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C-3PO hurried to keep up, the faint whining sound of his arm and leg servos increasing as he did so. “Thank the maker you're unhurt. If I'd had to report to Master Han and Mistress Leia that you had come to some harm, I'm sure I'd find myself doomed to an eternity of opening ale bottles in the filthiest taproom in Coruscant's sublevels—”

“You keep talking about a maker. Who made you?”

“Actually, I don't quite recall. But I was made, so the existence of my maker is beyond question. And since I consider my existence to be a good thing, he was without a doubt benevolent and forward thinking.”

“I guess.”

In a large natural cave, one with several tunnels splitting off at various angles, Leia studied the sensor board, considered their options, and shook her head. She pointed straight up. “That way.”

Han looked up as though he could see through both the speeder's opaque roof and the impenetrable darkness, then turned his attention to the sensors. They showed a recess in the ceiling, one that could easily be interpreted just as a natural depression in the rock. But Leia had sensed otherwise. Han put the speeder into a careful vertical ascent.

The cleft was easily wide enough to accommodate the speeder at its base, but it narrowed, becoming a not-quite-straight chimney of sorts. As they rose, something bumped onto the roof, then scrambled free with a skittering noise. Han froze for a moment, then realized it could not have been one of the energy spiders—a spider would have attacked rather than fled.

Twenty meters up, the chimney widened into a broad cave, one that sloped downward to the southwest. At Leia's nod, he put the speeder on a slow, gentle course down that decline.

Leia returned her attention to the sensor board, where topographic lines, constantly changing, showed the irregularities of the channel they were following. “I swear, this is all natural caves and tunnels. Worn by water.”

“Do you think Kessel had more water once upon a time?”

She shook her head. “I think Kessel used to be a chunk of some other planet, a much bigger one, with seas and a thicker atmosphere. The life-forms we know of here, the spiders and the avians, must have developed at that time—can you imagine a big avian developing on this world, with an atmosphere so thin they can barely fly? But then some calamity destroyed that world, and the chunk that became Kessel is all that remains of it.”

“Maybe the rest of the debris fell into the Maw.”

The tunnel they followed continued laterally and downward for several kilometers. It was a winding course but remained broad, clearly the remains of a long-dead underground river. Eventually, Leia spotted signs on the sensor screen of fissures, vertical cracks in the rock. They shone the speeder headlights on those spots and saw that the breaks in the rock were far more recent than the surrounding stone. “Groundquakes,” Han said.

As if in response, an ominous vibration filled the air. Small rocks dislodged themselves from the tunnel roof overhead and began clattering down all around the speeder and onto its roof. The rumbling, like the galaxy's largest giant tucking into a big bowl full of boulders for his breakfast, did not diminish—it intensified, the rocks crashing down onto the speeder growing from pebble-sized to fist-sized to head-sized. Han kept his hands tight on the yoke, knuckles white, ready to duck one way or another if he had enough warning of disaster.

The flooring beneath them gave way. The speeder's repulsors, set to maintain an altitude of a meter above the ground, were not strong enough. Han, Leia, and their vehicle dropped into pitch blackness, with more stones and boulders following them.

CITY OF DOR'SHAN, DORIN

Luke could tell that Ben was finding the temple of the Baran Do both alien and comfortably familiar. The décor was characteristic of the Kel Dors, a constant barrage of symbols and metaphors stylistically representing their natural surroundings and forces of nature, but the chambers had obvious purposes he instantly understood. Training