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Luke kicked out, catching his opponent in the center of the torso, sending him hurtling. The warrior staggered back to the walkway aperture … then dropped out of sight with a shout of surprise.

The walkway was gone. Only smoke and the jagged edges where it had once joined the building suggested it had ever been there. Even with his ears ringing from the explosion, Luke could hear the smashing, grinding noise as its wreckage descended three or four hundred meters to the boulevard below.

They stood panting for a moment, Jedi, Wraiths, and scientist, staring at one another. Finally Luke said, “Anyone hurt?”

“I got grazed by a thud bug,” Danni said. “But it hit the armor. It only knocked me down.”

“Something of a disastrous encounter,” Luke decided. “But at least we don’t have any injuries.”

“It was a very successful encounter,” Face said. “Very promising.”

Luke frowned. “How so? Now they know we’re here. That Jedi are here.”

“No. First, I think they were all on the walkway. So no one alive knows that Jedi are here.”

“Until they find the bodies,” Mara pointed out. “With distinctive lightsaber burns on them.”

Face shrugged. “You have me on that one. But second, more important, until those lightsabers came out, they believed we were Vong. The disguises, and my extraordinary diligence in learning some conversational Yuuzan Vong during the last couple of years, are working. We can expect them to work again.”

“Good point.”

Face’s tone became professionally worried. “So, does that count as my turn, or do I have to check out the next walkway?”

Luke grinned. “It counts as your turn.”

“The next one,” Kell said, “will be twenty or thirty flights down. We’d better get to it.”

Bhindi slapped the back of Kell’s helmet. “That one is going to have been hit by debris from this one, Explosion Boy. We go up.”

His tone subdued, Kell said, “I knew that.”

Borleias, Pyria System

Han Solo, upside down and up to his waist in machinery beneath the deck plating of the Millennium Falcon, heard and felt footsteps approaching. They were light, precise—Leia. That meant there would be a second set, the footsteps of Meewalh, Leia’s Noghri bodyguard, but Han had never actually heard them.

A desire to finish patching the coupling he was working on kept him inverted and incurious—that, and the fact that he knew that if Leia had a problem, her walking pace wouldn’t be normal. “Artoo, you want to hand me the electrical flow meter?” He extended a hand up into the air.

R2-D2, Luke’s astromech droid, responded with a series of cheerful whistles and bleats. Han heard the whine of a manipulator arm being extended, felt the meter being pressed into his hand. Then he heard his wife’s voice: “Do you think if I poked him, he’d bang his head into the flooring?”

R2-D2’s blatted response sounded definitely affirmative.

“You better hope she doesn’t, Artoo,” Han said. “I can’t take revenge on my wife, so I’ll have to take it on the nearest droid at hand.”

R2-D2 replied with a distinctly sour set of notes, then Han heard the droid whir away. “What did he say?” Han asked.

Leia laughed. “I don’t know. But if I were him, it would be, I’ll go fetch See-Threepio, then.”

“Good point.” Han clipped the flow meter to the wires he’d just installed. “You want to power up the holocomm for me?”

“Are you down there with your head in the holocomm power cables?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“I can’t tell if the power flow is right if you don’t.”

“Come on up out of there and leave the meter where you can see the readout.”

Han growled. He knew, deep in his heart, that nothing could go wrong, that the Falcon would never hurt him while he was working on her. He knew this in spite of innumerable minor abrasions, contusions, and electrocutions he’d suffered over the years. But Leia remained stubbornly unconvinced.

He also knew, from long experience, that Leia was not going to leave until she was sure he wasn’t going to do something she considered foolish. He could either wait