[Thrawn Trilogy] - 01(143)

“I thought all this relief shipping had more or less taken over the whole place,” Wedge frowned.

Afyon shrugged. “Theoretically. In practice … well, the Sluissi are easy enough to talk into bending that kind of rule. You just have to know how to phrase the request.”

Reluctantly, Wedge nodded. It did all seem reasonable enough, he supposed. And a damaged, empty ship would probably handle something like an intact full one. And the freighter was empty-the Larkhess’s sensors said so.

But the tingles refused to go away.

Abruptly, he dug his comlink from his belt. “Rogue Squadron, this is Rogue Leader,” he called. “Everyone to your ships.”

He got acknowledgments, looked up to find Afyon’s eyes steady on him. “You still think there’s trouble?” the other asked quietly.

Wedge grimaced, throwing one last look out the viewport at the freighter. “Probably not. But it won’t hurt to be ready. Anyway, I can’t have my pilots sitting around drinking tea all day.” He turned and left the bridge at a quick jog.

The other eleven members of Rogue Squadron were in their X-wings by the time he reached the Larkhess’s docking bay. Three minutes later, they launched.

The freighter hadn’t made much headway, Wedge saw as they swung up over the Larkhess’s hull and pulled together into a loose patrol formation. Oddly enough, though, it had moved a considerable distance laterally, drifting away from the Larkhess and toward a pair of Calamari Star Cruisers orbiting together a few kilometers away. “Spread out formation,” Wedge ordered his pilots, shifting to an asymptotic approach course. “Let’s swing by and take a nice, casual little look.”

The others acknowledged. Wedge glanced down at his nav scope, made a minor adjustment to his speed, looked back up again—

And in the space of a single heartbeat, the whole thing went straight to hell.

The freighter blew up. All at once, without any warning from sensors, without any hint from previous visual observation, it just came apart.

Reflexively, Wedge jabbed for his comm control. “Emergency!” he barked. “Ship explosion near orbit-dock V-475. Send rescue team.”

For an instant, as chunks of the cargo bay flew outward, he could see into the emptiness there … but even as his eyes and brain registered the odd fact that he could see into the disintegrating cargo bay but not beyond it—

The bay was suddenly no longer empty.

One of the X-wing pilots gasped. A tight-packed mass of something was in there, totally filling the space where the Larkhess’s sensors had read nothing. A mass that was even now exploding outward like a hornet’s nest behind the pieces of the bay.

A mass that in seconds had resolved itself into a boiling wave front of TIE fighters.

“Pull up!” Wedge snapped to his squadron, leaning his X-wing into a tight turn to get out of the path of that deadly surge. “Come around and re-form; S-foils in attack position.”

And as they swung around in response, he knew with a sinking feeling that Captain Afyon had been wrong. Rogue Squadron was indeed going to earn its pay today.

The battle for Sluis Van had begun.

They’d cleared the outer system defense network and the bureaucratic overload that passed for Control at Sluis Van these days, and Han was just getting a bearing on the slot they’d given him when the emergency call came through. “Luke!” he shouted back down the cockpit corridor. “Got a ship explosion. I’m going to go check it out.” He glanced at the orbit-dock map to locate V-475, gave the ship a fractional turn to put them on the right vector-And jerked in his seat as a laser bolt slapped the Falcon hard from behind.

He had them gunning into a full forward evasive maneuver before the second shot went sizzling past the cockpit. Over the roar of the engines he heard Luke’s startled-sounding yelp; and as the third bolt went past he finally had a chance to check the aft sensors to see just what was going on.

He almost wished he hadn’t. Directly behind them, batteries already engaging one of the Sluis Van perimeter battle stations, was an Imperial Star Destroyer.

He swore under his breath and kicked the engines a little harder. Beside him, Luke clawed his way forward against the not-quite-compensated acceleration and into the copilot’s seat. “What’s going on?” he asked.

“We just walked into an Imperial attack,” Han growled, eyes flying over the readouts. “Got a Star Destroyer behind us-there’s another one over to starboard-looks like some other ships with them.”

“They’ve got the system bottled up,” Luke said, his voice glacially calm. A far cry, Han thought, from the panicky kid he’d pulled off Tatooine out from under Star Destroyer fire all those years back. “I make it five Star Destroyers and something over twenty smaller ships.”