Solo: A Star Wars Story: Expanded Edition Read online

  DEL REY

  NEW YORK

  Solo: A Star Wars Story is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Lucasfilm Ltd. & ® or ™ where indicated. All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  DEL REY and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Hardback ISBN 9780525619390

  International edition ISBN 9781984819369

  Ebook ISBN 9780525619406

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Elizabeth A. D. Eno, adapted for ebook

  v5.3.2

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  The Del Rey Star Wars Timeline

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Epilogue

  Photo Insert

  Dedication

  Also by Mur Lafferty

  About the Author

  A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….

  It is a lawless time. CRIME SYNDICATES compete for resources—food, medicine, and HYPERFUEL.

  On the shipbuilding planet of CORELLIA, the foul LADY PROXIMA forces runaways into a life of crime in exchange for shelter and protection.

  On these mean streets, a young man fights for survival, but yearns to fly among the stars…

  Han summoned speed, but his boots could only run so fast.

  He had meant to be on time, but there had been a Sabacc game going on and most everyone respected the need for a good game of Sabacc. Anyone worth playing Sabacc with, anyway.

  And he was on time, if you considered half an hour late to be on time, and who counted half hours anyway, when you’re meeting a shady back-alley dealer in a shady back alley in the poorly lit hours of the morning?

  Unfortunately for Han, Kilmo, the shady back-alley dealer, was waiting for him. He, apparently, counted those half hours.

  Han came skidding to a halt in front of him, his engineer boots sliding in some industrial goo. He grinned a hello, hoping his charm would win him some points here. “Hey, Kilmo, you’re looking good,” he said, barely recognizing the tall, lanky human lurking in the shadows. A couple of larger shadows moved behind him. “And Kilmo’s friends. Hey.”

  Friends. Lady Proxima had said nothing about Kilmo bringing friends.

  “You’re late,” Kilmo rumbled. He sounded even taller than he was. Han wouldn’t have said someone could sound tall, but that was Kilmo for you. He moved into the light, his pockmarked face half hidden by greasy blond hair.

  “Only a little bit,” Han agreed amiably. “But I’m here now, and I’ve got what you need.” He winked, hoping they could see he was no threat.

  One of the tall shapes behind Kilmo stepped forward. It looked like a Sabetue, gaunt, skeletal, and skin the rare, pure white indicating they were genderless. Han had never seen a white Sabetue before, but no matter their color, he thought it would be a good idea to keep his eyes on the claws. You really didn’t want to deal with the claws on either their hands or feet. At all. Ever.

  “Less talk,” they said. “More showing.”

  Han fished around in his right-hand pocket, pulled out five small metal vials, and showed them to Kilmo. “The finest hyperfuel credits can buy.” Kilmo reached out his hand eagerly, but Han jerked his away. “If you brought the credits, that is.”

  The Sabetue seemed to be the brains of the outfit, because while Kilmo’s eyes gleamed with greed, their ugly face frowned, adding at least two more degrees of ugliness to it. “We agreed to seven vials of refined coaxium.”

  Han’s eyes went wide. “Seven?” He looked at his hands and made a show of counting the vials. “…three, four, five. I could’ve sworn she gave me seven.”

  The Sabetue stepped forward, flexing their claws, and Han took a quick step back. “Hang on, hang on, let me see if I misplaced them,” he said, holding up one hand to stop the advance as his other hand grasped the coaxium.

  He rooted around in one trouser pocket, and then the other one, awkwardly reaching across his body while his right hand tightly grasped the treasure the gangsters wanted. His fingers brushed another vial, and he fished it out, sighing in relief. “I misplaced it!” he said triumphantly. “Here you go.”

  “That’s still only six,” Kilmo said, finally catching on. “Where’s the last one?”

  “Well, I’m sure Lady Proxima will accept a reduced payment for a reduced number of vials,” Han said. “You were going to pay forty-one thousand for seven? How about twenty thousand for six?”

  The gang advanced as one, and Han backed up, scrabbling for another answer. “Eighteen? Sixteen! Give me a number! I can be reason—uh-oh.” He had backed into something. It wasn’t a wall, but it was about as solid, and a lot angrier.

  If he’d thought Kilmo and his friends were large, they were nothing compared with this person. Another human, a man, but bigger than any he had ever seen. The person was enshrouded in shadow, but Han could feel the muscles move under his skin, like busy rocks putting their affairs in order before an avalanche. Hands fell on his shoulder, and he staggered under the weight.

  “Another friend?” he asked, smiling weakly and looking up. That’s when Kilmo hit him.

  The first punch landed squarely on his left eye, rocketing his head backward and making him see stars in the overcast sky. The second attack was the lucky one, though. It was a one–two that glanced off his nose and hit him in the gut. It was lucky not because the punches didn’t hurt—his eyes watered from the pain and he doubled over, desperately trying to get his breath back—but because they drove him backward into the man who held him.

  Since Kilmo had been so helpful as to give him some extra force, Han drove back with his elbows as he hit the man behind him. He would have liked to slam his head back and break the guy’s nose as well, but the guy was too tall. Besides, Han was doubled over from the force of the blow to his stomach, but he could still hit the guy behind him so he, too, could feel the pleasure of a gut punch.

  As Han had hoped, the man staggered backward, doubling over and losing his grip on Han. The coaxium vials fumbled through Han’s fingers and rolled to the ground as he forced himself to run, still doubled over. At least hunched over in pain was a good position to avoid the Sabetue’s attempt to grab him as he scrambled away.

  He gave one last mournful look at the coaxium, now being gathered by Kilmo’s greedy hands. “Blast,” he said under his breath—except it was more like a c
roak, since his breath hadn’t returned. He hadn’t wanted to leave without the payment. Not having the credits would be a problem when he returned to Lady Proxima, but if Han had learned anything in his years on Corellia, it was to get away with your life first, and then later you could deal with all the other problems that getting away had caused.

  His middle stopped spasming and he took in a great whoop of air. Han straightened up, stretched his legs, and ran.

  The predawn light began to tentatively touch the pills of Coronet City, making the dark-gray connected islands somewhat lighter gray, before the sun would rise and turn them to their glory of, well, a little bit lighter gray than that. The city was always gray in some shade or other.

  Through the dark gray, Han sought an answer to the question that seemed to come up a lot: How was he going to get out of this with his life? Kilmo had not been content with letting him go; after he and his gang had gathered up the metal vials, they’d started after him.

  All in all, this mad dash for his life was not unlike all the other mad dashes for his life. Adrenaline surged as he ran down the alley, dodging trash, boxes, leaking canisters of he-didn’t-want-to-know. Feet, human and nonhuman, pounded the street behind him.

  Ahead lay Narro Sinear Boulevard, one of the bridges that connected the island pills of Coronet. He aimed to cross it and hit the alley on the other side, lose the pursuers in the maze of power generators and desalinization units. It was a solid plan, one that had saved him countless times in the past. He definitely didn’t want to move from the shadows into the street that had just started to wake, with L-1g droids powering on and getting to work, but something caught his eye.

  Kilmo had been driving an M-68 landspeeder—shiny brand-new, and just sitting there. I guess you don’t worry about leaving your speeder in a bad part of town when you’re what makes the town bad, Han thought. Still, Kilmo should have known better than to leave a street-racing-quality speeder—an open-air model at that!—just sitting there with only its security system to protect it.

  This speeder was treasure. Treasure that would lead to freedom and a ticket away from this grimy and downtrodden life.

  He threw himself out into the street, dodging around the tall droids, some of them protesting that he was impeding their work. He hoped they would shield him from his pursuers—but there weren’t a lot of droids or people out at this time of day. When he reached the speeder, he ducked down and rolled under it, panting and watching.

  Feet wandered past his hiding place, most of them human engineering boots and droid feet. No surprise; the best barely-living-wage jobs were in the factories. The Corellians were famous for starship designs and construction. Most jobs on the world had to do with building starships, testing the mechanical and electrical parts, and designing them—and those jobs tended to work you to death. They were marginally better than the other jobs on the planet: no fish guts.

  The local jobs that paid less consisted of fishmonger, sailor, and thief. Han, like most orphans, outcasts, and runaways in Coronet City, held the last job.

  Most respectable jobs had dried up since the Empire had claimed the planet as its own, and put its citizens to work building Imperial ships. Gangs and crime had risen in the subsequent years as more and more desperate people looked to find a way to feed themselves. And there were the rat gangs, taking orphaned and poor kids to their bosom, offering food and credits for lifted goods. Joining the White Worms had seemed like a great idea at the time, a family to replace the one he’d had. Or at least a place he could sleep off the streets.

  Unfortunately this “family” also came with danger on the street, beatings within the grimy lair, and a constant reminder that you were worth much less than the clothes they put on you and the portions they grudgingly gave you. And if the authorities caught you outside doing the Worms’ dirty jobs, you were on your own. No one would come and help.

  Han had fallen into this life as a boy, and there was still no end in sight.

  Imperial feet wandered by the speeder, white boots stepping with smart certainty. He hoped they would keep his pursuers at bay, but no such luck. Kilmo and his gang soon came into view. Their pace slowed somewhat, likely due to the Imperials, but they still came. Human feet, Sabetue claws, three legs belonging to one being, and then a tail sliding in the street. He hadn’t even seen whom the latter feet had belonged to, but he guessed they had been ready as backup for Kilmo. They hurried toward him, coming closer and closer, and Han held his breath, knowing that if they caught him, he couldn’t get away again. They’d probably kill him right there in the street, claiming to have found a thief.

  They weren’t entirely wrong about that, but technically they were the thieves this time.

  The feet paused. They were so close Han could see that the Sabetue needed a pedicure badly; they had a split claw that oozed, as if it had recently been tearing at something. It looked painful, but Han couldn’t make himself drum up too much sympathy as he wondered who had been at the other end of those claws.

  He swallowed nervously and kept perfectly still. If Kilmo decided to search for Han in his speeder, Han would have an entirely new set of problems very quickly.

  Then the feet moved on, disappearing down the alley.

  That should be all of them. Han popped up and looked around: Imperials were gone. The thugs were gone. Then he looked at the console of the speeder. He grinned and hopped inside.

  A gritty metal taste filled Han’s mouth as he held his light between his teeth to see in the early dawn. He took his tools in his hands and smiled to himself. It was child’s play, really. Especially because he had been doing this kind of thing since he’d been a kid.

  “Come on,” he muttered. He bypassed the alarm before it could even wake up to alert anyone, and then broke through the security system. He shook his head, the light bobbing back and forth across the console. Whatever Kilmo paid for his security system, it was too much. He was about to learn an expensive lesson.

  Once security was disabled, Han reached under the steering wheel. His hands knew what they were doing; they moved almost without him thinking about it. Switch this, push that aside, strip a mechanism down to the wires. With surgical precision, he united two wires and gave them a twist.

  “Come on,” he urged, the wires sizzling but nothing happening. He popped his head up and looked around, seeing Kilmo’s back only a few meters away.

  “Come on,” he said a third time, giving the wires another twist. The wires dug into his fingertips, sparking on contact, and the slight shock sent a charge of excitement up his arms. The speeder hummed to life, a gentle purr that didn’t even alert anyone to the theft that was about to happen.

  Han quickly familiarized himself with the console, his fingers dancing over the switches. He slammed a lever, and underneath him the repulsorlift engine flared, lifting the speeder. It wobbled briefly and then steadied. Han reached into his jacket pocket and produced his two lucky golden dice attached by a chain. The moment he took to hang them from the windscreen was not wasted time.

  He ignited the rear thrusters and was gone. The speeder was his, now.

  The theft was masterful, clean, and swift.

  Masterful and swift, yeah, but Han wasn’t clean at all. His face was coated in ash, stuck to his skin with sweat and the blood smeared around his nose and lip. His left eye throbbed from Kilmo’s recent punch. But nothing could diminish the utter elation he felt as the speeder took him away from the gang that still searched for him, hoping to finish what they’d started.

  He drove into the dawn, urging the engine faster, ignoring the shouts of protest behind him. They soon dissipated and he hit the bridge, luxuriating in the wind in his face, the smell of brine on the air, the breakneck speed he reached. This was the life he needed. Not skulking around tunnels doing errands for a crime boss.

  He thought of the only place that deserved the word “home” des
pite how dubious. Han had grown up in the lair of the White Worms, placed a favela in the underbelly of Coronet City.

  Where Coronet City was the gray of ship hulls and circuit boards, coated with the grime of any industrial or manufacturing area, the favela was the gray of filth and despair, with a metallic tang of danger. The place he wanted desperately to drive away from.

  But then there was Qi’ra. He smiled wryly, the drying blood on his lip cracking, picturing the look on her face when they were free. He couldn’t leave her here. He just couldn’t. If she’d been in the same position, she wouldn’t leave him.

  He didn’t listen to the small doubt in his head that said he wasn’t entirely, 100 percent sure if that was true. But Qi’ra was like all the kids the White Worms had raised: a survivor. They had to be. Still, he wouldn’t have been able to face himself if he’d left her. With a sigh, he changed course and headed in to the favela.

  He slowed a bit, trying to look less like a thief getting away with the best lift of his life and more like a respectable man heading to work in the factories, building a respectable Star Destroyer for the respectable Empire.

  Never mind that he looked nothing like a respectable man right now. He wiped his sleeve across his nose to try to clean up some of the blood, but he couldn’t tell if the blood transferred to the sleeve, or if he’d just wiped more dirt on his face.

  Forget respectable then, it was boring. He revved the engine again and picked up speed, dodging sleepy merchants carrying barrels of fish and bolts of cloth. He wove in and out of traffic, leaving the slower-moving vehicles behind him as if they were standing still. He couldn’t help but let out a whoop of joy. Speed was life. Speed was everything.