The streaming starlines of hyperspace were excellent for clearing my mind. No distractions, just visual white noise. I remembered training with the remote, wearing a helmet with the blast shield down and feeling the Force as a power within and without that worked with me and yet was not me. That had been a twinge, a tiny awakening of a new part of my mind, like a half-glimpsed dawn through sleep-encrusted eyes. I knew I wasn’t fully awake yet; I think part of me wanted to go back to sleep. But the dawn comes whether you sleep through it or not, and I think the Force might be like that—always there, but unseen until you make the effort.
My breathing slowed and deepened, and soon I became aware that there were others breathing on the ship. Drusil was nearest, sitting in an attitude of prayer or perhaps meditation like myself, attempting to soothe away her worries. Perhaps the activity of her mind was pure math. Farther back and to the left, Nakari felt happy, though I didn’t know about what. Her breath was uneven and sort of purred—was she humming to herself? I couldn’t hear that to confirm it, of course, but I felt through the Force that it must be true.
And what about … beyond the ship? There was nothing else breathing nearby, that’s for sure. But I knew the Force could tell me of things beyond my immediate surroundings. Ben had shown me that. When the Death Star destroyed Alderaan, he had felt it, even in hyperspace, when we were still light-years away. I wondered if I could sense anything outside hyperspace.
I opened myself more—or perhaps I should say that I lost myself more, let go of my five senses and focused only on what the Force could show me. Nanth’ri waited ahead, and around it … some kind of danger? Anger? No, nothing so personal. More like antagonism. Aggression. But I couldn’t see who was feeling such things, or against whom they were directed.
Artoo’s warning bleep was a sharp tug on my hearing that broke my trance. I blinked and saw his words stream in the holofeed: ONE MINUTE TO ARRIVAL IN NANTH’RI SYSTEM.
Nakari returned and took her seat as I acknowledged Artoo. I remembered feeling through the Force that she had been happy and humming about something, and now I tried to confirm visually that she was in a good mood. She had pulled her curly hair back into a ponytail and I admired what that did for her profile, the line of her neck, and—uh-oh, she caught me. When my eyes came back to her face, one eyebrow and a corner of her mouth were quirked up as if to ask, What are you looking at? That sent me into a brief panic—if I admitted I thought she was beautiful that would be flirting, badly, but if I said nothing I’d look slow-witted.
I cleared my throat and said, “I wonder if the Jedi had any secret tricks to keep them from feeling awkward.”
Amused, she asked, “Didn’t Ben Kenobi have anything to say on the subject?”
“Well, he kept telling me to ‘trust my feelings,’ and I trust that I feel awkward right now. Sorry about, you know. Staring.”
Nakari snorted. “Relax, Luke. You’re not the first man I’ve caught in the act—and this isn’t the first time I’ve caught you, either. It’s just the first time I let you know you’re a little obvious.”
I winced. “Is it possible to be a little obvious?”
“No. I was trying to be nice. You were obvious.”
I was grateful that we dropped into the Nanth’ri system a moment later, because it drew our attention to something else. An alarm pinged in my brain—danger, there—and without thinking, I banked the ship tightly to starboard and accelerated, even as a small fleet of ships appeared on our scanners that decidedly weren’t Imperial. It wasn’t the Alliance, either, so why were there more than twenty ships flying below us to port in a loose formation? Most of them were small fighter craft escorting a large cruiser capable of docking them all. Some of those fighters on the trailing edge of the formation were close enough to engage us if they wanted, and within seconds they demonstrated that they wanted that very much. The others turned to pursue, as well, but they would never have time to get involved unless I flew at them; my quick assessment was that I only had about five to worry about, but if I had waited those extra few seconds for them to appear on the screen, and then assessed the information before acting, I would have flown closer and drawn within range of a few additional ships.
Throwing up the deflector shields, I accelerated even more, to about three-quarters full, and their first shots never landed, but Nakari still saw the bolts zip past the cockpit and realized belatedly that we were under attack.
“Whoa, who’s firing at us?”
“Most likely pirates,” I said. “Right now they probably just think our ship is slick and carrying something valuable. When they find out we’re traveling without any goods, though …”
“They’ll take the ship and sell us into slavery. Or ransom us to my father.”
“Or give us to the Empire, if they find out about the bounty on our heads.”
“I liked that thing you did a few seconds ago where you made the ship go faster,” Nakari said. “I think you should do it again.”
“I’ll consider it, but I think we’re okay for a little while.” Their cannon fire was coming faster and starting to concentrate but still hadn’t hit us; the Desert Jewel was a slim target and I had run evasive patterns before. We did have room to push the engines, but I didn’t want to pull away too quickly because the pirates might decide to use missiles if they saw us widening the gap; our deflector shields should be able to withstand some blasterfire but might be overtaxed by missiles.
“Artoo, how long until you can take us to hyperspace?”
FORTY-FIVE SECONDS … MARK, his reply read.
“Okay, take us as soon as you can; don’t wait for my order.”
“Forty-five seconds is a long time when people are shooting at you,” Nakari pointed out, tension clear in her voice. I stole a quick glance at her and realized that she hadn’t been in many firefights like this. Her comfort zone was in atmosphere with a slugthrower cradled against her shoulder and a backup blaster; piloting was something she did to get to the next planet, and her evident worry told me she’d flown in few if any combat situations. Her experience working for her father had taught her the shooting usually didn’t start until she landed.
Not that I wasn’t a little concerned myself; five against one is a poor scenario, especially when the five have fifteen more behind them, but the fact was we had a better ship and the enemy didn’t know it yet. I was willing to bet these sublight engines could match the speed of a TIE interceptor. The Jewel’s sensors told me that the pirates firing on us flew CloakShape fighters and a couple of B-wings, and while they were no doubt customized to some extent, it was improbable that they could match the Desert Jewel once I went to full burn. But I didn’t want to use that fuel if it wasn’t necessary; we had a long trip ahead and friendly ports would be scarce when we got into trouble, so if the shields and our Rodian upgrades could handle this, I would let them.
“I think we’ll be okay,” I said, and of course as soon as the words left my mouth we took our first hit on the bottom of the starboard wing. The shields prevented any damage, but the impact spun us around and changed our vector. I had to fight the ship back on course to present the smallest target.
“That’s not okay, Luke! What are you waiting for? Go faster!”
“The shields are still fine. Most of their shots are missing us.”
We got hit and spun again, and this time the shield energy readout dipped noticeably.
“It’s the ones that hit us I’m worried about!” she exclaimed.
“Every time I try to reassure you we get nailed, so I’ll just fly, okay?”
Before Nakari could retort, a growled message from one of the pirates fed through the comm system. “Unidentified ship. Surrender for inspection and we guarantee your personal safety. Continue to flee and you will be destroyed.”
Nakari snarled and took out her frustration on the speaker. She jabbed the comm button and said, “Unidentified hole, please shut it and inspect yourself. Continue to talk and you will be ignor
ed.”
Her rebuke worked in one sense: They didn’t talk anymore. But all three of the CloakShapes decided to let heat-seeking missiles do their talking for them, a development for which I was prepared but which still surprised me. A ship blown to fragments wouldn’t yield them any profit.
Maybe they’d had a rough day of piracy, or maybe they were trigger-happy; I didn’t dwell on it since surviving the six missiles was more important than discovering why they’d been fired. I’d hoped to avoid dealing with missiles altogether, but we’d had some flares installed on Rodia that would be useful now.
Phosphorous flares can burn much hotter than the engines for a brief time and draw the heat seekers away, but timing their release is crucial. Deploy them too early and you risk them dying out and allowing the heat seekers to reacquire the sublight engines; deploy them too late and the explosion will damage your drives anyway. Thinking of that made me reevaluate the pirates’ strategy: They weren’t trying to kill us—they were merely trying to damage our engines. They were gambling that we had flares and hoped we would either deploy them poorly or at the very least deplete the number of flares at our disposal. If they damaged us, their objective was achieved; if not, fire another volley and repeat until we were crippled. If they gambled poorly and we were destroyed after all, they wouldn’t lose any sleep over it, because they’d given us a chance to surrender.
If Drusil were in the cockpit she might be able to look at the vectors and speeds of the incoming missiles and calculate the optimal release time for the flares, but I had to rely on instinct—or rather instinct aided by the Force. We wouldn’t be jumping to hyperspace before the missiles reached us, and trying to outrun them was the sort of idea that would have C-3PO pronouncing our doom, so it had to be the flares.
When I closed my eyes and reached out to the Force, it was as if I had never left it a couple minutes ago; the awareness was still there, a rush of it filling my head like an additional sense that spoke to me of my surroundings, inside the ship and out. Nakari was worried and willing to let me know; Drusil was also worried but keeping silent; Artoo was simply there, and I assumed he was busy working with the nav computer on our jump. I felt the five closest pirates and the six missiles, adjusted the course of the Jewel in response to their positions and pattern of fire, and waited for the right moment to set off the flares.
When it came, I opened my eyes to check that my finger really was hovering over the correct button on the newly installed Rodian weapons system panel—a moment of self-doubt, I suppose—and pressed when my eyes confirmed it. The flares deployed and attracted the heat seekers; explosions rocked the space behind us, cannon fire continued to streak past, and the pirates launched another round of missiles.
“Are we okay? Did you get them all?” Nakari asked.
“I got the first six, but six more are inbound.”
“Do we have enough flares for that?”
“I think we have enough, but we won’t need them.”
“Why not?”
I grinned at her. “Because it’s been forty-five seconds now.” The stars streaked past like raindrops on a window as Artoo jumped on schedule.
Nakari closed her eyes, clenched her fingers on the armrests of the copilot’s seat, and took a deep breath. When she exhaled, she relaxed, tension draining out of her shoulders and fingers, and she opened her eyes and looked at me. “I’m sorry for yelling, Luke. You obviously knew what you were doing, and I wasn’t helping.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “People tend to yell in combat. It’s high stress. Was that your first time being chased like that?”
Nakari nodded, her lips pressed tightly together.
“If we’d been in the Harvester, you’d have had cause to be worried,” I told her. “But you made a good decision to spend all your credits on those engines. A fancy bunkroom wouldn’t have saved us.”
“Thanks.” She took another deep breath and then made an effort to smile. “You know, we never did get to finish our earlier conversation.”
Uh-oh. “We didn’t?”
“No, we were interrupted.” She unbuckled herself and moved close to me. Her right hand raised to my left cheek and I flinched minutely, wondering if I had crossed a line with my staring earlier and now I was going to pay for it, but something else happened. She rested her hand lightly there, and then she planted a soft kiss on my right cheek. She murmured in my ear, “I was going to say I don’t mind if you’re obvious. But since I think you missed all my subtle hints, this is me being obvious.”
“Oh” was all I could manage to say, overwhelmed by surprise. Nakari didn’t remove her hand from my face, but she reared back to look me in the eye, her expression incredulous. “That’s all you have to say? ‘Oh’?”
I made a completely unnecessary throat-clearing noise and said, “I liked that thing you did a few seconds ago where you kissed me. I think you should do it again.”
DRUSIL’S VOICE CARRIED over the intercom, interrupting a kiss that was more than a peck on the cheek. “Quick thinking, Luke Skywalker, and admirable piloting. But be advised it is now probable the Empire will know where we are.”
We broke apart and Nakari chucked me once on the shoulder and whispered, “To be continued.” She returned to her seat and buckled in while I responded to Drusil.
“Why is that?”
“That small fleet was patrolling the sector of space that would come from Exodeen.”
“So? That’s what pirates do.”
“Do they normally waste fuel by having their escorts launched and spread out for fast attack when they could simply have scrambled to catch an unsuspecting and slow-moving cargo ship? Most of their normal targets would not suspect anything of that cruiser until it launched fighters at them, and by then it would be too late. Catching a fast ship piloted by a crew anxious to avoid capture, however, requires different tactics, am I correct? Hence the fighters already in position. Few fleets would be so wasteful of their resources otherwise.”
“You mean they’d already heard about the bounty on us and were patrolling in case we showed up,” I said.
“Yes. And now they can profit merely by reporting that they have seen us and telling the Empire which direction we fled.”
“They had plenty of time to scan us, Luke,” Nakari said. “They would know we have three life-forms aboard. If the pirates get a message to them quickly enough we could be running into Imperials sooner rather than later.”
Drusil chimed in. “A message from the pirates isn’t necessary to make an Imperial encounter likely. We’re near a frequently patrolled area of the galaxy. I happen to know the Empire has been inspecting—and thereby harassing—all traffic going into Hutt Space in an effort to cut into their trade and reduce the Hutts’ ability to remain independent.”
“That’s a recent development? How old is your information?”
“Very recent. For the past few weeks the Empire had me working on encrypted messages they intercepted in those sectors.”
That sounded like a bad omen, but there was nothing I could do about it, so it was pointless to waste time worrying about it. “Well, nothing’s happening right now except recharging the deflector shields. I could use some caf.” I unstrapped myself and rose from the pilot’s chair. “Would you like a cup?” I asked Nakari.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “Do you make your caf like your nerf steak?”
“I’ll try not to burn it, but no guarantees.”
“Okay, I’ll risk it, then. It’d be an equal risk if I made it.”
I felt almost giddy heading back to the galley because I thought that the automatic brewer in the galley would produce something drinkable, but it turned out to be fair-to-middling horrendous, a fact that I remembered belatedly from our trip to Fex. Since it was the same type of brewer one saw almost everywhere, it was likely that the problem lay with me and perhaps with Nakari also, not the appliance. I gave up and decided to mask my incompetence with lots of cream and sugar.
A shrill alarm from the cockpit and an accompanying explosion of digital dismay from Artoo was my first clue that something had gone very wrong. A lurch in the ship caused me to spill all the hot caf on myself, and that was my second clue. Nakari followed that up with, “Luke, get back here! We’re in trouble!”
Slapping at my tunic and pants to wick away some of the caf, I dashed back to the cockpit, where a battery of red lights winked at me and the infinite black of realspace darkened the view.
“We’ve been pulled out of hyperspace. Fail-safes came on in response to a mass shadow.”
“What? But Artoo plotted a course using established—oh.” We’d been pulled out of hyperspace by an Imperial Interdictor cruiser—shaped like a Star Destroyer but much smaller, with four gravity-well projectors. One of those projectors had pulled us out of hyperspace, and no doubt the others were blocking our exit from the system. We couldn’t leave without dealing with the Interdictor. So be it.
“Shields up and arm everything we have,” I said to Nakari as I strapped in. “Artoo, where are we?”
DAALANG SYSTEM, came the reply.
“Okay, I need a way out of here. We can’t go back because of the pirates. If we keep going on the route we already chose, we’ll probably run into more Imperial resistance. Is there another lane out of this system?”
YES. TRADE ROUTE TO KUPOH.
The home system of the Kupohans. Perfect—or at least the best option at the moment. Since the Kupohans were superficially cooperative with the Empire, they wouldn’t have an Imperial fleet parked in their orbit to bully them into good behavior.
“All right, I need you to prepare us to jump for Kupoh and tell me which gravity projector on that Inderdictor is blocking our path to it right now.”
“Wait, are you suggesting we attack the Interdictor by ourselves?” Nakari said.
“It’s either that or let them catch us. I don’t think they’ll respond to a polite request to stand down. And this is one of the old models. We should go before they have time to get reinforcements here. Right now it’s unescorted and only has twenty-four TIE fighters.”