C-3PO squawked in alarm. “That’s my hand, Captain Soio!”
“Stop whining,” Han ordered, “It didn’t even burn through.”
“I’m still going to require a new metacarpal covering,” the droid complained. “Perhaps we wouldn’t need to evade so wildly if Princess Leia were to travel in a direction opposite the enemy.”
“I can’t, Threepio,” Leia said. At the moment, she was flying away from the usurpers at a right angle, doing her best to keep the Falcon pointed toward the growing yellow crescent of Hapes’s third moon, Megos. “We’ll get caught in the crossfire.”
“Crossfire?” C-3PO asked. “Between whom? I didn’t see a friendly fleet exit hyperspace behind us.”
“It will be here,” Leia said.
“Sure, any day now,” Han added.
Leia could hardly blame Han for his skepticism. The Alliance rescue fleet should already be attacking, and the brief brush of Force contact she had felt earlier was hardly confirmation of its existence. But nothing else made sense. She had sensed Jaina and Zekk watching as the Falcon departed the Kiris Asteroid Cluster, which could only mean that the Galactic Alliance had been waiting for the right opportunity to pounce on Corellia’s secret assault fleet. So why weren’t they pouncing?
A turbolaser strike erupted close to port, throwing the Falcon sideways and slamming C-3PO into the back of Leia’s seat. The droid bounced off and crashed to the deck, leaving a tangle of broken wires sparking in an empty control board socket.
“Oh, dear,” C-3PO said from behind Leia. “I seem to have pulled the shield-adjustment panel away from the control board. Now it’s going to take Captain Solo twice as long to make repairs!”
“Forget it, Threepio.” The fusing pen gave a soft snap as Han deactivated it. “We never had a chance.”
The resignation in Han’s voice worried Leia more than any amount of yelling or cursing would have. It almost seemed as though he did not believe they would get out of this-as though he did not think she was a good enough pilot to save them.
“Sorry I missed your signal about the message thing,” Han said to Leia. “Getting the control board shot up is going to cost us.”
“No, Han, I’m sorry,” Leia replied. With the tactical display still showing no sign of the Alliance Fleet, she was beginning to wonder if she had been right to urge Tenel Ka to stand firm in the first place. “But I’m not giving up.” She put one hand on the throttles. “Do you see any reason I shouldn’t push the engines hard?”
“You mean aside from the leaking coolant line and the number four vector plate getting sticky?”
“Yeah.” Leia almost took her hand off the throttles-she hadn’t noticed the sticky vector plate. “I mean aside from those two problems.”
“Well, then-no, I don’t.” Han sounded a little more hopeful, as though taking a desperate gamble with their lives on the line was all he ever needed to cheer him up. “Let her rip, sweetheart.”
Leia pointed the Falcon’s nose straight toward the dark interior of the crescent moon, then pushed the throttles past the overload stops and kept pushing until they would go no farther. She felt herself sink in her seat as the vessel’s acceleration tested the already overburdened inertial compensators, and they shot forward into the swarm of Miy’tils that had been harassing them.
As the Falcon careened through their midst, the starfighters took close-range snap-shots, and space exploded into a wall of energy blossoms. The Noghri answered with the quad cannons, taking out four starfighters in half as many seconds. Then the Falcon was through the formation, with nothing but the crater-pocked sickle of Megos swelling rapidly in the forward canopy.
The Miy’tils launched a desperate volley of concussion missiles and turned to give chase-placing themselves between the Falcon and the Nova cruiser, exactly as Leia had hoped they would. Han activated the decoy launchers and the Noghri kept the quad cannons chugging, and the missiles started to vanish from the tactical display two and three at a time.
Fearful of hitting her own starfighters, the Nova quieted her turbolasers, and there was a moment of relative peace as the Miy’tils struggled to bring themselves back into cannon range and reacquire target locks. Leia kept their nose pointed straight ahead, adding gravitational pull to the ship’s acceleration, and the gap between the Falcon and Megos began to close more quickly than the one between the Falcon and the Miy’tils. “Trying the old Solo Slingshot?” Han asked, “A partial, anyway,” Leia said. “Seems like a good time to learn it.”