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The mechanic’s feet hit the floor and he began to turn. Tam slammed into him with all his considerable mass, hammering him into the room’s corner, stabbing wildly with the vibroblade, kneeing and screaming and battering. He felt blood on his knife hand, felt fingers around his left wrist.

Then his wrist was being twisted, mercilessly, as if by a machine, and he was facedown on the chamber floor. There was pain like an explosion in his left arm and when he twisted his head he could see that it was dislocated, the ball of his arm levered out of its socket.

He hurt too much to move, almost too much to hear, but he caught the mechanic’s words: “You fight like child.”

Then there was the sizzling noise of a blaster shot, a roar of such noises as a rifle on full autofire opened up. Blood sprayed down onto Tam’s back.

The mechanic fell atop Tam. The mechanic’s hand, vibroblade still held in it, hit the floor beside Tam’s ear.

Tam strained to look up. The door into the chamber was open and uniformed security operatives were flooding in. With them was a brunette woman he’d seen around the base: Iella Wessiri, head of Intelligence for this operation, General Antilles’s wife.

She knelt before him and one of her men rolled the mechanic’s body off. “Tam?” she asked. “Can you hear me?”

“I’m going to pass out now,” he said.

And he did.

Aphran System, Aphran IV

They came for Han and Leia in the quietest hour of the night, rushing into their bedchamber and leveling blasters before the two of them could stagger out of bed.

Han stared into the bright lights affixed to the rifles. “What’s the meaning of this?” he asked. His voice was calm, the words perfunctory.

The leader of the intruders, only a silhouette behind the lights, answered, “Han Solo, Leia Organa Solo, you are charged with falsification of identification, smuggling, entering Aphran space on false pretenses, and crimes against the state.”

“Is that all?” Han offered them a dismissive wave. “That’s only a couple of hours’ worth of crimes.”

“Get up. Get dressed.”

Han and Leia rose and began groping in the semi-darkness for their piratical garments.

R2-D2 whistled.

C-3PO, running through a self-diagnostic sequence in trickle-power mode, heard the alarm in his counterpart’s musical tones and started up full-power mode. In a fraction of a second he regained use of his motivators and other systems.

They were where they’d been when he’d performed his partial power-down, in the now empty starboard cargo hold of the Millennium Falcon. “What’s that you say? Performing a bypass of what?”

The ominous clanking noise from the exterior cargo hatch just meters away made any answer unnecessary.

“Oh, dear, oh, dear.” Surely there was some procedure in his memory for coping with an intrusion, but the only thing that occurred to the protocol droid was to run and hide.

The astromech whistled again at him, clearly irritated with him for dithering. R2-D2 leaned forward into wheeled-transport mode and rolled out of the bay into the circular corridor that provided access to most of the Falcon’s compartments.

C-3PO trotted along after his partner. “Could you slow down? This is an undignified pace.”

He followed the astromech into the stern compartment that provided access to the Falcon’s escape pods. R2-D2 already stood at the portmost pod, his manipulator arm activating its access button. The door slid partway open and then jammed. The data screen on the front read MALFUNCTION. But the astromech tapped on the button, a rhythm C-3PO did not recognize, and the door slid open the rest of the way.

That noise was drowned out by the groan of the starboard cargo hatch opening, by shouts of “Commence search!” and “Move all this out of here!”

C-3PO trotted into the pod after R2-D2. “This is entirely inappropriate,” he said. “Master Han and Mistress Leia are not doing anything illegal.”

The astromech whistled and tweetled at him as he activated the controls inside the pod.

“Oh, they are? Well,