CORUSCANT, 40 YEARS ABE:

Scattered blaster bolts sprayed from the smoky haze that covered the platform as Breha and Poe sprinted for their ships, heads ducked low as though that might help keep them from being hit with a stray blast. In addition to the distant, aimless blaster fire they also had to dodge around panicking senators and dignitaries.

Breha almost ran full-tilt into an overdressed Bothan who flailed at her in a panic, crying, "Where are the guards? Where are the guards!" in a high-pitched shriek.

"I don't know," Breha said. "Senator Fey'lya, please, I need to get to my—"

She watched in horror as a blaster bolt shot past the side of her head, crisping several strands of her coiled braid, and struck him in the face. Fey'lya fell back with a muffled, watery cry. She stared, horror-struck and motionless, at the body, the smell of scorched fur strong enough to make her sway with nausea until Poe grabbed her by the arm and dragged her bodily away.

Dignitaries weren't the only bodies they had to dodge, living and dead and wounded alike; as Breha and Poe crossed from the permacrete square to the landing platform where the X-Wings and landspeeders stood parked, the crowd thickened, several audience members having raced toward what they saw as the comparative safety of the New Republic security forces and starfighter pilots.

Although little of the smoke and blaster fire had yet made it this far across the square, chaos reigned.

"Rogues!" Poe yelled, as soon as he came within auditory range of his squadron. "Rogues, disengage from whatever you're doing, get in your ships, and prep for launch! Move it, people!"

He and Breha shoved their way through the panicky crowd, Breha sticking close to Poe's heels; for all that she was the daughter of legends she was also a skinny young human woman a little shorter than galactic average. Commander Dameron, on the other hand, had the commanding presence of several years of snubfighter leadership under his belt and a willingness to use his elbows like they were proton bombs.

They moved forward stubbornly against the press of bodies. The going got easier once they came in close proximity to their ships: the security cordon around the X-Wings was still intact, and the civilians were being held back by the violet force beams projected like a fence around the delicate fighters.

Poe and Breha each flashed the data-spikes worn high on the sleeves of their dress uniforms and the barrier dispelled long enough to permit them to pass through.

"Rogues!" Poe bellowed again, throwing his voice above the tumult with parade-ground pitch. "Get in your kriffing ships!"

Several pilots were already sitting in or perched on top of their X-Wings, and they scrambled to drop into their seats, pull on helmets, or buckle crash restraints. The rest made for their fighters at a run, some veering sideways to talk to the commander as they ran.

"What about life support units?" asked a nervous Devaronian man. "Dress uniforms don't have them built-in—"

"And there's no time to go back and get them," Poe interrupted. "We'll fly without."

"But commander—"

"Just make sure you don't have to go EV, right?" Poe said. His smile was grim.

"Right," the Devaronian pilot said. His smile was even weaker than his commander's, and he fingered a gold talisman hanging around his neck as though it was a good luck charm or a sacred object. He took a deep breath and hurried to his starfighter, jumping for the s-foil and clambering up to his cockpit with the ease of a man accustomed to minor acrobatics.

"What's the mission, commander?" demanded a heavy-set human woman with short brown hair and a heavy frown. "They don't expect us to take on all those Destroyers, do they?"

Poe shook his head. "All we have to do is get a message out, Ito. No miracles today."

Ito raised a skeptical brow. "Getting out of atmo alive in the face of that much firepower sounds like miracle enough to me," she said.

Poe clapped her on the shoulder. "I know," he said. He gave her a cocky grin. "Good thing miracles are our stock in trade, right?"

They separated as they reached their starfighters, Poe and Breha veering to the left and Ito breaking off toward her own ship, which was parked at the far end of the formation.

All around them, pilots were climbing into ships, some of them helping to boost their less-acrobatic squadronmates onto the wings and into the cockpits of the narrow snubfighters. Ordinarily there would have been landing crews with ladders and mechanics running last minute once-overs to make sure the X-Wings were fit to fly, but today the Rogues were on their own—

Or mostly on their own, at least. A sharp snap-hiss broke through the general tumult and Poe and Breha spun around in time to see a lean brown-haired young man in drab brown robes leap out of the air to land at their backs. His green lightsaber swung in a quick arc, knocking two blaster bolts aside before they could hit either pilot.

"Bail!" Breha cried.

"Hey, sis," Bail Solo said, flashing her a tight grin over one shoulder. He stood in guard position for another moment, his dark brown eyes scanning for further threats, before his shoulders sagged in relief and he clicked off the lightsaber. "Need a hand?"

"Nope," Breha answered blithely, "everything seems to be under control now."

Bail rolled his eyes, then turned to face Poe. "Commander Dameron, anything I can do to help?"

"Just keep the bystanders back so they don't get fried by our thrusters," Poe said. He looked a little rattled by Bail's sudden appearance, or perhaps by the realization of how close he had just come to catching a blaster bolt in his back.

Bail nodded. "Sure thing," he said. "What happened?"

"Did you miss the Imperial Star Destroyers dropping out of hyperspace overhead?" Breha said tartly.

Bail rolled his eyes again. "No, obviously, I meant—why? This was supposed to be a peace treaty."

"Your guess is as good as mine right now, kid," Poe said distractedly, running his eyes along the twelve red-streaked X-Wings to check on the status of his pilots. "But your sister and I need to get in the air and go fetch the fleet before things turn into any more of a disaster than they already have, so you'll have to pack the sibling rivalry in for the day, okay?"

"Yessir," said Bail, while Breha blushed and nodded.

"Bail!" a new voice shouted, and the Solo siblings both spun to see a Rutian Twi'lek in an orange dress uniform running toward them. In one hand he held a helmet with attached lekku sleeves; the other he flung in a hug around the startled but smiling Bail. "What are you doing here?"

"Seeing you off, of course," Bail said.

"He's lying," Breha said. "It's nothing so altruistic. He just selfishly came over to stop Commander Dameron and I from getting shot."

"Stop making me look bad," Bail told his sister while the young Twi'lek smirked, his sharp teeth bright against the bold blue of his skin.

"Fortunately for you," the Twi'lek said, "I have been your sister's wingmate for long enough to know not to listen to anything she says."

Breha stuck her tongue out at both men, grabbed Bail in a hug, and said, "Be careful. Go get mom! She's off doing something stupid again!"

Bail nodded. "Big surprise," he said, and hugged her back. "May the Force be with you!"

As Breha ran off to vault onto her own X-Wing and cram her helmet on over her still-smoking braid, Bail turned to the Twi'lek and caught his free hand, squeezing it hard. "That goes for you, too, Jaen," he said.

"The Force always is, with you around," Jaen Vao said, leaning in to kiss Bail on the cheek. Then he winked, twitched one lekku in a pert gesture, and whirled to run to his own X-Wing.

"All right, Rogues, I hope your engines are hot, because we have some anxious friends up there ready to fly a few rounds of gwayo bird with us!" Poe Dameron called from his X-Wing, punching the button to lower his canopy. As it descended he leaned forward far enough to see Bail, whom he saluted casually.

Bail returned the gesture with a broad wave and an anxious smile, then ducked his head and raced for the barrier. While it was easily capable of holding back an ordinary crowd, it could have been twice as tall and still offered little inconvenience to a Jedi Knight. Rather than another flashy jump, this time he merely held out a hand, closed his eyes, and parted the beam around him with a gentle Force nudge. Then he clipped his lightsaber back to his belt and vanished into the crowd.

Poe switched to his ship's commlink, dialing up the default squadron frequency. As he waited for the encryption to cycle on he asked his astromech, "It's gonna be a dicey one today, buddy. You ready for this?"

The little droid replied with a cheerful and enthusiastic series of trills and whistles, making Poe grin. He sobered as his comm popped, announcing its readiness to broadcast, and when he spoke again his voice was serious. "All right, Rogues, here's the mission: go get the fleet. With that long-range comm jamming up, there's no way to tell whether or not they know we're in trouble—so we'll be playing message runner today." As he spoke, Poe flipped switches and twirled dials across his cockpit, getting his X-Wing ready to fly. Thankfully short-range comms-at least closed and hardened ones like those sported by modern snubfighter squadrons-didn't seem to be affected by the jamming; running a mission without the ability to communicate with his squadron was something that Poe had done once before and had no desire to ever repeat, especially a mission that would have to be planned on-the-fly like this one. "That means no heroic stunts, people," he continued briskly. "Engage as little as possible with the enemy. We're flying to evade and, when we have to, to punch through—not to fight."

"Wouldn't it make more sense to just skip around to the opposite side of the planet then, Leader?" The voice on the other end of the comm was steady, not fearful; it was a question born of pragmatism rather than cowardice. Leeso Voond, a Duro woman with a long scar down the side of her green-gray face, was not someone who spent a lot of time wrestling with fear, but she was someone who could take a vibroblade straight through the emotional detritus of an issue to get to the core of a mission.

This time she wasn't on target, though. Poe shook his head. "Not with at least four Star Destroyers and a Super up there, ready to target anything down here that looks tempting. Shooting straight up at them will put us in their targeting brackets for less time than breaking horizontal." His preflight checks all in the green, Poe raised his snubfighter onto its repulsorlifts and angled for a take-off. Around him, the rest of the squadron was going airborne as well.

"But it will be pointing us straight up their turbolaser emplacements," Breha pointed out. She didn't sound worried about it; her tone was more that of a woman discussing lunch plans that odds of survival.

"True," Poe said, and his face broke into a predatory grin. "So let's see how many of those turbolasers we can destroy, or at least distract, on our way out." He paused, then as he angled his X-Wing up and hit the thrusters, added, "and may the Force be with us."

Twelve X-Wings rose out of the smoke and into the sky. From the other end of the wide platform, twelve blue-black TIE interceptors followed, screaming.