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“Hardly long enough to build my lightsaber,” he said. “Eventually, I found a Master who taught me to accept my weakness—and who helped me find my strength.”
    Han raised his brow.
    “And I’m sure you don’t know
her
,” Izal said.
    “Your story is smelling more like a Gamorrean kitchen every minute,” Han warned. He gestured at the flakes and disassembled transmitters. “And you still haven’t explained these.”
    “Oh … those.” Izal’s slanted smile might have been one of relief or anxiety. “That’s easy.”
    “So explain.”
    “First, I wasn’t keeping this a secret,” Izal said. “I was going to tell you when things settled down.”
    “Quit stalling,” Han ordered.
    Izal swallowed hard, which was quite a sight given the Arcona’s long neck. “All right.” He picked up one of the black flakes. “This scale—”
    The proximity alarm broke into a shriek. Han glanced at his tactical display and found a wall of blips taking form behind the
Falcon
.
    “Nice trick,” Han said. He hit the reset, but the alarm resumed its screeching half a second later. The tactical display returned with even more blips. “Now cut it out. You’re testing my patient nature.”
    “You think this is a Force trick?” Izal’s eyes were fixed on the tactical display, and there was enough panic in his voice that Han almost believed him. “I’m not that good.”
    “So they’re real?” Han was starting to worry. There were no transponder codes beneath the blips, and vessels without transponder codes tended to be pirates—or worse. “What are they doing here?”
    “I don’t know.” Izal began the ion engine warm-start procedure. “I must have missed a homing beacon.”
    “Or planted one,” Han said. Homing beacons could not be used to track a ship through hyperspace, only to locate it once it returned to realspace. For a flotilla to arrive so quickly, it had to have been lying somewhere outside the Corellian system, ready to depart as soon as it learned the
Falcon
’s position. “This seems way too handy.”
    “Or desperate.” Izal brought the ion drives on-line. “I’m not the one trying to snatch your wife.”
    “I’d like to believe you.” Han fired a stun bolt into the Arcona’s ribs. “But I just can’t take the chance.”
    Leaving Izal to slump over the side of his chair, Han holstered his blaster and hit the throttles. The ambushers’ rate of closure began to slow. Some of the leaders started to fire, but Han did not even raise the
Falcon
’s power-hungry energy shields. The ship’s sensor array computer had identified the newcomers as a motley mix of Y-wings and old T-65 X-wings, and neither of those could fire effectively at such long range.
    C-3PO’s voice came over the intercom. “Captain Solo?”
    “Have the stowaways got Leia?” Han asked. There was a timewhen his thoughts wouldn’t have leapt instantly to the worst scenario, but a lot had changed in the galaxy since then—and in him. “If they’ve got Leia, you tell them—”
    “Mistress Leia is well and quite alone,” C-3PO said. “Aside from me, of course.”
    “Keep it that way.” Han activated the navicomputer and began to punch coordinates; though the course to Commenor remained the same, transit times would have to be recalculated from the new entry point. “And don’t bother me unless that changes.”
    “Of course, Captain Solo.” A distant streak of red flashed above the cockpit canopy as a cannon bolt reached maximum range and faded away. “But—”
    “Threepio, not now!”
    The starfighters, especially the X-wings, were still closing. Han plotted a course projection and saw what he had known intuitively: they would reach effective firing range only a few seconds before the
Falcon
entered hyperspace.
    Han slammed his palm against the yoke. “Sith spit!”
    He changed the tactical display to a larger scale. Sitting dead ahead, well beyond the range of anything less sensitive than