The Faux Harla broke through Rishi's atmosphere and soared as fast as it could for the building where the now-late Talon Karrde had stationed his headquarters. But just as their ship was several miles away, Jaina and Jag saw a single A-wing starfighter blast off from the top of that building's landing pad just as several of Karrde's people were scrambling for their own vessels to give chase.
Then, when the A-wing was several hundred miles in the air and reaching for space in the bare quarter of a minute it departed from the landing pad, the building exploded, killing everyone on the landing pad in an instant. As the fire that came turned into a flaming arrow pointed for the sky, the resultant shock wave caught up with the Harla and sent it tumbling in the opposite direction out of Jaina's control.
The ship's Jedi Master pilot desperately fought the console that defied her as she and her husband felt their beloved vessel twirling end-over-end in a way that the inertial compensator couldn't account for; even as she tried to regain control of the Harla, she and Jag were pushed back in their seats, their teeth gritting against the force that may very well signal the end of their lives.
But in the end, after the shock wave died down and the Harla was out of its blast radius, Jaina finally managed to successfully regain control of her ship just as she saw through the viewport that it was about to collide into a building up ahead.
Without hesitation, she wrestled the controls to put the ship into a steep climb that resulted only in the Harla's belly scraping against the durasteel framework of the building that it nearly crashed into for a few dozen meters before it reached past the roof and was soaring back into the air.
Jaina then turned the ship in the direction that she remembered that the lone A-wing, which she had no doubt been piloted by the Sith who killed Karrde and subsequently blew up his headquarters, had flown toward. She saw with both her naked eyes and the Harla's sensors that it was just reaching the end of Rishi's gravity well, and it was clear that it was planning to depart the system via hyperspace.
"Plot its course, Jag!" Jaina urgently demanded. "In case it gets away, we can at least follow it!"
Jag set to work immediately on his side of the console board as Jaina throttled her ship forward as fast as it could go, short of going into hyperspace of course, so that it broke through Rishi's atmospheric fold in a little over five seconds and began chugging out lasers to incapacitate, if not outright destroy, the A-wing.
But before the first laser could hit the starfighter's hindquarters, it disappeared into hyperspace.
"Damn!" Jaina cursed, her fists hitting parts of the console before her without accidentally pressing any buttons. She then turned to her husband. "Did you get its course?"
"Yeah," Jag nodded.
Jaina looked at the hyperspace coordinates that the A-wing plotted, then wordlessly set to input those same coordinates. Within less than half a minute, the Harla was once again in hyperspace.
.
Ben's eyes shot open from sleep in the darkness of the medbay as he felt the sensation of the Force again. He looked up in the unlit room and could discern, at the foot of the table he still laid on, an oddly circular form that gleamed a silver ray of light even in the dark.
"Can you feel the Force again?" 5U-M4N's voice asked at a lower modulation.
"Yes," Ben replied. "You killed the ysalamari, didn't you?"
"You're welcome," Five-U replied sardonically as he moved over to Ben's left to undo the straps at his feet before he removed the straps holding down his arms.
"Why are you helping me?" Ben asked as he sat up on the table, his body feeling sore for having laid there for so long; that, and the brutal rape that Vestara commenced upon him.
"You are a Skywalker, yes?" Five-U asked. "Descended from one Shmi Skywalker?"
"Who?" Ben asked as he stood up off from the table.
"She had a son named Anakin, didn't she?" Five-U pressed.
"Anakin Skywalker?" Ben asked. "Yeah, I'm his grandson. Why do you ask?"
"Then I didn't make a mistake," Five-U said. "Come on, I already loaded your clothes in the escape pod, so we can get out of here while the Sith is still asleep. But we have to be quiet." With that, Five-U said no more as he grabbed Ben's wrist and carefully led him to the door to the medbay.
A few minutes later, after walking down the darkened corridors of the medical freighter that they were aboard, the two of them finally made it to the escape pod that Five-U promised, whose lit interior, Ben saw, had his clothes and robes. He then entered to dress himself up as Five-U followed him in, closing the door of the pod, sealing it from the vacuum of space, and promptly launched them away from the freighter.
Mere seconds after the pod was launched, a Mindabaal Custom yacht dropped out of hyperspace several hundred miles away from the pod. Both vessels then began racing for each other to meet up halfway for the Custom to catch the pod in a tractor beam that sealed it against its airlock, allowing Ben and Five-U to enter this vessel without any trouble. There, after entering the ship from the cockpit, Ben and Five-U were greeted by a multi-appendaged medical droid dressed up as the vessel's captain.
Ben had a feeling that if Five-U would be greedy and enjoy pornography, then this droid really was the captain of this ship.
"Welcome back, Five-U," the droid captain stated as he committed a salute that Five-U easily returned. The captain then turned to Ben. "And welcome aboard, Jedi Knight Ben Skywalker."
"I assume you're the captain?" Ben asked.
"Indeed I am," the captain said. "I am Captain 11-4D, but you may call me Captain Ford for short. And I can see now, based on the scans that I've been running on you from my visual receptors since you stepped aboard, that you are, in fact, the descendent of one of my first masters."
"You mean Shmi Skywalker?" Ben asked.
"You are descended from her, but she was not a master of mine," Ford said.
"Then were you a droid owned by Anakin Skywalker?" Ben asked.
"Oh, no, you see, I did not work for anyone by the name of Skywalker," Ford clarified.
"Then who did you work for?" Ben asked.
Before Ford could answer, he hesitated. "We must leave this system now," he said before turning for the cockpit. Five-U followed wordlessly, and Ben, after standing in confusion, decided to join them.
At the cockpit, Ford took control while Five-U sat in the copilot's seat just as the yacht was beginning to take hits from behind.
"You didn't tell me that that Sith manned that medical frigate with laser banks!" Ford exclaimed to Five-U as he began plotting coordinates to enter hyperspace.
"I didn't think it was pertinent information!" Five-U countered. "I didn't know she was going to wake up!"
"Whatever, just make sure she can't track us!" Ford said as they continued their preparations.
"You sure the shields can hold?" Ben asked the captain.
"Yep," Ford replied before he pulled down the throttle to enter hyperspace.
"And she won't be able to track us now," Five-U said as the viewport outside was filled with the familiar blue void.