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He shook his head again, and mopped at his broad, pale-green brow with a square of soiled linen he’d dragged from the depths of his yellow polyfibe suit. His curly brown hair was surrendering to its destiny, and he’d picked up a couple of extra chins in the years since Han had last seen him as a two-bit gunrunner in the Juvex Systems.

“So what happened?”

“What happened?” Kemple blinked at him through the gloom. “Place got cleaned out. He’d been strippin’ old machinery, droids and computers and lab stuff, down under the ruins. Some kind of old laboratories, they musta been, and there were rooms full of ’em, Nubblyk said. I will say for Nubblyk …”

The Abyssin brought Han a drink that would have flattened a rancor, and Kemple, evidently forgetting for whom he’d ordered it, polished it off, his long, prehensile tongue questing around the bottom of the glass for stray drops.

“I will say for Nubblyk, he kept a strong hand on the loot, played it out and kept anybody else from hornin’ in. It was his show, nobody else’s, and he didn’t trust a soul. And why should he, hey? Business is business. He never even told me how he was gettin’ into the tunnels.”

“D’ja look for the way in, after he left?”

“ ’Course I did!” Kemple’s vertical pupils flexed open and shut indignantly. “Think I’m stupid or somethin’?” Two new dancers climbed up to an even older—and scratchier—holo of Pekkie Blu and the Starboys. Han winced. “We checked the cellar of this joint, and that house he had in Painted Door Street, and finally ran a deep-rock sensor scan of the ruins themselves.” He shrugged. “Double zeros. Not enough gold or xylen under there to register. We couldn’t even pay the rental on the scanner. He musta cleaned the place out before—”

He stopped himself.

Solo raised his eyebrows. “Cleaned the place out before he went where?”

“We don’t know.” He lowered his voice and glanced nervously over at the Abyssin barkeep, who was pouring out a drink for a tall black girl and listening to a long tale of the last mark’s perfidy. “That woman who rents the house in Painted Door Street says the credit house where she sends the money every month changes a couple times a year, so it sounds like he’s on the run. But before he left he said …”

He leaned forward to whisper. “He said something about the Emperor’s Hand.”

Mara Jade. Solo’s eyebrows quirked up. She’d neglected to mention this in last night’s discussion. “Oh, yeah?”

Kemple nodded. Solo recalled that the man never could keep that enormous mouth of his shut. “He said the Emperor’s Hand was on the planet; that his life was in danger.” He leaned close enough for Solo to be able to tell the composition of his last three drinks by the smell of his breath and sweat. “I’m thinkin’ he cleared out and ran.”

“Could he have cleared out that much loot?”

“How much?” Kemple straightened up and reached for his hookah again. “It must have been playin’ out, anyway, for him to take it all with him. Believe me, we ran sensor scans up, down, backwards, and sideways of the ruins and this place and his house, and you don’t get that many sensor malfunctions.”

Oh, don’t you? thought Solo, remembering Leia’s questions about unexplained flutters in the behaviors of droids.

“Mubbin didn’t buy it.”

Han looked sharply around at the new voice. It was one of the hustlers, a childlike Omwat like a little blue fairy, with eyes a thousand years old.

“Mubbin the Whiphid,” he explained. “Another of the Slyte’s runners. He always said there were shipfuls of stuff still down there—”

“Mubbin didn’t know what he was talkin’ about,” said the city boss quickly, a gleam of guilty nervousness in his eyes. He looked back at Han. “Yeah, I heard Mubbin go on about how much stuff there still was …”

“He was Drub McKumb’s pal, wasn’t he?” Solo addressed the question to the hustler, not Kemple. He remembered the Whiphid Chewie had killed, thin and starved and screaming in the dark.

The boy nodded. “One of my pals was with