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“Hey, where does a fullgrown bantha sit?” Jacen asked.

Jaina groaned and rolled her eyes, but Anakin played along. He answered in a serious voice, as if this topic had been of a lifelong concern to him. “I’ve always wondered about that—where does a fullgrown bantha sit?”

Jacen chortled. “Anywhere he wants to!”

Jaina reached behind her seat to give her twin a good-natured swat as the comm speakers crackled to life.

“This is Ord Mantell docking control to Millennium Falcon,” a voice announced. “We are ready for you to begin.”

“We’re coming,” Han said as the Falcon drifted up through the rooftop hatches. The bright sunlight in Ord Mantell’s open sky splashed across the hull, gleaming through the cockpit windowports.

As Jaina’s eyes adjusted, she saw that the blocky, drab buildings were now festooned with colorful banners. Bobbing repulsorspheres floated in the air, trailing narrow metallic streamers. Rainbow-hued tassels, like levitating balls of tangled ribbon, flitted about in flocks.

Jacen cried out with delight. “Hey, they’re alive! I’ve heard of them—Ord Mantellian flutterplumes.”

Jaina could see that the tiny ribbons were indeed alive, drifting like clusters of colorful worms in the air.

The voice over the cockpit speakers grew louder, as if shouting to millions of other listeners. “The Ninety-Third Annual Blockade Runners Derby is about to begin! Please welcome the Millennium Falcon, piloted by General Han Solo, three-time winner of the Derby!”

The cheers drifting up from the rooftops below sounded like a distant avalanche. Small one-person fliers drew close to the Falcon, shoving holocams to the viewports and taking pictures as the ship cruised along. Han grinned and waved at the nearest HoloNet news reporter.

“Didn’t expect such a big send-off,” Jaina muttered.

Han grinned at her. “Guess we’d better give them a show worth watching.” He punched the sublight engines, and a blue-white glow flared from the rear of the Millennium Falcon, pushing them forward.

They arrowed up into the sky, leaving the holocams and the crowds behind. Their journey would be broadcast, though, by remote observer cams planted in buoys all along the route to record the race.

Jaina called up the course diagram and displayed it in three dimensions so that Anakin and Jacen could study it to find any potential points of difficulty Han and Jaina might have missed. The Blockade Runners Derby ran up out of the orbital plane into the tangled, diffuse cometary cloud that surrounded the Ord Mantell system like a distant bubble made up of mountains of ice and rock.

Frequently, gravitational perturbations from nearby star systems or planetary alignments would knock some of these tenuously held comets loose from their holding patterns, and the comets would fall down toward the sun. As they heated up, the gases would evaporate, stretching out into wispy tails of dust and ionized gas, making beautiful sights in the Ord Mantellian sky. But out here, in the deep cold of space, the comet chunks were dark, erratic navigational hazards, as dangerous as a swarm of piranha beetles.

During the Blockade Runners Derby, ships weaved through the tumbling ice cloud, ducking around and through protocomets. Speed and skill counted for everything… including a ship’s survival, of course.

Leaving the planet’s atmosphere, Han Solo increased the Falcon’s speed.

He roared up at full acceleration, straight out of the ecliptic and into the cometary cloud. Jaina felt the skin on her cheeks pulled back by gravitational force as the engines labored. She was glad they had just tuned them up.

“Why so fast, Dad?” Jacen said from his seat in the rear. “We’re just a slow, sedate pace craft, not an official contestant.”

Anakin said in a level voice, “I think Dad’s just trying to get some of the frustration out of his system.”

“Not exactly,” Han said to his sons. “We’re running through the course, but”—he raised his forefinger—“they’re also recording our time. So wouldn’t it be wonderful if the old Falcon happened to do better than any of the actual contestants? How could the real winner ever live down his shame?”

“Or her shame,” Jaina said.

“Or its shame,” Jacen added.

“I get the point,” Han said. “I intend to beat even my last speed record, when I actually won this thing.”

“Is that breaking the rules?” Anakin asked.

“Naw. But it’ll give the crowds something to talk about for years.”

Han worked the controls, increasing speed again. “Hang on, everybody. Comet cloud ahead.”

Jaina adjusted the controls, activating the newly installed windowport filters. “I’m increasing infrared pickup,” she said. “There’s not much reflected sunlight out here, but this way we’ll be able to detect the comets a little better.”

Suddenly the view changed color as they hurtled forward. Glinting, tumbling specks became visible like a cloud of sparks drifting toward them. In the holographic projection of the cometary cloud, a dotted line wove like a needle and thread through the loosely packed cluster of ice fragments.

“All right,” Han said. “Get ready for some tricky maneuvers.”

Almost before Jaina realized it, they exploded into the blizzard of ice chunks. Some were nearly round, some blocky and geometric, others spiny with crystalline formations.

Han gave a howl of delight as he spun the Falcon around. Jaina watched the engines while Anakin monitored their course. They skimmed low over one ice field, then looped around. The comets were so small and light that their weak gravity had little effect on the ship’s navigation.

A tiny fragment of ice too small to be detected on their sensors evaporated against their deflector screen in a sparkle of light. More bright flashes appeared as the Falcon continued without slowing.

“Hey, it’s like we’re in a snowstorm,” Jacen said.

“More like a hailstorm,” Jaina said. “Those little bits of ice would poke holes right through us at our speed if the deflector shields weren’t working.”

“You did tune them up, didn’t you?” Jacen asked.

“Naturally. Nothing to worry about.”

Han focused ahead and plowed through a gaping cave in a fragile ice latticework, a comet that looked like crystal straws melted together.

One of the tiny shafts struck the deflector shield and snapped. The entire cave opening began to collapse as the Falcon soared through and burst out the other side. But the comet’s gravity was so low that it would take well over an hour for the avalanche to complete itself “I’m increasing speed,” Han said.

“Dad, you’re already close to the red lines,” Jaina warned.

“And close to beating my record, too. Let’s keep on with it, but keep your Jedi senses alert for anything unexpected.”

“We will,” Jacen said with conviction.

“We always do,” Anakin added.

The ice boulders spun around as they whipped through a denser orbit.

Jaina spotted holocam buoys mounted on some of the ice chunks, and she knew that thousands of spectators on Ord Mantell were even now watching their flight. By now everyone would see that Han Solo was recklessly trying to break his speed record, and that his kids were helping him.

Jaina smiled to herself. She would just have to make sure her father didn’t get embarrassed.

“Let’s tighten the course,” she said, looking at the projection.

“Gravity calculations show we could come even closer to that next comet, make a sharper turn to shave off a bit of distance here and increase our speed, whip around this hazard, come out in a backward spiral, and pull up.”