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ship’s seemingly impenetrable shields, one of the skip pilots took aim on the Bith-piloted swoop. Caught in midair by a single lava-hot projectile, the machine disappeared without a trace.
    Thorsh clenched his jaws and steered the swoop for deeper water. The swoop was grazing the white crests of five-meter waves when something enormous rose from beneath the heaving surface.
    “Cakhmaim’s getting to be a pretty good shot,” Han said over the sound of the reciprocating quad laser cannon. “Remind me to up his pay—or at least promote him.”
    Leia glanced at him from the copilot’s chair. “From bodyguard to what—butler?”
    Han pictured the Noghri in formal attire, setting meals infront of Han and Leia in the
Falcon
’s forward cabin. His upper lip curled in delight, and he laughed shortly. “Maybe we should see how he does with the rest of these skips.”
    The YT-1300 was just coming out of her long turn, with Selvaris’s double suns off to starboard and an active volcano dominating the forward view. Below, green-capped, sheer-sided islands reached up into the planet’s deep blue sky, and the aquamarine sea seemed to go on forever. Two coral-skippers were still glued to the
Falcon
’s tail, chopping at it and holding position through all the insane turns and evasions, but so far the deflector shields were holding.
    His large hands gripped on the control yoke, Han glanced at the console’s locator display, where only one bezel was pulsing.
    “Where’d the other swoop go?”
    “We lost it,” Leia said.
    Han leaned toward the viewport to survey the undulating sea. “How could we lose—”
    “No, I mean it’s gone. One of the coralskippers took it out.”
    Han’s eyes blazed. “Why, that—which one of ’em?”
    Before Leia could answer, two plasma missiles streaked past the cockpit, bright as meteors and barely missing the starboard mandible.
    “Does it matter?”
    Han shook his head. “Where’s the other swoop?”
    Leia studied the locator display, then called up a map from the terrain sensor, which showed everything from the mouth of the estuary clear to the volcano. Her left forefinger tapped the screen. “Far side of that island.”
    “Any skips after it?”
    A loud explosion buffeted the
Falcon
from behind.
    “We seem to be the popular target,” Leia said. “Just the way you like it.”
    Han narrowed his eyes. “You bet I do.”
    Determined to lure their pair of pursuers away from the swoop, he threw the freighter into a sudden ascent. When they had climbed halfway to the stars, he dropped the ship into a stomach-churning corkscrew. Pulling out sharply, he twisted the ship through a looping rollover, emerging fromthe combo headed in the opposite direction, with the two coralskippers in front of him.
    He grinned at Leia. “Now who’s in charge?”
    She blew out her breath. “Was there ever any doubt?”
    Han focused his attention on the two enemy craft. Over the long years, Yuuzhan Vong pilots faced with impossible odds had surrendered some of the suicidal resolve they had displayed during the early days of the war. Maybe word had come down from Supreme Overlord Shimrra or someone that discretion really was the better part of valor. Whatever the case, the pilots of the two skips Han was stalking apparently saw some advantage to fleeing rather than reengaging the ship their plasma missiles had failed to bring down. But Han wasn’t content to send them home with their tails tucked between their legs—especially not after they had killed an unarmed swoop pilot he had come halfway across the galaxy to rescue.
    “Cakhmaim, listen up,” he said into his headset mike. “I’ll fire the belly gun from here. We’ll put ’em in the Money Lane and be done with them.”
    Money Lane
was Han’s term for the area where the quad lasers’ firing fields overlapped. In emergency situations, both cannons could be fired from the cockpit, but the present situation didn’t call for that. What’s