Free Shadows of the Empire by Steve Perry Page B

see them, Wes,” Luke said. “Everybody stay alert!”
    Took them long enough
, Luke thought.
Must have thought it was a drill; they probably don’t get much action out here
. Maybe they’d gotten fat and lazy. Well. He could hope they had.
    “Double up on the forward shields,” Luke ordered. “Attack speed, targets of opportunity.”
    “Yeeehhaaawww!” one of the squad yelled into the comm.
    Luke had to smile. He really should tell whoever it was—sounded like Rogue Five, that was Dix—to bottle the unofficial commspeak, but he knew just how the pilot felt.
    There was nothing else in the universe that felt like flying into combat.
    “Watch yourselves,” Luke said.
    Then he was cutting across the Destroyer’s axis, laser cannons spitting high-energy beams, no time to talk now.
    The battle was joined.
    O n the
Millennium Falcon
, Leia crouched down behind Chewie and Lando in the control cockpit. Threepio stood behind them, braced more or less in the doorway.
    “Do be careful, Master Lando. We’re awfully close to the tops of those trees!”
    “Oh, really?” Lando said. “I hadn’t noticed.”
    “Well. There’s no need for sarcasm.”
    Ahead of them a couple hundred meters, Dash flewthe
Outrider
, and the wind of his passage was enough to fan the tall evergreens below; you could see the air wake ripple through the foliage. The chrome-silver ship cleared the tops of the highest trees by no more than five meters.
    “Any closer and we’ll get green stains on our belly,” Leia said.
    “Tell me about it,” Lando said. “He said we’d have to fly low but I didn’t realize he meant this low. Chewie, what’s our altitude?”
    Chewie looked at a control panel and said something in that half gargle, half moan of his.
    “Oh, my!” Threepio said.
    “Do I want to know?” Leia said.
    “I don’t think so,” Lando said.
    Over the comm on a shielded opchan, Dash spoke. “You nervous back there, Calrissian?”
    Lando glanced at Chewie. “Who, us? Nah. I thought you said we were going to be flying
low
, Dash. We’re practically in the stratosphere way up here.” He cut the comm off.
    Lando grinned at Chewie. “Guess I told him, didn’t I?”
    Dash didn’t respond in words; instead, the
Outrider
dropped four meters lower. If a passenger on the smuggler’s ship could have reached through the floor, he would have been able to touch the tops of the trees with his fingertips.
    He’s crazy
, Leia thought.
    “He’s crazy,” she said.
    “Yeah, but he can fly, you got to hand him that,” Lando said. “Give me a little more thrust, Chewie.”
    “Master Lando! What are you
doing?
”
    “I can’t let him think he’s scared us, can I?”
    “Certainly you can!” Threepio said. “He has!”
    “You’re crazier than he is,” Leia put in.
    The
Millennium Falcon
lost four meters of altitude.
    Chewie said something.
    Threepio said, “Oh, dear!”
    “What?” Leia asked.
    Threepio waved his arms. “He says that another centimeter and we’ll snag the laser cannon!”
    Leia shook her head. “What’s with this guy? What’s he trying to prove?”
    Lando concentrated on his flying—that was good—so he didn’t look at her as he spoke. “You never heard the story of the Rendars?”
    “Should I have?”
    Chewie yelled something.
    “I see it, I see it!” Lando said. The ship lifted a meter to avoid a particularly tall tree directly in its path.
    After they’d cleared it, Lando continued. “Dash was at the Imperial Academy, a year or so behind Han. His family was wealthy and highly placed. Dash’s older brother was a freighter pilot working his way up through the family shipping company. There was an accident. A control system blew out, not the pilot’s fault, and the freighter crashed on liftoff from the Coruscant spaceport. Killed the crew, destroyed the ship.”
    Leia nodded. “Terrible. So?”
    Chewie started to speak, but Lando beat him to it. “I
see
it. Do you want to fly it?”
    Chewie