“Hunter Maas has jumped in system,” Scarlet said.
“Great. And the Imperial fleet?”
“Not yet.” Taking a seat at the dejarik table, Scarlet pulled out a datapad and called up a hologram of a ship. “He’s flying in this. We need to go get him and escort him back.”
Han sat down with her, swiping his hand through the air to kill the hologram. “Why does he need an escort?”
“Because,” she said, “I need to make sure we’re the only party he speaks to about selling his data. You fly out, make sure he lands at the dock we want him to, and Leia and I will be waiting for him there. We can’t let this turn into a bidding war. And the sooner we get it, the sooner the evacuation can start.”
“Well, now you’re talking something close to sense. Do we have any reason to think he’ll do what I tell him to?”
“Be persuasive,” Scarlet said with just a hint of a smile.
Han frowned to keep himself from smiling back. “This is coming from Leia? This is what she wants?”
“It’s what needs to happen,” Scarlet said, the smile vanishing. “So go do it.”
“Hey, I have one boss, sweetheart,” Han said, tapping his own chest, “and as far as I’m concerned—”
“Call when you’re coming back,” she said, standing up. “I’ll give you a dock assignment then. Don’t screw this up, Solo.”
“Don’t—” he started, but she was already leaving.
Chewbacca wandered back into the room, the smoking welder in one big paw. He cocked his head to one side and howled out a question.
“I am really starting to dislike the level of bossiness hanging with these rebels entails,” Han said. “I thought the princess was bad.”
The Falcon’s reactor wound up with a hum so high-pitched it was almost subliminal, then cycled back down with a sound like grinding gears.
For the third time.
The knowledge that Scarlet was down in the dock’s viewing area watching as he vainly tried to get his ship off the ground made each successive failure a little more humiliating.
“It’s got to be a short,” he said to Chewbacca. For the third time. “It’s the only thing that makes sense. Are you sure you scraped all the gunk out of the cabling?”
Chewbacca growled back dangerously.
“Then it’s got to be that tertiary power cable splice.” Chewbacca rumbled out another terse reply. “Yes, I know I was the one who did that. We can sit here all day assigning blame, or we can fix it.”
Chewbacca stared at him for several long seconds.
“I have to stay up here! Someone has to be in the pilot’s seat to monitor and test.”
Chewbacca got up and headed to the back of the ship without a word. The comm came to life with a hiss, and Scarlet said, “Are you pouting? Or does your ship not work.”
“I don’t pout,” Han said, aware that actually having to say those words out loud automatically made them a lie. “Just need to finalize something and we’ll be heading right out.” He shut his mouth before so stop watching could sneak out.
Chewbacca growled from the back of the ship, and an indicator on Han’s panel shifted from yellow to white. The reactor came on with a smoothly rising whine and stayed on. A few moments later the Falcon lifted off the dock, not a warning light in sight.
Flying up off the planet was like watching the universe come into being, stars unfolding as the tops of the mountains fell away. The small, ruddy moon hung on the horizon, and then drifted behind them as Han angled the Falcon out of the atmosphere to where he could safely bring the throttle up to full.
Han was scanning the space around Kiamurr, looking for Maas’s ship, when Chewbacca walked back into the cockpit and plopped into the copilot’s chair. The Wookiee growled at him for a minute, waving his big paws around angrily.
“Don’t I know it, Chewie,” Han said, then shifted the scan to a new vector and started over. “When did we go from having no boss to everyone being our boss? This Hark character isn’t even a princess. You can forgive royalty for acting like the universe owes them something, but Scarlet’s just a spy. Where does she get off?”
Chewbacca burbled out a reply while he worked on the damage control, double- and triple-checking the various systems they’d just repaired.
“Take my word for it, buddy, there’s gonna be trouble there eventually,” Han said. “You put two stiff-necked women like that in proximity to a good-looking guy like me? Sooner or later, it comes to blows.”
Chewbacca looked at him out of the corner of one eye and barked a laugh.
“Hey, I’m just giving you the heads-up. You don’t want to be anywhere nearby when that reactor pile goes hot.”
Chewbacca turned his chair toward Han and opened his mouth, but whatever he was about to say was lost when a console alert sounded. The Falcon had found a fast-moving light freighter headed their direction. Chewbacca swiveled back to his console and started scanning the new contact. He barked out the info as it came up.
“Moving awful fast for a YU-four-ten,” Han replied. “Those things usually drive like garbage scows.”
A few moments later, the reason became clear. The YU-410 model Corellian freighter was typically slow moving and heavily armed. Someone had stripped off most of the armaments and beefed up the drive. It had a single laser cannon turret instead of the usual four, and the one it had could only fire forward. Fast moving, its armaments pointing forward, it had been refitted from a freighter into a predator. He’d seen a thousand ships like it, and not one of them had been made for respecting the law.
“That’s got to be our boy,” Han said. “Let’s get over alongside him and introduce ourselves.”
Chewbacca ramped up power to the drive to close the distance as quickly as possible. Han warmed up the Falcon’s concussion missile tubes, just in case. People had a tendency to listen more closely to your arguments when you’d just flattened their ship’s shields.
The big YU-410 came straight at them, heading toward Kiamurr at maximum speed. Chewbacca plotted them a looping course that would put the Falcon alongside the other freighter as it passed by. Han pulled on his headset and started hailing the other ship. The only reply was static.
“Huh,” he said, “it’s almost like someone is jamming them—”
A large energy blast hit the stern of the YU-410, lighting up its shields and sending crackling bolts cascading across its hull. When the light show was over, the YU-410 was still flying, though it looked as if the rear hull plating had taken some damage.