“Fine,” he said. “Fine, if you really want to go out into the middle of enemy territory and get killed, who am I to stop you?”
“Why, Captain,” Leia said, her voice sweet and unassuming and utterly false, “did you think I only risked other people’s lives?”
Right, Han thought, feeling slightly chagrined.
A sudden flare of light filled the air. For a moment, he thought Chewbacca’s welding torch had malfunctioned, but the brightness came from the turret. From the sky. Han scrambled into the cockpit, crawling over the console to look up. Through the break in the canopy, a swath of bright blue sky was scarred by black smoke and flaring green energy blasts. As he watched, the sky sparkled again, and another handful of bright flares streaked across the blue.
The radio squawked. “This is Red Wave One. This is Red Wave One. Everyone all right?”
Han picked up the headset. “What’s going on up there?”
“Mission successful,” Wedge replied.
“We got it,” Luke added.
“Got it?”
“The Star Destroyer. We got it.”
A deep rumbling shook the air, louder than thunder. All around, the jungle canopy shuddered and trembled. A massive, brightly plumed beast rose up from among the gigantic roots and fled into the twilight of the jungle, shrieking.
“Um,” Han said. “Good job.”
“It’s not over. There’s still a lot of fighters up here. We’re going to have to pull back,” Luke told him.
“I don’t think anyone can fault you, kid. We’ll let you know what we find.”
“All right, Han. Good hunting.”
He put down the headset. Chewbacca chuffed. “He got it,” Han said. The Wookiee stood still for a moment, then went back to welding. Really, what else was there to say?
The others were gathered by the crew ramp. Baasen and Sunnim had their blasters in their hands. Scarlet had a handheld mapping device and a long black-composite blade. Leia was adjusting the seal on thigh-high black boots scavenged from a repair suit. From its clamps, the R3 whirred and whistled. Han nodded to it like he had any idea what it was saying.
“All right,” he said, lowering the ramp. “Let’s go.”
THE BOTHAN STUMBLED OVER a thick root and crashed into the trunk of a massive tree. He pushed away from it, shouting curses in three languages. A long, slimy vine came away with him, wrapped around his face and neck. He continued to curse and claw at it for several seconds before Scarlet pulled the knife from her belt and cut the creeper away in two small strokes.
“Lovely planet,” Baasen said, waving his hand in front of his face to keep the clouds of tiny biting insects from flying into his mouth when he spoke.
“You could have stayed on the ship,” Han said.
“You’d have trusted me on your precious Falcon?”
“I’d have trusted Chewie.”
Leia had wrapped her face in a gauzy white scarf to keep the bugs away, but she was fighting to keep her tall black boots from sticking in the thick, muddy jungle floor. Han walked at the rear of the group, one hand on his blaster, waiting for something larger and hungrier than the bloodsucking insects to make an appearance. All around them, the air was full of the whine of tiny wings and the calls of unseen animals. Everything stank of rot.
Once the Bothan was freed, Scarlet shifted back to the front of the group and took point again. She moved through the thick undergrowth, finding the most solid footing available and avoiding the tangles of vine and moss that hung from the branches above. Occasionally, she opened up a hologram of the terrain on her datapad and checked their location. She looked like she knew what she was doing, so Han trusted that they were heading on the right path to find the temple. If not, he’d never know. The jungle looked exactly the same in every direction. And the heavy canopy completely blocked off the sky, making his usual tools for orienting useless.
“Watch out,” Scarlet said, pointing off to her left and moving right. “Deep mud here.”
Leia pulled her boot out of another mud hole with a wet sucking noise. “And that makes it different how?”
Instead of answering, Scarlet shouted in alarm and danced away from the large puddle, yanking out her blaster as she moved. Behind her, the Bothan yelled and backpedaled into Baasen, nearly knocking him down. By the time Han reached the front, Scarlet was pointing her weapon at a large creature in the middle of the puddle. Its wide mouth was large enough to swallow a Wookiee whole, and a cluster of eyes the size of Han’s fist sat on top of its broad head. Its brownish gray skin was almost exactly the same color as the mud around it, and when it croaked at them, its mouth was filled with big flat teeth.
“Don’t shoot it!” Han yelled as he ran up to it.
Scarlet frowned and cocked her head. “It almost ate me.”
“It wasn’t going to eat you. Look at it. All the eyes on top of its head and camouflaged skin—it spends most of its time hiding under the mud. And those teeth are for grinding plants, not animals. Don’t shoot it for being ugly.”
“Sure,” Scarlet said, holstering her blaster. “Didn’t realize you guys were friends.”
Han leaned over and patted the monster’s snout. “It’s just curious. Never seen a human before, I bet.”
“What about Bothans?” Sunnim said, clearly not entirely convinced by Han’s explanation.
Han ignored him. “Watch out for us,” he told the monster. “We’re not very nice.”
As if in response, the creature slid back under the mud almost without a sound. Scarlet rolled her eyes at Han and started off again, Sunnim close behind.
“Didn’t know you were such an animal lover,” Leia said when she caught up to him.
“If everyone got to kill anything that looked big and scary, Chewie would never be able to leave the ship.”
Leia laughed and hooked her arm through his, using his support to keep her feet out of the worst of the mud. “Funny, I always took you as a shoot-first sort of fellow.”
“Oh,” Han said, “trust me. I am if you’re waving a blaster in my face. Not for the crime of being slimy and having too many eyes.”
“See?” she said. “There, you keep doing that. Surprising me.”
“I’m a complicated man. Many layers to me.”
Leia jumped over a large tangle of roots, using Han’s arm to keep from sliding when she landed on the muddy jungle floor on the other side. A cloud of the little biting insects burst out of tiny holes in the ground when her foot hit, and for a few moments neither of them spoke. Leia clutched her scarf around her head, and Han waved his hand to drive off the insects. After a while, the bugs seemed to get tired of annoying them and left.