Honor Among Thieves

  “Go go go!” Scarlet yelled. She was yelling at the computer, not him. Something physical slammed into the back of the Falcon like a hammer blow. Baasen’s ship had fired a missile into them, but the damage didn’t seem too severe. A dud, but there would be another one in seconds. Chewbacca charged into the cockpit, howling in anger.

  “Buckle up,” Han told him. “We’re leaving right now.”

  “Wait,” Scarlet said. “There’s a missile stuck in the ship! Won’t it blow up if we—”

  She never finished. Han pulled back the throttle on the hyperdrive, and the stars disappeared in a swirl of light.

  Eleven

  The stars were still. Half a dozen warning indicators and error codes blinked and whined from the control boards. A jagged crack ran through the screen in front of him, charred where the battle hadn’t quite managed to shatter it. Han leaned back in his seat, took a deep breath, and sighed happily. The tension of battle flowed out of his muscles, leaving him relaxed and a little giddy. Beside him, Chewbacca grunted petulantly.

  “What?” Han said. “It all worked out.”

  “It was bracing,” Scarlet said. “Are we really all right, or is that missile stuck in your ship going to blow up and kill us all?”

  “One or the other,” Han said, and pushed himself up. “I’ll go find out which. Where are we, Chewie?”

  Chewbacca shrugged magnificently.

  “Well, see if you can figure it out. We managed one jump. If we can get one more, we’ll be fine.”

  “I need access to your computer,” Scarlet said, holding up the stolen data. “I need to get this encryption broken.”

  “You can have whatever Chewie doesn’t need,” Han said as he walked out the cabin door. “Calculating the jump gets first priority.”

  “Yes, Captain,” Scarlet said, her tone somewhere between amused and sarcastic.

  “Damn right,” Han shot back, but nothing could touch his euphoria. Not every fight left him feeling good, but that one had. When the adrenaline had burned its way through his bloodstream and the fatigue kicked in, he’d probably collapse, but until that happened there was plenty of work to do.

  He climbed the ladder up to the gunner’s turret. If he pressed his cheek almost against the transparisteel, he could just see where Baasen’s missile still protruded from the skin of the ship. It was a gray-green oblong. Depending on how much of it had actually penetrated the Falcon, it could have been anywhere from a meter and a half to three. Strands of what looked like cable spread around it. He crawled back down and ran a battery of diagnostics and tests. The missile had cut or crushed part of the power grid, and coolant was leaking badly around it, which was probably what made the ropy-looking things around the missile’s entry. There were no traces of explosives or invasive proteins. It wasn’t injecting tiny droids into the ship to disassemble her or sabotage her in the middle of a jump. If it had a warhead, it wasn’t exposed or sparking. Probably a dud, but he’d still feel a lot better once it was off his ship.

  Chewbacca shouted out a list of the systems that were complaining. The signal from the passive sensor antenna was cutting in and out. One of the freight barge clamps had come open and jammed. A power fluctuation in the acceleration compensator had the hyperdrive generator in safety shutdown. The port shield generator was overheating, probably because of the coolant leak.

  Han cracked his knuckles.

  “I’ve seen her worse,” he said.

  Chewbacca howled, and from somewhere deep in the belly of the ship a woman’s laughter rose up with the sound of it.

  Han didn’t remember falling asleep. The last thing he could recall clearly was wriggling on his elbows and knees through a crawl space almost too narrow for him, hydrospanner held in his teeth, to retune a power coupling for the third time. And then he was in his bunk, swimming up from a darkness as deep and black as space. He rolled over, yawned, and sat up slowly. His right side felt like one continuous bruise, and his back was stiff. He was still wearing the rough black of an Imperial officer, the fabric a maze of wrinkles and oil stains. He stripped the uniform off and threw it away. According to the ship’s chrono, he’d been asleep for something like fourteen standard hours, and a quick check of the general status board told him Chewie had been hard at work for most of it. Apart from the coolant leak and the occasional hiccup in the passive sensor antenna, the ship was good to go, or as good as could be expected with a missile still stuck in her backside.

  Before he pulled his own clothes on, he took stock of his injuries. Black scabs around his wrist from when he’d hung over the shaft outside Scarlet Hark’s window. Purple-black bruises on his hip and shoulder where the Falcon had scooped him up. A long, angry scratch across his chest whose origin he couldn’t remember. He was as beat up as his ship. He put a hand to the decking, felt the gentle vibration of the engines.

  “We made it again,” he said softly. “Real close that time.”

  He waited for a long moment as if the ship might answer, and then got dressed.

  In the lounge, Scarlet and Chewbacca were sitting together at the single, small table, eating from bone-colored bowls. Scarlet looked up as he stepped down into the space. Her smile was bright and sharp and pleased to see him. She wore dark pants and a pale open-necked shirt that was a little too big for her. He felt as if he’d gone three rounds with a rancor, and she looked like her months of desperation, lies, secrets, and violence had been a long vacation.

  “Good morning, Captain Sleepyhead,” she said.

  “Same to you,” Han replied. “Are you wearing my clothes?”

  She shrugged. “Not my first choice in sartorial splendor, but I was packing pretty light this trip.”

  Han turned to Chewbacca. “You gave her my clothes?”

  Chewbacca gestured toward his own soft pelt and lifted his massive tawny brows.

  “Fair point,” Han said.

  “If it’s a problem—”

  “No,” Han said. “It’s fine. It’s a good look for you.”

  Scarlet pretended to preen for a moment, then went back to her food. The truth was, with her dark hair down and the tension of danger gone, Han found her considerably more attractive than when they’d been on Cioran. Her smile had settled into an expression of mild amusement, and her eyebrows arched high. The quirks and architecture of her face conspired to give her an edge of constant playful challenge. Han felt an answering smile playing at his own lips as he nodded toward the bowls.

  “Any of that left?”

  “We saved you some,” she said, nodding toward the counter behind him. Han reached for the third bowl. A mixture of soft green leaves and dark flecks of meat filled it almost to the halfway point. Scarlet took one of the last bites of hers.

  “You made sahbiye?”

  Scarlet shook her head and nodded toward Chewbacca.

  “I think my friend here has a little crush on you,” Han said. “He never makes sahbiye.”

  Chewbacca grunted and whined.

  “I do too appreciate it. Here I am appreciating it right now,” Han said around a mouthful. He turned his attention to Scarlet. “So while we still have a missile stuck on our back, it doesn’t look like it’s about to detonate. Everything else is solid enough that we’ll be able to get you to the fleet.”

  Scarlet nodded, her gaze fixed on the bottom of her bowl. “About that.”

  “No.”

  She looked up. Her eyes were bright with feigned innocence. “No?”

  “Whatever it is, no. My job was to fly into the heart of the Empire, find you, and get back out. I already added in stealing data from a high-security intelligence installation. I’ve done plenty of impossible things. Whatever else it is you’re about to ask, the answer’s no.”

  “I broke the data encryption. Galassian’s codes only got me in partway, but I know some of the security force’s habits, and it was enough. The datafile is the full record of the investigation of the data theft, but there are also some hints about what was in
the data that got stolen. Galassian’s found something big. Maybe useful. Certainly dangerous. He’s already gone back out on some kind of follow-up investigation, and the Empire is scared blind that word of it is going to leak out before he’s done.”

  “And I’m sure all the generals in the rebel fleet are looking forward to hearing all about it.”

  “The important thing is that they found the thief.”

  Han took another bite of the sahbiye, stopping to pry a bit of the meat from between his teeth with a fingernail. “Answer’s still no.”

  “The man who got it works with the Sendavé Shared Interest Collective. Ever heard of them?”

  “Sure. They’re small-time gunrunners out of Elkkasinn and Sunin. Mostly K’rrandin, but with some humans thrown into the mix. They amounted to something before the Hutts decided to take their toys away,” Han said. “But the information’s wrong. Sendavé Collective wouldn’t have any use for hot Imperial data, no matter what it was about. They’re strictly small fry these days.”

  “That’s not how they see it,” Scarlet said. “According to Imperial intelligence, they’ve got ambitions. The thief is a human named Hunter Maas. And apparently he has plans for taking the collective to the big time. He’s trying to parlay the stolen data into a better position for the collective in general or, failing that, himself in particular. And your friends and mine at Imperial intelligence? They don’t like the plan. You want to know what they’re going to do about it?”

  “I’m guessing something unpleasant,” Han said.

  “A full strike force. Shock troopers. Five thousand regular stormtroopers. Special permission from the Emperor to clear any space lanes and supersede any standing orders or Imperial protocol.”

  Han’s eyes went wide despite himself, and he covered it by laughing. Chewbacca muttered to himself and started gathering the bowls.

  “Sister,” Han said, “if this is your idea of talking me into getting involved, your technique’s a little rusty. Answer was no before, and it’s about a hundred times no now.”

  “This data is critical to the Empire,” Scarlet said, sitting forward, her elbows resting on the table. “Whatever Galassian found, they care about it a lot. Enough to bend rules, and they hate bending rules.”

  Han chewed slowly, a smile tugging at his lips. He didn’t mind the idea of the Empire being the frightened one for once. Chewbacca chuffed, shook his head, and lumbered toward the galley.

  “They’re willing to kill a lot of people to make sure no one finds out what Galassian’s up to,” Scarlet said.

  “And I won’t be one of them. And more to the point, neither will you. Once you get to the fleet—”

  “Once I get to the fleet, it will be too late. They staged a dummy strike on the collective’s base on Nummunr a week ago. Hunter Maas escaped, but they’ve mobilized half the long-range scouting ships in the Core. According to the data, their orders are to find him and then call in the full strike force to kill him and anybody he might have shared the data with. They’ll slag planets if they have to.”

  Han shoveled the last of his sahbiye into his mouth, chewed, and swallowed. Scarlet watched him silently. From the pilot’s cabin, an alarm squeaked in protest and went silent.

  “So,” Han said. “You’re saying that instead of doing what I agreed to do—and I’ve already done more than that—you want me to get between a massive Imperial hunting party and the poor jerk they’re about to turn into a grease spot. And you want me to do it just because they wouldn’t want me to.”

  “Yes.”

  “Let me tell you exactly why that’s not going to happen. First, because saving every half-wit who thinks he’s big enough to take on the Emperor isn’t my job. Second, because I’ve got an unexploded missile stuck in my ship, and I’d like to get to a nice friendly port with some bomb-disposal technicians who can help me pry it out in a reinforced dock. And third, because the answer is—”

  “The Empire doesn’t know where Maas is going. I do. We can get there before him.”

  “The answer is no,” he said. And then, “Hold on. You know where he’s heading and they don’t? How did you find out?”

  “Chewbacca told me.”

  “Chewie?”

  “Well, he brought me up to speed on a lot of things. I’m the one that connected the dots.”

  “I don’t know what dots you’re talking about,” Han said, and then the next words died in his throat. The coppery taste of fear filled his mouth even before he knew quite why it was there.

  A small-time criminal organization looking to parlay stolen Imperial data into a seat at a much larger table. The kind of big table where they decided the future of the galaxy. If he’d been in Hunter Maas’s position, there was only one place he’d have gone: the secret conclave of rebels and rogues, criminals and freedom fighters. He’d have gone to Kiamurr and made himself into one of the Rebel Alliance’s new allies.

  And so when the Imperial hammer came down, it would wipe out not just the remnants of Sendavé Shared Interest Collective, but every prospective ally the rebels could hope for. Even the ones who didn’t come would see the corpses of the ones who had.

  And more to the point, Leia was there.

  “Chewie?” Han said, standing up. “Where are you?”

  Han went to the pilot’s cabin and started pulling up star charts, figuring the paths that could take them from the depths of nowhere that presently hid them and into Kiamurr. It wasn’t the straightest path, but if he could bend a couple degrees off it . . .

  Chewbacca appeared in the doorway, wide arms splayed. He groaned and howled, but Han barely heard him. The jump wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t clean. But it was possible. That would have to be good enough.

  “I’m warming her up for jump,” he said.

  The Wookiee bared his teeth and howled again.

  “It didn’t blow up last time,” Han said. “Maybe it won’t blow up this time, either. Baasen always went cheap on ordnance. That’s why he’s a bottom feeder desperate for a score and we’re the heroes of the galaxy.”

  Chewbacca threw up his hands in exasperation, but Han knew him well enough to see the relief under the theatrics. Scarlet leaned in the doorway, her arms crossed. Her eyes were a little narrowed, her lips a little wide. She looked like a scientist who’d come across some particularly fascinating and amusing new specimen. Han ignored her.

  “Where are we jumping to, Captain Solo? The fleet?”

  He went down the readouts. The coolant leak was messing with a lot of different systems, but none of them so badly that it would keep them out of hyperspace. He thought. He hoped.

  Scarlet dropped into the copilot’s seat. She looked tiny in the space that usually held Chewbacca. “Are you going to abandon Kiamurr?”

  “You want my answer?”

  “I do.”

  “Here’s my answer,” Han said, pointing a finger at her and staring from under lowered brows. “Nobody likes a wise guy.”

  Twelve

  High in the atmosphere of Kiamurr, a thousand species of birds soared on the permanent updrafts of the planet’s vast mountain ranges. Long experience had taught the creatures to avoid the ships that sloped down through the planet’s thin atmosphere. Flocks of them swirled around the path of the Millennium Falcon as it burned through the high air; black dots against white clouds like space in negative. Han leaned in over the controls, certain that the next second would leave a hundred tiny bodies crashing through the cracked screen, into the landing gear and access panels, damaging the already pounded ship a little more and messily. The birds knew better and kept out of his way.

  Knifelike mountain ranges of pale stone rose through the cloud cover, veined with green where the local vegetation clung to it like ivy to a wall. The ice caps that topped the mountains were the color of the clouds, and deep valleys between the peaks dropped five, six, even ten kilometers deep. The crosswinds made navigation tricky, and the walls of stone and ice made it dangerous.

&nb
sp; “Are you sure we’re in the right approach?” Han asked. “Because I’m not seeing anything.”

  Chewbacca bared his teeth and howled.

  “I know I’m the pilot,” Han said. “But you’re the one who—”

  “There,” Scarlet said, leaning over Han’s shoulder to point at an off-colored smear on a cliff face. The gray of metal, with a blocky shape at one side. Laser cannons.. The first line of defense of Talastin City, if he didn’t count the birds, the wind, or the stone. They sped past it, the fortification swiveling its weapons to track them. The radio squawked to life.

  “Hey, unidentified freighter. We expecting you?”

  “No,” Han said. “We didn’t have time to file a flight plan.”

  “That’s gonna be rough, then.”

  “We’re here with the . . . ah . . . Alderaan refugee relief cooperative.” Han said. “Part of the delegation.”

  “Oh, hey. You Rebel Alliance? I can respect that, but it doesn’t mean we got anywhere to put you.”

  Chewbacca whined as the valley narrowed, mountain ranges on either side coming perceptibly closer.

  “Think you could check on that for us?” Han asked into the radio. “Because if I need to pull up out of here, I should probably do it soon.”

  “Sure. Hold on.”

  Along the cliff face to their left, a massive snakelike creature longer than the Falcon clung to the stone, its sides glistening with golden scales. Han tapped the console impatiently. Chewbacca grunted, slowing the airspeed. The snake-thing turned placid black eyes toward them and opened its gigantic mouth.

  “How’s our fuel?” Han asked.

  Chewbacca yowled an answer.

  “That’s too bad.”

  “Well,” Scarlet said, “you can tell it’s not the Empire.”

  “Yeah,” Han agreed. “I’ll take inefficiency and corruption over well-regulated malice every time.”