'Glad you finally got here,' the man commented over his shoulder as they reached the top of the ramp. 'I was starting to think you'd been caught.
'That could still happen if you don't shut up,' Mara growled back.
'Keep your voice down, will you?'
'It's okay,' he assured her. 'I've got all your MSE droids clattering around on cleaning duty just inside the outer hull. That should block out any audio probes.'
Theoretically, she supposed, he was right. As a practical matter ... well, if the locals had the place under surveillance they were in trouble, anyway. 'You have any trouble getting the ship out of impoundment?' she asked him.
'Not really,' he said. 'The spaceport administrator said the whole thing was highly irregular, but he didn't give me any major grief about it.' He grinned. 'Though I suppose the size of the bribe I slipped him might have had something to do with that. My name's Wedge Antilles, by the way. I'm a friend of Captain Solo's.'
'Nice to meet you,' Mara said. 'Solo couldn't make it himself?' Antilles shook his head. 'He had to leave Coruscant on some kind of special mission, so he asked me to get the ship sprung for you. I was scheduled for escort duty a couple systems over anyway, so it wasn't a problem.'
Mara ran a quick eye over him. From his build and general manner...'B-wing pilot?' she hazarded.
'X-wing,' he corrected her. 'I've got to get back before my convoy finishes loading. Want me to give you an escort out of here?'
'Thanks, but no,' she said, resisting the urge to say something sarcastic. The first rule of smuggling was to stay as inconspicuous as possible, and flying out of a third-rate spaceport with a shiny New Republic X-wing starfighter in tow didn't exactly qualify as a low-profile stance.
'Tell Solo thanks.'
'Right. Oh, one other thing,' Antilles added as she started past him.
'Han also wanted me to ask you if your people might be interested in selling information on our friend with the eyes.'
Mara sent him a sharp look. 'Our friend with the eyes?' Antilles shrugged. 'That's what he said. He said you'd understand.' Mara felt her lip twist. 'I understand just fine. Tell him I'll pass on the message.'
'Okay.' He hesitated. 'It sounded like it was pretty important-'
'I said I'll pass on the message.'
He shrugged again. 'Okay-just doing my job. Have a good trip.' With a friendly nod, he headed back down the ramp. Still half expecting a trap, Mara got the hatchway sealed for flight and went up to the bridge. It took a quarter hour to run the ship through its preflight sequence, almost exactly the amount of time it took the spaceport controllers to confirm her for takeoff. Easing in the repulsorlifts, she lifted clear of the landing pit and made for space.
She was nearly high enough to kick in the sublight drive when the back of her neck began to tingle.
'Uh-oh,' she muttered aloud, giving the displays a quick scan. Nothing was visible; but this close to a planetary mass, that meant less than nothing. Anything could be lurking just over the horizon, from a single flight of TIE fighters all the way up to an Imperial Star Destroyer. But maybe they weren't quite ready yet...
She threw full power to the drive, feeling herself pressed back into the seat cushion for a few seconds as the acceleration compensators fought to catch up. An indignant howl came from the controller on the comm speaker; ignoring him, she keyed the computer, hoping that Torve had followed Karrde's standard procedure when he'd first put down on Abregado.
He had. The calculation for the jump out of here had already been computed and loaded, just waiting to be initiated. She got the computer started making the minor adjustments that would correct for a couple of months of general galactic drift, and looked back out the forward viewport. There, emerging over the horizon directly ahead, was the massive bulk of a Victory-class Star Destroyer.
Bearing toward her.
For a long heartbeat Mara just sat there, her mind skimming through the possibilities, all the time knowing full well how futile the exercise was. The Star Destroyer's commander had planned his interception with exquisite skill: given their respective vectors and the Etherway's proximity to the planet, there was absolutely no way she would be able to elude the larger ship's weapons and tractor beams long enough to make her escape to lightspeed. Briefly, she toyed with the hope that the Imperials might not be after her at all, that they were actually gunning for that Antilles character still on the surface. But that hope, too, evaporated quickly. A single X-wing pilot could hardly
