[Dark Nest] - 1(149)
“Dead ahead, fast.”
Han pushed the throttles into overdrive. The canopy grew suddenly transparent again, and still he could not see anything. There was only a thick brown fog, blossoming here and there with cannon fire and laced with the blue trails of starfighter ion drives.
“They melted it!” Han gasped. “They melted an entire-“
“Instruments, Han!”
Han glanced down and found the reassuring sight of a space battle on his tactical display. What looked to be about ten dozen squadrons of starfighters were whirling around Kr, maneuvering for position and pouring laserfire at each other. A single Chiss cruiser was sliding quietly around the moon’s bulk, playing a game of moog-and-rancor with a pair of Hapan Novas.
Kr’s surface, a sensor-blocking layer of frozen ethmane, was literally disappearing before their eyes. Every time a stray cannon blast struck ground, a thumb-sized area of ice vanished from Han’s display.
Leia found the fading rad signature of the Skywalkers’ proton torpedoes and reestablished their navigation lock. Han slipped the Falcon under the moon, streaking toward their destination only a hundred meters below Kr’s jagged belly. Their goal lay about ten kilometers ahead of the Chiss cruiser, so he chose a slow, direct route that would take them past its weapons turrets at a respectable distance. In a battle like this, the only way not to get shot at was to make clear you were no kind of threat.
As the Falcon neared the cruiser, a flight of clawcraft dropped out of the fog to look her over.
C-3PO opened an emergency channel. “This is the Millennium Falcon hailing all combatants. We are neutral in this conflict. Please direct your fire away from us! I repeat: we are neutral!”
The clawcraft dropped back into the kill zone behind the Falcon and hung there. The navigation lock slowly drifted toward the center of the screen.
The stolen skiff was floating amid the rest of the wreckage, a pile of flattened durasteel flickering in the light of Mara’s two functioning spotlights. There was no way to tell whether Alema and Ben’s Killik “friend” had been aboard when the proton torpedoes eviscerated the launching bay, but Mara was betting the pair had escaped. So far, she had seen no signs of the Twi’lek’s body among the scorched pieces of chitin tumbling past her canopy, and Alema was a Jedi. She would have sensed what was about to happen and raced for shelter.
Mara guided her ailing starfighter through a jagged breach in the launching bay’s rear wall. Her spotlights stabbed through a dusty cloud of floating rubble, illuminating a maintenance hangar with a bank of shattered dartship berths on the far wall. She sealed her EV suit and dropped her StealthX to the deck, skidding to a lopsided landing between the broken remnants of two egg-shaped storage tanks.
Knowing that Luke would be covering her from his own craft, Mara sprang out of the cockpit and tumbled all the way to the ceiling, coming to a rest beside a spitcrete ridge that would have served the Gorog as a sort of upside-down catwalk. When no attacks came, she exchanged her lightsaber for her blaster and covered Luke while he landed.
A large part of her-the part that was Ben’s mother-would have preferred him to rejoin the Falcon and come back with the Solos and the heavy artillery. But she had known from the moment her R9 died that would never happen; Luke would no more have left her alone than she would have him. Besides, this wasn’t so bad. It had been her and Luke against a world more times than she could count, and they always won.
Luke took cover inside the shattered base of a storage tank, then Mara pushed off the ceiling and joined him. They were taking care to stay out of their StealthXs’ spotlights, but there was enough ambient light to see his lips pressed tight together through his faceplate.
“What do you think?” Mara spoke over their suit comm. She wanted to keep her Force-senses clear for alerting her to danger. “Try to squeeze into your Stealth and sneak out?”
Luke shook his helmet. “There won’t be any slipping past that dartship swarm out there. As a matter of fact…” He turned toward his StealthX and commed his R9. “Arnie, go find a dark corner and-“
The command came to a sudden end as the orange glow of rocket exhaust lit the launching bay entrance. Mara grabbed Luke’s arm and kicked off the floor, using the Force to pull them toward a ruptured door membrane in the back of the maintenance hangar. Arnie started to tweedle a question, but the comm channel abruptly dissolved into static as a trio of bright flashes lit the chamber.
There was no boom, of course, but Mara suddenly grew uncomfortably warm inside her vac suit, and the shock wave hurled her and Luke headlong through the door membrane into the darkened utility passage beyond.