“Han!” Leia cried.
He looked at her as Scarlet fired. Galassian waved his hand, and the women scattered as the remaining droid dove in for them. Han put his head down and ran, charging Galassian with a roar. The impact felt like tackling a wall, but Baasen had hold of Galassian’s ankle and, when the man staggered, kept his grip. Like a tree cut at the base, Galassian tipped back. Han saw annoyance turn to surprise, and then disbelief. A volley of blasterfire and a metallic shriek marked the death of the second droid, but Han didn’t turn to look.
Baasen let go of Galassian’s ankle as the madman disappeared over the edge of the platform with a scream. And then another one. And then another, each growing more distant as Galassian began the long fall to the planet’s glowing core thousands of kilometers below them.
Han knelt at Baasen’s side. The wounds in the old bounty hunter’s chest were deep. The stink of cauterized flesh was bright and greasy. Baasen’s yellow-green face was pale and his breathing shallow. He blinked up at Han, and Han was surprised by the thickness in his own throat.
“Hold on, old man,” he said. “We’re going to have to get you patched up.”
“Han, old friend,” Baasen said. “You always were a third-rate liar.”
“What are you talking about? I lie with the best of them.”
“Not that time.”
Scarlet came forward, limping. The medpac in her hand looked profoundly insufficient. Han could see from her eyes that she was thinking the same thing.
“We got him, though,” he said. “Just like old times.”
Baasen bared his teeth in a kind of smile, turning to look through the grate over his shoulder. “I suspect he’ll outlive me, for all of it. That is a powerfully long fall,” he said, then gasped. “Truth is, if I’d thought for part of a second, I wouldn’t have done that.”
“The man you used to be is still down in there somewhere.”
Scarlet pulled back the ruins of Baasen’s shirt and doused the wounds with numbing spray. Baasen sighed and swallowed.
“If that’s right and there’s a world past this one, me and that man I was are going have words in it. Powerful stupid, he was.”
Leia came to stand by them. The glow of the planetary core streamed up past Baasen, casting him in shadows and brightening her face as she looked down. Her expression was calm, gentle, and strong. Baasen coughed again, and it was a deep, wrong sound.
“Y’know, Han, old friend. If I’d had both my hands, I think I’d have taken him,” he said with a grin. “So there’s a way this is all your fault.”
“Same to you,” Han said, but he said it to a corpse. He plucked Baasen’s blaster up from the steel grating and put it in his own holster. The three of them stood over the Mirialan, silent for a long moment. Memories flooded Han of the times he’d known Baasen before.
“Turned out he was a good man,” Scarlet said.
“No, he wasn’t,” Han said.
“A friend, then,” Leia said.
“Not for a long time.”
At last, they turned away, walking back to the lighted table that Galassian had been standing over. The bright surface was alive with strange letters and shifting designs. The script was like nothing Han had ever seen, and while some of the images—a circle more than halfway colored in red, a series of bars with triangles at different points along them—had the vaguely familiar, functional look of technical readouts, what they meant was opaque.
“Does any of this make sense to you?” Leia asked, scowling at the readouts as if simple force of will could make them make sense. Han was still shaking a little from the fight, and he tried not to show it.
“Maybe a little?” Scarlet said. “Let me … let me look at it.”
“I was afraid you were in trouble for a second, Your Highnessness,” Han said, but the barb sounded hollow and unconvincing. Leia looked up at him, and the softness in her face told him that she’d heard the relief in his voice. He might just as well have said I thought I’d lost you.
“No such luck,” she said softly. He was surprised by the power of his urge to sweep her into his arms and kiss her. For a moment, there was something else in her expression—apprehension or hope or something of both. She blinked and looked away. “Do you think he’s still falling?”
“If they excavated the mantle down to the actual planetary core, he’ll be falling for about the next five hours,” Scarlet said, not looking up from the table. “The heat will probably sear his lungs and light him on fire before he makes impact, though.”
“Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy,” Han said. “So can you work this thing?”
“No,” Scarlet said.
“I thought you had the instructions.”
“Galassian wrote the instructions, and he couldn’t work it all, either. Not completely, anyway. Let me see what I can manage.”
Han nodded, stepped away from the table, and tried to comm Chewbacca and the Falcon, to get some better idea of what was happening on the other side of the planet’s crust. He had the irrational certainty that the full Imperial fleet had jumped into the system just after they’d gotten down to the bottom of the K’kybak ruins, and they’d be going up to a massive, ongoing firefight. There was no signal. He hadn’t really expected one.
Baasen Ray’s body lay still and silent, his eyes closed and his face the calm that seemed to come over all people in death. At peace. He’d been a good smuggler once, with all the bravado and addiction to excitement that they’d all suffered from to one degree or another. And then the universe had worn him down. Beaten him until he was a third-class bounty hunter carrying bad debts and desperation. Han could have gone down the same path, become another Baasen Ray. That he hadn’t was equal parts luck and perversity of character. He didn’t really see how he could take credit for either one.
Leia walked to him. Her blaster was still in her hand.
“Thinking about him?” she asked.
“Thinking he’s the only man I’ve ever known who stole from Jabba the Hutt and died of something else,” Han said. “And that he saved us.”
“Complicated.”
“The universe is a complicated place,” Han said. “Unless you’re Luke.”
“You don’t think he’s complicated?”
“No. He’s a farmboy who loves flying his fast ship. You don’t get much simpler than that.”