He hesitated, finally shook his head and unbuckled her straps. “Forget the cargo. Move.”

She stood and another bolt hit Fatman. An explosion rocked the rear of the ship. Another. They were going down. Alarms wailed. The ship was burning, falling through the sky. Zeerid hit the control panel to engage the thrusters and keep the ship in the air.

For the moment, at least.

“THEY ARE DEAD IN THE AIR,” Lieutenant Makk announced. “Drifting on thrusters.”

Commander Jard looked to Malgus for the kill order. Vrath, too, looked on with interest.

The freighter hung low over Coruscant’s atmosphere. It limped along on thrusters, trailing flames from its dead ion engines. They could rope them back in with the tractor.

“Shoot them down,” Malgus ordered.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Vrath smile and cross his arms over his chest.

EXPLOSIONS IN THE REAR of Fatman started to spread, the secondary explosions working their way forward in a series of dull booms. They would never make it to the escape pod.

Aryn activated her lightsaber. “Grab hold of something.”

“What are you doing?”

“Getting us out.”

“What?”

She did not bother to explain. Bracing herself and holding on to her seat strap, she stabbed her blade through the transparisteel of the cockpit canopy and opened a gash. The oxygen rushed out of the cockpit while the pressure equalized. Their masks allowed them to breathe, despite the thin atmosphere. The cold startled Aryn.

She used her blade to cut a door out of the canopy. The thin air whipped by, whistling.

“We’re fifty kilometers up, Aryn!” Zeerid said, his voice rising for the first time. “The velocity alone—”

She grabbed him by the arm and gave him a shake to shut him up. “Do not let go of me no matter what. Do you understand? No matter what.”

His eyes were wide behind the lenses of his mask. He nodded.

She did not hesitate. She sank into the Force, cocooned them both in a protective sheath, and leapt out of the ship and into the open air.

The wind and velocity tore them backward. They slammed into the ship’s fuselage and whipped through the flames pouring out its sides. At almost the same moment, plasma fire from the cruiser above them hit Fatman dorsally and the ship exploded into an expanding ball of flame. The blast wave sent them careering crazily through the sky and set them to spinning like a pinwheel. For an alarming moment, Aryn’s vision blurred and she feared she would lose consciousness, but she held on to awareness with both hands and fought through it.

Zeerid was shouting but Aryn could not make it out.