Agents of Chaos I - Hero's Trial (The New Jedi Order, 4) by James Luceno

Author:James Luceno [Luceno, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Star Wars, Science Fiction, Fiction
ISBN: 9780345428608
Publisher: Del Rey
Published: 2000-08-02T07:00:00+00:00

SIXTEEN

The shuttle veered left and right, as Han wove a jagged course among the hundreds of ships moored in the Wheel’s shadow. Most of the barges and freighters remained at anchor, but some were every bit as bent on escape as Han was, and were moving out at all speed, in whatever direction seemed best.

Han twisted the shuttle to port, hugging the curve of the station’s outer rim, ascending or descending as necessary to avoid debris yanked from the interior by the Yuuzhan Vong dread weapon that had struck it. A quarter of the way around the Wheel an enormous enemy warship came into view, black as night and made more hideous by pairs of branching yorik coral arms. Retracting into an orifice in the bow was the colossal serpentine creature obviously responsible for the trio of erose breaches along the outer face of that part of the station’s rim.

“That’s gotta be the thing that swallowed Roa and Fasgo,” Han growled to the Ryn. “You and I might have been inside it right now.” Firewalling the shuttle’s throttle, he accelerated straight for the creature, oblivious to his copilot’s wide-eyed distress.

“What are you doing?” the Ryn screamed.

Han gestured with his stubbled chin out the viewport. “My friends are imprisoned in that thing.”

The Ryn’s voice abandoned him momentarily, then he exclaimed, “You can’t just break them out!”

“You just watch me,” Han said out of the corner of his mouth.

“You’re demented!”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“Okay, how about, we’re unarmed!”

Han suddenly grasped that he wasn’t aboard the Falcon, and he cursed to himself. If he was alone, or even if it was just him and the Ryn, he might have risked attacking the dread weapon anyway. But the shuttle’s passenger compartment was filled with scores of innocents who were already on the run from the war, and who definitely didn’t deserve to be taken into battle by a madman at the controls of a weaponless and unshielded craft.

It also dawned on Han that he was in the same position Anakin had found himself in on Sernpidal, forced to choose between the lives of a shipload of strangers and the life of one friend. The realization pierced Han’s heart like a vibroblade, and he swore to himself that if he made it home in one piece, he would put things right with his estranged son.

Still, Han couldn’t resist harassing the creature with a flyby. When the nose of the thing loomed all but close enough to touch—and the Ryn was half out of his seat in naked alarm—Han slewed the shuttle hard to port, hoping the slithering aberration would get a good taste of the ship’s ion exhaust.

The fact that the creature suddenly shot from the warship, nearly snagging the shuttle with its vacuuming mouth, suggested that Han’s wish had been realized.

“Nice going!” the Ryn fairly shrieked. “You certainly managed to get its attention!”

A bit wide-eyed himself, Han took the shuttle through a power climb, then a series of evasive loops and rolls while the creature continued to snap at it.

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