X

ATUARRE restrained herself from running back through the maze of tunnel-tubes, conscious of the Espo guard at her heels. Han’s desperate plan left her so much room for doubt. What would happen if the bluff failed? But on that thought she corrected herself at once—Solo-Captain was not bluffing, and was more than capable of taking all his enemies with him in an act of awesome revenge.

But she approved of the gamble. This might be Stars’ End’s only vulnerable moment. Even so, she took her longest strides now, dragging a stumbling Pakka along breakneck-quick.

They passed into the final junction station, the one nearest the Falcon. A tech lounged on duty behind his console. The Espo’s com-link signaled for attention, and Atuarre heard the crackled order, relayed from Hirken through the Espo major, as clearly as did her escort himself. The two Trianii were to be brought back to the tower. She wondered if that meant Han had successfully intervened in Bollux’s combat.

But Atuarre had no intention of going back now; Solo-Captain specifically wanted her onboard the Millennium Falcon. She tried her most reasonable tone. “Officer, I have to pick up a very important item on my ship, then we can return. Please? It’s very vital; that’s why I was given clearance to go in the first place.”

The Espo wasn’t paying heed. He drew his side arm. “Orders say at once. Move it!”

The attention of the duty tech was aroused now, but the guard was the immediate danger. Atuarre held Pakka’s paw high, so that his toes barely touched the floor, showing him to the guard. “You see, I was also told to leave my cub onboard ship. His presence displeased the Viceprex.” She felt Pakka’s short, elastic muscles tighten.

The Espo opened his mouth to reply, and she whipped the cub up. Pakka took snapping momentum from the launch, and both of the Trianii split the air with predatory howls, astounding the Authority men.

Pakka’s dropkick caught the astonished Espo in the face and throat. Atuarre, coming in behind her cub, threw herself on the man’s arm, prying his hand loose from his blaster. The Trianii bore their antagonist over backward, the cub with arms and legs and tail wrapped around the Espo’s head and neck, Atuarre wrenching the blaster free.

She heard a scuffle of sound behind her. Whirling, she saw the duty tech half standing from his chair behind the console. His left forefinger was stabbing some button on his board, hard. She assumed it to be an alarm, but the tech’s right hand was bringing up a blaster, and that was first on the agenda. She fired with the dispatch of a Trianii Ranger. The brief red flash of the blaster knocked the tech off his feet backward, overturning his chair.

The Espo, bleeding from his wounds, threw Pakka off and charged at Atuarre, hands clutching for her. She fired again, the red bolt lighting the junction station. The Espo buckled and lay still. She could hear alarms jangling through the tunnel-tube layout.

Atuarre was about to go to the junction station console, to disconnect the tunnel-tubes and cut off pursuit, when the station jolted on its treads, as if the surface of Mytus VII had surged up under it. She and Pakka were bounced in the air like toys by the tremors of an explosion of incredible force.

Atuarre picked herself up dazedly and staggered to one of the thick exterior observation ports. She couldn’t see the tower. Instead, a column of incandescent fire had sprung up where Stars’ End had stood. It seemed impossibly thin and high, reaching far up into the vacuous sky of Mytus VII.

Then she realized that the force of the explosion had been contained by deflector-shield generators around the tower. The pillar of destruction began to dissipate, but she could see nothing of Stars’ End, not a fragment. She couldn’t believe that even an exploding power plant could utterly vaporize the nearly impregnable tower.

Then, on some impulse, she looked up, beyond the tip of the explosion’s flare. High above Mytus VII she saw the wink of the small distant sun off enhanced-bonding armor plate.

“Oh, Solo-Captain,” she breathed, understanding what had happened, “you madman!”

She pushed herself away from the port unsteadily and assessed her situation. She must move without hesitation. She raced to the console, found separator switches, and matching them with indicators over the junction station’s tunnel-tubes, worked the three not connected to the Falcon. The tubes disengaged, their lengths contracting back toward the junction, pleating in on themselves.

Then she brought the junction station’s self-propulsion unit to life, setting its treads in motion, steering it toward the Millennium Falcon, gathering in the intervening tube length as she went.

She chilled the discord in her mind with the discipline expected of a Trianii Ranger, and a plan began to form. One minute later, the Millennium Falcon raised from Mytus VII.

Atuarre, at the controls with Pakka perched in the copilot’s chair, scanned the base. She knew the personnel must be coping desperately with pressure droppages and air leaks through their ruptured systems. But the armed Espo assault ship had already boosted clear of the base; she could see its engine glowing as it climbed rapidly in the distance. That someone had comprehended what had happened and responded so quickly gave her one more worry. No more Authority ships must be allowed to lift off.

She guided the starship in a low pass at the line of smaller Authority vessels. The Falcon’s guns spoke again and again in a close strafing run. The parked, pilotless ships burst and flared one after another, yielding secondary explosions. Of the half-dozen craft there, none escaped damage. She swooped past the deep crater where Stars’ End had once stood.

She opened the main drive, screaming off after the departed Espo assault craft. She kept all shields angled aft, but there was only sporadic, inaccurate turbo-laser cannon fire. The personnel at the base were too busy trying to keep the breath of life from bleeding off into the vacuum. That was one advantage, a small help to her in what seemed like a hopeless task.

Stars’ End’s anticoncussion field must very nearly have overloaded, Han thought; for the first seconds after the power plant blew, stupendous forces had been exerted on the tower and everything in it. But the immobilizing effect began to recede as the systems adjusted.

Smoke and heat from both the ruined Executioner and the now-defunct primary-control ancillaries rolled and drifted through the dome, choking and blinding. There was a universal rush of indistinct bodies for the elevators. Han could hear Hirken yelling for order as the Espo major bellowed commands and the Viceprex’s wife and others shrilled in panic.

Han skirted the mob headed for the elevators, wading through the anticoncussion field and the drifting smoke. Like all standbys, the anticoncussion field fed off emergency power inside Stars’ End. The tower’s reserves would be limited. Han grinned in the murk and confusion; the Espos were in for a surprise.

He made his way down the steps of the amphitheater, groping along, coughing and hoping he wasn’t being poisoned by burned insulation and molten circuitry. His toe hit something. He recognized Viceprex Hirken’s discarded belt unit, kicked it aside, and went on. He located Bollux when he stumbled over the ’droid’s foot.

“Captain sir!” Bollux hailed. “We’d thought you’d quite left, sir.”

“We’re bowing out now; can you make it?”

“I’m stabilized. Max improvised a direct linkup between himself and me.”

Blue Max’s voice drifted up from Bollux’s chest. “Captain, I tried to tell you when I rechecked the figures that this might happen.”

Han had gotten a hand under the ’droid’s arm, helping him to rise to his wobbly legs. “What did happen, Max? Not enough power in the plant?” He started moving Bollux off unsteadily through the drifting reek.

“No, there was plenty of power in the plant, but the enhanced-bonding armor plate is a lot stronger than I thought at first. The exterior deflector shields contained the force of the explosion, all except the overhead one, the one that dissolved in the overload. All the force went that way. Us too.”

Han stopped. He wished he could see the little computer, not that it would have helped. “Max, are you telling me we blew Stars’ End into orbit?”

“No, Captain,” Max answered darkly. “A high-arc trajectory, maybe, but never an orbit.”

Han found himself leaning on Bollux as much as the ’droid was leaning on him. “Oh my! Why didn’t you warn me?”

“I tried,” Max reminded him sulkily.

Han was in mental overdrive. It made sense: Mytus VII’s relatively light specific gravity and lack of atmospheric friction must give it an escape velocity that was only middlin’. Still, if the tower’s anticoncussion fields hadn’t been on when the large charge had gone off, everybody in Stars’ End would’ve been colloidal slime by now.

“Besides,” Max added testily, “Isn’t this better than being dead? So far?”

Han brightened; there was no arguing with that logic. He shouldered part of Bollux’s weight again. “Okay, men; I have a new plan. Forward!” They reeled off again, away from the elevators. “All the elevators will be out; life-support and whatnot will have pre-empted all the reserve power. I saw a utility stairwell in the floor plans, but Hirken and Company will be remembering it pretty soon, too. Shag it.”

They rounded the curve of the utility core as Han took his bearings. They were almost to a yellow-painted emergency door when the door snapped open and an Espo jumped out, riot gun in hand. Cupping his hand to his mouth, the man called, “Viceprex Hirken! This way, sir!”

Then he noticed Han and Bollux and swung his weapon to bear. With only a microcharge in the blaster, Han had to make a quick head shot. The Espo dropped.

“Brown nose,” Han grunted, still hanging on to the ’droid, stooping to grab the riot gun. He manhandled himself and his burden through the emergency door. A furor of shouting reached him; the others had found the elevators useless, and someone had remembered the stairwell. Han secured the door behind him and fired several sustained bursts at its latching mechanism. The metal began to glow and fuse. It was a durable alloy that would shed its heat again in moments, leaving the latch welded shut. Those remaining on the other side would be able to blast their way through with hand weapons, but it would take precious time.

As he and Han half fell, half ran, down the stairs, Bollux asked, “Where to now, sir?”

“The stasis-booth tiers.” They careened around a landing, nearly falling. “Feel that? The artificial gravity’s fluctuating. In time the power-management routers will cut off everything but life-support.”

“Oh, I see, sir.” Bollux said. “The stasis booths you and Max mentioned!”

“Give the ’droid a prize. When those booths start conking out, there’re gonna be some pretty cranky prisoners on the loose. The guy who might be able to pull our choobies out of the conflagration is one of them—Doc, Jessa’s father.”

They made their way down, past Hirken’s living quarters and the interrogation levels, encountering no one else in the stairwell. The gravity fluctuations lessened, but footing remained unpredictable. They arrived at another emergency door, and Han opened it manually.

Across a corridor was another door, which had been left open. Through it Han saw a long, wide aisle between high tiers of stasis booths like stacked, upright coffins. The lowest rows of booths were already darkened, empty, the highest still in operation. Booths in the middle two rows flickered.

But down in the aisles a line of six guards wavered before a mass of humans and nonhumans. The released prisoners, members of dozens of species, growled and roared their hostility. Fists, tentacles, claws, and paws shook angrily in the air. The Espos, waving their riot guns and advancing, tried to contain the break without firing, afraid they might be overwhelmed if they opened up.

A tall, demonish-looking being broke from the mob and launched himself at the Espos, his face splitting with mad laughter, hands grasping. A burst from a riot gun brought him down in a groaning heap. The prisoners’ hesitation disappeared; they advanced on the Espos in unison. What did they have to fear from death, compared with life in the interrogation chambers?

Han pushed Bollux aside, knelt behind the emergency-door frame, and cut loose at the guards. Two of them fell before they realized they were taking fire from their rear. One turned, then another, to exchange shots, while their fellows tried to hold back the seething prisoners.

Red darts of light crisscrossed. Smoke from charred metal rose from the doorframe with the ozone of blaster fire. The smell of burned flesh was in the air. The unnerved guards’ bolts zipped through the open emergency door or hit the wall, but failed to find their target. Han, kneeling to make himself as small a mark as possible, winced and flinched from the intense counterfire and cursed his own riot gun’s poor sighting characteristics.

He finally nailed one of the two Espos shooting at him. The other dropped to the floor to avoid being hit. Han, seeing that, used an old trick. Reaching through the door frame, he placed his weapon flat on its side on the floor, triggering frantically. The shots, aligned directly along the plane of the floor, found the prone Espo and silenced him in seconds.

The remaining guards broke. One let his piece fall and raised his hands, but it did him no good; the mob poured over and around him like an avalanche, burying him in murderous human and alien forms. The other Espo, trapped between Han’s sniping and the prisoners, started scaling one of the ladders connecting the catwalks along the tiers of stasis booths.

Partway up, the guard paused and shot those who had tried to follow him. Han’s shots, at the wrong angle, missed. Han gathered up Bollux, headed for the tier room.

The last Espo’s gunfire had made the prisoners draw back as he climbed for the third catwalk. From out of the pack of prisoners, three shaggy, simian creatures swarmed up after him, disdaining ladders, swinging up arm over long arm along the tiers’ outerworks. They overtook the Espo in moments.

He hung from the rungs long enough to shoot one of the simians. It fell with an eerie caw. The other ape-things drew even with the Espo, one on either side. As he tried to fire again, his weapon was snatched from his hand and dropped to those below. The yowling guard was then caught up by both his arms, swung, and hurled with incredible strength straight upward. He slammed against the ceiling above the highest row of booths and fell to the floor in a windmilling of arms and legs, with an ugly sound of impact.

Han, setting Bollux aside, ran to join the milling prisoners. Overhead, more and more of the stasis booths were being shut down to power the overtaxed life-support systems, yielding inhabitants of many planets. Now that the immediate challenge of the guards had been eliminated, the recent escapees were at a loss. Many of them had been killed or wounded by the guards’ fire, and many others were dead or dying, unwounded, because their physiologies weren’t compatible with Stars’ End’s atmosphere and they hadn’t entered stasis with their life-support equipment. Voices overbore one another: “Hey, where are—” “The gravity’s funny! What’s happ—” “What place is this?”

Han, yelling and waving, got their attention. “Grab those guns and take up positions in the stairwell! Espos will be finding their way here in a minute!” He spotted a man in the uniform of a planetary constabulary, probably a bothersome official the Authority had decided to put on ice. Han pointed to him. “Get them organized and set up defenses, or you’ll all find yourself back in stasis!”

Han turned, heading for the corridor. As he passed the ’droid, he told him, “Wait here, Bollux; I’ve got to find Doc and Chewie.”

As the prisoners scrambled for the fallen Espos’ weapons, Han dashed into the connecting corridor, swung right, and headed for the next tier block. But as he closed on the next door, it snapped open, unlocked from the inside. Three Espos crowded, elbows and hips, each trying to be the first to get out of the tier block, as a pandemonium of fighting and shooting echoed from the room behind them.

The guards made it only halfway through the door. There was a deafening roar, and a familiar pair of long hairy arms reached out to gather all three of them back into the fray.

“Yo, there you are now,” Han called happily. “Chewie!”

The Wookiee had finished draping the guards’ limp forms over a nearby handrail. He saw his friend and hooted ecstatically. Han, his protestations ignored, was caught up in a comradely embrace that made his ribs creak. Then the artificial gravity waffled for a second and Chewbacca nearly fell. He let Han down.

“If we ever get out of this, partner,” Han panted, “let’s go settle down on a nice, quiet, stellar delivery route, what d’you say?”

This tier block had been taken with less trouble than the other; apparently fewer guards had been here when its stasis fields began to go. There was the same confusion, though, in a multitude of tongues and sound levels. The Wookiee, jostled into Han, turned with a truly stentorian roar, holding his fists aloft. A space cleared around him instantly. Into the interval of silence Han inserted the order that the prisoners take up what guns they had and join the other defenders.

Then he grabbed Chewbacca’s shoulder. “C’mon, Doc’s here somewhere, Chewie, and we haven’t got long to find him. He’s our only chance of coming out of this alive.”

The two went on to the next tier block, of which there were five altogether, as Han recalled from the floor plan. They encountered a door already open. Han brought the riot gun up and peered cautiously into the chamber. Its stasis booths were empty, and a disturbing silence hung over all. Han wondered if, perhaps, the Authority hadn’t gotten to use this portion of its prison yet. He stepped into the tier block; Chewbacca followed after.

“Stand where you are!” ordered a voice behind them. Men and other creatures jumped up from concealment on the catwalks and outerworks, and along the walls. More appeared from around the bend in the corridor.

But both Han and his first mate had identified the voice that had commanded them. “Doc!” Han cried, though he and the Wookiee prudently held their places. No use being fried.

The old man, his head wreathed by a white, frizzy cloud of hair, blinked at them in utter surprise. “Han Solo! What in the name of the Original Light brings you here, son? But I suppose that’s obvious: two more inmates, eh?” He faced the others. “This pair’s okay.”

He trotted over to them. Han was shaking his head, “No, Doc. Chewie was here. A few of us came to see what we—”

Doc hushed him. “More important things to get to, youngster. All these tiers in the first three rooms went at once; that’s how we took the blocks so quickly. The demands on the systems must’ve been extraordinary; and now I notice the gravity’s unstable.”

Three tier blocks going all at once figured, Han thought, what with that first giant demand placed on the anticoncussion fields when the power plant went. “Uh, yeah, Doc. I meant to mention that. You know you’re in a tower, right? Well, I, I sort of blew it into space; overloaded the power plant and cut the overhead deflector shield so that—”

Doc clapped a hand over his eyes. “Han, you imbecile!”

Han became defensive. “You don’t like it? Climb back into your shipping crate!” He saw he’d made his point. “No time to argue; there’s no way Stars’ End can make it all the way out of Mytus VII’s gravity. We’re due for a crash, and I’m not sure how soon. The only thing that’ll save us is that anticoncussion field, and it’s faded. It’s up to you to make sure it’s juiced up when we hit.”

Doc was staring at Han with his mouth open. “Sonny, energizing an anticoncussion field is not like hot-wiring somebody’s skyhopper and going for a joy-ride!”

Han threw his hands up. “Fine; let’s just sit and wait to smash ourselves flat. Jessa can always adopt a new father.”

That struck home. Doc sighed. “You’re right; if it’s our one shot, we shall take it. But I don’t think much of your taste in jailbreaks.” He turned to the others, who had been kept from intruding in the conversation only because of Chewbacca’s looming presence. “Pay attention! No time for chatting! Come with me, and do as I say, and we may make it yet; at least I can promise you an end to interrogation.”

He elbowed Han. “Blaze of glory, and all that, eh?” Then he started off at the head of a shuffling, loping, hoof-clacking horde, each individual moving on whatever extremities or in whatever fashion was his.

As they went, Han rapidly told Doc the bare bones of the story. The old man interrupted: “This Trianii is onboard the Millennium Falcon?”

“Should be, but it won’t do us much good; the Falcon’s tractors could never hold back this tower from re-entry.”

Doc stopped. “I say, did you hear something, boy?”

They all had, the mew and crackle of blaster fire. They broke into a run. For all his apparent age, Doc kept up with the pilot and the Wookiee. They reached the emergency door just as the limp body of a prisoner was passed into the corridor from the stairwell. It was a gangling, saurian creature with a blaster burn in its midsection. From the stairwell came the irregular sounds of a firefight.

“What’s going on?” Han shouted, trying to elbow his way through. Chewbacca got in front, shoving and yelping, and opened a way. The prisoner who Han had arbitrarily put in charge appeared on the stairs. “We’re holding an upper landing. There are a number of Authority people up there, trying to fight their way down. I put some lookouts on the lower stairs, but nothing’s happened down there yet.”

“Hirken and his bunch are trying to make their way down because the air locks are located here and on the lowest level. He’s hoping for a rescue,” Han told them.

Doc and the others looked at him in surprise. He remembered that Stars’ End must be largely unknown territory to them. The constabulary officer asked, “Just what’s happened?”

“Our time’s running out, is what,” Han answered. “We have to hold up here and give Doc there a chance to get down to the engineering levels. Take whoever’s armed on point; there’ll be some resistance down there, but it ought to be light. The rest can follow at a distance.”

The expedition down the stairwell began, with Doc hurrying because none of them knew when the tower would hit its apogee and begin its plummeting descent.

Meanwhile, Han and Chewbacca dashed upstairs. Han felt himself breathing hard and understood that life-support systems were beginning to fail. If the oxygen pressure in the tower fell too low, all their efforts would mean nothing.

They joined the defenders holding the second landing above the tier blocks. Blaster beams from above sizzled and crashed against the opposite wall as the remaining armed prisoners here fired quick, unaimed shots around the corner when they could, with little chance of hitting anyone up on the next landing. Several defenders lay dead or injured. As Han topped the stairs, one man edged his weapon around the corner, quickly squeezed off a few shots, and drew back hastily. He spied Han. “What’s going on down there?”

Han crouched beside him and was about to ease around the corner for a squint upstairs when a volley of red bolts burned and bit at the floor and walls out in the field of fire. He shrank back.

“Get your damn bulb down, man,” the defender cautioned. “We ran into their point men right here at the turn. We drove them back, but the rest came down. It’s a standoff, but they have more weapons.” Then he repeated, “What’s going on below?”

“The others are headed for the lower levels, to rig a, a way out of this. We’re here to keep the riffraff out.” He began to sweat, thinking that the tower must surely be succumbing to the pull of Mytus VII by now.

The steady salvos from the next landing lit the stairwell. Chewbacca, checking it out with narrowed eyes, gobbled something to Han.

“My pal’s right,” Han told the other defenders. “See all the incoming bolts? They’re hitting the far wall and the other side of the floor, and that’s all, nothing on this side.”

He slid around on the seat of his pants, cradling the riot gun high across his chest. Chewbacca braced Han’s knees solidly to the floor. Han squirmed back on his buttocks, centimeter by centimeter, until his back was almost into the line of fire.

He and Chewbacca traded looks. The man’s was rueful, the Wookiee’s concerned. “Hang it out.”

Han let himself fall backward. The riot gun, clamped across his chest, pointed straight upstairs. Still dropping, he saw what he’d expected. A man in Espo brown was stealing down the stairs, hugging the near wall to avoid his covering fire. The scene burned into Han’s mind with an abrupt, almost painful clarity as he cut loose with a flurry of shots. Without waiting to see their effect, he leaned up again, long before his back could touch the floor. Chewbacca felt the move, pulled hard. Han came sliding to safety; his pop-up appearance had begun and ended so suddenly that nobody upstairs had managed to redirect his aim.

There was a rapid clattering on the stairs, and an Espoissue side arm spun to a stop on the landing. A moment later, with a weighty bouncing, the pistol’s owner rolled to a halt next to it, more than adequately dead. It was the Espo major.

Han nodded in tribute to the major’s devotion to duty.

The barrage from the next landing became more intense. The defenders answered with what weapons they had. Chewbacca picked up a pistol dropped by one of the fallen defenders, a feathered creature lying in a pool of translucent blood. The corpse’s beaked face had been partly obliterated by a blaster shot. The Wookiee found that the barrel of the pistol had been hit, and was twisted and useless.

Chewbacca, pointing at Han’s empty, holstered blaster, threw him the unusable gun. Han threw back the riot gun in exchange and drew his own side arm, to charge it from the ruined pistol. Chewbacca, whose thick fingers didn’t fit the human-sized weapon well, tore off the trigger guard, then began firing around the corner without looking—high, low, and in between, at every angle.

Han mated the adapters in the pistol’s grip to those in his own blaster’s power pack, just forward of the trigger guard. He wound up with only half-charge capacity, but it would have to do. Finished, he tossed the useless Espo pistol aside and joined the Wookiee. To frustrate counterfire, the two fired unpredictably, and they could be very unpredictable indeed. None of the Authority people seemed to want to emulate the major’s heroism.

Suddenly the firing from above stopped. The defenders also stopped, watching for a trick. It occurred to Han that if Hirken had even one shock-grenade—but no; he’d have used it already.

A flat, hissing voice called down, “Solo! Viceprex Hirken would speak with you!”

Han leaned back against the wall nonchalantly. Without showing himself, he answered, “Send him down, Uul-Rha-Shan. What the hell, come on down yourself, old snake! Happy to oblige.”

Then came Hirken’s strong-sales-experience voice. “We’ll talk from here, thanks. I know now just what it was you did.”

Han wished to himself he’d known, too, beforehand. “I want to strike a bargain,” Hirken went on. “However you’re planning on getting away, I want you to take me with you. And the others with me, of course.”

Of course. Han didn’t even hesitate. “You got it. Throw your guns down here and come down one at a time, hands on your—”

“Be serious, Solo!” Hirken interrupted, depriving Han of the chance to tell him where to put his hands. “We can keep you occupied here so that you won’t be able to get out yourself! And Stars’ End is at the top of its arc; we’ve seen that much through the dome. It’ll be too late soon for any of us. What do you say to that?”

“No way, Hirken!” Han wasn’t sure whether Hirken was bluffing about the tower’s having reached apogee, but there was no way to check it short of leaning out one of the locks—a poor idea in view of the scarcity of spacesuits. “Hirken’s dead center about one thing,” he whispered. “They could pin us here if we let them make the rules.”

The others followed him quickly down to the next landing, the last one before the tier-block level. They slipped around the corner and took up positions, waiting. Now it’d be the Viceprex’s turn to sweat. From what Han could hear, it sounded like the majority of the prisoners were still in the tier blocks, unsure of what they should do. Han just hoped they wouldn’t panic and come his way.

He had his blaster raised, knowing a questing head must come around the corner they’d abandoned, but it was impossible to anticipate exactly when it would come.

A head did flick around the corner, Uul-Rha-Shan’s, high up; he’d stood on someone else’s back or shoulders. He flashed out, saw the disposition of the defenders, and pulled back with astounding speed. Han’s tardy shot merely chipped a little more wall away; the pilot marveled at how quickly the reptilian gunman had moved.

“Is that how it is to be, Solo,” came Uul-Rha-Shan’s hypnotic voice. “Must I hunt you from level to level? Strike a bargain with us; we only desire to live.”

Han laughed. “Sure, it’s just everybody else that you don’t want to live.”

There was a noise from below, boots on the stairs. Doc reappeared, puffing. He threw himself down next to Han, his face composed in alarm. Han hand-signaled him to speak quietly so that those above wouldn’t hear.

“Han, the Espos have come! Their assault craft is at the lower lock, unloading a strike force. They’ve linked up with the Authority people who were hiding from us down there. They drove us off the engineering levels; many were shot, and we were forced back. More died on the stairs before a rear guard was organized, but the Espos are pushing a heavy blaster up, step by step. We’re in it where it’s deep, this time!”

A stream of prisoners was already pouring frantically up the stairwell, bound for the only shelter left, the tier blocks. “The Espos down there have spacesuits on,” Doc said. “What if they bleed off our air?”

Han abruptly saw that the men around him were looking to him for an answer, and thought, Who, me? I’m just the getaway driver, remember?

He shook his head. “I’m tapped out, Doc. Get yourself some machinery; we’ll play them one last chorus.”

Hirken’s voice boomed down triumphantly. “Solo! My men just contacted me by com-link! Surrender now, or I’ll leave you here!” As if to emphasize that, they heard the oscillation of a heavy blaster somewhere in Stars’ End.

“Well, they’ll still have to come through to us,” Han muttered. He grabbed Doc’s shirt, but recalling Hirken, spoke in a low, hard tone. “Don’t sweat the air; the Espos can’t bleed it off or they’ll kill their Viceprex. That’s why they hit the lower lock instead of the one at prisoner level; they knew they’d have a much better chance of getting in without having to burn and rupture the tower. Send up everyone you can, anyone who’ll come. We’ll rush Hirken, whatever it costs, and use him as a hostage.”

Remembering the barrage the Authority people could lay down in the narrow stairwell, he knew that the price would be terrible. Doc did, too, and pushed himself off looking, for the first time, like the very tired old man he finally felt himself to be.

“Don’t stop for anything,” Han was telling the others. “If somebody falls, somebody else grabs his machinery, but nobody stops.”

He caught Chewbacca’s eye. The Wookiee peeled back his lips from his curved fangs, scrunching his black nose, and sounded a savage, appalling howl, shaking his shaggy head—a Wookiee’s way of defying death. Then he grinned and rumbled at Han, who smiled lopsidedly. They were close enough friends not to have to make any more of it than that.