“What’s that have to do with the price of spice on Nal Hutta?” Han demanded.
“They’re too strong, Han,” Mara said. “Especially Jaina.”
“Yeah?” Han asked. “If they’re so strong, how’d that Force-call drag them all the way out here in the first place?”
The troubled silence returned.
Leia reached over and laid her hand over Han’s. “It’ll be all right, Han. I can still feel them out there. They’re not Joiners.”
“Yet,” Han grumbled. Over the comm, he asked, “How about those ideas?”
“Try a code search,” Luke suggested helpfully.
Han rolled his eyes.
Leia smiled at him, then said to Luke, “Thanks for the suggestion. We’ve already tried that.”
“No need to worry,” Mara said. “We haven’t lost them.”
“We haven’t?” Leia asked. Before the XR808g left Lizil, Han and Juun had hidden a subspace transceiver beneath the cockpit and linked it to the navicomputer. Each time the XR808g initiated a jump, the transceiver automatically encoded the galactic coordinates and broadcast them to the Shadow and Falcon - but that didn’t help them now, when they were already at those coordinates. “I don’t understand.”
“Give me a second.” Mara remained silent for a moment, then said, “Be ready to take a fix, in case Juun is smarter than he looked.”
Han raised his brow. “I don’t recall planting a homing beacon on the Exxer.”
“Because you ‘re not the sneaky one-despite all reports to the contrary,” Mara commed. “Ready?”
Leia smiled and prepared a navigation lock. “Ready.” A red dot began to blink in the upper corner of the tactical display. “Got it.”
Leia activated the lock, and Han swung the Falcon around behind the red dot. Yoggoy traffic proved an unimaginable free-for-all, with muscle-powered balloon-bikes competing for airspace against dilapidated cloud cars and modern airspeeders. Thick-waisted rocket planes flashed past in all directions, packed to bursting with goggle-eyed insects and trailing oily plumes of smoke. Battered space freighters eased their durasteel hulks down into the mess, descending through the traffic toward the haze-blanketed towertops below.
A stubby little rocket plane shot out from under a cargo blimp off to starboard and began to climb, coming for Leia’s side of the cockpit.
“Rodder!” Han cursed, and the Falcon took a sudden skip upward. “Watch where you’re going!”
“Don’t get so upset,” Leia said. “We have plenty-“
A thirty-meter insect shuttle flashed into view from beneath Leia’s side of the cockpit, headed straight for the little rocket plane.
“Oh, my!” C-3PO said from the navigator’s station. “That was too close-“
“Hard to port,” Leia interrupted. “Now, Han!”
“Port?” Han shot back. “You’re crazy!”
Leia glanced over and saw the mountainous hull of a giant transport gliding past above the Falcon’s forward mandibles.
“Oh-” Leia slapped the crash alarm, bringing the inertial compensators to maximum, priming the fire-suppression systems, and setting off a cacophony of alerts farther back in the vessel. “Brace yourself!”
“Dead stop!” Luke’s voice came over the comm. “Dead stop!”
Han already had his hand on the throttles-but before he could pull them back, the shuttle was diving and the rocket plane was climbing past the Falcon almost vertically, so close that Leia could have reached out and grabbed the pilot’s antennae.
Han casually slipped his hand off the throttle and deactivated the crash alarm. “No need to get all excited.” His hands were shaking as badly as Leia’s, but she saw no use in pointing that out. “I’ve got it under control.”
“Yes,” C-3PO agreed. “It’s fortunate that you were wise enough to do nothing. It gave the other pilots time to respond to your error.”
“My error?” Han replied. “I was flying straight and level.”
“Quite so, but the others are all following sine wave trajectories,” C-3PO said. “And may I point out that any system functions optimally only when all elements use the same equations?”
A two-seater rocket plane dropped in ahead of the Falcon and bobbed along pouring fumes into their faces, then swerved aside to reveal the bulbous shape of a balloon-bike coming at them head-on. Han rolled into an inverted dive and spiraled past beneath it.
“Now you tell me,” Han said.
“Watch it back there,” Leia warned the Shadow. “And have Artoo plot a sine wave trajectory for us-a safe one.”