Read Razor's Edge: Star Wars (Empire and Rebellion) for Free Online Page B

view. She couldn’t take her eyes off it, much as she wanted to. The merchant ship still fought back, firing a quad laser at the pirates, but, as Han had pointed out, it didn’t have the
Gamble
’s augmented systems, and its weapons were woefully inadequate. She told herself they were lucky the pirates had trapped the freighter, and not the
Gamble,
on station approach, but she didn’t feel lucky.
I’m so tired of watching and not being able to do anything to
—Then the sensors beeped to signal a fix on the pirate ship, and a clear schematic of it popped up on the screen.
    â€œWhat?”
Leia sat up straight as a bolt of cold shock went through her. “That’s an Alderaanian gunship!”
    Han stared at the screen, brow furrowed. “What, the pirate?”
    â€œYes!” Leia snapped, cold shock turning to hot fury. She tore at the buckles of her straps, fuming. “I know where all the gunships are.” After Alderaan’s destruction, the surviving gunships had all managed to contact the Alliance, some of them badly damaged, their crews injured. “Display the ID!”
    Han put the string of ID information up on the screen. “It’s a fake, Your Worship,” he said pointedly. “The planet of origin—”
    â€œThat doesn’t matter, the ship is Alderaanian. The name—” The name was the
Aegis.
She knew that ship, or at least knew of it. She didn’t think she had met the officers or crew personally. All the other information in the ID string was false, but whoever had altered it hadn’t bothered to change the name. “I know that ship. It was on the system defense patrol.”
    The gunships had been a deterrent, meant to protect Alderaan’s system, trade routes, and commercial shipping from just this kind of attack. They gave assistance to ships in trouble, protected and assisted civilian traffic. Not all of them had been officially accounted for, but that was to be expected: when the planet was destroyed, some must have been grounded on Alderaan, and some must have been close enough to the planet that they had been caught in the blast wave. She had been certain all the surviving Alderaanian naval ships had been found. This one must have been attacked at some vulnerable moment before it could make contact with the Alliance, taken by the pirates, and the crew … She had to know where the crew was.
    It was like having an old wound ripped open, except this wound had never closed. She had just learned to pretend it didn’t exist, most of the time.
    She shoved to her feet and stepped up behind Ilen to reach the comm board. She put one of the spare headsets on and silenced the other frequencies, then opened a new one to call the gunship. She made it a closed connection, so the station wouldn’t be able to monitor the transmission. Ilen stared at her, wide-eyed, and Han said, “Leia, stop! You’re just gonna get their attention—”
    Leia ignored him, too blind with fury to care. “
Aegis,
I know you were an Alderaanian gunship. If you tell me where you obtained the ship and where the original crew is, I won’t fire on you.”
    Leia heard Han swear. She just hoped her bluff would work. Her pulse was pounding so hard she couldn’t hear herself think. She wasn’t sure what response she wanted from the pirates. They would have killed the crew, or sold them into slavery somewhere across the galaxy. Even in the latter case, it must be far too late to save them. Unless she could find out what system they had been sold in …
    She said into the comm, “I just want to know what you did with the crew.”
    â€œThey’ve stopped firing on the freighter,” Ilen said, his voice low and tense.
    Han said, “That’s because they’re about to start firing on us.”
    He probably isn’t wrong.
Leia watched the sensors. The merchant freighter hung helpless in