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Han gave him a quick embrace. “We were chased off Coruscant by bureaucracy. You were the lesser of two evils.”

“I usually am.” Lando offered one of his rakish smiles, obviously pleased still to be considered a bad influence. “C'mon inside. Tendra and Chance are there.” He glanced up at the top of the ramp. “Hey, Artoo! Long time.”

The conference room was laid out with a light lunch and drinks. The chamber did not seem as though it belonged on this dingy, slowly dying world; the oval table in the center was topped with the finest blue-white marble, the chairs were covered in flawless dark leather, and the whole atmosphere conveyed a sense of doing business in the heights of Coruscant's business district.

But the oversized display viewport in the longest wall showed the unpromising grounds of the mineworks, powdery, sterile whiteness from which nothing could grow. In the near distance was the parked Falcon. Farther away was a dark building with featureless brown walls; every few minutes, a gout of gas erupted from it, sending much-needed oxygen and nitrogen into the unhealthy-looking pink sky. In the far distance on artificial slopes was a building of tremendous size, gray and tan, its outer walls steeply slanted backward with rows of gleaming durasteel and transparisteel; that, Han knew, was the old Imperial Correctional Facility, the prison from which the former masters of Kessel had drawn the workers for the mines.

Han, Leia, Lando, Tendra, and Nien Nunb sat at the table. In an adjoining chamber, the door left open so sound would carry, Allana and Chance played in the company of the droids—not just C-3PO and R2-D2 but also the little boy's nanny droid. The four-armed automaton with its round, beaming face and almost-human female voice looked identical to Nanna, the ferocious defensive droid fabricated from a nanny droid and a YVH 1 combat droid to nurse and protect Ben Skywalker in his early years; Leia idly wondered if this was the same one.

Tendra, Lando's wife—a lean woman, dark-haired, many years the junior of her husband—was dressed in a pearlescent blue jacket-like top that suggested a world of distant sands and arena duels between animals and men. The blouse beneath it was an iridescent gray, and her long skirt alternated layers of those two colors. Tendra waited until the catching-up chitchat had completely died away before getting to business. “I guess I ought to offer some context.”

Han nodded ruefully as he ate a strip of grilled bantha steak from a skewer. “That's definitely the businesswoman's approach. Do you have a printed agenda to give us?”

She smiled. “Quiet, you. Lando has owned these mines for about thirty years now. I bought in when we married. Nien Nunb, who manages the facility, and very well, I might add, gradually acquired shares as part of his contract. The three of us own the business outright.”

Leia nodded. “And since Kessel's government basically consists of whatever the major business owners want it to be, there's no one to bail you out if disaster wrecks the business.”

Lando looked unhappy. “That's right. And while on the one hand the only thing we stand to lose is money, it's a lot of money. And on the other hand, if this business becomes unviable, for us or anyone else, the amount of glitterstim available in the galaxy drops to zero. All the legitimate medical uses of the drug go away.”

Nien Nunb spoke in the rapid, singsong language of his people; he understood Basic, but had a hard time articulating it.

Lando translated: “And, yeah, there'll be a negative reaction on the illicit side of things. Glitbiters, glitterstim addicts, will cause a lot of trouble as they fight over the last remaining stores, and there will be a scramble for a new drug to appease them. They'll probably end up with more dangerous ones, like one of the synthetic ryll replacements.”

Finished with his skewer, Han set it down. “I thought Kessel was just a rock. An ugly, cold rock shaped like a ground tuber, spinning peacefully through space. No tectonic or volcanic activity at