[Dark Nest] - 1(11)

“You sure about this?” he asked. “It looks about as safe as a rancor’s throat down there.”

The image on their displays was that of a jagged five-kilometer mouth surrounded by a broken rim of asteroids, with dark masses of dust and stone tumbling down into the opening in lazy slow motion. Though the scanner’s view extended only two thousand meters into the chasm, the part it did show was a twisted, narrowing shaft lined by craggy protrusions and dark voids.

“I’m sure.” Leia could feel her brother’s presence somewhere deep inside the jumble of asteroids, calm, cheerful, and curious. “Luke knows we’re here. He wants us to come in.”

“Really?” Han turned the Falcon toward the lights and started forward. “What’d we ever do to him?”

As they passed over the array, Leia began to catch glimpses of a black, grainy surface carefully cleared of the dark dust that usually lay meters thick on carbonaceous asteroids. Once, she thought she saw something scuttling across a circle of light, but Han was keeping them too far above the asteroid to be certain, and it would have been too dangerous to ask him to go in for a closer look. She trained a vidcam on the surface and tried to magnify the image, but the shaft was too dusty and dark for a clear picture. All she saw was a screenful of gray grains not too different from sensor static.

They were barely past the first array when two more came to life, beckoning the Falcon deeper into the abyss. The ship bucked as Han avoided-only half successfully-a tumbling dustberg, then a frightened hiss escaped Leia’s lips as the jagged silhouettes of two small boulders began to swell in the forward viewport.

“Don’t sit there hissing.” Han’s gaze remained fixed on his display, where the resolution of the terrain schematic was not fine enough to show the two objects. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

“There!” Leia pointed out the viewport. “Right there!”

Han looked up from his display.

“All right, no need to get all worried.” He calmly flipped the Falcon on her side and slipped between the two boulders an instant before the pair came together, then went back to watching his display. “I had my eye on them.”

Han’s voice was so cocky and sure that Leia forgot for a moment that this was not the same brash smuggler who had been running her defenses since she was still fighting the Empire - the man whose lopsided grins and well-timed barbs could still raise in her a ruddy cloud of passion or a red fog of anger. He was wiser now, and sadder, maybe a little less likely to hide his goodwill behind a cynical exterior.

“Whatever you say, flyboy.” Leia pointed at the light arrays, the ones she had decided would be too dangerous to investigate. “I want to do a close pass on one of those.”

Han’s eyes widened. “What for?”

“To see what kind of technology we’re dealing with here.” Leia put on a flirtatious pout, then asked in an innocent voice, “That isn’t too risky for you, is it?”

“For me?” Han licked his lips. “No way.”

Leia smiled and, as Han angled toward the array, shunted extra power to the particle shields. Maybe the challenge of nap-of-terrain flying down a dark, twisting shaft filled with flotsam would help snap Han out of his touchy mood.

Han weaved past a dozen obstacles, working their way across the abyss toward the second array of lights… and that was when C-3PO, returning from a postjump hyperdrive check, arrived on the flight deck.

“We’re crashing!”

“Not yet,” Han growled.

“Everything’s under control, Threepio.” Leia’s attention was focused on the asteroid ahead, where the lights had begun a slow flashing as the Falcon approached. “Why don’t you go back and continue supervising the maintenance checks?”

“I couldn’t possibly, Princess Leia!” C-3PO placed himself in the navigator’s chair behind Han. “You need me in the cockpit.”

Han started to reply, but stopped when a ball of frozen gas came floating across the Falcon’s path.

“You see?” C-3PO demanded. “Captain Solo nearly missed that object!”

“I did miss it,” Han snapped. “Otherwise you’d be plastered across the canopy right now.”

“What I meant was that you failed to see it until the last moment,” C-3PO explained. “Do be careful-there’s a rather large one coming toward us from forty-seven point six-six-eight-“

“Quiet!” Han swung around an oblong megalith the size of a heavy cruiser, then added, “You’re distracting me.”

“Then perhaps you should have your synapses checked,” C-3PO suggested. “Slow processing time is indicative of aging circuits. There’s another object at thirty-two point eight-seven-eight degrees, inclination five point-“