His brief triumph was interrupted by a sudden shriek from the Falcon’s hyperdrive units. The ship shuddered. Proximity alarms wailed.
Leia, her heart beating in synchrony to the blaring alarms, stared into Han’s startled brown eyes. Han turned to Commander Dorja.
“Sorry to interrupt dinner just as it was getting interesting,” he said, “but I’m afraid we’ve got to blow some bad guys into small pieces.”
The first thing Han Solo did when he scrambled into the pilot’s seat was to shut off the blaring alarms that were rattling his brain around inside his skull. Then he looked out the cockpit windows. The stars, he saw, had returned to their normal configuration—the Millennium Falcon had been yanked out of hyperspace. And Han had a good idea why, an idea that a glance at the sensor displays served only to confirm. He turned to Leia as she scrambled into the copilot’s chair.
“Either a black hole has materialized in this sector, or we’ve hit a Yuuzhan Vong mine.” A dovin basal to be precise, an organic gravitic-anomaly generator that the Yuuzhan Vong used for both propelling their vessels and warping space around them. The Yuuzhan Vong had been seeding dovin basal mines along New Republic trade routes in order to drag unsuspecting transports out of hyperspace and into an ambush. But their mining efforts hadn’t extended this far along the Hydian Way, at least not until now.
And there, Han saw in the displays, were the ambushers. Two flights of six coralskippers each, one positioned on either side of the dovin basal in order to intercept any unsuspecting transport.
He reached for the controls, then hesitated, wondering if Leia should pilot while he ran for the turbolaser turret. No, he thought, he knew the Millennium Falcon, her capabilities, and her crotchets better than anyone, and good piloting was going to get them out of this trouble more than good shooting.
“I’d better fly this one,” he said. “You take one of the quad lasers.” Regretting, as he spoke, that he wouldn’t get to blow things up, something always good for taking his mind off his troubles.
Leia bent to give him a quick kiss on the cheek. “Good luck, Slick,” she whispered, then squeezed his shoulder and slid silently out of the cockpit.
“Good luck yourself,” Han said. “And find out if our guest is qualified to take the other turret.”
His eyes were already scanning the displays as he automatically donned the comlink headset that would allow him to communicate with Leia at the laser cannon. Coralskippers weren’t hyperspace capable, so some larger craft had to have dropped them here. Was that ship still around, or had it moved on to lay another mine somewhere else?
It had gone, apparently. There was no sign of it on the displays.
The Yuuzhan Vong craft were just now beginning to react to his arrival—so much for the hope that the Millennium Falcon’s stealth capabilities would have kept her from being detected.
But what, he considered, had the enemy seen? A Corellian Engineering YT-1300 freighter, similar to hundreds of other small freighters they must have encountered. The Yuuzhan Vong wouldn’t have seen the Falcon’s armament, her advanced shields, or the modifications to her sublight drives that could give even the swift coralskippers a run for their money.
So the Millennium Falcon should continue, as far as the Yuuzhan Vong were concerned, to look like an innocent freighter.
While he watched the Yuuzhan Vong maneuver, Han broadcast to the enemy a series of queries and demands for information of the sort that might come from a nervous civilian pilot. He conducted a series of basic maneuvers designed to keep the coralskippers at a distance, maneuvers as sluggish and hesitant as if he were a fat, nervous freighter loaded with cargo. The nearest flight of coralskippers set on a basic intercept course, not even bothering to deploy into military formation. The farthest flight, on the other side of the dovin basal mine, began a slow loop toward the Falcon, to support the others.
Now that was interesting. In a short while they would have the dovin basal singularity between themselves and the Falcon, with the mine’s gravity-warping capabilities making it very difficult for them to see the Falcon or to detect any changes in her course.
“Captain Solo?” A voice on the comlink intruded on his thoughts. “This is Commander Dorja. I’m readying the weapons in the dorsal turret.”
“Try not to blow off the sensor dish,” Han told her.
He looked at the displays, saw the far-side squadron nearing eclipse behind the distorting gravity mine. His hands closed on the controls, and he altered course directly for the dovin basal just as he gave full power to the sublight drives.
The gravity mine was now between the Millennium Falcon and the far-side flight of coralskippers. The gravity warp surrounding the dovin basal would make it nearly impossible to detect the Falcon’s change of course.
“We have about three standard minutes to contact with the enemy,” he said into the comlink headset. “Fire dead ahead, on my mark.”
“Dead ahead?” came Dorja’s bland voice. “How unorthodox … have you considered maneuver?”
“Don’t second-guess the pilot!” Leia’s voice snapped like a whip. “Keep this channel clear unless you have something of value to say!”
“Apologies,” Dorja murmured.
Han bit back his own annoyance. He glanced at the empty copilot’s chair—Chewbacca’s place, now Leia’s—and found himself wishing that he was in the second laser cockpit, with Chewbacca in the pilot’s seat. But Chewie was gone, the first of the deaths that had struck him to the heart. Chewbacca dead, his younger son Anakin killed, his older son Jacen missing, presumed dead by everyone except Leia … Death had been haunting his footsteps, on the verge of claiming everyone around him.
That was why he hadn’t accepted Waroo’s offer to assume Chewbacca’s life debt. He simply hadn’t wanted to be responsible for the death of another friend.
But now Leia believed that Jacen was alive. This wasn’t a vague hope based on a mother’s desire to see her son again, as Han had earlier suspected, but
