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She gave him a look no other person could have interpreted—half appreciation for his concern, half aggravation that he was telling her things she was already prepared to do.

The air around them dimmed as the outer edges of the dust cloud rolled over them. But the noise of the avalanche diminished. A few moments later, it was reduced to the sound of an occasional rock tumbling onto the mound, and stony grumbling as the mound itself settled.

Carefully, quietly, Han and Leia emerged from the speeder. There was no pop of the atmosphere seal breaking as they did so; the speeder's frame must have twisted, ruining seal integrity, during their crash.

Leia found a powerful glow lamp in the jumble of equipment in the backseat. She snapped it on and played it toward the cavern ceiling. Though weak at this range, the beam showed that the hole in the ceiling was no more; it was plugged by jagged chunks of stone, some of them weighing dozens or hundreds of tons.

“Great,” Han said. He moved to the front of the speeder and opened the engine compartment.

“Hey, any landing you can walk away from is a good one,” Leia said.

He offered a derisive snort. “That's survivor talk. A pilot says, any landing you can't fly away from is a failure.”

“You did all right.”

“I know I did. It was this archaic piece of junk that let us down.” He shook his head over the state of the engine and slammed the compartment closed. Then he gave the side of the speeder a savage kick.

“That good.”

“Yeah. I hope you like walking, lady.”

“Han, you may have noticed, in the distance, some light sources?”

“Probably phosphorescent lures of an infinite number of giant carnivorous tunnel beetles.”

She laughed at him, then began pulling equipment from the backseat. “Let's gear up for a hike.”

Half an hour later, they looked out over a new and different world.

It was the source of the light they had seen down the tunnel past the mound of fallen stone; Leia had judged it to be closer, so they had headed in that direction. The walk had been easy. Though they had all but emptied the gear from the speeder and Han had taken turret gun grenades besides, in Kessel's gravity the sixty or so kilos of gear he was packing was a comparatively comfortable load.

The approach to the point where lofting tunnel met vast cavern was a rise; Han and Leia had to clamber up a steep climb of stone some three meters high before they could look into the cavern beyond.

The size of a city, the cavern was lined with great blocks of manufactured equipment, each block the size of a human habitation; some were as large as three-level houses, some the size of ten-story apartment buildings, and all were thick with colored lights, some constant, some blinking regularly or intermittently. The faces of the equipment blocks were broken down into rectangles of different colors of metal, but at this distance Han could not tell whether they were merely decorative touches or if the rectangles were access hatches.

In addition to the indicators on the equipment, there was light from above and below. The ceiling of the chamber had patches of greenish material, possibly organic, that exuded a soft blue-green glow. The floor was bare of equipment and was littered, though not thickly, with greenish round-capped fungi, some of which stood taller than Han. Light from all these sources blended together into the dim, pale glow Han and Leia had seen from so far away.

The vista of machinery, fungi, and cavern walls went on as far as the eye could see—kilometers at least.

Leia reached over and gently pressed up on Han's jaw under his breath mask, closing his mouth. “Lando has no idea what he's sitting on, does he?”

Han shook his head. “If all of this shut down tomorrow, just the scrap value would make him a richer man. But what's it for?”

“Let's find out.” Hitching up her pack, she walked down into the cavern.

They divided their duties naturally and without discussion. Leia investigated the machinery.