[Dark Nest] - 1(99)

Then Leia did something really foolish… she fired the sublight drives.

The shrieking and wailing stopped at once, and suddenly it was the Falcon spinning instead of space. Han felt as though his heart were going to fly out between his ribs, and he lost his last three meals.

But incredibly, he was still alive to know how bad he was feeling. He realized he had lost his count and eased the control lever back some more.

The whir returned. It occurred to him that the Falcon had fallen otherwise silent-which meant they weren’t being pelted by dust particles, which meant the sublight drives were blasting a hole through the dust shell. Han looked over to congratulate Leia. Her face was a meter wide and five centimeters tall.

Nice try, he said. It came out yiiiiirt eeeeeciiiiN in his own head. He doubted he would ever know how it sounded to Leia.

The whir vanished. He eased the control lever back. Leia’s face went to a meter tall and ten centimeters wide. Something big exploded against the Falcon’s rear shields and the ship shook so violently that Juun-who had not strapped himself in - ended up splayed against the forward viewport.

Han eased the control lever back and took a long deep sniff, smelled only the sour barf of five different species-maybe a hint of verbobrain actuating gas-and eased the lever farther.

Leia’s face shrank to half a meter on the diagonal, and Han said, I love you, Princess, even if you drive like a…

He didn’t finish. The words came out Eeeyyyyeeee wooooobe ooooooo, which wasn’t half bad, considering.

Han eased the control lever back again, and Juun slid down the canopy and disappeared behind the instrument console.

Then the proximity alarm went off, and the color outside the canopy went from blue to red to blue to whirling stripes of silver. Suddenly, Leia’s face was the proper size and shape-still far too green, but at least oval and no more than twenty-five centimeters from chin to hairline-and Han felt even sicker than before.

That was when C-3PO came tumbling up the access corridor. “Doomed!” He crashed to a halt behind the navigator’s chair, then fell to the deck, flailing. “We’re doomed for sure!”

Han immediately knew they were going to make it. He took control of the Falcon and began to fire attitude thrusters, slowly bringing their spin under control. There was just a hint of coolant sweetness in the recycled air-enough to mean they would have to decontaminate the ship, but not so much they would die before they had a chance.

A pair of small hands appeared at the top edge of the control panel, and Juun pulled himself up to peer over the edge. “Real space?”

“Yeah.” Han glanced out the viewport and saw nothing but the veined, red sky of a still-cooling nebula. “I think.”

“It is,” Leia said. “The proximity alarm dropped us out of hyperspace. “

“And we survived?” Juun sounded almost disappointed. His sunken eyes swung toward Han. “That wasn’t in any of the history vids. Did you teach her that?”

“No,” Leia said. “And it hasn’t worked yet. There’s still one tiny problem.”

“As long as it’s tiny,” Han said, eyeing the white static on his sensor screen.

“Well-not really tiny.” Leia used the attitude thrusters to spin the Falcon around, bringing into view the green, rapidly swelling disk of the planet they were about to crash into. “It was big enough to drop us out of hyperspace.”





TWENTY-THREE


Jacen dropped out of the tik tree to discover that even here, in the muggy heart of her private jungle garden, Queen Mother Tenel Ka was not alone. Seated in a small sunken courtyard with her rust-colored braids hanging down the back of her sleeveless frock, she was surrounded by twenty courtiers-mostly male and attractive, all attired in absurd, hand-tailored imitations of the Queen Mother’s rustic fashion. Tenel Ka could have that effect on people.

Jacen crept up silently behind a camouflaged sentry who was patrolling the musky foliage along the garden wall-the last of the palace’s many layers of security-and grasped the man’s neck. The fellow tried to spin and yell the alarm, but went limp as Jacen sent a paralyzing jolt of Force energy through his spine.

Still alert to her Jedi instincts, Tenel Ka felt the disturbance and turned on her bench, revealing a classic profile even more stunning than the one in Jacen’s memory. He expanded his presence in the Force so she would not be alarmed, then lowered the unconscious sentry to the ground and stepped out of the shrubbery.

Several courtiers cried out and sprang forward to shield Tenel Ka, and three more sentries emerged from the foliage along the garden wall. The two guards with clear angles zipped blasterfire in the intruder’s direction, while the third called for help. Jacen deflected the bolts with his palms, then reached out with the Force and jerked the blaster rifles from their hands.