Honor Among Thieves

“That it will.”

“Han,” Leia said from the corridor. He hadn’t heard her coming, but the tone of her voice was worrying. Quiet, and just a little frightened.

“What’s going on?” he asked, walking over to her. She gave Baasen a look, then gestured toward the cockpit with her head. Han followed her there, his own worry growing.

“No one can find the survey team,” she said when they were alone.

“Then they’re probably still in the Seymarti system. If it can kill hyperspace travel, could it block the relays, too?”

“Scarlet thinks it could, if Galassian’s figured out how to turn it on.”

“If he’s figured it all out, we wouldn’t have gotten here.”

Leia waved his reassurance away with an impatient gesture. “We know the Empire has the location. We know Galassian’s there. Our ships may have jumped into the middle of anything. It was just supposed to be a survey and scouting mission. The escort wasn’t armed for a full-scale conflict.”

“Okay,” Han said. “What do we do?”

Leia sat down, rubbing the bridge of her nose between her thumb and finger while she thought. Han dropped into the pilot’s chair and waited. He knew how much was riding on her decisions right now. If it had been up to him, he’d have taken Scarlet straight back to the rebel fleet, and Leia would have been killed on Kiamurr. It made his head hurt even to think about how close he’d come to a major blunder. And now maybe Luke was in even bigger trouble, and Leia had to weigh that against the needs of the whole Rebellion. Han didn’t envy her at all.

“I’ve contacted the Alliance. They agree that the possibility of this technology falling into the Emperor’s hands is too great a threat. A massive strike force is being assembled to assault Seymarti directly and take the relic if we can, destroy it if we can’t.”

“Sounds like they’re taking this seriously,” Han said. “If it does turn out to be a wild gundark chase, we’re all going to look pretty silly.”

“At these stakes, we can lose some dignity.”

Han shrugged. “What about Luke?”

“That’s the problem. General Rieekan says he can’t have the strike force ready for almost a week. And meanwhile Luke and the others may be trapped, or worse.”

“Then we’re going to get him, right?”

“You’d do that?” Leia asked, frowning. “Risk the Falcon to jump into a system we might not be able to jump back out of, filled with an unknown number of Imperial ships? You aren’t getting heroic on me, are you?”

Han raised his hands in mock surrender and grinned at her. “I don’t believe in heroes. Luke’s my friend. I don’t like the idea of leaving him there until some general decides the math is right.”

Leia stared at him for a moment, searching his face. Then she got up, but stopped at the hatch to say, “I’ll go tell the others.”

“Besides,” Han said, turning back to his console and starting the calculations for a jump to Seymarti, “Luke owes me a couple, and if I let him get killed, how can I collect?”

“There’s the Han I know,” Leia said to his back, but there was a smile in her voice when she said it.

Han sat quietly as the navigation computer finished figuring out the jump, watching the occasional smuggling ship bounce out of the system in a hyperjump or arrive suddenly in a spray of light and other energetic particles as they dropped out of hyperspace. Places like Trundalki would die instantly if the Empire could control hyperspace traffic. It was the kind of backwater outpost that survived only because there were people who needed a way station in a quiet corner of the galaxy. People like him. There were a thousand places just like it scattered across populated space. All of them waiting, all unaware, for the death sentence Seymarti might bring.

Voices drifted down the corridor to him. Leia, talking to the rest of the crew in the lounge. The voices laughed, Chewbacca’s loud honk mixing with the Bothan’s chittering and the various human sounds. Leia being funny, lightening the moment, getting everyone on the same team.

Another ship jumped out of the system. Han wished them a silent good luck, then almost fell out of his seat when he heard the sound of a throat being cleared behind him.

“You all right?” Leia asked. Han realized the laugh he’d heard must have been their meeting breaking up.

“Sure, just stretching a bit while I work,” Han said, then tapped on some controls to look like he was busy. He turned the water recycling system off, then on again. “Uh-huh, that’s just about done.”

“You finished with the calculations?” she asked.

“Yep, pretty much.”

She put a hand on his shoulder, leaning close. “Then punch it, fly-boy.”

THE SEYMARTI SYSTEM LAY ALONG the space lanes that led from the Core to the Inner Rim. Its sun was a small white star with a tendency to throw off flares massive enough to bathe its three closest planets in nuclear plasma. The fourth and fifth planets orbited beyond that, and then a cluster of four gas giants spun beyond them, each with a constellation of moons surrounding it. Jumping into the system behind the largest of these, Han could see the great smear of the galaxy. Billions of stars so far away that their light melted together into one great, unbroken band. On the display, the tactical computer drew out the planets and their orbits, the moons, the asteroids, the curving masses of high-energy ejecta from the star. Otherwise, the Falcon ran dark. Only the bare minimum of life-support and computational resources. If he’d done it right, they wouldn’t look like anything more interesting than a rock with a high concentration of metals.

“Nice placement, old friend,” Baasen said. “Just here, we’re in three different kinds of shadow.”

“Complex systems make for lots of cover,” Han said. “And more things to run into.”

“Trade-offs,” Baasen said. “Always trade-offs.”

Chewbacca moaned, gesturing toward the glowing planets and moons.

“Yeah, I see ’em,” Han said.

Leia ducked in behind them. The light from the display painted her in shades of red and black. “What’ve we got?” she asked.

“Passive sensors are picking up something in orbit around the fifth planet,” Han said. “We don’t have great resolution yet, but it’s about the right size for a Star Destroyer.”

Leia’s expression went grim. “Well, we knew there’d be something.”