For a moment, as the Yavin Turtle straightened out of the evasive loop they'd pulled to get out of the Star Destroyer's hangar bay, Anakin tried to make some sense of the tactical situation.
With Lowie at the controls and Jaina on the guns, and Tahiri stripping out of her stolen imperial jumpsuit in the cockpit doorway as if they weren't in the middle of a running firefight, that meant that everything beyond actually dodging blaster bolts and shooting back was Anakin's responsibility. A ship that wasn't built for more than hauling cargo. Defensive countermeasures that were set up to hold off long-range pursuit from Yuuzhan Vong coralskipppers and Peace Brigade pirate fighters, useless against the close-range blaster fire of Imperial TIEs. A constellation of yellow warning indicators that meant the nav computer was still refusing to spin up the hyperdrive, their shifting pattern no more than a visual echo of the warble and whir of Fiver's increasingly frustrated attempts to override the system. The flashing comm light up front that told them the Star Destroyer was trying to hail them, and the basic problem of trying to work out where they were going.
"I don't know! Just don't shoot anything!"
"Easy for you to say, Little Brother!" Jaina called back. She only ever called him that when she was dangerously tense - he'd been the tallest of the Solo kids since he was fifteen, and it had become her way of reminding him that she was still the eldest. In the background behind her voice, he could hear the rising howl that signalled incoming TIE Fighters, relayed by the speakers in the Turtle's turret - lots of TIEs, judging by the way the noise was layered.
They were punching through Chimaera's picket screen, which meant that TIE Fighters were spiralling out of their patrol lines onto diving intercepts towards the little freighter. The long-range scope showed that the massive bulk of the Star Destroyer was swinging round behind them, pivoting slowly onto a pusuit vector - and spiking wavelenths on the sensor readout confirmed that the big ship was powering up for battle, throwing energy into drive acceleration, deflector screens, and turbolaser turrets. Up ahead, the vast cloudscape of Bespin filled half the cockpit canopy, and the pair of green-tinged ice moons above the curved horizon didn't just make the picture prettier - their mass-shadow would require some sophistication in their approach course to the planet.
Manoeuvring in orbital space was disorientingly complicated, and the fact that they were back in level flight didn't make things any simpler. Chimaera's idea of up was to keep its keel aligned with the Galactic plane, but the down towards the planet on their left was a completely different direction, the TIEs were coming in from crazy angles - and to get where they wanted to be, running across the Bespin sky towards Cloud City or one of Uncle Lando's smuggling pads on the old gas rigs, they'd have to flip into a completely different frame of reference altogether, made all the more complex by being wrapped around the curve of the planet's sphere.
... which is converted into a two-dimensional plot of relativistically straight lines by the gravitic exponent of a four-dimensional mass-energy body.
Sometimes, actually understanding hyperphysics just made things even more disorienting.
But a girlfriend grinning as she dropped into his lap in her underwear, a blond bounce looking at him for explanations of all the things going on around her, was one way to get him to focus on the stuff that mattered.
Time for a quick kiss? Yes. Lowie and Jaina could fly the ship. Lips against Tahiri's, her hips against his waist, one hand on the keys that steered the aft deflector, switching off the useless jammers and punching up the power, keeping the blade of the vertical alignment tracked in the centre of the nearest pursuit formation, and nodding the elevation down a little for three-dimensional deflection.
Just like a lightsaber, really.
Tahiri gave him a look, amused eyes and lips that wanted more, but she was at least as smart as him as well. "Did you just do something technical while we were making out?"
"They weren't actually trying to hit us," he shrugged, nuzzling her again. The long-range shots from the pursuing TIEs had been desinged to skim under the hull, but trying to scare his sister usually just made her aggressive. So he'd spun them off the angled shield.
Tahiri grinned at him, and started unfastening his Imperial tunic. "So, how irresponsible can we be?"
From behind them came the sound of the laser turret, firing. Beside them, Lowie yelled something, waving his arms in exasperation. Tahiri looked at him, alarmed.
Anakin sighed. "And now my sister's trying to shoot them down."
"Just warning shots!" Jaina said.
Lowie asked again.
"Yeah." Anakin took the controls. "You get back there and tell her to go easy on them."
"You sure you can fly like this?" Tahiri asked, wrigging in his lap as Lowie ducked out of the hatchway.
"Stars!" Anakin objected, standing the freighter on it side, as blaster bolts zinged past. "Yeah, I think so..."
"What's the plan, then?" Tahiri asked.
"Trying to defuse the situation," Anakin answered, levelling out in flight. "We have some TIEs on our tail. They're looking for an excuse to shoot at us." Breathe out. "I don't want Jaina to shoot them down. They're supposed to be our allies, and I don't want anyone on our side to do anything dumb until we get some answers here."
Something made the Yavin Turtle jump. A laser impact on the aft deflectors.
"They are shooting at us!" Tahiri protested.
"Just trying to rattle you," Anakin gritted, resisting the urge to adjust the shield angle and the power balance. The TIEs weren't likely to shoot the same place twice, and if they were trying to bring down a deflector, it would probably be good for one more hit. "They want to scare us, not blow us up..."
"I'd noticed," Tahiri sighed, flicking back blonde hair from her face. "So, do we just try to ignore them...?"
"Yeah," Anakin agreed, evening out his course, and reaching for the commlink switch. The Imperials could be dangerous, but he'd just play it calm, and they'd hopefully hold off rather than risk getting too close. Maybe even make mistakes. "You want a crash course in how to co-pilot a smuggler ship running away from bad guys?"
Tahiri glanced at the sensor scope. "Those four little returns are the TIEs, right?"
"Mmhm."
From the corridor, he could hear an argument back at the gun turret, his sister's voice and Lowie's Wookiee rumble. At least someone around here understands the problem.
"So, what do we do if they keep shooting at us?"
Anakin grinned at her. "Hang on..." A quick slalom on the sticks, as much as to throw off Jaina's aim as to dodge the shots from the four TIEs on their tail. "You see those four blue buttons - they steer the main deflector. Left, right, up, down." A slip-roll to the left, standing the freighter on its cockpit canopy and drives and deck gravity proetsting a little. "Try to keep the vertical line on the little display there somewhere centrally between the group of dots which reprisent the TIE Fighters, and feel free to move the box a little up or down if you feel like being creative."
Tahiri settled in his lap. "So I do the hard work? What are you doing?"
"I'm taking us into the cloud layer," he said, breaking towards Bespin. "TIE Fighters don't like thick atmosphere - they've got the aerodynamics of a rock, and their solar-gather power arrays can't get the energy they need. We ought to be able to outrun them, and shake their sensors."
"And stop your sister trying to shoot them down..."
"Exactly. If Cloud City is still under Lando's people, we can head there. They should have some E-wings we can borrow. If not, we find one of his smuggling platforms, and lie low..."
"So all we need to do is outrun all these TIEs, the Imperial command ship, and Grand Admiral Thrawn?"
There was a flash of pseudomotion, a line of light slashed across their bows, and another Imperial ship decelrated out of hyperspace directly in front of them, a neat orbital insertion on a vector that had cut around the shoulder of the gas giant, under the belly of Bespin's moons.
"Kriff."
It wasn't nearly as big as the Chimaera, but it looked a lot like a miniature Star Destroyer, with a dager-shaped hull, and tall control tower rising above three engines at the back. There were two weapons turrets on the flanks of the superstructure, and more guns projecting from recessed emplacements along the edges of the hull.
"Great," Jaina sighed. "Imperial frigate - a communications ship, I think."
"At least this one's smaller," Tahiri offered cheerfully, squinting out the viewports.
Anakin decided not to mention his suspicion that a frigate would be lot more dangerous in the Bespin clouds than TIE Fighters or a full-sized Star Destroyer. But the fact that the new arrival's turbolaser turrets hadn't started tracking towards the Turtle suggested that their appearance was a coincidence, and the Imperial command crew hadn't yet worked out what to do about the furball off their starboard bow. The perfect intercept revert position they'd arrived in was just the Force being disconcerting.
"Yeah. We need to get some cloud between their guns and us, though." He reached forward again, and opened his mouth to hail Bespin control, but the jolt of the next shot threw him off, and the noise from Fiver snapped his attention to something completely different. "What?"
"Translation?" Tahiri asked, sounding worried - picking up on his own concern.
"Let me see that." Anakin leaned across, tugged the display so he could read it, and then felt the instincts in his midriff drop suddenly through the deck beneath his boots. "Oh. Sith."
"What is it?" Tahiri was really worried, too, now. She leaned in, squinted at numbers she didn't understand. "What does it mean?"
"That's the date," Anakin sighed.
"IY45." She frowned. "That's not a date. Or if it is, it's about nine months before your sister was born..."
Anakin turned, and found her gaze, and blinked at her. "Yeah. That's exactly what I mean. That jolt that threw us out of hyperspace must've thrown us about twenty years backwards, too." Anakin paused, sensing the tension that had descended on Jaina and the Wookiee in the turret. "You two listening back there?"
Jaina's answer was to shoot through each of the pursuing TIEs.
Lowie gave a cry of anger, complex and defiant.
Tahiri had picked up the meaning of that particular Wookiee noise, and her eyes opened wide.
Unlike Anakin or Lowie, she'd never really had direct experience with Imperials, or even had stories about them from her childhood - as far as Anakin could think, the sum total of her encounter with the bad guys was a couple of run-ins with the small chorus line of fake stormtroopers Orloc had kept around for appearances; but everything was starting to make sense to her, too.
She looked at Anakin, and her eyes were bright and wonderful. "Right back into the time when the Empire ruled the Galaxy, you mean?"