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“It is both or neither,” Tila Mong said. “Answers for both or answers for none.”

Luke frowned, but Ben nodded. “I'm in.”

His father turned to him. “Ben—”

“Dad. Jacen. Coruscant. Answers.”

Luke scowled. “I don't like it that you can win an argument without using verbs.”

Ben just smiled at him.

Charsae Saal climbed into his transport. The lid was lowered over him. Tila Mong shoved the transport along the rails until it fully entered the hole in the wall. Then gravity, magnetic propulsion, or some other motivator Ben couldn't detect took over. The transport disappeared, clattering its way down into the depths of the planet.

The other two Baran Do Masters returned with transports on rolling carts. They lifted one onto the rails. Luke climbed in and gave Ben one final, encouraging look. Then the Masters lowered the lid on him, too, and shoved him into the railed tunnel.

As they positioned his transport on the rails, Ben wondered what he was getting into this time—and whether he would soon consider his time on the surface of Dorin to have been a vacation spot in comparison.

CALRISSIAN-NUNB MINES, KESSEL

They had breakfast in the conference room where Lando, Tendra, and Nien Nunb had first talked to Han and Leia, but none of the adults were there now. Nanna served, C-3PO chattered, Chance treated his food as though it were as much a toy as a meal, and Allana moped, scarcely tasting her food.

Lando's wild yell of victory jolted her. She stared wide-eyed as he burst into the conference room, his hip cloak askew, his face all smiles.

“Get your breath mask,” he told her. “We're going on the Lady Luck, my yacht. To pick up your parents.”

Ten minutes later, Lando, Tendra, Allana, and Nien Nunb, all crowded into the cockpit of the Lady Luck, came in for a landing on a salt plain many kilometers from the mine. Han and Leia stood there in the middle of nowhere, breath masks not concealing the smiles on their faces. They looked dirty, scuffed, tired, and cold, but they had never looked better to Allana.

“That's the way it is with your folks,” Lando told Allana. “Everything's fine now.”

CALRISSIAN-NUNB MINES, KESSEL

THINGS HAPPENED FAST AFTER THE SOLOS RETURN.

Mere minutes after Lando, Tendra, and Nien Nunb heard the Solos' story, they placed a rush order to Trang Robotics for dozens of small flying sensor drones, a type used in military operations for reconnaissance over a large area. Two days later, a first shipment of ten drones arrived. Tendra already had their programming worked up and ready to be installed; then Han and Lando used the Falcon to take the drones to the sensor access tunnel by which Han and Leia had escaped the underworld. They released the drones into the shaft, planted a data relay unit there, and returned to the mineworks.

Hours later, the drones had transmitted enough visual and sensor recordings that the data could begin to be integrated. In the conference room now being used as the Calrissian-Nunb-Solo base of operations, Tendra brought up a schematic of the planet, a green wire frame of the entire world.

“All right, start your Podracers.” Tendra pressed a button on her console, and an elaborate webwork of yellow lines appeared on the diagram; the yellow web spread hundreds of kilometers from the site of the mineworks, straight lines intersecting at larger bulbous spots.

Leia leaned in close, peering at the design. “Where were we?”

Tendra tapped a spot on the diagram, a yellow line between two closely situated yellow blotches. “This is where you escaped the complex.” She tapped one of the two yellow zones, which was dotted with blackness. “This is the cavern that blew up.”

Han whistled. “Every one of those yellow things is a cavern?”

Tendra nodded. “Every one. All part of the same ecosphere, with pretty much the same sorts of life-forms. A lot of the caverns were destroyed already, though, apparently due to magnetics-and-explosives devices like the one you saw at the center of yours. Sometimes they caused complete cavern collapses, sometimes not.”

“And if Leia's interpretation