“We can’t,” Organa Solo said. “The Imperials have boarded. Our people are cut off from the docking bay.”
Mara looked across at the dark bulk of the Dreadnaught, lit only by its own running lights and the flickers of reflected light from the battle raging near and around it. “Then you’d better write them off,” she said. “The Imperials aren’t likely to be far away—their backup will get here long before yours does.”
And as if cued by her words, there was a flicker of pseudomotion off to her left; and abruptly three Dreadnaughts in triangular formation appeared. “Mara!” Aves snapped.
“I see them,” Mara said as a second triad flickered in behind and above the first. “That’s it, Karrde. Get out of there—”
“Attention, New Republic forces,” a new voice boomed over the channel. “This is Senator Garm Bel Iblis aboard the warship Peregrine. May I offer our assistance?”
Leia stared at the comm speaker, a strange combination of surprise, hope, and disbelief flooding in on her. She glanced up at Karrde, caught his eye. He shrugged slightly, shook his head. “I’d heard he was dead,” he murmured.
Leia swallowed. So had she … but it was Bel Iblis’s voice, all right. Or else an excellent copy. “Garm, this is Leia Organa Solo,” she said.
“Leia!” Bel Iblis said. “It’s been a long time, hasn’t it? I didn’t expect you to be out here personally. Though perhaps I should have. Was all this your idea?”
Leia frowned out the viewport. “I don’t understand what you mean by all this. What are you doing here, anyway?”
“Captain Solo sent my assistant the coordinates and asked us to come along as backup,” Bel Iblis said, a note of caution creeping into his voice. “I assumed it was at your request.”
Leia smiled tightly. She should have guessed. “Han’s memory sort of slips sometimes,” she said. “Though to be honest, we haven’t had much time since we got back to compare notes.”
“I see,” Bel Iblis said slowly. “So it wasn’t actually an official request from the New Republic?”
“It wasn’t, but it is now,” Leia assured him. “On behalf of the New Republic, I hereby ask for your assistance.” She looked over at Virgilio. “Log that, please, Captain.”
“Yes, Councilor,” Virgilio acknowledged. “And speaking for myself, Senator Bel Iblis, I’m delighted to have you along.”
“Thank you, Captain,” Bel Iblis said, and in her mind’s eye Leia could see the other’s famous smile. “Let’s do some damage, shall we? Peregrine out.”
The six Dreadnaughts had moved into encirclement formation around the Star Destroyer now, smothering it with a flood of ion cannon fire and ignoring the increasingly sporadic turbolaser blasts raking them in return.
“Mara’s right, though,” Karrde said, stepping close to Leia. “As soon as we can get the tech team off that ship, we’d better get them and run.”
Leia shook her head. “We can’t just leave the Katana fleet to the Empire.”
Karrde snorted. “I take it you haven’t had a chance to count how many Dreadnaughts are left out there.”
Leia frowned. “No. Why?”
“I did a scan,” Karrde said grimly. “Earlier, when you were arguing with Fey’lya. Out of the original two hundred Katana ships … there are fifteen left.”
Leia stared at him. “Fifteen?” she breathed.
Karrde nodded. “I’m afraid I underestimated the Grand Admiral, Councilor,” he said, an edge of bitterness seeping in beneath the studied urbanity of his voice. “I knew that once he had the location of the fleet he would start moving the ships away from here. But I didn’t expect him to get the location from Hoffner this quickly.”
Leia shivered. She’d undergone an Imperial interrogation herself once. Years later, the memory was still vivid. “I wonder if there’s anything left of him.”
“Save your sympathy,” Karrde advised. “In retrospect, it seems unlikely that Thrawn needed to bother with anything so uncivilized as coercion. For Hoffner to have talked so freely implies the Grand Admiral simply applied a large infusion of cash.”
Leia gazed out at the battle, the dark feeling of failure settling over her. They’d lost. After all their efforts, they’d lost.
She took a deep breath, running through the Jedi relaxation exercises. Yes, they’d lost. But it was just a battle, not the war. The Empire might have taken the Dark Force, but recruiting and training crewers to man all those Dreadnaughts would take years. A lot could happen in that time. “You’re right,” she told Karrde. “We’d do best to cut our losses. Captain Virgilio, as soon as those TIE fighters have been neutralized I want a landing party sent to the Katana to assist our tech team there.”
There was no reply. “Captain?”
Virgilio was staring out the bridge viewport, his face carved from stone. “Too late, Councilor,” he said quietly.
Leia turned to look. There, moving toward the besieged Imperial ship, a second Star Destroyer had suddenly emerged from hyperspace.
The Imperials’ backup had arrived.
“Pull out!” Aves shouted, his voice starting to sound ragged. “All ships, pull out! Second Star Destroyer in system.”
The last word was half drowned out by the clang of the Z-95’s proximity warning as something got entirely too close. Mara threw the little ship into a sideways skid, just in time to get out of a TIE fighter’s line of fire. “Pull out where?” she demanded, turning her skid into a barely controlled spin that had the effect of killing her forward velocity. Her attacker, perhaps made overconfident by the appearance of the backup force, roared by too fast for more than a wild shot in her direction. Coolly, Mara blew him out of the sky. “In case you’ve forgotten, some of us don’t have enough computing power aboard to calculate a safe hyperspace jump.”
“I’ll feed you the numbers,” Aves said. “Karrde—”
“I agree,” Karrde’s voice came from the Escort Frigate. “Get out of here.”
Mara clenched her teeth, glancing up at the second Star Destroyer. She hated to turn tail and run, but she knew they were right. Bel Iblis had shifted three of his ships to meet the new threat, but even equipped with ion cannon, three Dreadnaughts couldn’t hold down a Star Destroyer for long. If they didn’t disengage soon, they might not get another chance—
Abruptly, her danger sense tingled. Again she threw the Z-95 into a skid; but this time she was too late. The ship lurched hard, and from behind her came the hissing scream of superheated metal vaporizing into space. “I’m hit!” she snapped, one hand automatically slapping cutoff switches as the other grabbed for her flight suit’s helmet seals and fastened them in place. Just in time; a second hiss, cut off almost before it began, announced the failure of cabin integrity. “Power lost, air lost. Ejecting now.”
She reached for the eject loop … and paused. By chance—or perhaps last-second instinct—her crippled fighter was aimed almost directly at the first Star Destroyer’s hangar entry port. If she could coax a little more power out of the auxiliary maneuvering system …
It took more than a little coaxing, but when she finally gripped the eject loop again she had the satisfaction of knowing that even in death the Z-95 would take a minor bit of revenge on the Empire’s war machine. Not much, but a little.
She pulled down on the loop, and an instant later was slammed hard into her seat as explosive bolts blew the canopy clear and catapulted her out of the ship. She got a quick glimpse of the Star Destroyer’s portside edge, an even quicker glimpse of a TIE fighter whipping past—
And suddenly there was an agonized squeal from the ejection seat’s electronics, and the violent crackle of arcing circuits … and with a horrible jolt Mara realized that she had made what might very well be the last mistake of her life. Intent on aiming her crippled Z-95 at the Star Destroyer’s hangar bay, she had drifted too close to the giant ship and ejected directly into the path of the Dreadnaughts’ ion beam bombardment.
And in that single crackle of tortured electronics she had lost everything. Her comm, her lights, her limited maneuvering jets, her life support regulator, her emergency beacons.
Everything.
For a second her thoughts flickered to Skywalker. He’d been lost in deep space, too, awhile back. But she’d had a reason to find him. No one had a similar reason to find her.
A flaming TIE fighter roared past her and exploded. A large piece of shrapnel glanced off the ceramic armor that wrapped partially around her shoulders, slamming her head hard against the side of the headrest.
And as she fell into the blackness, she saw the Emperor’s face before her. And knew that she had again failed him.
They were approaching the monitor anteroom just behind the Katana’s bridge when Luke abruptly jerked. “What?” Han snapped, looking quickly around down the corridor behind them.
“It’s Mara,” the other said, his face tight. “She’s in trouble.”
“Hit?” Han asked.