“Too late!” Leia swung the Falcon toward the notch, coming in at an angle so the nose pointed at the mountain on the far side. “Launch missiles!”
“Missiles?” Han looked forward and saw the gap opening before them, then reached out and flipped an arming switch. “Why not?”
He depressed a pair of LAUNCH buttons, and two blue circles appeared in front of the cockpit, then rapidly shrank as the missiles raced away. Leia rolled the Falcon up and banked into the notch with their pursuers still close behind. She was too busy flying to see what happened next, but by the time the Falcon reached the star-filled wedge at the other end of the gorge, the hammering on her stern had stopped.
As they shot out of the canyon, the moon’s surface fell away, and Leia finally had time to risk a glance at the tactical display. The Miy’tils were gone, either destroyed when the missiles filled the gorge mouth with debris or momentarily outmaneuvered. Leia stayed within a kilometer of the surface for a few seconds to be certain no Miy’til survivors were going to pop up from behind the mountain range, then pulled the yoke back and pointed their nose away from the moon.
They had just started to climb when space ahead broke into crooked snakes of iridescence. The proximity alarm blared to life, and the viewport was suddenly packed with blue halos-alt growing steadily larger.
“What the blazes?” Leia gasped.
“I think your fleet showed up,” Han said. “And in the wrong place!”
Leia glanced down and found her tactical display growing more crowded by the moment. Frigates, cruisers, and Star Destroyers were reverting from hyperspace at the rate of two or three per second, all pouring starfighters into space and accelerating toward Megos at full power. The name ADMIRAL ACKBAR appeared under a Star Destroyer at the rear of the formation, and suddenly Leia understood why it had taken the Alliance so long to attack.
“That’s Bwua’tu!”
“Figures,” Han grumbled. “What Bothan makes a straightforward attack when he can try something tricky like coming out from behind a moon instead?”
“Well, at least they cared enough to send the best.” Leia pushed the Falcon’s nose down and started back toward the moon. Continuing to approach a reverting fleet at this velocity was not an option. Even if Bwua’tu realized they were not on an attack run, the chance of a head-on collision with one of his capital ships would still force him to blast them to atoms. “What do you think? Find a crater to hide in?”
“At this velocity, we’d make a crater,” Han said. “No time to decelerate.”
“You mean…”
“Yeah,” Han said. “We have to do the whole Slingshot.”
“Back through the battle?” Leia asked. “With no rear shields?”
“Relax,” Han said. “At this speed, we’ll be on the other side of the fighting before the gunners get a lock on us.”
“Which means they’ll be firing at our stern,” Leia pointed out. “Where we don’t have any shields’.”
“Well, yeah,” Han said. “Got any better ideas?”
Leia had to admit she did not. They were in a bad spot. Of course, they had been in bad spots a hundred times before. But this time, she was sitting behind the pilot’s yoke instead of Han , . . and he had never let her down.
Leia looked out the viewport and saw that they were already coming up on Megos’s light side. “How are our nacelle temperatures doing?” she asked.
“Not bad,” Han said. “We’re only thirty-seven percent over spec.”
“And you’re sure we can go to forty?”
“Sure,” Han said. “I just don’t know how long we can stay there.”
Leia considered reducing the throttles, but by then they were already crossing between Megos and Hapes, and a full view of the battle convinced her they would want all the velocity they could achieve. Space ahead was one big sheet of turbolaser fire, dotted by crimson knots of energy and the tiny slivers of distant ships jetting flame, vapor, and lives.
As the Falcon left the moon behind, a tightly packed screen of Battle Dragons-looking like stacked dashes at this distance-began to appear inside the conflagration. They were clustered in front of two thumb-sized eggs, slowly falling back toward Hapes and putting up such a wall of 6re that the Corellian Dreadnaughts had been forced to abandon their penetration tactic and simply try to punch it out from short range.
“Looks like Tenel Ka trusted us.”
“Yeah-I just hope it didn’t get her killed,” Han said. “Bwua’tu took too much time getting here. There are a lot of broken ships floating around out there.”