CHAPTER 5

HAN SOLO STRETCHED BACK FAR ENOUGH IN THE CONFERENCE room chair that when he laced his fingers together behind his head, he had to jam one knee up under the table to keep from toppling over. He stared at the ceiling and wondered, for the three or four hundredth time that day, if it was possible to die of boredom.

He decided, as he had all the other times, that if such a thing were possible he would have bumped off at least two days ago. If there was anything in the galaxy he hated more than sitting around in a room for hours on end with nothing to do but listen to people yap, it had to be sitting around in a room for hours with nothing to do except listen to Mandalorians yap.

Man, he hated those guys!

Han was no bigot; despite some unfortunate experiences with a certain Mando bounty hunter—who, if the Force believed in justice, was still to this very day screaming as he slowly dissolved in a sarlacc’s digestive juices—he didn’t hate Mandalorians in general. He’d just never met a single one of these stuck-up more-studly-than-thou self-proclaimed MESFACs (Masters of Every Single Flippin’ Aspect of Combat) who could even so much as say “Good morning” without making it sound like he was really saying It better be a good morning, because if you pull anything, I will without hesitation jariler your weak peace-lovin’ Corellian butt till you don’t even know what galaxy you’re in.

He didn’t hate Mandos in general; he only hated the ones he’d actually met.

Further, some screwed-up sense of honor or ethnic pride or something had somehow made these particular Mandalorians unwilling to speak Basic during these talks. Which didn’t stop them from yapping, of course. They just yapped in Mando’a, a language that, to Han’s more-than-somewhat biased ear, made them sound like a pride of sand panthers trying to cough up hairballs bigger than his head. And this hairball-hacking then had to be dutifully translated into Basic for the convenience of the chief New Republic negotiator by the chief negotiator’s high-strung, hypersensitive, relentlessly neurotic protocol droid, who somehow among his six million flippin’ forms of communication had never managed to lose that snooty Core Worlds accent that, after hearing it nonstop for a couple of days cooped up in this room with nothing better to do, made Han want to whop him so hard he’d land somewhere back on Tatooine.

The main consideration that stopped him from engaging in catastrophic droid-remodeling was the presence beside him of the New Republic’s chief negotiator, who was so breathtakingly beautiful that Han couldn’t even glance her way without feeling his heart begin to pound.

She was not only beautiful but brilliant and fiercely courageous, and she had done only one really foolish thing in her life: a couple of years ago, she had let herself fall in love with a dashing-but-impoverished tramp-freighter captain—well, okay, a disreputable smuggler on the run from Imperial authorities and various bounty hunters and crime lords, but who was counting?—and Han could never shake this lurking dread that if he, say, did something nasty to C-3PO, who, after all, usually meant well, Leia might suddenly wake up and realize what an awful mistake she’d made.

Not that he would ever admit this, not even to Chewbacca. Not even to himself, most days—his ego was nigh-invulnerable to self-doubt—but on those rare occasions when he found himself getting irritable and depressed because he was stuck somewhere with way too much time to think and not nearly enough to do, these little whispers would start hissing around the back of his head. He could quiet them only by privately reaffirming his personal blood oath that he would never—never ever ever—give the woman he loved a reason to regret falling for him.

Which left him sitting in a conference room in a pressure dome on an unnamed asteroid in some Inner Rim system so obscure he couldn’t remember its name, pretending to give a damn while C-3PO translated yet another string of Mandalorian gabble. “The commander repeats that surrender simply is not possible, and reiterates that the only peaceful solution to this unfortunate situation is for all Rebel—that is, New Republic, of course; he doesn’t seem to understand the distinction, or else is being deliberately obtuse, but no matter—is for all Rebel forces to depart the system forthwith. Of course, this is not his exact phraseology; the literal translation—stripped of vulgarity—is roughly along the lines of You Rebels stay, everybody dies, you Rebels leave, everybody’s happy, which wholly fails to capture the entirely savage brutality of his vocabulary. Really, Princess, having to process such coarse language—my vulgarity-filter capacitors are on the brink of overload!”

Han didn’t even entirely understand what the negotiation was all about; he’d missed the battle completely, as he and Leia had been off somewhere on the far side of nowhere, hammering out the details of bringing into the New Republic a minor star cluster inhabited mainly by hairy spider-looking critters who had thoroughly creeped him out, not least because these, unlike most of the arachnoid races, had very humanoid-looking faces, including mouthfuls of gleaming white, entirely human-looking teeth.

Anyway, by the time he’d brought Leia here at the urgent summons of the local system authority, the Imperial forces had been thoroughly defeated and scattered to the stars—all except five or six hundred Mandalorian mercenaries, who were dug in around several trineutronium power plants on the system’s main inhabited world; the Mandos had proclaimed themselves ready and willing to detonate these installations at the first touchdown of a Republic ship, which would sterilize the planet and kill all three and a half billion people who lived there.

They’d taken the world hostage.

Han had been able to gather, through the endless hours of tense negotiations, that the final order from the fleeing Imperial commander had been for the Mandos to deny the planet to Republic forces “by any and all necessary means.” The Mando commander had interpreted that to mean “Even if you have to kill everybody, including yourselves.” But the New Republic wasn’t about to give back a system that was not only rich in natural resources and manufacturing capacity but had also, in a system-wide referendum, voted overwhelmingly in favor of Republic membership, with something like ninety-seven percent recommending union. Han privately hoped that the three percent diehard ImpSymps all lived right next door to one of those trineutronium plants.

Anyway, the negotiation had disintegrated into a standoff: Leia’s rationality and persuasive powers matched against the rock-ribbed Mandalorians Never Surrender nuttiness of the mercenary commander. It had gotten to the point that Han was actually looking forward to Lando’s arrival.

This was surprising not because of anything to do with Lando himself, whom Han, despite their long and often unhappy history together, actually liked—well, most of the time—but rather with what Lando was bringing to this table. Well, less what than who.

Lando Calrissian, unlike his old buddy Han, had hung on to his general’s commission. He was currently the director of Special Operations, a fancy-sounding title that apparently involved, today, being a highly decorated chauffeur. He was on his way back from Mandalorian space, where he had gone to corral the one guy in the galaxy Lando claimed could change the alleged minds of these commandos: the Big Boss of the Mandalorian Protectors and self-styled Lord Mandalore, Fenn Shysa himself.

Or, as Han usually thought of him, Fenn You-So-Much-as-Look-at-Leia-That-Way-One-More-Time-and-I-Swear-I’m-Gonna-Pop-Your-Mando-Skull-Like-a-Bladdergrape Shysa.

Shysa and his men had given up the mercenary life, and he’d organized his cadre into the kernel of the Protectors—kind of civic-minded volunteer police and freelance do-gooders, more or less. Which meant that Shysa, on top of his born-and-bred MESFAC more-studly-than-thou thing, had piled more-honorable-than-thou, more-self-sacrificing-than-thou, and more-all-around-good-guy-than-thou.

If Han were inclined to be entirely honest about such things—which he was not, on principle—he might have admitted that his problem with the Protector commandant had more to do with a sneaking suspicion that Fenn might also be better-looking-than-thou, and with how much attention this particular Hero of Mandalore paid to Leia. And how much Leia seemed to enjoy it.

This time, though, Han was actually grudgingly willing to let Shysa have the pleasure of spending time in a room with Leia—a conference room, with Han and a few dozen officers as chaperones—as long as it got this situation resolved. He figured this proved he’d grown as a person. A little. Maybe.

Just how questionable that growth might be was amply demonstrated when Leia turned to him, put a hand on his arm to draw him close, and leaned toward him to whisper in his ear; he actually more than half expected that she was about to tell him how much she was looking forward to seeing Shysa again.

Instead, she muttered in a voice stretched thin with tension, “Han, Luke’s in trouble.”

The front legs of Han’s chair bumped back down to the floor. “What?”

Leia gave her head that little shake, one Han knew so well, barely more than a lip-compressed shiver that signaled I don’t know why, but I don’t like this at all. “It’s a—feeling. He might—”

“Hey, I worry about him too, but—” Han laid a comforting hand on her shoulder. “He can take care of himself, you know? The stuff he can do …”

His voice trailed off as he felt the knots of tension in her shoulder; instead of him giving her comfort, she was giving him dread.

A dimple appeared at the corner of her mouth that told Han she was biting the inside of her lower lip. “It’s not just the Mindor raid. I think—I think there’s something … wrong there. Something bad.”

“Something he can’t handle? I mean, we’re talking about Luke, here—Luke I-Must-Face-Vader-and-Palpatine-Alone Skywalker, y’know?” Han thought it was a pretty good line, but it sounded hollow, even to him. He forged on. “How much trouble can he really be in?”

“I—I don’t know, Han!” The twist of uncertainty at the corners of her eyes brought a similar twist to Han’s heart. “If I knew, I wouldn’t even have mentioned it—or else we’d be on our way already.”

“Excuse me, please—I beg your pardon most awfully, Princess—” C-3PO leaned in between them. “Though my vocabulary filter and voice-stress analysis subprogram suggest that your conversation is very likely private, the commander is becoming restive, and is requesting a translation. Not very respectfully, I might add.”

“Ask him if he needs you to translate this—” Han began, but the gesture he’d been referring to was interrupted by Leia’s astonishingly strong grip on his arm.

“Han, can you just—just find out? Try the comm center. The RRTF will be in subspace contact. Just—make sure he’s all right. And tell him to be careful.” Her urgent whisper dropped to a barely audible hush. “Tell him I have a bad feeling about this.”

HAN TROTTED THROUGH THE HUGE ROCK-DOMED docking bay, buckling his blaster belt and tying down his holster as he went. He threaded through deck gangs busily shifting fighters and shuttles into parking slips, sneezing at the thick petrochemical fumes belched out by overstressed dry-tugs. When he reached the Falcon, the shadow of her starboard mandible was littered with a bewildering array of components in various states of disrepair and disassembly, most of which—to his sadly all-too-experienced eye—appeared to belong to the control assembly of her starboard deflector unit. The party responsible for this wanton destruction of property was currently standing down to his knees in the proximal access hatch—all that could be seen of him was a pair of vast russet-shagged feet on top of a coffin-sized toolbox that rested on a rusty, battered scrap of scaffolding that looked like it had once been some kind of picnic table, while the rest of his vast hairy body was jammed way up into the innards of Han’s ship.

“Chewie—hey, Chewie!”

The feet gave back no reaction, which was no surprise. The growl of dry-tug engines and the electronically amplified orders bawled by the deck bosses were so loud Han could barely even hear himself. He swept up a nearby gauss wrench and whanged the Falcon’s hull hard enough to leave a bright new scar. From deep within the access hatch came a thump Han could feel though the hull—Chewbacca’s head was fully hard enough to dent durasteel—and a brief but heartfelt snarl of Wookiee expletive, which would be enough to erode the confidence of almost any human being in the galaxy. Almost. “Get the ship zipped and clipped,” Han said. “I’ll start the launch sequence. Skids up in ten.”

Chewie howled a protest. Han said, “Well, if we could land somewhere for more than twenty minutes before you start taking the ship apart, we wouldn’t have this—”

Chewbacca’s reply of “Geeroargh hroo owwweragh!” translated, roughly, as If I missed any chances to take the ship apart, we wouldn’t have a ship at all, which was so patently true that even Han couldn’t argue, so he changed the subject. “Lando’s escort drops skids in about twelve minutes. The Falcon needs to be ready to go when traffic control drops the particle shields so we can slip out.”

Chewie’s massive brows pulled together, and he grumbled a wary interrogative.

“No, no, no, nothing like that. Nobody’s after us.”

“Garouf?”

“It’s—an errand, that’s all. We need to, uh, drop in on Luke. Pay him a little visit. A, ah, social call.”

“Rhouergh hweroo snngh.”

“What’s the matter? Don’t you want to see Luke? What, you don’t like him anymore?”

“Lowerough. Lowerough garoohnnn?”

“No, she’s not coming.”

“Garouf?”

“Because I said so. Am I still the captain around here?”

“Hnerouggr fnerrolleroo!” Chewbacca’s voice rose, as did one vast finger that waggled in Han’s face. “Sscheroll ghureeohh—”

“All right, all right, keep it down, huh?” Han took a quick glance around to make sure nobody was close enough to overhear on the noisy deck. “I was just up at ComOps. Luke’s whole task force has gone dark—they haven’t gotten a peep out of him since insertion—and his reserves went dark about ten minutes ago.” His face darkened. “And Leia’s got a feeling he’s in trouble.”

Chewie began to grumble another question, but Han cut him off. “I don’t know what we can do about it. Maybe nothing. But at least we can find out what’s going on. I can’t—Chewie, you know me. You understand. I can’t just leave him out there …”

“Ghn lowerough?”

“No, she asked me to try to contact him. She doesn’t know we’re actually going. And she’s not gonna know. There is no way I’m gonna let her come along.”

“Howergh?”

“Because …” Han made a face. “Because I have a bad feeling about this, too,” he said, and vanished up the boarding ramp.

LANDO CALRISSIAN WALKED DOWN THE RAMP OF HIS personal command shuttle looking every centimeter the general he was, from the millimetrically level brim of his gleaming cap to the subtly iridescent uppers of his similarly gleaming boots. The elegantly close-fitting jumpsuit he wore was also subtly iridescent, so that its powder-blue sheen could pick up complementary highlights from whatever environment he might find himself in—because a gentleman and an officer must never, ever clash—and it fit as if it had been designed specifically for him, which, of course, it had. He’d designed it himself.

Thrown over one shoulder he carried his custom belt-length uniform jacket—jet black, naturally, because black goes with everything—which he’d commissioned after being reliably informed that Ackbar and Republic Command would absolutely draw the line at an opera cape. At his side walked Fenn Shysa, wearing only his usual battered flight gear—which, Lando had to admit, suited him rather well.

When Lando had come into the shuttle’s cabin for the first time wearing these dress blues, Shysa had snorted openly. “Don’t recall ever seeing a holo of Madine in an outfit like that.”

“That’s because Crix can’t pull it off,” Lando had replied with a shrug, admiring the jacket’s cut in a full-length mirror. “He carries a bit much in the middle, know what I mean?”

“And you’re wonderin’ why Mandalorian mercenaries don’t seem to respect you.”

Lando grinned. “I like being underestimated.”

“I’m thinkin’ it’s mostly that you like your fancy clothes.”

“If looking good ever becomes a crime, Fenn my friend, I’m ready to do life.”

Shysa marched through the busy docking bay with his usual straight-ahead military stride. Lando lagged a bit, nodding to this tech and that deckhand, greeting most of them by name, introducing himself to those he didn’t know. The same uncanny knack of memory that let him mentally track the tactics and tells of thousands of gamblers across the galaxy also helped him recall the names of anyone he’d ever met—often the names of their children and details of their homeworlds, too. It was more than just a trick, though; he genuinely liked people, and this had made him almost ridiculously popular with the rank and file of the RDF. But it could slow him down when he had to move through a crowd, which was why he was a bit late to catch what Leia was saying to Fenn as he came up, something about C-3PO waiting in the conference room with full briefing and status report.

Something had brought an entirely lovely blush to Leia’s cheeks, which Lando automatically assumed must be the result of some clumsily flattering compliment from Shysa. Since to be outsmoothed by a gruff-mannered fighter jock would never be part of Lando’s life plan, he stepped up and bowed over Leia’s hand. “Princess, I apologize in advance for my inadequate words,” he said, “because as usual, your beauty leaves me entirely speechless.”

“Stow it.” Leia reclaimed her hand with a brisk yank; that high color in her cheeks was apparently not due so much to pleasure as to, say, rage. “Answer a question instead.”

Lando blinked. “Princess?”

“Why is it,” she said through clenched teeth, “that the only man I know under the age of sixty who is capable of even pretending to be a grown-up is my own brother?”

Before Lando could begin to stammer out anything resembling an answer, she swept off along the corridor, stalking toward the docking bay in a stiff-backed march that reminded him uncomfortably of a Socorran granite-hawk’s threat display.

Fenn leaned toward him. “What’s with her?”

“She does seem a bit wrought up.”

“I thought she’s a diplomat—isn’t she supposed to be more, I dunno, kinda self-possessed?”

“She is. She was once interrogated by Darth Vader himself and never so much as blinked. Look up unflappable on the HoloNet, you’ll find her profile.”

“She’s sure flappin’ some right now.”

“I’d say so.”

“So what is it that can get a girl like her so spittin’ mad and all?”

“It’s not a what, it’s a who,” Lando said with a smile of fond remembrance. “In her defense, he could make a Jedi Master throw a full-scale hissy fit.”

Shysa nodded. “You must be talkin’ about Solo.”

LEIA BROKE INTO A TROT AS SHE ENTERED THE DOCKING bay cavern, but stopped short when she registered the absence of a familiar silhouette that should have been in the repair bay beyond the lines of shuttles and fighters. She pushed her way through the deck gangs to the place where the Falcon had been docked. There was nothing to be seen there except some grease and coolant stains, a few scraps of hull plating and random electronic components, and one lone gauss wrench with a dented head. Setting her jaw, she swept the gauss wrench up and weighed it in her hand. But then she lowered her arm and just gazed balefully out into the dark of space beyond the docking bay’s particle shield.

She should never have sent Han in the first place. She should have made him stew in that stifling conference room listening to C-3PO struggle to find polite translations of that Mandalorian’s sneers. He hadn’t been gone ten minutes when she’d realized what a mistake she’d made. And why.

It was because she didn’t take herself seriously enough.

Even after all these months, she couldn’t make herself entirely believe that actual Jedi blood ran in her veins—not only Jedi blood, but the blood of arguably the most powerful Jedi in history. She had never entirely gotten her mind around the truth that her instincts and intuitions and premonitions were much more than psychological phenomena: that they were, really and truly, the whispers of the Force itself. She had sent Han because, deep down, she’d really believed that he’d just run on up to the communications center and check on the real-time subspace status reports coming from Luke’s task force, and when he found out that all was well, he’d just run on back and tell her so. With maybe a bit of teasing about some static today on the Feminine Intuition Channel, huh?

Coming to grips with their Jedi heritage must have been easier for Luke; growing up on the Outer Rim, he’d barely even known what a Jedi was. Leia, on the other hand, had been raised in a household that was steeped in reverence for the Jedi Order and everything it had stood for. The man she still thought of as her father—Bail, the Prince Consort—had had an inexhaustible fund of tales of the Jedi, not just from the Clone Wars but from the whole history of the Republic. He had never spoken of any Jedi with less than absolute respect for the way they had devoted their lives wholly to the cause of peace and justice, sacrificing everything in the tragic Clone Wars.

Was it any wonder that she couldn’t quite believe it? That one of those legendary heroes had been Anakin Skywalker, her real father … and that this legendary hero had somehow been transformed into the most ruthless, homicidal, and terrifying enforcer of the Empire’s tyranny … and that the eager puppy of a Tatooine farm boy who had burst into her cell on the Death Star to rescue her—without the faintest ghost of a plan beyond a naive faith in the essential justness of the universe—was her twin, who now expected her to follow in his, and their father’s, footsteps …

It was all just too preposterous. She might, just barely, be able to believe it could possibly have happened … to somebody else.

Right up until something equally preposterous would happen. Like sitting in a bleak conference room on an airless asteroid and suddenly knowing, just flat knowing, that her brother—thousands of light-years away—was so deep in danger that even he didn’t have a chance of surviving on his own.

But then she’d still had to hack through the thickets of Oh, I’m just being silly second thoughts; what finally cleared her mind and righted her course was the added premonition, after some fifteen minutes spent fitfully waiting for his return, that now Han was also in danger. Even then, after she’d become alarmed enough to mutter a lame excuse to the Mandalorians and leave the room, she’d had to go all the way up to the communications center to confirm in person what was going on. When she found out that the RRTF’s subspace real-time reports had suddenly gone dark—and that Han had been up here some fifteen minutes earlier and had gotten the same information—she had turned straight for the docking bay cavern, because she knew Han would jump out of here just as fast as he could get the Falcon’s engines hot.

She also knew why: Han could no more leave a friend in danger than he could jump to lightspeed by flapping his arms. And she knew that he’d leave without telling her he was going, because he knew she was, in this respect, no different than he was, and he still had this profoundly silly masculine notion that he could somehow keep her from danger just by leaving her behind. Just how profoundly silly this masculine notion was she planned to demonstrate graphically as soon as she caught up with him. Maybe she’d draw him a picture. On his skull. With the gauss wrench.

But how could she catch him?

She looked around the docking bay, but in the chaos of hustling crew and tugs and the clouds hissing out from gas exchangers and the space dust billowing away from hulls hooked up to electrostatic reversers, there were no answers to be found. She thought, What would Luke do? … and when she closed her eyes and took a deep breath or two, she decided that right now she should be going that way …

She drifted aimlessly through the docking bay cavern for a few minutes, bemusedly waiting for another feeling to strike her; she was so focused on her inner feelings that it took her a second or two to register that the handsome profile of that tall pilot up ahead, the one chatting with the deck crew men who were cleating down his B-wing, belonged to a friend of hers.

“Tycho!” She waved and headed over to him. “Tycho, I am so glad to see you!”

Tycho Celchu greeted her with a bemused look of his own. “Princess? Aren’t you supposed to be in the negotiations?”

“Forget the negotiations,” she said. “I need a ride. It’s a diplomatic emergency.”

Tycho frowned. “Um …”

“I’m a rated gunner on that thing,” she said, nodding toward the B-wing. “I need you to get it space-ready as fast as possible.”

His frown deepened. “Princess, you’re a civilian—”

“And my mother was your queen.” Trading on her family’s station always left a sickly weight in the pit of her stomach, but this was an emergency. “You’ve been Alderaanian a lot longer than you’ve been an officer. Will you do this for me, or should I ask somebody else?”

“Ask somebody what?” Wedge Antilles had come up beside her. “Hi, Princess. How go the negotiations?”

“Wedge, hi.” Leia winced—another friend she’d have to lie to. “Uh … something’s come up. I need to borrow Tycho and his B-wing. Maybe for just a few hours.”

“If it were up to me …” Wedge spread his hands apologetically. “But Lando—that is, General Calrissian—he’s a real nice guy, y’know, easygoing and relaxed when he’s out of uniform. But the first time you violate his orders, you find out he’s got no sense of humor at all.”

She looked from one to the other. Why would the Force have sent her in this direction in the first place if there were no chance she could—

What would Luke do?

She took a deep breath, shut her eyes, and sighed it out again. When she opened her eyes, she could now see the two men before her clearly. Tycho had been only a vehicle for her, Wedge only a roadblock … but now they were men, good men, friends who honestly cared about her obvious distress. They deserved better than to be conned into helping her.

Slowly, clearly, simply, she said, “Luke’s in danger.”

Wedge and Tycho exchanged an unreadable glance. Wedge said, “What kind of danger?”

She couldn’t keep a hint of quaver out of her voice. “The fatal kind.”

Tycho looked at Wedge. Wedge’s mouth compressed and he stared down at the deck. Not for long—less than a second—and then he huffed a sigh, and gave a decisive nod. Tycho wheeled and sprinted away.

Leia watched as the Alderaanian raced headlong through the chaos in the docking bay cavern. “Where’s he going?”

Wedge was already jogging toward his own X-wing. “To round up the rest of the Rogues,” he called back over his shoulder. “Fifteen minutes.”

LANDO SAT IN THE CONFERENCE CHAIR HAN HAD ONLY recently vacated. He’d stopped listening to Fenn Shysa argue with the mercenary commander about thirty seconds after he’d finished the introductions; Lando had enough Mando’a to get along in conversation or fleece an unwary Mandalorian over a sabacc table, but he’d seen in those first thirty seconds that the commander wasn’t buying what Fenn was selling—a combination of “Lord Mandalore Commands You” and an appeal to civic responsibility and Defend Our Honor sentimentality. Lando probably should have mentioned to Fenn before they’d gone in that those kinds of arguments worked only on people who already believed in that stuff, and people who believed in that stuff didn’t often end up spilling blood for Imperial credits.

Like most fundamentally decent men, Fenn seemed to believe that down deep, nearly everybody else was fundamentally decent, too. He seemed to think that because he had once been a mercenary, other mercenaries were just like him: a cynical shell over a core of natural nobility. But Fenn had never been exactly your factory-issue mercenary.

Lando, on the other hand, was a gambler. A successful gambler. Like all successful gamblers, he knew that “natural nobility” was more rare than a flawless Corusca gem, and that over the long run, you never lost by assuming that everyone you met was driven by a combination of greed, fear, and stupidity.

After half an hour, he’d found himself wondering how Han had managed to sit through two days of this without taking his own life. After an hour, it became clear to him that neither Han nor Leia was going to be returning to the conference room anytime soon. Nearly another hour had passed before the ensign he’d sent looking for Leia had returned to the conference room door with a look on his face that indicated either failure or chronic illness.

Lando leaned forward to speak softly in Fenn’s ear while the opposing commander was making yet another long, insultingly skeptical-sounding speech. “I have to step out for a minute or two. Cover for me, huh?”

Fenn nodded without hesitation. He must not have been really listening either. “Don’t blame you,” he said from the side of his mouth. “Are you as sick of this fella as I am?”

“I never get sick of people,” Lando said, smiling. “I’ll be right back.”

Out in the corridor, the ensign looked like he was wishing he could be just about anywhere else. “She was last seen, General, getting into Lieutenant Celchu’s B-wing.”

“Really.” Lando was still smiling. He’d been a gambler too long to give anything away. “And where was the lieutenant last seen?”

“Well, I—I mean, General, you would know … wouldn’t you?”

Lando’s smile went wider. “Pretend I don’t.”

“Rogue Squadron lifted off over an hour ago, sir—traffic control says they were on one of your, ah, special missions, sir …”

“One of my special missions?”

“Yes, sir. Commander Antilles gave the verification code.”

“Did he, now?”

“Yes, sir. Is—is there, uh, a problem, sir?”

“Why would there be a problem?”

“Well—the Princess had just been up to ComOps, sir. She was asking about General Solo.”

“Of course she was.”

“And General Solo had been there just a few minutes earlier. He was asking about General Skywalker.”

“And what did General Skywalker have to say?”

“Oh, uh, well—nothing, sir. I mean, he’s out of contact—the whole RRTF has gone dark.”

“Has it? Well, well.”

“Yes, sir. And, um, there is this, as well, sir.” The ensign held out a datareader. “It’s a transcript of an automated burst-transmission that is being fed into the HoloNet over and over again, at five-minute intervals. The transmissions began less than a minute after the RRTF went dark.”

Lando weighed the reader in his hand. “Summarize it for me, will you?”

“Well—it claims to be from Lord Shadowspawn, sir. ComOps hasn’t verified authenticity yet, but—”

“But you thought I might want to know about it. Because you think it might have something to do with our missing princess and her two favorite generals.”

“In the transmission, sir, Lord Shadowspawn claims to have captured the entire task force—and he says he will kill them all in three Standard days unless the Republic agrees to an immediate cease-fire … and acknowledges his claim on the Imperial Throne.”

“Really. Hm. Well, well again.”

“But like I said—” The ensign licked nervous sweat from his upper lip. “We don’t know if—ComOps hasn’t verified its authenticity—even if it really is from Shadowspawn, we have no way of knowing if any of it is true—”

“Sure we do. It’s all true,” Lando said. “Luke’s already there. Han and Leia are on their way. Not to mention Rogue Squadron.”

“Sir? I don’t understand.”

“That’s because you’re new around here, son.”

“Sir?”

“Forward your personnel file to my exec. I can use a man like you.”

The ensign’s mouth dropped open. “Sir—? I don’t—I mean, I failed—”

“When you submit your file, put a note in there that I’m promoting you to lieutenant j.g.”

The ensign’s eyes went as wide and slack as his mouth “Sir—?”

“You’ve just saved a general from being bored to death. If I thought I could get away with it, I’d give you a medal, too.” He left the ensign gaping in the hallway.

Inside the conference room, Lando nodded a grin at Shysa and kicked his empty chair out of the way. “Let me handle this.”

He slipped around the corner of the table, to the mercenaries’ side. He sat on the edge and grinned down at the astonished commander. “Okay. Negotiation’s over. You win.”

Shysa frowned. “They do?”

The commander blinked. “We do?”

“Sure. I’ll put it in writing. No Republic forces will land on, permanently orbit, or otherwise occupy this world or this system while you live to serve the Empire. Satisfied?”

“Well, I—ah, I suppose, I mean—well, yes.”

“Great!” Lando’s grin got wider. “Now what?”

“Now?” The commander blinked again. He was still so astonished he entirely forgot he was supposedly refusing to speak Basic. “What do you mean?”

“I mean you’ve won. Your victory is complete. What now?”

“Well, we—I suppose, I mean—”

“How are you planning to get paid?”

“Paid?”

“I have to tell you, our sensors aren’t picking up any sign of Imperial ships dropping out of hyperspace to, y’know, jettison bags of cash or anything.”

The commander’s face clouded over. “I see what you mean.”

“Strikes me,” Lando said carelessly, examining his flawless manicure, “that failure to deliver payment qualifies as a breach of contract, doesn’t it? Not to mention scampering off and leaving you all here to die. Forget that part. I guess they figured that with you all dead, they’d never have to pay. And if you live, well, you’re trapped on a planet deep in Republic space. How are you supposed to collect?”

The commander scowled. “You’re trying to trick me.”

“Not at all.” Lando winked at him. “I’m trying to hire you.”

The commander looked thoughtful.

“Might you and your men be interested in, ah, a new position? Working for people who give a damn whether you live or die? Who will actually—believe it or not—pay you?”

The commander’s scowl got deeper and deeper the longer he thought it over; after what seemed like a long, long time, he turned that scowl on Lando.

The commander said, “In advance?”