Caught
"Shit, shit, shit, shit."
Janson muttered the refrain as he fired his thrusters, hovering over the starboard docking bay plating and engaging his sublights to push through the pressure seal on the bay doors. He repeated it over and over again, a kind of prayer for safety, for success, because—
Because shit was definitely about to hit the fan. The Executor was out there. Vader was out there.
"Rogue Four to Rogue Two, do we have an eye on the target?"
"Negative, Four," Wedge's voice came through the comm. "But we do have a heading."
Janson made a face though no one could see it. "A blind target?"
"We're the blind ones, Rogue Four," a female voice chimed in and it took a moment for him to place it as Salla Zend's.
Janson opened his mouth to respond with a smart remark but was interrupted by Solo's deep voice, calm and collected and a little pissed off always. "Rogues, Greens. We have orders to hold the line while Home One evacuates."
Hobbie's dour voice hopped into a new range of outright panic. "Who ordered the evac?"
"I did," a gruff, sharp voice chimed in and Janson recognized it immediately as Rieekan's. "Hold the line. Follow Commanders Skywalker and Solo's orders. Once Home One is clear, retreat to the evac heading being sent to your consoles now."
"General Rieekan, sir, we have not heard from Commander Skywalker," Janson argued. "He hasn't been seen since we got the scramble code from Antilles."
"Rogue Three to Home One, how do we know Rogue Leader is safe?"
"I have him," Solo said. "Kid's not in good shape but he's stable."
Janson pursed his lips, nervous. The Rogues were used to their commander being a kind of talisman; since he'd been named Rogue Leader they'd had minimal losses and had become something of an elite squadron. New Alliance pilots tested into the Rogues and they had a reputation within the motley assortment of rebels for getting the job done quickly, efficiently and with creative solutions. All that excellence stemmed directly from Skywalker.
But a Rogue Squadron without their commander? Without the hero of Yavin? Janson tried to shove down the worry but it persisted, cold and hard, in his gut.
"Home One to Green Leader, where is Pearl?"
Janson cocked an eyebrow at his comm and at the obvious worry in Rieekan's voice but disregarded it in favor of assessing the scene around him. He was clear of Home One's shadow and could now see the larger field; thirty-some ships fanned out along the port heading near Zone 266, a mixture of sleek X-wings and the Merc's mismatched flight of freighters and fighters and everything in-between. Staggered with an ever-expanding front line, ships added to the mix one-by-one. He also caught a glimpse of three spacecraft popping in and out of view a little further off, what he thought must be Wedge, Salla and the Falcon.
No one had given the order to engage, though, so the rest of the Rogues and Mercs waited.
"I got her, too," Han said. "We'll get them both to the rendezvous, Home One."
Wes blinked at that, wondered at the tone of Solo's voice, the way the hair on the back of his own neck rose.
"Rogue Four copies," Janson said. "Ready to follow your command, Green Leader."
—0—
Han muted the comm, took a deep breath and turned to his copilot. "Time for a plan," he murmured.
The Wookiee cocked his head to the side and shrugged, a helpless look on his face. I do not know, Cub. The Executor is a formidable foe.
"No kidding."
Han struggled to keep his wits about him. He could feel the full weight of the situation on his shoulders and scrambled to heft it with responsibility and calm. In truth he wasn't worried about his own performance; he'd fought Vader and won twice now. The black bastard wasn't invincible and there was no reason to think the Falcon was doomed out here, in the big nothing of Sector 266.
But this was Han's first real battle in command of others. A flash of anxiety, sinking into his bones, heavy. Had he done enough to prepare them? Had he focused on the right things? Would they die out here, sacrifice their lives to the goddamn altar of evil because he was cocky enough to think he could take charge of all of them, could adequately lead them through what was going to be a tough skirmish?
"We don't have to win," Leia whispered, so low Han almost didn't hear her. "We just need to cover the retreat."
He turned to her. "A little hope here, Princess. We can do better than that."
"No one can win against the Executor."
His temper flared, not against Leia herself but against her pessimism. The jaded soldier came out against horrible odds, tried-and-true. Only to him and a few others she trusted: to everyone else she was the paradigm of hope. And yet in the quiet of the Falcon's cockpit, as they watched the starfield full of danger, full of beta-blasts and tractor beams and deadly ion cannons, the last thing he needed was his cynosure losing faith.
"I can win against anything," he said and turned to the viewport. "How many TIEs are docked with her?"
Chewie growled, Over a hundred when she attacked Kashyyyk.
"Two flights," Leia corrected. "Closer to 150, according to our spies."
Han gritted his teeth. "But they aren't shooting at us yet. Just the one."
Give them time, Chewie muttered.
Something clicked in Han's brain, a question he hadn't known he'd had. "They aren't shooting at us," he muttered.
He jerked into action, thrust the Falcon into a hard dive, flipped through a gravity well and slingshotted through vacuum like a podracer around a curve.
What are you doing?! Chewie roared in surprise.
"Testing a theory," Han answered his copilot. "Rogue Two, Green Two, stick with me and stay close. Don't get more than a few meters off my flank."
Wedge and Salla each copied and Han set course straight into the heart of where he believed the original beta-blast had come from. He couldn't see him, but Han imagined Vader's TIE lurking in the darkness, waiting for the Falcon like a predator stalking its prey.
He hadn't imagined the beta-blast; he just hadn't realized what it meant. No one used a beta-blaster during an ambush, not unless the aim was not to destroy but to capture.
Luke and Leia, that's what Vader wanted.
You want them so bad? Han thought, a flicker of confidence lighting his pathway like a flame in the darkness. Come and get 'em.
Thirty seconds into the black and the first green beta-blasts swept over the Falcon like miniature asteroids. Han smiled. Dipping under the blasts, he easily swooped beneath the lasers with all the Falcon's grace and power.
"Gotcha," he muttered and keyed his comm.
—0—
"Green Leader to Greens and Rogues, hold the line. Do not engage. Repeat, do not engage."
Janson stared at his comm in incredulity. "Rogue Four to Green Leader, why the hell not?"
He had a good view of the starfield: below and to starboard of the center of the blockade line, with clear scopes and a strong visual. Energy mass signatures indicated that the source of the TIEs—a Star Destroyer at the very least by the looks of it—nestled in a gigantic gravity well. Behind him, Home One began to lumber off, slow and bumbling. The waves of gravitic disturbance had rocked Wes more than once as the cruiser retreated, displaced energy rocketing through the fleet.
"Because they're after me, not you," Solo said. "And the more of you that crowd me, the more likely it is someone gets blasted by accident."
And that was the most ludicrous thing Wes had heard all day. Apparently Hobbie thought so, too.
"Respectfully, Green Leader, that's bullshit."
Wes chimed in, "You can't take them all by yourself."
"I don't have to," Solo replied. "The second Home One jumps, we jump, too."
Wes' mouth gaped. "You're gonna get yourself killed, Green Leader. You and everyone on that bucket you're flying."
"And Rogue Two and Green Two," a voice Janson didn't recognize said. "Come off your ego, Green Leader."
"It's not his ego," a female voice said into the comm. "He knows what he's doing. Watch."
Janson watched through his scopes. To the naked eye, the gravity wells distorted the shapes and distances between the three small Alliance ships and whatever Imperial ships were hiding out there. The scopes designated Wedge, Salla and the Falcon as friendlies, and Janson watched breathless as their symbols popped into the top right of his screen. Three TIEs looped after them, quick and sure. Wincing, Janson sent up a prayer to Ghaldi, the Tanaabian god of mercy, as his beloved XO's X-wing came within easy firing distance of the TIEs.
"C'mon, man," Janson breathed, too soft to be picked up by the comm.
The Falcon climbed and in seconds Salla and Wedge did, too. It was a strange maneuver, opening their afts to fire, and Wes watched in horror as the Alliance ships climbed, steady and slow, clearly in range of the ion cannons he assumed were trained on him.
Wes switched the scopes, looking at energy signatures, expecting the ugly, glaring red of laserfire. A green beam shot from the TIE closest to the Falcon's aft instead, narrowly missing it as the old CEC freighter tipped into a dive with the quickest jerk Janson had ever seen. At the same moment, the two other TIES shot at Salla and Wedge, who respectively jinked to avoid them.
Janson exhaled. "What's wrong with the Imp lasers?"
"Rogue Ten to Rogue Four, it's something new. Maybe a kind of portable ion cannon?"
"Rogue Ten, that's stupid," Dak said. "TIEs can't have portable ion cannons! Ion cannons are bigger than four TIEs put together."
"So they shrunk them," Wes said, defending Hobbie like any good wingman would do. "R&D came up with something new and they're trying it out in the gravity wells to minimize their own losses."
"Green Six to all of Rogue Squadron, you're absolutely dense. Those are beta-blasts."
Janson scowled. "The hell are beta-blasts, Green Six?"
A different voice now, female and alien. "Green Fourteen here. Beta-blasts are what pirates use. They fry central droid brains but they don't destroy their targets."
"Pirates," Hobbie scoffed. "These aren't pirates! They're Imps! Look at all the TIEs."
Wes switched his scopes again, watched the Falcon swing broadside to a giant gravity well, her port flank disappearing in what he at first thought was a destructive blast of laserfire. The Falcon's flank reappeared a heartbeat later and Janson realized that the gravity well had disrupted his scope's display. He exhaled in relief as Wedge's X-wing reappeared along with the Starlight Intruder.
"They're not shooting to destroy, Rogues," Qiee said. "Trust us. We know pirate arms when we see them."
"They aim to capture," another Green pilot added.
A third voice chimed in. "Takes a Merc to spot a pirate."
Janson gritted his teeth, feeling a confusing mix of gratitude and annoyance at Green Squadron's quick pick-up of a new Imperial tactic. "Okay, Green Squadron. Do any of you geniuses know who they are trying to capture?"
The Greens quieted and Janson winced at the telling silence, at the crimson thread of their thoughts. There was only one person the Empire wanted so badly they would race across the galaxy on the findings of a single probe.
—0—
Luke Skywalker focused on breathing, focused on reality. He fought as his body was assaulted by dark shadows, as his mind was surrounded by inevitable defeat. He inhaled, tried to focus on the work of his lungs, exhaled, pushed back on the darkness that felt ready to swallow his soul.
He could feel the Falcon's medbunk beneath him, the straps that held him down. He knew that Chewie had carried him into the old freighter, knew that Han had strapped him in. The sweat on his brow prickled, the evasive maneuvering turning somehow distinguishable from his own tremors, the shaking that consumed him.
Something dire was happening outside of the Falcon's hulls.
But that was all secondary to the pressure in his brain, to the heavy weight that sat on his chest. Luke felt like he was being strangled by a psychic cloud, like the cells in his body were being squeezed so tightly that he feared he might implode in on himself. The shadows surrounded him, choked him, fought with him for the very oxygen in his lungs.
Ben! he tried, reaching for the essence of his old mentor. Ben, help me!
But Ben did not answer. All that Luke felt and heard was Vader: his dark stranglehold on the unseen universe around Luke. Pitch blackness. Empty, lifeless and cold.
He didn't want to move. He didn't want to do anything. His limbs would not work and it was all he could do to keep himself breathing.
What he could do, what he knew he could do, was keep the darkness at bay. Luke was being strangled, yes, but as long as Vader was focused on him, he would not be focused on anyone else. Luke couldn't move, but he could hold himself fast. He could counter the darkness within the bonds of his own body. And as long as Luke did that, he was helping.
You can't have me, he thought to the dark cloud. The light always defeats the dark.
You are not the only one, the darkness whispered back.
Luke struggled to understand the words, struggled to keep the dark with him. The thought slipped from him and he bore down on his own light. You can't have me, you can't have me, you can't have me—
"Go," he whispered, urging his friends to move, the ones who could fight the battle within the scope of the physical world. "Go."
—0—
Han was sweating and muttering curses under his breath, whipping through gravity well after gravity well with maniacal speed. His arms were shaking, the strain of flying through such a hazardous trajectory making his whole body ache. In theory, a jaunt around a bunch of gravity wells while playing with non-lethal beta-blasts was fun. A challenge. But the stakes were too high for sloppiness or a moment of wandering focus. This was the Empire. The blasts might not be fatal but the interrogation would be.
His worst nightmare had been realized. Vader had come for both Luke and Leia. He had known it would come to this, had told Leia so. He'd known since the Diagnostics had declared the probe to be of Imperial manufacturing.
And she hadn't listened.
So they'd fallen right into Vader's trap. Whatever he'd done to make Luke and Leia react the way they had had worked like a charm: Leia had told Han to go and that's what he'd done without hesitation, without really questioning why. Now, though, it felt like that instruction had come straight from a monster in a respiration mask. The Empire had laid a trap and Han had flown them right up to the Executor like an overeager smuggler on his first run for Jabba.
Han made a face and tried to banish that awful thought into the depths of his brain where it belonged. Not helpful. He could figure this out later once they'd survived this clusterfuck of a night.
Wiping his brow with his sleeve, he jerked the yoke into a nosedive that tugged at his torso like an enormous magnet. Flipping between and through gravity wells was tricky business and left him unsure what his goal even was, beyond surviving long enough for Home One to hit lightspeed. The constant, hair-trigger decisions that were keeping them moving were bound to fail at some point.
Han didn't know how much longer he could hold Vader off.
"Rogue Two to Green Leader, I'm starting to lose it," Wedge said. "Getting sloppy."
Han grimaced. "Hang in there, Rogue Two."
"Go ahead, get sloppy," Salla said, though Han could hear the line of worry in her voice. "You'd be making room for me on the Rogue roster."
Han dove beneath the edges of a particularly nasty gravity well, cut power and let the TIE on his tail flail past him and reappear clear on the other side of the zone. "Rogue Leader will kill me if you kick it, Rogue Two," he said, trying to help Wedge as much as he could.
"Wasn't planning on kicking it, Green Leader," Wedge said. "But this isn't sustainable. One of us is bound to get—ah, kriff—bound to get hit sooner or later."
Han winced to see the bright flash of green just off Wedge's wing. "I think you're right," he muttered.
Home One is nearly out of the perimeter, Chewie announced. Two minutes until she jumps.
"You hear that, Rogue Two? Two minutes."
"Copy, Green Leader," Wedge said.
Han exhaled, chanced a look to Chewie before he took the Falcon into another gravity well. "Don't know how we do this, buddy," he said."Two minutes is a long time."
He turned another look to Leia, saw a beautiful, unfathomably strong woman with eyes trained on the viewport, her lips pressed together in a tight line. He felt his chest crack open. Can I keep her safe? He shouldn't have brought her on board, should have taken her to Rieekan. Luke, too. He was out of his depth here, fighting a war he couldn't see against an enemy he didn't understand.
But in the moment it had felt important to keep them with him. In a galaxy that was cruel, heartless, where decency failed on a regular basis and it was easy to think good had died a long time ago, he'd always trusted himself. He'd been raised—or maybe not raised so much as hit the ground running—to trust his instincts and his abilities. The safest place his people could be were with him. Period.
He'd move mountains for them; for Leia and Luke and Chewie. And he'd do this, too, even in service to a mystical energy field he couldn't see. He blew out his breath and narrowed his eyes, ready for the fight ahead. One minute and fifty seconds. He could do this.
"Wait," Leia said, just as Chewie growled under his breath.
"What?" Han asked them both.
Little Jedi says—
"Go into the cloud," Leia finished.
Han quirked an eyebrow to his copilot but already knew they would follow the orders, would fly into the same dense electromagnetic cloud that they'd flown through the day before, where the probe had lain in wait for them to stumble on it. The cloud that had made a mess of the Merc's nav systems, the cloud that had nearly decapitated Salla.
Was that crazy? Hell yes, it was. Most pilots spent a career avoiding such high-stakes situations like an interference field that could pound them into dust if they weren't careful.
But he wasn't most pilots.
"Heads up, Green Two, Rogue Two," Han said into the mic, readying himself for another challenge. "We have a new plan."
—0—
"Green Leader to Home One," Solo's voice blared from the starboard comm array next to Carlist Rieekan's hip.
Carlist turned weary eyes to the comm as a reprieve from staring at the nav console on the other side of the bridge. Watching digits click down and knowing the Executor could pop out of its gravity well at any moment to kill them all. Ackbar stood on the bridge, stiff and somber; Dodonna was further aft in the control center for starfighter command. Everyone knew their role, efficiency drummed into Alliance members because they had nothing else to offer except pure, fleet-footed defense.
As for Carlist, the Alderaanian had offered himself as liaison between Solo and the Home One command staff. His reputation didn't concern him: it hadn't since everyone and everything he loved had been annihilated two years ago. He had approved the evacuation on a spur-of-the-moment hunch and had been right in that assessment. Whatever this ambush was, it hadn't gone as the Imperials had planned and the fact that Home One had sustained no damage so far was an unexpected windfall. The hammer would drop, he was sure, but until then he'd have some faith.
And as part of that faith, he would support his people. Green and Rogue Squadrons were under his command. The fact that the executive officers of both squadrons had run off on some hairbrained, nonsensical mission didn't concern him so much as the knowledge that all of those good people would resort to sacrifice if it came to it.
And while there was little that could shake him after his homeworld's demise, losing the princess would destroy him. It was a simple fact.
"Go for Home One," he answered.
Solo's voice was strained through the comm. "We're going into the electromagnetic interference field, vector 6300-A."
Carlist glanced back to the nav-board, seeing the jump-point numbers entering the last one-and-a-half-minute mark.
"I copy, Green Leader. We are under two minutes to jump. Can you last that long out there?"
He'd seen the reports from yesterday, the danger of the cloud. Lieutenant Zend had lost power to her cockpit for nearly ninety seconds and the chances of that happening again were incalculable. They hadn't known the cloud had existed at that time; perhaps it was some movement of the gravity wells had created it. Space dust and spare particles whizzing through gravity abnormalities at the speed of light? A long-lost planetary body from eons ago? Whatever its cause, it posed unique problems to the three intrepid vessels taking the brunt of the Imperial ambush and he wanted—needed—to know that Solo knew what he was doing.
"Our onboard mystic is giving the order," Solo replied. "Seems pretty sure that's where we need to be."
Carlist puzzled at onboard mystic for a moment before he realized Solo meant Skywalker. "We might lose comm contact with you out there."
They just plain didn't know. The cloud's rapid formation and changing properties seemed like an enormous risk, considering Home One's proximity and vector for escape.
"Carlist," Solo said, the edge of anger creeping into his tone. "Vader's after someone on this ship. It's the only reason for the beta-blasteers. And at some point the logical thing for him to do is turn his sights on you to force our hand. They follow us, they stay away from Home One. Simple."
Carlist stood stock-still, aware of cautious eyes on him. But the needs of the many took precedence over the few and his choice wasn't really a choice. Please keep her safe, he prayed.
"Copy," he said. "You have approval. Clear skies, Green Leader."
—0—
Vader turned off his targeting computer. He'd never liked using it when in the cockpit and he didn't need the sensors or the alarms anyway. What use was it if he already knew what it was about to tell him? The Force had so much more to give him than any piece of electronics ever had.
Almost, he projected to the newborns in front of him.
They were a cloud of movement and anxiety in the Force, so bright and clear they astounded him with their potency. The old freighter was aglow with it, powerful beyond anything but his own presence in the Force. Organa was a tempest of flurry and function, but she didn't seem to have the same kind of laser-clear reception that the boy did. Vader couldn't connect as well to her; he assumed it was because Skywalker was his son, though that was pure speculation on his part. It wasn't as if the Jedi had done a great deal of research between Force-sensitive fathers and sons in their day.
One of the many things he now wanted to know.
The freighter changed heading and Vader watched with detached fascination as it seemed to speed in a direct line. Suspicious, considering this confrontation with the Millennium Falcon had been primarily one of chase and escape. Clearly they wanted him to follow.
He did the math, looking at what he stood to gain and what he could sense in the Force around him. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, nothing seemed to warn him against following the three ships. And the Force would warn him—he commanded it to warn him—if this was some sort of trap.
"On me," he ordered his two best TIE pilots and they followed the Alliance gambit, whatever that might be. Almost, he projected. Almost.
—0—
Han blinked twice and forced himself to focus. One minute and forty seconds until Home One could jump. He had to keep Antilles, Salla and everyone aboard the Falcon alive for one minute and forty seconds before he could hit lightspeed. With a grim press of his lips, he set his internal clock—his natural ability to keep track of the passage of time—by watching the Falcon's atomic display. The internal and external rhythms meshed and the seconds became data in his muscles, marrow in his bones, caught in the breath of his lungs.
One minute thirty-eight seconds.
"Rogue Two, Green Two, fan out. Stay close enough for me to see you, but take care of the wingmen for me."
"Copy, Leader," said Salla.
"Rogue Two copies," Wedge answered. "You better know what you're doing, Solo."
The X-wing and the Intruder veered off in a lazy diagonal to the Falcon's heading. Salla curved downward and Wedge went up; competent pilots, the both of them, working through dimension like experienced fighters in their own right. He felt a flicker of pride, not because of their training—both of them had far more experience outside of his command than in it—but because they trusted him enough to follow orders that probably sounded insane.
Little Jedi is not saying anything, Chewie rumbled.
"Now he shuts up?" Han said, though there was no bite in his words. He had no idea what Luke was dealing with back there. Given the opportunity, he'd take the helm every time.
Turning to check on Leia, he found her sitting quietly, alert and aware, eyes trained on the viewport in front of her. She found his eyes and sent him a quick nod.
Licking his lips, he nodded once, and then turned back to the controls. "Slow and steady," he ordered Chewie. "Let's keep him interested but not too close."
Chewie grumbled a reply and Han focused on their vector into the cloud. Yesterday they had stumbled onto it by accident; now that he knew the danger it posed, he kept his eyes open and trained. The enemy in this interference field wasn't physical so much as a constant battle against electromagnetic pockets and waves of radiation that seemed to be undetectable to the average ship and the abnormalities of the gravity wells didn't help, either. The cloud in Zone 266 was a murky cesspool of hidden horrors and knowing about it did nothing to dim the raging firelight of stress in Han's gut.
The Falcon slipped beneath a gravity well—one they only registered because of a slight ripple in the darkness—and Han noted the one minute thirty second mark until Home One jumped. He checked the aft sensors, saw Vader's TIE coming up on him. A second later a single green beam shot out beneath the Falcon's belly and Han swung into evasive maneuvers, jinking to starboard to avoid it.
"Watch for the wells," he warned Wedge and Salla. "And the interference fields."
"No shit," Wedge called out. "How did you do this yesterday?"
Salla gave a hoarse, mirthless laugh. "No one was shooting at us yesterday."
"It's like flying through a—"
Wedge's voice cut off suddenly and the X-wing disappeared from Han's scopes. His stomach dropped and he heard Chewie exhale in a rush.
"Rogue Two?" he called.
Han's sensors crackled and a sharp whine echoed through the Falcon's cockpit, similar to what they'd experienced the day before: a sure indication that they had breached the edge of the interference field. Screeching, the tell-tale alarm of electromagnetism hit the very center of his brain like knives.
"Wedge!" Han called again, yelling to be heard over the din. "Where the hell are you, buddy?"
"He's in a pocket," Salla answered him, even as her own controls screeched around her. "A—a bubble? Some kind of gravity disturbance, I dunno. I got a visual on him."
"Is he alive?"
"Copy, Leader. He's in one piece."
Han didn't allow himself a celebration and instead toggled the alarm disable patch. There was nothing he could do about the environmental or electrical systems but at least he could override the proximity alarms. "Where's his pursuit?"
"I think Wedge pulled a Cranker's Switch," she replied. "His TIE isn't on the scopes."
Han dove to avoid another green beam, narrowly missing his sensor dish by centimeters. "Keep an eye on him and watch yourself."
Salla grunted into the comm and then copied as she swung out of sensor range, too.
One minute. He had to keep them with him for one more minute. "Okay," he murmured to himself, then louder he said, "Chewie, can you find where we had to pick up Salla last time?"
Chewie rumbled in the affirmative, already catching onto Han's plan.
Leia's voice was quiet. "Where her system was fried?"
Han shrugged. "You got a better plan, Worship?"
The nickname was broken off by a sudden jerk to port in order to avoid another close-cut beta-blast. Vader was coming in hot with that shit, Han realized. The cannon seemed to be able to fire quite a few blasts in succession, an improvement on the old pirate model Han was familiar with.
Another blast, this time so close to the Falcon's aft that the lights in the cockpit went out for a millisecond before the effects wore off.
Forty-five seconds.
"Fuck," he said, and threw them into a corkscrew just to get some distance from the TIE. "Fuck, fuck, fuck."
Systems back online, Chewie roared over the noise of the alarms. But another direct hit and—
"I know, I know," Han said, distracted. "Where're my coordinates, Chewie?"
"This isn't working," Leia said. "He's going to clip us."
He ignored her. Thirty-nine seconds. "Now, Chewie."
He flipped the Falcon, cut power in a split second, half a breath, as the TIE shot past them with a whine loud enough to be heard over the alarms. Unfortunately, Vader was already on to the deceit and cut acceleration just past the Falcon, forcing Han to peel away to port to avoid a collision. The TIE was closer now, the green beams shooting right and left, on his tail like gnats on a carcass.
"Oh, goddess," Leia murmured behind him. "This isn't going to work—"
"Chewie!" Han yelled, at his wit's end, his heart beating so loud in his ears that he could feel it in his head, against his ribs, his lungs, beating too fast to be healthy. Thirty seconds.
The Wookiee rumbled. On your console now.
Han looked down briefly to see the display, nodded to himself, and pressed the accelerator to max capacity. "Come on," he whispered. "Come on."
The Falcon raced to the coordinates Chewie had sent into the nav computer, quick as she ever was, but Vader's TIE held fast, maintaining distance, and Han struggled against the nav computer to jink and juke out of the way of the beta-blasts, frequent and terrifyingly close. Han was sure a lesser pilot would have been hit by now; it was taking all his considerable piloting prowess to stay ahead of the Dark Lord.
The TIE clung to the Falcon's tail like a being possessed. Beta-blasts shone through the canopy, hot like fire through the glare shield, and he briefly caught sight of the Intruder as a TIE exploded just ahead of her.
He toggled his comm "Green Two, get Rogue Two and jump," he said.
"Negative, Green Leader," Salla interrupted before he finished the last word.
Han shook his head though she couldn't see it. "Twenty seconds, Green Two."
"No—"
"Salla!" he yelled as another beta-blast shot from the TIE, wide, nowhere near the Falcon. "Get the hell out of—"
The lights cut out in the Falcon's cockpit. The hum of the thrusters was silenced and their acceleration stopped so suddenly that Han was thrown into the console in front of him. The alarms ceased with an ominous clunk and what was left was a cold, tumbling mess of nothing so startlingly fast that Han wasn't sure that the wide beta-blast hadn't actually hit them. The comms, the displays, everything was dark. He couldn't see anything or anyone except the darkness of the viewport in front of them, unchanging and unhelpful.
Han's breath left him in a rush as he instinctively looked to his copilot even though he couldn't see him. "Where is he?"
Chewie's response was lackluster, the Wookiee equivalent of a human shrug.
"You think the cloud shorted us out?" Leia asked from the back, leaning forward with her hands on Chewie's chair. "Not a beta-blast?"
"Hopefully," he answered her. "Ten seconds until Home One can jump."
In point of fact he didn't know. One of two things was about to happen. Either the Executor would use her tractor beam to tow them into her docking bays after Vader relayed their location and their status as victim to the beta-blasts.
Or their instrumentation would pop to life in a matter of seconds as Salla's had the day before.
Leia sucked in a breath. "That's a big gamble," she whispered, though it felt loud in the hush of the cockpit.
Five, four, three...
"Yeah, well," he muttered, distracted.
Two.
One.
Home One had cleared to jump the system. Without scanners or comms, he didn't know for sure that they had—any number of unforeseen problems might have arisen; battles had a nasty habit of going off-script—but at the very least he knew Vader wasn't out there messing with the larger fleet.
And without comms, he didn't know if Salla and Wedge had jumped, either, and that bothered him, too. Salla was stubborn but she wasn't an idiot. The Intruder and Wedge's X-wing were free of the TIEs and could figure out how to get out of the system. They were two of the brightest minds in the Alliance, for fuck's sake.
But he didn't know, and that ate at him. He could do nothing, say nothing, until he knew whether the beta-blast had got him or if the interference field had. All he could do was sit and wait.
A collectively anxious group, Han, Chewie and Leia held their breath. Watching for flickers on the instrumentation, a hum from the engines, anything to signal that the Falcon would rev to life as the Intruder had the day before. The waiting was interminable, endless.
Han's heart pounded in his chest like a doomsday drum.
C'mon, baby, Han thought, lost in the darkness. Come back to me.
Counting up the time until they knew the result of their gambit brought a new use for his internal clock. Ten seconds. Twenty. Thirty. They ticked by in razor-sharp clicks, almost worse than the subtle notes of the countdown for Home One's jump.
A minute.
No bright blue light of a tractor beam. No light at all. Just terrifying, soul-crushing blackness outside the viewport as the Falcon tumbled in a lifeless, lazy spin.
A minute and ten seconds. How long had Salla been down? A minute? Two?
"Is Luke talking?" he asked Chewie, desperate to fill the quiet. Luke had come in handy with his mumbo-jumbo and he'd been the one to suggest the cloud in the first place. Surely he had some wisdom now, when it was so desperately needed—
No.
A minute and twenty seconds.
Han turned to Leia. "Do you… can you tell? Was Vader disabled by the cloud, too?"
That was the other pressing question. If Han's gambit had worked, then Vader would have hit the cloud just milliseconds after the Falcon had. Out of sheer stubbornness and ingenuity, Han and Chewie had been working on the Falcon's cold-start engines for years now, tuning and updating and creating a system that could roar to life quicker than any model on the market. The few seconds head-start would give them the advantage; if Vader had hit the cloud after them, they could cold-start and jump before the bastard even knew what was happening.
But that was a lot of ifs.
Leia didn't answer him. Her eyes were far away, focused but somehow not available to him, her mind light-years away.
One minute and thirty seconds and nothing.
Chewie growled low in his throat, concerned, and Han nodded, unsure he could trust himself to say anything. It suddenly felt like they were absolutely alone, the pilot and the copilot of the Millennium Falcon vulnerable and so godlessly alone that they could very well perish out here. Luke wasn't talking. Leia wasn't talking.
A minute and forty-five seconds and he started to despair. They were waiting on the Executor to find them. Would they kill him and Chewie on the spot before taking Luke and Leia? Would they be captured, too, interrogated for information? He knew what interrogation looked like, had seen the scars on Leia's skin from her time as Vader's prisoner on the Death Star.
Two minutes.
Two minutes and fifteen seconds.
Two minutes and thirty seconds.
This is it, he thought. This is how it ends.
Leia exhaled in a rush, piercing the silence like blaster whine. "Han," she said and he turned to her with defeated eyes, unsure if he had anything left to give her. What could he say now, when everything was hopeless? Three minutes and the Falcon had not restarted. It was like sitting in one's own coffin.
I'm sorry, he wanted to say. I'm sorry I took us out here. I'm sorry we didn't have more time—
"Get ready," Leia said.
Han opened his mouth, her words unexpected and inexplicable, but was silenced by a very small, very quiet beep.
He twisted to scan his console, his breath leaving him. That sounded like … it might have been the—
One lone, blinking red light under the heading of Quick-Start Engines. In the dark, in the nothingness, it was like pressure in vacuum. A life-line. It blinked twice, three times, and Han's jaw clenched in desperate, ringing hope.
Three minutes and fifteen seconds since they'd lost power, since that red light disappeared with the rest of them, since the cockpit had been drowned in darkness.
Han waited. A breath. Two. Barely able to contain the frantic rhythm of his heart.
With a whine and an explosion of color, the console flickered to life. Reds and blues appeared around him like fireworks, like the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen. A low whine, getting louder, loud enough to feel. A cough of engines and then the beautiful, beautiful, beautiful feeling of thrusters, compensators, the yoke resurrected like the old Corellian myth of Ignok the Terrible...
His hands were a blur. He didn't know what he was saying, or even if he was saying anything at all, but he was drowning in sensation, in sights and sounds that he couldn't take in. He engaged the thrusters and they hummed, they danced, they responded like skin to his touch. He heard Chewie roaring in triumph but he didn't have space to understand Shyriiwook at the moment, heard Leia's heavy breathing but that was too much, too.
Three minutes and twenty seconds after they had been suddenly jerked to a stop, the sublights kicked in and the Falcon sped out of the cloud. She was rough to handle, clearly still asleep in some vital areas, but she was trying, she was moving, she was lit up like life itself and he had never been more grateful.
He jerked the yoke around in a wide vector away from the cloud. His scanners were still struggling to come online, so he looped around to check the Falcon's former coordinates. There, tumbling and adrift, was a lone TIE, only illuminated by the Falcon's distance lights. Nothing shone back at Han.
"He's fried," Han murmured.
Leia reached through the space between Han and Chewie's seats, toggled the sluggish comm. "Millennium Falcon to Green Two, Rogue Two. Do you copy?"
Static answered her and Han took that as all the confirmation he needed.
"Millennium Falcon to Home One, do you copy?"
More static. Han blew out his breath and gunned the Falcon's accelerator like a madman, putting distance between the cloud and the Executor with spectacular speed.
They hit open space and Han's hand was on the hyperdrive lever within seconds. With a tight fist he pulled it towards himself, waiting with bated breath for the pinprick beauty of the starfield to turn into sharp lines of distorted light. Once more, he was thrown into his seat as the Falcon hurtled through time and space, as the Empire was left behind, as the hopelessness bled from him in giant, rolling gasps...
And then Han finally, finally, took a deep breath.
Author's Note: this one goes out to the anonymous reviewers, the people who are nameless but who I know just as assuredly as anyone else. I wish I could PM you individually because there is so much gratitude I have for your kind reviews and I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. But as anonymity is priceless, too, I'll respect you enough to simply say thank you.
And then, too, thank you to AmongstEmeraldClouds, who is my partner in this endeavor and helps to shape each and every chapter to its gleaming professionalism. Thank you so much!
Chapter 7 will be posted Wednesday, April 1st! Be well and wash your hands! -KR
