A FEW PARSECS FROM CORUSCANT, 40 YEARS ABE:

Han's hand slapped down on the hyperdrive levers and yanked them back, jolting the ship back into realspace. The swirl of hyperspace travel through the viewport dissolved abruptly into ordinary starfield once more although the alarms did not stop ringing.

"-too close to a supernova!" See-Threepio was wailing.

"Shut-up!" Han snarled. "Chewie, damage report?"

The Wookiee's paws were already dancing across the console and he rumbled a complicated string of growls and yips that had Han nodding, grim-faced and sober. Chewbacca sounded unhappy but subdued; it was too late to change what had happened now and he knew that risky as Han's choice to jump without calculations had been, they hadn't had much alternative.

Leia as yet knew no such thing, nor was she aware of the precise circumstances under which they had jumped to hyperspace-only that the journey had been too short . "Don't tell me the hyperdrive is broken again?" she said as she hurried in, voice raised to be heard over the shrilling alarms.

"It's worse than that," Han muttered, leaning over the damage display. "Looks like we've got a cascade-burn starting in the engine room...Bail!" he shouted unnecessarily, pressing the intercom button and holding it down with white knuckles. "The engine's on fire, go put it out!"

"On my way," came Bail's measured response through the cockpit speaker; he had flown on the Millennium Falcon too often to be nonplussed by comments like "the engine's on fire."

Leia, somehow, retained her ability to be surprised-or maybe she simply derived pleasure from preserving the fiction of shock and the opportunities thus offered for her and her husband to snipe at one another. "The engine's on fire?" she repeated. "Han-"

"Don't worry about it," Han said. Chewbacca wuffed his disagreement but quietly, shaking his head more to himself than at Han; he, too, was no newcomer to the realities of life on the Falcon .

"Mistress Leia!" Threepio cried, golden arms waving in distress, "Mistress Leia! This madman must be removed from command of the ship for all our safety!" Leia was already shaking her head, moving forward to lean over her husband's shoulder and inspect the damage reports for herself, Threepio's melodramatic lamentations another reality of life that she had long ago learned to dismiss-but then the fussy protocol droid said, "Engaging the hyperdrive without navigational coordinates is a clear violation of sane spaceflight procedure and-"

Leia's head whipped around so fast her hairbuns wobbled. She stared at her husband. "A blind hyperspace jump?" It came out as more accusation than question, easily outdoing the alarms. "You put us into a blind hyperspace jump?"

"For a second," Han admitted defensively. "We had to get out of there before that Super Star Destroyer turned us all into free-floating atoms, and the navicomputer-"

Chewbacca roared, waving one shaggy hand in the general direction of the now-blank viewports.

"A second of blind travel in hyperspace translates to hundreds of parsecs!" Leia shot back. "We could have died-"

"And if we'd hung around long enough for the navicomputer to finish calculating a jump, we would have!"

Han and Leia glowered at each other, two sets of brown eyes narrowed and pale cheeks red. She planted her fists on her hips; he crossed his arms over his chest. In the co-pilot's seat, Chewbacca continued to flip switches and check read-outs. As he twisted a blinking dial the piercing alarm finally shut-off, leaving everyone's ears ringing in the sudden silence.

Bail walked into the cockpit looking calm, although his brown hair was dishevelled and there was a smudge of soot across one cheek and in several places on his brown robes. "The fire's out," he said mildly. "What did dad do now?"

"Only saved all our skins," Han said tartly. "You're welcome."

"Only risked all our lives with a truly idiotic, brainless-"

Chewbacca's rumbling growl cut-off the argument.

Leia took a deep breath. "You're right, Chewie," she said, smoothing her hair back primly. "We can finish this later, after we've contacted the fleet." She turned toward the navicomputer and paused to eye her husband. "Provided your father doesn't mind if we make our next jump after we have the coordinates plotted?" she asked sweetly.

"Be my guest," said Han in a voice that dripped with sarcastic politeness in equal measure to that of his wife and sweeping his arm toward the navicomputer in a low bow.

Bail stepped over behind Threepio's chair and folded his hands in front of him, the patient stance doing nothing to conceal the way he rolled his eyes at his parents' antics as Han poked at the controls in front of him and Leia pressed buttons on the navicomputer. Her lofty expression faded into a frown and her button-pushing became sharper, more staccato. Eventually she swore.

"It's scrambled," Leia announced. "Even Coruscant isn't coming up right."

"It lost triple zero?" Bail said, raising his eyebrows. "You're kidding."

"Where did you pick up military slang like-never mind," Leia said, shaking her head. "Jaen, of course."

"Syal, actually," Bail corrected, moving forward so he could look over his mother's shoulder. "But that's not really relevant to...uh-oh."

Leia nodded. "Uh-oh indeed," she said. She looked up and met Han's eyes as he leaned back around his seat to watch. "Threepio, see if you can make sense out of this." Leia waved the droid forward.

She didn't look particularly hopeful as she moved herself and Bail aside so the droid could shuffle over to the navicompuer and plug in. Threepio's yellow eyes flickered several times as his processor interfaced with the ship's computer brains, then he looked up and shook his head. "I'm not sure if it was feedback from the turbolaser strike that interrupted the initial calculations, or a result of Captain Solo's ill-advised unplotted hypserpace jump, but this navicomputer's data has been irrevocably corrupted."

Han and Chewie exchanged a look. "We're in trouble," Han muttered. Chewbacca barked.

"This probably isn't a good time to mention that the hyperdrive got a little fried before I could get the fire out, is it?" Bail said. "I don't think we're going to get more than one or two jumps out of it before it shatters."

"Replacement navigational data could be downloaded from the Holonet," Threepio continued primly, "but our long-range communications don't seem to be functioning."

Chewbacca wuffed an explanation, shoulders slumping.

"What do you mean, gone?" Leia asked, eyes widening. "The whole dish? But how-"

"When the Super Star Destroyer shot at us, I bet," Bail suggested. He looked down at his mother, frowning. "That's not something we can jury-rig back together."

"We're in trouble," Han repeated.