Shadows of the Empire by Steve Perry

aim, gave himself to it. Pinpointed the targeting sensors in the nose cone. Felt the
rightness
of it—
    Fired again …
    A hit!
    Now Wes’s guns were dead and he—or his crazed droid—couldn’t fire the lasers or the torpedoes.
    Luke sighed again.
Thank goodness
.
    What in the galaxy could have caused it to malfunction that way?
    “Wedge, see if you can get a magnetic line on Wes and let’s get out of here, fast!”
    “That’s affirmative, Luke.”
    Bad enough when it was the enemy shooting at you; much worse when it was your own men.
    “Hey, I’m sorry, Luke, I don’t know what happened!” Wes said.
    “Don’t worry about it. We’ll sort it out later. Right now, we’d better go before the Empire decides we might be worth chasing after all.”
    “Copy that, Luke.”
    But now that the heat—and sweaty cold—of the incidenthad passed, the fear oozed back, the taste of it sour in him.
    He could have been blown apart.
    If not for the Force warning him, he would have been fried, would have winked out like an overloaded glowbulb, never knowing what had hit him. Dead, gone, no more.
    “Those TIE fighters are coming back, Luke.”
    “Let’s move it!”
    Until now, that had never seemed a real possibility to him. Luke had always thought that somehow all the lasers would miss, all the missiles would sail past harmlessly, that he would live forever. It hadn’t seemed real that he could actually cease being.
    Now
it seemed real.
    L eia fired, and the quad-barrels of the
Falcon’s
dorsal guns pistoned, spat its hard energies at the incoming TIE fighter.
    The Imperial craft flew right into the beams. Exploded.
    That was three she’d gotten, and Chewie had hit some of them, too, but there were more of them swarming in.
    Too many more.
    “We can’t land,” Lando said over the comm. “If we put it down on the deck, we’ll get blasted!”
    “What are we going to do?” Leia said.
    “I don’t know; we can’t keep flying around—uh-oh.”
    “ ‘Uh-oh’ what?”
    “Boba Fett’s ship—it’s taking off.”
    “Follow it!”
    “How? There’s a wall of Imperial fighters between it and us!”
    “Go around them!”
    She was too close to lose Han now.
    “I’ll try.”
    The
Falcon
lurched, fell in a belly-twisting dive. Because they were in a gravity well and they needed the power for the shields, the artificial gravity was turned off. Leia felt herself go weightless; only the safety straps kept her from floating out of the seat. Abruptly she grew heavier as the power dive bottomed out and Lando hit the throttles hard in a climbing turn.
    Another TIE fighter came into view. Leia started the guns working, but the fighter zipped past, too fast. Missed it.
    She felt the
Falcon
rock as the shields were hit by enemy fire.
    “I sure hope that bootleg shield generator Han installed holds up,” Lando said.
    Leia didn’t answer; she was too busy trying to shoot down the next pair of TIE fighters coming at her.
    Her gun beams lanced out and pierced one of the fighters, sent it spinning away, control surfaces riddled with holes.
    She missed the other one.
    She heard Chewie yelling something, and she wished she could understand him other than from context.
    “I hate to be the one to say it,” Lando said, “but I have a bad feeling about this.”
    B ack at Rogue Squadron’s secret moonbase, Luke and Wedge hurried from their fighters to where Wes’s X-wing had been towed. Wes stood there staring at his ruined ship.
    Wedge said, “You all right?”
    “Yeah, I’m fine. I’d sure like to know what my Artoo unit ate for breakfast, though. What could have gotten into it?”
    Luke hoped he looked better than he felt. He was still rattled, his knees a little rubbery. He took a deep breath, fought to keep his voice calm. “Why don’t wesee if we can find out?” he said. He waved at the crew chief. “Get a coupler on this Artoo unit, would you?”
    As the chief hustled her crew over to do just that, Luke heard a