Honor Among Thieves

  “I’ll get back where I belong, then,” Han said.

  “I know the danger’s real,” Scarlet said. “And more than that? She knows it is. I respect that you want to protect us both, but you need to trust me. And her. These are risks we have to take.”

  “You don’t need to tell me about taking risks,” Han said, standing up. “Taking risks is what I do best.”

  “I know,” Scarlet said. “It’s why we need men like you on our side.”

  “Damn right you do,” Han said, the words a little less powerful than he’d meant them to be. He stood for a moment. “Are you teasing me?”

  A glimmer came to Scarlet’s eyes. “Absolutely not. And I promise as soon as I hear anything important, I’ll make sure you know. Peace?”

  “Of course, peace,” Han said, tugging his vest into trim. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “All right then.” Scarlet stood up, too. “I should get back to work.”

  “I’ll be at the ship. For what it’s worth, you’re really dressed nicely.”

  “I’m really dressed appropriately,” she said.

  “Okay, now I know you’re teasing me.”

  She laughed and stepped out into the milling crowd. Han hovered for a moment, trying to catch Leia’s eye, but she and the Phindian were deep in conversation. Han made his way to the exit, out through the conclave hive, and into the streets. The night air was cool, and the narrow strip of stars above him gave little natural light to the setting. He itched to be out of the city, off Kiamurr, and anywhere that a massive attack force of Imperial fighters wouldn’t be anytime soon. An old woman driving an even older cargo droid hailed him. The droid’s lift arms had been fitted out with a rough couch. He handed her a few credits and sat on the worn, broken cushions, and in a moment the droid was lumbering through the dim streets. A flock of night birds flew by, their wings rustling in the dark air. Han sighed and opened a connection to the Millennium Falcon. Chewbacca answered it with a long, guttural howl of complaint.

  “I’m on my way,” Han said.

  The Wookiee howled.

  “Well, do you see a massive clot of ships trying to get out of here? No, she didn’t tell them.”

  Chewbacca wailed.

  “Yes, there’s a problem. There’re always problems. It’s nothing we can’t handle,” Han said, then dropped the connection. “I hope.”

  Fifteen

  “Well,” Han said with a sigh, “here’s our problem.”

  The torpedo that had carried the tracking device onto the Falcon had cut through the hull and embedded itself in a secondary coolant pump. Thick ropy tangles of congealed cooling fluid stretched across the cramped space around it. Several electrical systems had shorted as the conductive slime grounded them out. A tertiary power cable for the aft shield generator had been cut neatly in two by the head of the torpedo.

  Chewbacca growled and waved one hairy paw at the mess.

  “Yeah, buddy, I hear you,” Han said. He pulled a cutting torch out of his toolbox and crouched next to the missile.

  Chewbacca huffed and shook his head.

  “Well,” Han said, “yeah, if there’s also a warhead, it might go off. But I’m sort of betting there isn’t. If Baasen wanted us dead, why bother with the tracker? I figure he wants us whole for Jabba.”

  The torch sparked to life, and Han started cutting off the tip of the torpedo. The edges of the cut glowed white with heat, droplets of liquid metal falling to the decking and cooling to red. When the tip of the missile rolled away without exploding, Han pointed and said, “See? Told you so.”

  Chewbacca, who had backed out of the small compartment and was peering around the corner of the hatch, chuffed out an agreement and came back in to pick it up.

  The work went slowly and systematically for several more hours as they cut the rest of the torpedo out. When Han found the tracking device in its guts—a small unit no larger than his two balled fists together—he smashed it with a hammer. Chewbacca carried the irreparable pieces to the ramp and tossed them outside, where a multi-limbed scrap droid picked them up and trundled off with them.

  When that was done, they started patching the hull. Leia’s people had scrounged up a few square meters of decent plating, so Chewbacca began cutting the raw metal into the right shapes while Han welded them into place. Smoke and the stink of hot alloy filled the air. Sweat rolled down his back, making his clothes stick to his skin. The compartment was cramped, hot, filled with almost unbreathable air, and after the ballroom, it was where Han Solo finally felt comfortable.

  Leia could make her way through both worlds. She could be at home in a soldier’s uniform or a formal gown. She could wield a blaster or a diplomatic speech. If the last few weeks had taught Han anything, it was that he didn’t belong in the civilized part of her world. His place was in the bowels of the Falcon, or the pilot’s seat. Of all the smugglers, pirates, and criminals he’d known in his years living outside the law, the ones who survived were the ones who knew their place. The ones who developed pretensions of respectability usually wound up getting eaten alive by a society they didn’t ever really fit into.

  Han ran a weld down a long plate of hull patch, then inspected his work. Smooth, straight, airtight. It felt good to be in a place where he knew what he was doing.

  “Ready for that next piece, Chewie,” he said, holding out his hand. There was no reply. He pulled off his goggles and turned around. Chewbacca was gone.

  “Blast it.” Han climbed to his feet and stomped off into the corridor. He yelled, “Where’d you go? We’re not done here!”

  He turned the corner into the lounge and found Chewbacca standing with Scarlet. She’d changed out of her gown and into a pair of snug black pants and a dark gray top. She was wearing the belt covered with the tools of her trade, and she’d added a compact blaster in a quick-draw-style holster. Her hair was still up in a bun with sticks pushed through it, though with the new outfit the style looked functional rather than elegant.

  “What’s all this?” Han asked.

  Chewbacca started to growl out an explanation, but Scarlet cut him off. “You’re not done? What’s not done? Please tell me the Falcon can fly.”

  Han shrugged. “Got a sliced power cable, but I’ve capped off the coolant leak until we can replace it. Hull’s patched. She can fly. You two finally come to your senses?” Without waiting for an answer, Han handed the torch and goggles to Chewbacca. “See if you can get that cable spliced while we’re waiting for Her Worshipfulness to get on board.”

  Chewbacca took the tools with a growl and headed off. Han began mentally going through the list of rendezvous points for reconnecting with the rebel fleet.

  “Hunter Maas has jumped in system,” Scarlet said.

  “Great. And the Imperial fleet?”

  “Not yet.” Taking a seat at the dejarik table, Scarlet pulled out a datapad and called up a hologram of a ship. “He’s flying in this. We need to go get him and escort him back.”

  Han sat down with her, swiping his hand through the air to kill the hologram. “Why does he need an escort?”

  “Because,” she said, “I need to make sure we’re the only party he speaks to about selling his data. You fly out, make sure he lands at the dock we want him to, and Leia and I will be waiting for him there. We can’t let this turn into a bidding war. And the sooner we get it, the sooner the evacuation can start.”

  “Well, now you’re talking something close to sense. Do we have any reason to think he’ll do what I tell him to?”

  “Be persuasive,” Scarlet said with just a hint of a smile.

  Han frowned to keep himself from smiling back. “This is coming from Leia? This is what she wants?”

  “It’s what needs to happen,” Scarlet said, the smile vanishing. “So go do it.”

  “Hey, I have one boss, sweetheart,” Han said, tapping his own chest, “and as far as I’m concerned—”

  “Call when you’re coming back,” she sa
id, standing up. “I’ll give you a dock assignment then. Don’t screw this up, Solo.”

  “Don’t—” he started, but she was already leaving.

  Chewbacca wandered back into the room, the smoking welder in one big paw. He cocked his head to one side and howled out a question.

  “I am really starting to dislike the level of bossiness hanging with these rebels entails,” Han said. “I thought Leia was bad.”

  The Falcon’s reactor wound up with a hum so high-pitched it was almost subliminal, then cycled back down with a sound like grinding gears.

  For the third time.

  The knowledge that Scarlet was down in the dock’s viewing area watching as he vainly tried to get his ship off the ground made each successive failure a little more humiliating.

  “It’s got to be a short,” he said to Chewbacca. For the third time. “It’s the only thing that makes sense. Are you sure you scraped all the gunk out of the cabling?”

  Chewbacca growled back dangerously.

  “Then it’s got to be that tertiary power cable splice.” Chewbacca rumbled out another terse reply. “Yes, I know I was the one who did that. We can sit here all day assigning blame, or we can fix it.”

  Chewbacca stared at him for several long seconds.

  “I have to stay up here! Someone has to be in the pilot’s seat to monitor and test.”

  Chewbacca got up and headed to the back of the ship without a word. The comm came to life with a hiss, and Scarlet said, “Are you pouting? Or does your ship not work.”

  “I don’t pout,” Han said, aware that actually having to say those words out loud automatically made them a lie. “Just need to finalize something and we’ll be heading right out.” He shut his mouth before so stop watching could sneak out.

  Chewbacca growled from the back of the ship, and an indicator on Han’s panel shifted from yellow to white. The reactor came on with a smoothly rising whine and stayed on. A few moments later the Falcon lifted off the dock, not a warning light in sight.

  Flying up off the planet was like watching the universe come into being, stars unfolding as the tops of the mountains fell away. The small, ruddy moon hung on the horizon, and then drifted behind them as Han angled the Falcon out of the atmosphere to where he could safely bring the throttle up to full.

  Han was scanning the space around Kiamurr, looking for Maas’s ship, when Chewbacca walked back into the cockpit and plopped into the copilot’s chair. The Wookiee growled at him for a minute, waving his big paws around angrily.

  “Don’t I know it, Chewie,” Han said, then shifted the scan to a new vector and started over. “When did we go from having no boss to everyone being our boss? This Hark character isn’t even a princess. You can forgive royalty for acting like the universe owes them something, but Scarlet’s just a spy. Where does she get off?”

  Chewbacca burbled out a reply while he worked on the damage control, double- and triple-checking the various systems they’d just repaired.

  “Take my word for it, buddy, there’s gonna be trouble there eventually,” Han said. “You put two stiff-necked women like that in proximity to a good-looking guy like me? Sooner or later, it comes to blows.”

  Chewbacca looked at him out of the corner of one eye and barked a laugh.

  “Hey, I’m just giving you the heads-up. You don’t want to be anywhere nearby when that reactor pile goes hot.”

  Chewbacca turned his chair toward Han and opened his mouth, but whatever he was about to say was lost when a console alert sounded. The Falcon had found a fast-moving light freighter headed their direction. Chewbacca swiveled back to his console and started scanning the new contact. He barked out the info as it came up.

  “Moving awful fast for a YU-four-ten,” Han replied. “Those things usually drive like garbage scows.”

  A few moments later, the reason became clear. The YU-410 model Corellian freighter was typically slow moving and heavily armed. Someone had stripped off most of the armaments and beefed up the drive. It had a single laser cannon turret instead of the usual four, and the one it had could only fire forward. Fast moving, its armaments pointing forward, it had been refitted from a freighter into a predator. He’d seen a thousand ships like it, and not one of them had been made for respecting the law.

  “That’s got to be our boy,” Han said. “Let’s get over alongside him and introduce ourselves.”

  Chewbacca ramped up power to the drive to close the distance as quickly as possible. Han warmed up the Falcon’s concussion missile tubes, just in case. People had a tendency to listen more closely to your arguments when you’d just flattened their ship’s shields.

  The big YU-410 came straight at them, heading toward Kiamurr at maximum speed. Chewbacca plotted them a looping course that would put the Falcon alongside the other freighter as it passed by. Han pulled on his headset and started hailing the other ship. The only reply was static.

  “Huh,” he said, “it’s almost like someone is jamming them—”

  A large energy blast hit the stern of the YU-410, lighting up its shields and sending crackling bolts cascading across its hull. When the light show was over, the YU-410 was still flying, though it looked as if the rear hull plating had taken some damage.

  “Chewie, get us over there. I’m going to try to cut that jamming. See if you can lock onto whoever’s shooting our friend.”

  Chewbacca growled out a reply and sent the Falcon diving at the YU-410 at full speed. Han began cycling the communications controls, dumping more power into his broadcast and trying to force his signal through the jamming field. After a few moments of work, he was rewarded with a tenuous connection. A faint voice said, “Hello? Who is calling Hunter Maas?”

  “This is Captain Han Solo, of the Millennium Falcon. I’ve been sent to make sure you get safely to a dock on Kiamurr.”

  “You,” said the voice, “are doing a terrible job.”

  Han’s mouth shut with a click.

  “Be there in a second,” he said, then shut off the headset microphone. “Chewie, get us over there before this guy makes me want to watch him die.”

  A new alert began flashing on the console as the Falcon found the pursuing ship and locked on. “Great,” Han said. “Imperials.” He’d hoped against hope that the ship chasing Maas was a jealous rival, or a pirate, or really anything but the first sign that the Imperial fleet was on its way.

  The Imperial ship looked like a TIE fighter, which was bad. Han began scanning the sky for the carrier that had brought it. The real threat would be whatever ship the TIE had jumped in on. But after several seconds of scanning, the Falcon found nothing.

  “Try to put us between that freighter and the TIE,” Han said to Chewbacca, and the Wookiee growled out an affirmative. “And angle the rear deflectors. We’ll get in there and spoil their shot.”

  Han went back to the scan of the TIE fighter. It was an unusual design. Bigger than the usual escort ships, and it had a strange bulge as if someone had welded a bus on top of the hull. “I think I know this one, Chewie. I think that’s an SR. Experimental TIE with a hyperdrive for long recon. They didn’t make very many of them. If so, we’re in luck. He could have jumped in on his own, which means we don’t have a frigate hiding out here somewhere.”

  Yet, he didn’t say.

  Chewbacca growled and yanked hard on the controls. Hunter Maas’s freighter loomed in front of them, and the Falcon began shaking with incoming fire. The rear deflector alarms started squawking.

  “Oh, look,” Han said to Chewbacca, and grabbed the controls. “We’ve just been invited to the dance.”

  Sixteen

  Han threw the Falcon hard to port, and a stream of laser cannon fire flashed past.

  “That almost hit Hunter Maas’s ship!” Hunter Maas yelled in Han’s headset.

  “It almost hit Han Solo’s ship,” Han muttered to himself, then turned the headset mike back on. “We’re handling it; just keep heading to Kiamurr at full speed. We’ll get this guy off yo
ur tail.”

  “See that you do!”

  Chewbacca growled out a laugh.

  “Not a chance, pal,” Han said to the Wookiee, and pulled hard at the controls to throw the Falcon across the pursuing TIE’s field of fire, trying to draw its aim away from the fleeing Maas. “We’re not adding a third boss to this trip. Just as soon as we—”

  The Falcon shuddered as another burst of laserfire hit her rear shields. A warning light started flashing.

  “—get rid of this guy, we’ll make sure Maas knows his place in the pecking order.”

  The warning light shifted to red, and an alarm shrieked. The rear deflector was collapsing. The recently patched power cabling had burned out, and the energy surge had knocked out the backup generator. As if to highlight this fact, the cockpit of the Falcon started to smell like smoke and burning conduit.

  “We just fixed that,” Han said. Chewbacca growled back. Han nodded. “I know, it’s just frustrating.”

  Another stream of laserfire cut through the space between the ships. Han managed to evade most of it with a hard spiraling dive to starboard, but a few bolts struck the rear of the Falcon. The warning indicator shifted to black, and the alarm squealed one last time, then fell into a sullen monotone.

  The rear shield was gone.

  Han yanked back on the controls, pulling the ship into a tight loop. The moment they were out of the way, the TIE fighter began pouring laserfire into the back of Maas’s freighter. The pirate screeched at them.

  “Hunter Maas is being fired upon again! You said you came to protect! You are very bad at this job!”

  Han continued the loop until the Falcon was behind the TIE. “Yeah, but you still have rear shields,” he said to Maas, “so you can take it.”

  Maas wailed his disagreement, but Han killed the headset. “Chewie, start calculating a torpedo shot on that TIE fighter. If it doesn’t have shields like the rest of them, one concussion blast should be enough to take it out.”