At low velocities, the swoop handled like a falling rock, so Han went fast. Blaster-bolt fast. Pushing-the-sound-barrier fast, backed off just enough so the shock waves did not make the control vanes shudder. At that speed, Arch Canyon was a serpentine channel of speed-blurred rock, one impossibly tight turn following another, sandrock arch after sandrock arch, with the occasional stone pinnacle jutting up just to keep things interesting.
Han flew with one eye on the heads-up vidmap display on his face mask, watching the canyon’s twists and bends snake down toward the blip that represented his location, toeing the control vanes long before the curves and leaning into each turn until it seemed his cheek would scrape ground. Side canyons flashed past at the rate of two or three a second. On the vidmap, they were intersecting worms of display light; on the canyon walls, they were gaping instants of darkness.
Han loved the thunder of the big Podracing engine and the hiss of the canyon air sliding over the pilot’s cowling, and even the way his stomach fluttered when a curve was too tight and he had to rock the swoop up on its side to bounce himself off a canyon wall with a quick blast from the repulsor engines. But Tatoo I was already sinking beneath the horizon, turning the crooked swatch of sky above the canyon into a crooked snake of crimson brilliance. As Tatoo II followed, evening shadows would begin to creep across the canyon floor, cramming the path ahead with phantom hazards, concealing the real ones beneath blankets of purple gloom. Han would be forced to crawl along at no more than a hundred kilometers an hour, and his superpowered swoop would become a lumbering rock compared to the nimble speeder bikes the stormtroopers were riding.
He had already blown past two groups of Imperials, startling the first squad so badly they had not even fired on him. The second squad had been less surprised, and when cannon bolts started to explode into the surrounding sandrock, he had been forced to flame them with the efflux from his swoop’s overpowered engine. The less time he gave the next squad to prepare, the better. At this speed, all they would have to do was string a utility line across a narrow section of canyon, and he would never know he had died.
The message TUSKENS’ ESCAPE appeared on the head-ups vidmap above the swoop’s locator blip, and the crooked band of light denoting Arch Canyon split into three forks, each of which split again, and then again, forming a braided maze of deep-cut alleys that gave this section its name. A green line snaked its way through the labyrinth, denoting the fastest route to the desert retreat where Ulda said Banai was headed. Han rounded a bend and saw the three mouths of the Escape yawning ahead, the white blurs of a dozen stormtroopers vanishing down the center route.
Han checked his display and found the leftmost branch lit. “Suckers!”
He flipped a parting salute at the stormtroopers’ back and slid toward the left wall of the canyon—then glimpsed the blue dot of an ion engine bobbing along in front of the squad, perhaps a thousand meters ahead of the leader and slowly pulling away. Imperial speeder bikes did not have ion engines.
Racing swoops did.
“Blast!” Han muttered. “Kitster, what are you doing over there?”
Han toed the right-side control vane hard and barrel-rolled into the center branch. The vidmap error alarm beeped in his ear, and the alley into which he was heading started to flash red. He ignored the warning and opened the throttle wide.
The swoop seemed to hesitate, its controls shuddering so hard it felt like the machine was disintegrating. He leaned close to its body, trying to lower the center of gravity. The vibrations began to subside—then abruptly ceased altogether. The ride grew as smooth as that of a hovercar, and the roar of the big thrust engine faded to silence, leaving no sound in Han’s helmet except the insistent beeping of the vidmap error alarm. He silenced it with a command, then came up behind the stormtroopers almost too fast. He barely had time to pull up the swoop’s nose before he was gliding over the top of the rear echelon. His shock wave began to slam speeder bikes into the ground, but he was already past before any fireballs erupted.
The leader craned his neck to look over his shoulder, then he and two more riders broke formation, splitting toward the canyon walls where they would not be beneath Han’s shock wave when he passed. The maneuver saved them—for a fraction of a second. Instead of being slammed into the ground, they were tossed out of control by Han’s wake turbulence. The leader went into a wild spin and slammed into a canyon wall. Han did not see what happened to the other two, but no cannon bolts followed as he continued up the canyon.
The tiny dot of ion glow ahead rapidly began to swell as he closed on the fleeing swoop. He was just starting to make out the square shape of its back end when it came to another fork in Tuskens’ Escape and dodged down the right branch—in the direction opposite the flashing green line on Han’s vidmap display.
Why Kitster kept heading away from his desert retreat, Han could not say. Maybe Ulda had been wrong about his intentions, or maybe Kitster just did not see the odds in heading for his hiding place with a long line of pursuers on his tail. It hardly mattered. Once Han caught him, they would be heading for a quick rendezvous with the Falcon, where Banai would be paid for his “help” and offered transport to a safe sector for him and his family.
Han came to the fork and started down the right branch after his quarry. A fresh round of error alarms began to beep in his helmet. He silenced them with a voice command. Banai’s borrowed swoop did not seem nearly as fast as Wald and Tamora had claimed. Within moments, a lumpy shape grew discernible on the seat, a rider hunching down behind the handlebars to cut wind resistance.
Not hunching. A rider sitting upright, twisting around to watch over his shoulder, somehow still weaving around sandrock pinnacles and hugging curves tight inside, somehow still seeing where he was going while he looked back at Han.
A short rider in a sand cloak and goggles, with a long snout.
A line of blaster bolts began to stitch back at Han, coming over the shoulder opposite the one the rider was looking over. The guy was firing behind his head. Who did he think he was, Boba Fett?
The swoop vanished around a bend. Certain that the driver—he no longer thought it could be Banai—would expect him to come in tight, Han rounded the curve only half under control, sliding perpendicular to his direction of travel. The wind slipped around the cowling and threatened to blast him out of the seat, and he momentarily lost control as a swarm of blaster bolts flashed past and blew rock sprays off the canyon wall. He tipped the left control vane and hit the power.
The swoop shot upcanyon, and Han came up behind his quarry to find not one rider, but three—all short and dressed in identical sand cloaks. The Squibs, the one in front driving, the one in the middle sitting backward firing the blaster rifle, the one in the rear holding the one in the middle.
Han cursed into his helmet—first at them for drawing him off Banai’s trail, then at himself for thinking they would let the matter drop after Leia tricked them at Wald’s. Like all vermin, Squibs were persistent and resourceful.
Han wagged a finger at the one holding the blaster rifle, then followed them into the next curve. All three leaned into the turn together, the one in the middle still aiming at him, but no longer firing. He stayed close on their tail, taking the turn much wider, but keeping them in sight and continuing to gain on them the whole way. The one in the middle let her muzzle fall open—Han was close enough now to recognize her snout as Emala’s—then holstered the blaster rifle.
Han drifted over to the opposite wall of the canyon so they would not be tossed around too badly by turbulence as he blew past. He waved as he went by, but did not bother trying to motion them off; nothing was harder to shake than a Squib who smelled credits. Besides, the more Imperials they drew off, the fewer there would be chasing Banai and Killik Twilight. With a little luck, Banai might even be getting away clean.
Sligh’s voice came over the helmet’s comlink on the same channel Han had used at the auction. “Solo, that you?”
Han chinned his microphone. “Don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“Spare us the bantha bombs, Solo,” Emala said. “I was listening at the door back at Wald’s. We know who you are.”
“We’d already figured it,” Grees added, “soon as you showed up at Banai’s without your horns and voice synthesizer.”
“Then I’m surprised you’re not in Mos Eisley by now, blowing your Imperial credits at Lady Valarian’s.”
“Us? Sell out a business partner?” Sligh’s voice was indignant. “What do you take us for, Ugors?”
Han had to swerve to avoid a pinnacle and ended up ducking through a sandrock arch so small that when he came out the other side, his efflux rebounded off the exterior and came boiling back in a ring of orange heat.
“Uh, I’m busy here, guys.” He was surprised to hear a quaver in his voice. “So if you’re just comming to say thanks—”
“Say thanks?” Sligh interrupted. “What the poodoo for?”
“You just squared yourself by blowing those Imps off our tails,” Grees added. “The deal’s on again.”
“Back on? Forget it—”
“You don’t really want out, do you?” Emala asked.
“ ’Cause then you wouldn’t be our business partner, and we’d be free to talk to whoever we wanted about you.”
Han grated his teeth together.
“What was that?” Sligh asked.
“Fine,” Han said. “The deal’s on. Just don’t crash into any boulders or anything. I’m not coming back for you.”
“No need,” Grees said. “We’ll find you.”
Han closed the channel, then called up an overview on the vidmap and found two routes returning to the branch he needed. One was a long circuitous path that seemed to wind around the perimeter of Tuskens’ Escape; the other was a diagonal slash that jogged and twisted through a maze of tiny channels, rejoining his route only a few kilometers ahead. This route was lined in yellow dashes.
“I’ll take the short one,” he told the vidmap.
“The yellow dashes indicate a hazardous route,” the vidmap replied. “At the speed you’re traveling—”
“The short one,” Han repeated.
“Are you sure?” the vidmap asked. “Be advised that human reflexes will not be adequate to ensure your safety.”
“Yeah?” Han took another look at the long route and saw that the time estimate had him rejoining his original route well after dusk. “They used to say that about my father-in-law.”
Han half expected the vidmap to retort that his father-in-law had the Force. Instead, it simply shifted scales and indicated he should turn down the next side canyon. There was a big yellow CAUTION flashing under the display.
Han reduced his speed as much as was possible without turning the swoop into a flying rock, then began a long journey through a nerve-racking series of slot channels and serpentine passages that kept him too busy to worry about the deepening shadows in the canyon, or even about the growing number of dust devils he was flying through. All too often, he found himself bouncing along a boulder-choked chasm where a racing swoop’s lack of ride stabilizers left him feeling like he was in a starfighter dogfight with the acceleration compensators turned off. At other times, he had to snake down a twisting gorge piloting by his vidmap alone, his own turbulence sending a billowing cloud of sand down the passage ahead of him.
Finally, Han came to the last cutover, a narrow crevice that ran absolutely straight with a smooth bedrock bottom, then intersected the branch he needed less than a kilometer away. The vidmap finally turned off the CAUTION warning. He tore down the channel in less than a dozen heartbeats.
Han did not see the speeder bike at the end until a white blur hurled itself out of the seat.
“Blast!” Han cursed.
More blurs hurled themselves from more seats.
“Stang!”
He shifted his weight toward the rear of his swoop, pulling the control handles up to lift the nose, and climbed a dozen meters in a breath. The Imperial speeder bikes flashed past beneath, along with the stormtroopers who had vacated them, and a sandrock wall loomed ahead.
Han rolled the swoop on its side and was a kilometer gone before the stormtroopers could send a cannon bolt after him. The swoop was shaking so hard he thought he had snapped a control vane—until he looked down to check the systems display and saw that his trembling hands were the cause.
“Come on, Solo,” he said. “This is fun.”
Running into the squad had to have been a coincidence—or so he told himself. The gorges of Tuskens’ Escape were too deep and twisting for him to be tracked from the air. To maintain a surveillance lock, a craft would have to stay directly overhead, following him through every twist and turn of the canyon. And even if they had some hotshot pilot who could manage that, there was still no way they could have predicted his route and had a squad waiting to intercept him. Besides, had they been expecting him, they would have opened fire.
Unless they thought he was Kitster Banai and did not want to take a chance on destroying Killik Twilight.
Han was still trying to puzzle all this out when he came to a two-kilometer straight identified on his vid-map as Main Avenue. He risked a glance over his shoulder and searched the darkening sky for a TIE or some other craft that might be tracking him. Instead, he found the real reason the squad had been stopped—a kilometershigh wall of billowing sand and friction lightning, rolling back over the canyon from the direction of the Northern Dune Sea.
The sandstorm had reversed direction.
Han slowed to a crawl and hazarded a glance over his shoulder.
He was rewarded by the sight of a dozen speeder bikes rounding the corner into Main Avenue, blue stars flashing under their forward outriggers as they opened fire.
“If I’m not careful,” Han said to himself, “this could get dangerous.”
He hit the throttles and tore down the canyon, sprays of rock rising ever closer to him as the stormtrooper blaster cannons began to zero in. Han began to juke and jink like a fighter pilot; then another CAUTION message appeared on his vidmap. This one had an arrow pointing to the right and the words, DEAD MAN’S TURN—120 DEGREES.
Han decelerated hard and saw nothing but rock ahead. Trusting to the vidmap, he swung up on the wall and rode the repulsors into what looked like the side of the canyon—then a narrow slot opened ahead, and the rest was easy. With the shadows growing ever darker and longer, and the storm looming ever nearer, he followed the vidmap through Jag Crag Gorge. By the time he reached the other end, it had grown so dark and the dust squalls so frequent that he could not see the smoke rising at the outlet. In fact, Han would not have noticed it at all had his swoop not begun to chug and choke so badly that he had to stop to clean the silt from the clogged intakes.
But when he climbed off the swoop and raised his face mask to take a drink of water, the smell hit him like a Wookiee’s fist, hard and familiar and acrid, the odor of burning power cells and efflux-blasted ground.
The smell of a crash.
Han followed his nose past a giant pinnacle of specklestone and out into a murky basin. The billowing black curtain of the approaching sandstorm was sweeping in across a vast expanse of level ground, but it was the half-circle scorch mark that caught his eye. Less than fifty meters away, it encompassed the twisted exhaust nacelle of a still-smoking Podracer engine. If there was anything else left of the swoop Kitster had been riding, Han could not see it. Feeling at once sorry for Tamora and her children and angry about what he felt sure would turn out to be the loss of Leia’s painting, Han fetched a glow rod from his utility box and approached the crash site.
A few more pieces of Podracer engine and a twisted control vane lay scattered across the basin floor. But the rest of the wreckage was missing, and there was a deep tread mark on the straight side of the scorch mark. A few meters beyond that was another tread mark, running parallel to the first.
A Jawa sandcrawler.
Han spent a few more minutes searching the area for signs of Banai’s blood or the moss-painting. When he found nothing, he activated his comlink and opened a channel to Leia. “It’s me.”
“Where are you?” Leia demanded. “It’s after dark.”
Han glanced at the approaching storm. “Yeah, it’s beginning to look that way.”
In the background, Chewbacca growled a question about Kitster and the moss-painting.
“Not exactly. I think they’re both on a sandcrawler.”
“A sandcrawler?” Tamora echoed in the background.
“Yeah.” Han glanced down at the scorch mark. “My guess is he hitched a ride. I don’t think he’s hurt—”
“Hurt?” Tamora’s voice grew louder. “Why would he be hurt?”
“Well, uh, he sort of ran into it.”
A muffled thump sounded over the comlink.
“Tamora, there wasn’t any blood—”
“Don’t bother—she’s out.” This from Leia. “What about Twilight?”
“Same as Kit,” he said. “No sign of moss. I think it survived the impact.”
“Sounds convenient,” Leia said. “Maybe he faked it?”
“That’d be the smart thing.” Han ran his glow rod over the surrounding ground, but saw no footprints leading away from the crash site. “But I don’t think so. He might have had time to arrange something with Wald, but I don’t think he could have known there’d be a sandcrawler passing by out here. If he was going to fake a crash, he would have done it back in the canyon.”
A sigh of exasperation came over the comlink. “So what now?”
“I guess I catch the sandcrawler.” Han ran the beam of his glow rod down the tread trail and saw that it was traveling parallel to the approaching storm front. “Look, I attracted some attention on the way through the canyon. It probably wouldn’t be a good idea for me to ride back to Mos Espa on this thing, and the sandcrawler seems to be heading more or less toward Anchorhead. Why don’t we meet there?”
“When?” Leia asked.
Han glanced at the approaching curtain of sand. “Tomorrow morning,” he said. “I doubt I’ll make it before then.”
Though it should have taken no more than ten minutes to overtake the slow-moving sandcrawler, four hours later Han was still struggling to catch sight of it. As the storm drew closer, the squalls—both sand and dust—grew constant, and the big swoop was as temperamental as it was fast. He could usually travel through a dust squall for three or four minutes before alarms started screeching and he had to stop to unclog the intakes. But sand stopped him after only a minute, and, as the storm drew closer, there was starting to be a lot more sand than dust. For every minute flying along the sandcrawler tracks, Han was spending three servicing the engine. He knew because he had timed it.
To make matters worse, the swoop had no lights, and the storm had turned the evening into one of those blacker-than-a-black-hole nights found only on stormy planets. He had to travel with the glow rod fixed on the vidmap, trusting to the heading arrow to keep on the same bearing as the sandcrawler. Whenever he stopped to clean the intakes, the first and last thing he did was find the sandcrawler’s tracks and make sure the Jawas were still traveling in the same direction. So far, he had suffered only one close call, when he had drifted a hundred meters off course and been forced to spend another hour meandering back and forth across the basin floor with his glow rod trained on the ground.
It irked him to think that Banai was probably riding along in the relative comfort of a sandcrawler. As salvagers and traders, the little bright-eyed Jawas were all business, but unless you were a droid with salable parts, they were rarely hostile.
Han pulled the last of the sand out of the intakes, checked his bearing, and roared off through the darkness. The subtle shudder he had been noticing in the big engine was no longer subtle, no doubt because the sand was pitting the turbine blades and throwing the drive motor out of balance. There wasn’t much he could do about it—at least not out here, in the face of an approaching sandstorm. Racing swoops, especially this racing swoop, were hardly meant for this kind of travel.
But Han had to catch that sandcrawler before the Imperials—and not only because he wanted Leia to have her painting. Politics on the Provisional Council were as cutthroat as an Ord Mantell sabacc game. If it became known that Leia had allowed a Shadowcast code key to fall into Imperial hands, there would be no shortage of Bothans and Kuatis claiming she was either incompetent or a traitor. Other councilors had been forced to resign in disgrace for less cause. And while Han was all too happy to have nothing more to do with the New Republic government, being forced out would devastate Leia—and that was not something Han would allow.
Besides, there were the spies to think of. They were just little guys trying to do their part, and they really didn’t deserve to be tortured and executed. Half of the Provisional Council, sure, but not the spies.
A dozen small teardrops appeared in the storm ahead, hazy, white, and so faint Han could barely make out the peculiarly steady glow of thermal exhaust vents. The lights were a good three or four meters off the ground, high enough that they almost looked like a squadron of low-flying fighters, and they were growing rapidly larger as he came up behind them.
A muffled thumping arose in the compressor area beneath the seat. Han shone the glow rod over the instrument panel, but reading status displays in this miasma was out of the question. He continued to accelerate, and the sandcrawler’s anterior lights grew visible, creating a yellow-and-white halo that silhouetted the huge vessel’s blocky shape against the storm ahead.
Han stayed directly behind the crawler as the dark form swelled to mammoth proportions. An alarm came on and the swoop began to lose power, but he continued to come up on the sandcrawler like an X-wing on an air balloon. He swung out to the leeward side—and a cacophony of alarms erupted inside his helmet.
The swoop started to sink, and Han cut thrust and deployed the emergency braking chute. The swoop decelerated hard, hurling him against his safety restraints so ferociously he thought he might end up with a broken pelvis. Then the swoop slammed down and bounced along the smooth desert floor, rocking from side to side against the safety skids, the emergency tail-drag keeping the nose up to prevent tumbling … and still Han almost caught the sandcrawler.
Almost.
He came to a rest close enough that the sandcrawler’s stern was obscured by the dust rising behind its rear treads.
By the time Han realized he was still breathing—that the terrible pain in his body was only bruising—he was no longer in the dust cloud. He was back in the sandstorm, with the swoop rocking up on its leeward skids as the ferocious wind threatened to roll it. Han chinned his comlink and opened an emergency channel. The glow from the sandcrawler’s exhaust vents was already starting to shrink.
“Hey, you in the sandcrawler!”
The speakers in Han’s helmet remained dead and silent.
“You Jawas, stop! You’ve got salvage here!”
When the sandcrawler continued on its way, Han knew his helmet comlink was not broadcasting. He climbed out of the seat.
A storm gust sent him tumbling across the basin floor. By the time he stopped himself and got reoriented, the sandcrawler was fifty meters gone. Han opened his helmet face mask. Seventy meters. He ripped opened a utility pocket and pulled out his personal comlink. Eighty meters.
“Jawa sandcrawler! Wait. Stop.”
Only static in response. Ninety meters.
Han rechecked the comlink and found it set properly on the emergency channel. How could they not be monitoring it? Jawas always monitored the emergency channels. That was how they knew where to find crashes.
More than a hundred meters now. The glow of the exhaust vents was growing hazy. Han tried the emergency channel again. This time the static spiked, and his heart jumped into his throat—until he noticed a white flash sheeting across the sky. Sand lightning.
The storm static was smothering the comm channels. With the comm equipment aboard the Falcon, maybe he could blast through. But not with the swoop’s comm system—and certainly not with a personal comlink.
Han activated the channel search and staggered to his swoop through the buffeting wind, one eye fixed on the comlink signal light. It did not illuminate.
The sandcrawler had to be two hundred meters distant now, a line of exhaust vents fading into the stormy night. Han retrieved his helmet and crouched down on the sheltered side of the swoop, then opened a familiar channel.
“Leia? Can you hear me?” A crackle of static. “Are you there?”