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No one spoke. Few were even daring enough to lower their hands from their ears.

The judge gestured for everyone to sit. All did except those who, like Jaina, had found no empty seats.

“To continue, he will be detained through carbonite imprisonment until such time as a treatment for his condition, based on evaluation of his test data, can be determined. He will be brought out of carbonite stasis at intervals, as new and relevant tests, as well as periodic mental evaluations, are ordered. He will be brought out not less often than twice per standard year regardless of test and evaluation concerns.

“That concludes this hearing.” Her movements brisk, perhaps irritated, she rose. The advocates and onlookers did, as well. When she was gone, voices erupted again, this time the press hurling questions at the advocates, the Jedi, and the Horns.

Jaina ignored the heartfelt but irrelevant complaints of the Jedi around her. She watched Corran and Mirax Horn embracing in their shared misery, watched as the forbidding stare of Master Saba Sebatyne kept the members of the press from approaching them, watched as Nawara Ven sat again at his table, slumped in temporary defeat, shoulders knotted in frustration and anger.

And she was struck by a sense of foreboding. They're all killers, she thought. Jedi and combat pilots and smugglers, killers all, who waged war for the New Republic or who killed to stop the Yuuzhan Vong. The government is turning this situation into a war, and the people they're offending, beneath the surface, are killers. Myself included. This can't end well.

UNEXPLORED DEPTHS, KESSEL

The speeder plummeted into darkness. The underside almost immediately slammed into a slab of rock angled at about forty-five degrees to their descent. The repulsors, overrevving themselves to compensate, bounced the speeder away from the slab and flipped it. In the beams of the headlights, Han saw rocks seemingly spin around him as the speeder rolled.

He clicked the repulsors off the standard setting and brought them up toward full strength, trying to slow the speeder's descent and eventually hover. Then Leia shouted something he didn't understand. She was staring upward and he could feel more than see the immense shelf of rock falling into the shaft after them.

He killed the repulsors and fired the thrusters, rocketing the speeder straight down the shaft. In the spare second he had before further action was required, he flipped the repulsors to collision reduction, a forward projection that would reduce the severity of the crash when they hit.

They entered a huge cavern—or perhaps a tunnel, for it was of an almost constant diameter, more than a hundred meters, and there were faint glows to the right and left. He flipped over to normal flight mode and rolled to starboard. The sensors screamed that a collision with the floor was imminent—

He'd almost managed to pull out of the dive when the front portions of the speeder smashed into the stone floor. They hit at an oblique angle, a lifesaving circumstance. The impact was powerful, slamming the two of them forward in their restraints, but the speeder continued forward, bouncing like a flat stone being skipped across a pond.

The repulsors kicked off. The speeder hit again, jarring Han's spine, and bounced up again in Kessel's low gravity. Then it hit a third time and stayed down, skidding forward for another forty meters or more.

They stopped, but the thundering noise of descending stone didn't. Well behind them, an avalanche of rocks, boulders, and billowing dust poured out of the ceiling, creating an enormous hill directly beneath the hole through which they had fallen.

Hurried but detached, Han went through his emergency checklist. Leia: unhurt, unstrapping herself, checking for her lightsaber. Himself: minor pains in neck and arms, nothing significant. Control board: dark. Sensors: off. Odors: recycled air, nothing toxic. No sign that the recyclers were still functioning.

He let out his breath for the first