lando set course for the lumpy world of Kessel as he voiced his complaints. “We can’t detect that energy shield either. How do you know we won’t get disintegrated ourselves?”

“We’ve got better reactions than they do.”

Lando didn’t seem convinced. “I’ve already almost flown into an energy shield once during our attack on the Death Star. I’m not anxious to repeat the process.”

“Trust me,” Luke said.

Kessel swelled in front of them, pockmarked and wreathed in a cottony halo of escaping air. “We’re getting close.”

Luke held the back of the pilot chair, his eyes half-closed. He breathed regularly, reaching out, sensing the pulsing power generated as a protective blanket by the garrison moon.

“Don’t fall asleep on me, Luke!”

“Keep flying.”

The Headhunters swooped after, flanked by the remaining pair of Y-wings.

“The aft deflector shield is starting to feel the pounding,” Lando said. “If these guys get any closer, they’re going to fly up my exhaust ports!”

“Get ready,” Luke said.

Kessel filled their entire viewport now, boiling with its turbulent thin-air storms, tiny plumes from the numerous atmosphere factories tracing lines above the landscape.

“I’m ready, I’m ready! Just say the word and I—”

“Pull up, now!”

Lando’s tension helped him react like a spring-loaded catapult. He hauled up on the controls, ripping the Falcon straight up in a tight cartwheel. Taken by surprise, all four of the attacking ships splattered into clouds of ignited fuel and ionized metal as they slammed into the invisible energy shield.

“Missed it by a couple of meters at least,” Luke said. “Relax, Lando.”

Artoo bleeped, and Luke answered him after looking at the expression on Lando’s face. “No, Artoo, I don’t think he’s interested in an exact measurement.”

They soared just above the atmosphere on a tight orbit that took them around Kessel’s poles. The curtain of stars rolled out from the edge of the planet as the landscape sped beneath them; then they looped back into space in a mad dash to escape.

They ran straight into the wave of fighters belching out of the garrison moon.

Yelling in surprise, Lando launched a pair of Arkayd concussion missiles from the front tubes. The density of approaching ships was so great that even the wild shots scored twice, taking out a TIE fighter and a blast boat, while the hot debris cloud destroyed a heavily armed B-wing.

“Let’s not get cocky because we took care of a couple of ships. I’ve got only six more missiles.”

“We will not surrender now,” Luke said.

“No, I just mean we’re running, not fighting. At least the engines are in tip-top condition,” Lando said. “The Falcon hasn’t been this pampered since I owned her.”

“How fast can we get out of here?” Luke asked.

Jacked next to the copilot’s chair, Artoo chittered and bleeped. Luke glanced down and saw rows of flickering red lights on the navigation panel. “Uh oh.”

“What is he saying?” Lando said. He flicked his gaze from the ships swarming by the front viewport to the little astromech droid. “What’s wrong with him?”

“The navicomp’s not working,” Luke said.

“Well, fix it!”

Luke had already dashed around the bend in the corridor to pry off the access panel to the Falcon’s navicomputer. He glanced at the boards, feeling his heart sink into a black hole as deep as the Maw. “They’ve pulled the coordinate module. It’s not here.”

Lando groaned. “Now what are we going to do?”

In response to Lando’s concussion missiles, the Kessel fighters formed into tighter battle groups, striking at the Falcon with a firestorm of blaster bolts. Luke had to shield his eyes from the blinding flashes of near misses and deflected hits.

“I don’t know, but we’d better do it as fast as we can.”

“They’re from the New Republic!” Moruth Doole fumed in his rage, stomping up and down. “They’ll go back and report everything!” He straightened his mussed yellow cravat to regain his composure, but it didn’t work. He wanted to squash the escapees like a pair of bugs to eat. Spies and traitors! They had led him along, lied to him, taunted him.

“Send out every ship we have!” he screamed into the open channel that broadcast to his forces. He had managed to make it to the command center on the garrison moon. “Surround them, crush them, smash into them. I don’t care what it takes!”

“Sending out every ship might not be a good strategy,” responded one of the captains. “The pilots don’t know the formations, and they’ll just get in each other’s way.”

Doole’s mechanical eye lay in pieces scattered about the top of the console, and he could not see well enough to put it back together. With the blurry focus of his one half-blind eye, Doole could not identify the dissenting mercenary.

“I don’t care! I don’t want to lose these like we lost Han Solo!” He pounded his soft fist on the console, jarring the pieces of his mechanical eye. The primary lens bounced, then slid off the edge to shatter on the floor.

The Falcon ran straight toward the Maw, leaving Kessel behind.

“We’ll be all right,” Luke said. “I can use the Force to guide us through on a safe path.”

“If there is a safe path,” Lando muttered.

Sweat stood out on Luke’s forehead. “What other choice do we have? We can’t hide anyplace else, we can’t outrun all those fighters, and we can’t go into hyperspace without a navicomp.”

“What a great selection of options,” Lando said.

Finally mobilized, the capital ships came after them, firing ion cannon blasts powerful enough to clear a path through an asteroid field. The two big Lancer frigates made a deadly web in front of the Falcon with their twenty quad-firing laser cannons; but the Lancers were sluggish, and the Falcon increased its lead.

Somehow the other capital ships anticipated their run to the black hole cluster and converged ahead of them as Lando pushed the Falcon’s engines. “Come on, come on! Just squeeze a little more speed out.”

Ten system patrol craft, originally designed for maximum speed to combat smugglers and pirates, surged past the Falcon and lined up in a blockade. But in the three-dimensional vastness of space, Lando managed to slip under their grasp. Laser blasts erupted all around them.

“Our shields are edging the redlines,” Lando said.

Three Carrack-class light cruisers—midway in size between the Lancer frigates and the larger Dreadnaughts such as the ones in Bel Iblis’s lost Dark Force—formed a triple-pronged pincer, right, left, and top.

In hot pursuit behind the Falcon came the jagged ovoid of a Loronar strike cruiser, the largest ship in the Kessel fleet. As the chase plowed through the net of system patrol craft, the strike cruiser harmlessly took stray fire meant for the Falcon.

Lando stared out the viewport windows at the horrifying spectacle of the Maw and the giant battleships moving to meet them. Artoo bleeped something that even Luke could not translate.

“Only a complete idiot would go into a place like that,” Lando said. He squeezed his eyes shut.

“Then let’s just hope they’re not idiots, too,” Luke said.