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Winter pocketed the card. “This can't be traced back to you?”

He shook his head. “I made sure it was clean. It's supposedly for gifts and surprises for Jaina, things that shouldn't be traced back to a Head of State's expense account.”

Jaina looked crestfallen. “I'm not getting my presents?”

The others looked at her. Unable to maintain the pose, she laughed. “You're just lucky I'm a low-maintenance woman,” she told Jag.

“That I already knew.”

CALRISSIAN-NUNB MINES, KESSEL

IN TWO DAYS, THE SOLOS, CALRISSIANS, AND NIEN NUNB HAD MUCH more data and a little more useful information.

The drones, reinforced by a second shipment, continued tracing the webwork of the tunnels and caverns deep within Kessel and confirmed that the complex encircled the entire world.

Six YVH 1 combat droids, fresh from the Tendrando Arms assembly plant, arrived and were immediately put into service. Transported into the cavern system through connections with the mines discovered by the sensor drones, they began investigation of the demolition mounds.

Deployed in two-droid teams, the first thing they discovered was that anytime they approached the mounds, bogeys arrived to investigate them. The bogeys invariably flew through them, crashing the droids' systems. The automata, unlike the sensor drones, eventually recovered from this electronic mistreatment, but when they continued their approach toward the mounds, the bogeys returned. Unable ever to reach the demolition mounds, the YVH droids retreated to a safe distance.

One YVH pair, assigned to a cavern chosen as safe to destroy, utilized a long-distance military-grade missile launcher to fire on its mound from the comparatively safe distance of the cavern entrance. On Tendra's monitor back at the mines, the Solos, Calrissians, and Nien Nunb watched the first explosives package, a concussion missile, roar from the weapon barrel barely visible at the bottom of the screen. The bright flare of its thruster dwindled in the distance as it arced down to hit the ground mere meters from the mound.

The missile exploded. Viewing the scene through the high magnification of the YVH droids' visual sensors, the humans and Sullustan saw the explosion kick up soil and shredded fungi from the ground. The antenna-shaped device did not even rock. The barrels in the explosives mound shifted a little but did not otherwise react.

Lando looked dour. “Not very promising.”

Tendra keyed the comlink on her control board. “Next package, please.” She switched the microphone off and leaned back. “This will be a thermal detonator, one of the smaller ones YVH droids have as a basic option.”

“You sound like a speeder salesman,” Han muttered.

The monitor showed the arms of the droid loading a different, miniature missile into the launcher, then taking aim. Again the missile flew on its ballistic trajectory from the weapon and arced down to land meters from the demolitions mound. It, too, detonated—

The monitor blanked, going to whiteness. Tendra and the others leaned forward, expectant, hoping that this wasn't just a comm glitch. For long moments, the screen remained white and silent; then gradually holocam transmissions of sight and audio began to resume, first as bursts of static and then as full-resolution sound and visuals. The images showed a cavern whose center raged on fire, a fungus-shaped cloud of black smoke rising from a scorched crater at its base, a corresponding burned area on the ceiling above. As the YVH droid turned its head for a panoramic view, the onlookers saw machinery against the cavern walls shattered into junk, some of it burning … but the destruction was nowhere near as total as it had been in the cavern whose destruction Han and Leia had witnessed.

Lando whistled. “Frankly, I didn't expect that to work.”

“Some difference in the explosive characteristics of thermal detonators.” Han's voice came as a distant murmur. “Temperature, probably.”

“This is good.” Tendra breathed a sigh of relief. “If we'd had to go to proton torpedoes—I don't know how many we could