Jag stood outside the closed door of the cargo hold. His finger moved toward the button to open it, then fell back. Toward, then back. Toward. Back.
He sighed.
The Jade Shadow was on autopilot, making its way from the edges of the Kyrrtol system to the second moon of the fourth planet. When they got there and he landed at the safehouse, he would have to let Jaina out of her confinement. So really he had nothing to lose by seeing if she was reasonable enough now that he could get it over with a little early.
Nothing to lose, of course, except everything.
He'd never seen her that angry with him before. Never. Since he'd left the hold he'd been able to think only of his fears – What if she couldn't forgive him? What if she could never understand why he'd done this? What if she said it was over, and meant it? What if, by trying to show her the truth in her heart and soul, he'd only managed to destroy the one right and good thing in his life? What if he'd blown it, forever?
But there were the words she'd said, and he knew he hadn't heard her wrong. Even as her rage had exploded like a supernova, those truths he'd known were there had spilled out. She'd been waiting for him, waiting to tell him she wanted to accept his offer. She wanted to be with him. She'd decided he was the only man for her, the only life she could imagine. Her true feelings had been revealed. A little bit of anger – well, a lot of anger – couldn't undo that.
Jag reached out and tapped the button.
"So you've come crawling back," she said in an eerily quiet voice. "Ready to apologize?"
"I need to talk to you."
She rolled her eyes. "Guess not."
"I need to know if you meant what you said earlier."
"You mean the part about you being well and truly dead? Yeah, that's looking more and more likely about now."
"No, not that part," he said, treating her jibe with complete seriousness in the hope it would throw her off. "The part about how I am the only man for you, how you can't imagine your life any other way than with me in it."
It worked. "Oh."
"Did you mean it?"
She couldn't meet his gaze. She was looking at the floor, her feet, anywhere but his face. She scooted to the edge of the crashcouch but didn't stand. She wanted to, though. She wanted to stand and run into his arms. He could see it.
"Jaina?"
Suddenly there was a loud thwump and the floor beneath his feet shook. Jag nearly fell, but kept his balance at the last second with a long stride forward. Jaina toppled over and slammed backward into the crashcouch.
"What the hell was that?" she demanded, after swearing at the stuncuffs.
"Perhaps a small asteroid got past the autonav."
Awkwardly she sat up again. She narrowed her eyes. "Didn't sound like that to me."
"I'm sure it's nothing," he said, even though she was right. "The alarms aren't –"
THWUMP. "Gah!" she cried as she smacked back into the crashcouch again. "Ktah!" he barked when his knees crashed to the floor.
"You know," Jaina hissed, "I don't think it's nothing."
"Yes. I noticed," Jag shot back. He scrambled to his feet and charged toward the door.
"Where are you going?"
"Where do you think?"
"Jagged Soontir Fel, don't you dare leave without releasing me!"
He stopped in the open portal and spun back. "If you weren't so blasted stubborn, Jaina, you'd have released yourself an hour ago."
"What are you talking about?"
THWHU-WHUMP! This time Jaina benefited from having stayed where she was, and Jag caught himself on the wall."I'm leaving." He waved his hand at the untouched food. "Catch up when you're full."
"Jag! You'd better explain yourself this –"
The door slid shut behind him, and Jag ran as fast as he could toward the cockpit. When he arrived he sprang into the pilot's seat and immediately began to scan the readouts.
"How the –"
He wrenched the control stick with both hands and plunged the Shadow into a swift downward loop to avoid the laser cannon blasts being fired by a hostile ship dogging his aft. He barely had time to process the fact that he'd successfully avoided another thwump, or that the shields actually remained nearly at full strength, or that the ship that was firing on him was a quite ordinary-looking cargo freighter.
He was under attack in the Kyrrtol system. That shouldn't be possible.
And then it got worse. A lot worse. The console beeped just as the six small dots appeared on the tactical display.
"You can't be serious!"
The cargo freighter that wasn't really a cargo freighter, that wasn't supposed to be anywhere near this system in the first place, had just launched fighters.
The display updated, identifying the new arrivals as standard TIEs from the old Imperial fleet. Jag blew out a quick breath. This was a good sign, at least. TIEs would be no match for the Shadow. All he had to do was draw them a little further from the freighter and pick them off. Shouldn't be too difficult to –
"Asteroids?"
Jag spared Jaina a quick glance over his shoulder. "No."
"What, then?"
He didn't have to reply. A trio of TIE fighters screamed straight at the Shadow with their cannons blazing, and Jag barely managed to initiate an evasive roll in time.
"Let me fly," she said.
"No time."
"Why not? I've flown this ship more hours than you've spent admiring Iliana's –"
"Funny." Jag swerved the Shadow into a steep arc, squeezed the triggers, and incinerated one of the TIEs. "How about instead of cracking jokes you –"
"– do something to help. Yeah, yeah." Dramatically she flopped into one of the seats at the consoles behind him. "Shields?"
"That would qualify as help, yes." Another squeeze of the triggers, another TIE met its doom.
"You know, putting the key in the food was a neat trick."
"I thought so." Three down, three to go.
"I'll have to remember that one for the next time you're –" On the display the fore shields weakened and the aft shields strengthened. The incoming barrage of cannon blasts from the freighter behind them dissipated harmlessly against the energy barriers. Immediately the shields evened out again. "What've we got out there, anyway?"
"Apparently a heavily modified Kuat Engineering cargo hauler."
"That's who's firing at us from aft? A cargo hauler?"
"Yes."
"And they launched the TIEs too?"
"Yes."
Jaina whistled approvingly. "Yeah, I'd call that heavily modified, all right. I bet Karrde would be mighty impressed."
"Perhaps we can regale him with the tale later. But first that requires us to –"
"– live through this." She laughed. "Point made, flyboy. How many TIEs to worry about?"
"Three left, of six."
"Not so bad."
"On their way right now –" He watched the shields adjust just as the remaining TIEs began a head-on charge toward the Shadow. "– as a matter of fact."
"Way ahead of you," she said. He could hear the grin on her face.
Jag lined up his targeting reticule on one TIE and squeezed the triggers. He didn't even wait for the Shadow's cannon fire to strike home before he retargeted and blasted the one next to it. The final TIE broke off its charge and dove away frantically.
"We can outrun the freighter," Jag said. "Plot us a hyperspace jump out of here."
"To?"
Steering the Shadow into pursuit of the last enemy fighter, Jag snatched one of his datacards out of the command console and tossed it over his shoulder in her general direction. "Nirauan."
"On it." Her lack of complaint must've meant she'd caught it. "We'll be ready to jump out of here in just a – hey, where is here, by the way?"
"The Kyrrtol system."
"The what system?"
Almost… there… "Kyrrtol."
"Never heard of it."
"No one has." Jag fired again, and the last TIE fighter exploded in a ball of flame. "It's an inhospitable and abandoned system. Starcharts skip right over it."
"Just the place to woo a lady."
Jag chuckled. "My father stayed in a safehouse here a long time ago. No one outside of my family and our most trusted associates even knows of its existence."
"Good thing you trust me, then."
"Apparently." The sublight drives were increasing the distance from the cargo freighter with each passing second. "How much longer?"
"Fifteen seconds, twenty tops."
"Perfect." He pointed out the viewport. "I'll take us around that moon."
From the corner of his eye, he saw her nod. "So they can't track our jump."
"Right."
"Unless…"
He looked back at her sharply. "Unless what?"
"Unless they'll track us there the same way they tracked us here." She met his gaze sternly. "You do know how they tracked us here, don't you?"
He turned back to the viewport, and the rapidly approaching moon. "Uh… Not exactly."
"Then what makes you think –"
I'm not seeing this. I'm not seeing this. "Jaina."
"Don't Jaina me, Jag! We really need to figure out –"
No, no, no, no, no, no, no… "Jaina, look!"
She did, and cursed.
Coming into view around the dark side of the moon, more and more emerging into view with every racing heartbeat in Jag's chest, was the distinctive triangular bow of an Imperial Star Destroyer. The immense gray warship was heading straight toward them.
"How," Jaina finally exclaimed, "could you possibly have failed to mention that there was a fraggin' Star Destroyer in the system?"
"It was hidden in the moon's mass shadow," Jag explained even as he checked the tactical display. "The sensors couldn't pick it up. It's not my fault!"
"Fault or not," she said, "get us out of here right now!"
"I am!"
Except the Star Destroyer was only growing bigger in the viewport.
"Um… Jag?"
"Busy."
"Why aren't we getting away?"
"It seems," he replied after a long moment, "that we are caught in a tractor beam."
"This isn't funny, Jag."
He faced her again. "I'm not joking."
"My dad was right," she muttered, glaring at him even worse than she had when she'd been tied up with stuncuffs in the hold. "Only a Fel could mess things up this badly."
"Jaina, I… I'm sorry."
She snorted. "So let me get this straight… We've been ambushed in a system no one knows about, we don't know how they found us, none of our friends knows we're here, we're in a ship I'm quite sure you didn't properly borrow in the first place – which, I might add, is loaded full of ysalamiri so the one Jedi we have aboard can't use the Force – and we're caught in a Star Destroyer's tractor beam?"
"When you put it that way," he said, "it does sound pretty bad."