He killed the running lights on the speeder and took it up to five hundred meters, just above the top of the main center structure in the spaceport. Pushing the thrusters as hard as he could, he accelerated toward it.

His heart raced, not out of fear that they would be caught, but out of concern that Aryn would find the Twi’lek.

He swerved around one of the large-craft landing arms that reached up and over them. He hunched behind the controls, anticipating fire at any moment. But none came.

Below them perhaps a hundred meters, he could see the roof doors of the various small-craft landing pads. Aryn unstrapped herself, turned, and unlatched T7. The droid beeped.

Zeerid slowed the speeder but did not stop. If anyone had seen them approach, he wanted them to think that the speeder just kept on going.

“Ready?” he asked, and set the speeder’s unsophisticated autopilot to fly on another ten klicks before setting down.

“Ready.”

He released the stick, and he and Aryn quickly maneuvered onto the back of the speeder near T7. The wind pulled at them. He had trouble balancing but Aryn took him by the arm and steadied him. They sandwiched the droid between them, shared a look.

“Go,” he said.

She nodded and they stepped off the back of the speeder.

T7 whooped as they fell. The droid’s bulk did not allow them to control their descent; they were flipping end over end immediately. Zeerid’s field of vision veered rapidly, wildly, between the starry sky and the top of the spaceport below. His stomach crawled up his throat and he gritted his teeth to keep down the protein bar he’d eaten.

End over end they spun, T7 whistling with alarm, until Aryn seized them in her power, ended the spinning, and slowed their descent. The metal and duracrete of the spaceport’s roof rushed up to meet them. They had only a second, two. Aryn grunted, slowed them still further, further, until they touched down gently on the roof.

“Much better than last time,” Zeerid said, grinning, heart racing. “I could go my whole life without another fall and feel I’d missed nothing.”

Aryn did not so much as smile.

Zeerid gathered himself, took a blaster in each hand, and scanned the rooftop. He spotted a conduit access panel. “There.”

They ran over to it and he shot off the metal cover with his blaster, exposing a viper’s nest of wires. Ordinarily, a breached cover would have set off an alarm in the control tower, but the control tower was dark, unoccupied.

“Do it, Tee-seven.”

A panel in the droid’s abdomen opened and several thin, mechanical arms reached out. All ended in one kind of tool or another. T7 stuck the arms into the wires and began to work. Zeerid, still concerned that they may have been spotted, scanned the sky. He saw nothing.

T7 hummed while he worked.