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Lando shook his head. “No, you’re in the biggest of the guest cabins. I’m in the master cabin.”

They both looked at him. “You’re coming along?” Leia asked.

“After due consideration, it seems to me that you’ll be a lot more anonymous as my pilot and navigator—me being Bescat Offdurmin, holo-entertainment mogul and pleasure-seeker of the Corporate Sector—rather than the faces the authorities see whenever they establish communications with the Looooove Commander. Right?”

“Well…” Leia considered. “That’s true. But I don’t look forward to Tendra tracking us down and killing us if we get you hurt.”

“She’ll be glad to get me out of the home for a while. She knows how twitchy I’ve been lately.” Lando picked up his cane and twirled it theatrically. “Come on, nameless crew. Let’s get to it.”

Han clapped C-3PO on his metal shoulder. “Goldenrod, you get the most important mission of all. You stay here and record every single thing they do to the Falcon during repairs. And try not to talk to them while you’re doing it.”

“Oh, dear.”

An hour later, personal possessions moved aboard and preflight checklists completed, Han, sitting at the navigator’s console, was a bit more favorably disposed toward the Love Commander.

Despite the yacht’s name and pleasure-oriented mission, despite her swirly, mood-altering sky-blue-and-green exterior paint job, the vehicle wasn’t a bad choice for their current needs. At fifty meters, she was nearly twice the length of the Falcon but didn’t mass much more, having a long, sleek design with two outrigger propulsion pods, one on either side, each carrying sublight ion drive and hyperdrive components. The hyperdrives were nothing special, but the ion drives had been rebuilt and overbuilt, giving the yacht considerable speed in sublight situations.

Nor was she unarmed, though at first glance it had appeared she was. A pop-up turret hidden beneath an artfully concealed access plate on the top hull held a turbolaser. At the bow beneath the bridge was a concussion missile port hidden behind a false dish in a sensor array. And the yacht did have shields, though the shield generator, appearing to be an auxiliary hatch, lay folded down against the top hull when not in use and would take a few seconds to raise into position and become active.

Now, with Leia in the pilot’s seat—at Lando’s insistence, since Han was not yet fully healed—and Lando in the oversized, preposterously comfortable captain’s chair at the rear of the command cabin, the Love Commander lifted ponderously from her berth, backed on repulsorlifts away from the Falcon, and slid stern-first into vacuum.

“Where to, navigator?” Lando asked, activating his chair’s massage vibration. “Someplace interesting, I hope.”

“Should be interesting enough.” Han finished putting their course into the nav computer. “Corellia. We’re going to zip through the exclusion zone, laughing at the Alliance picket vehicles trying to blow us up. Then we’re going to drop down to the planet’s surface, determine whether Prime Minister Dur Gejjen was acting alone when he ordered the hit on Tenel Ka—which probably means beating a confession out of him—and then deciding whether to forgive him or kidnap him and his co-conspirators and bring them to justice.”

“Oh,” Lando asked. “What do we do on day two?”

Despite himself, Han snorted, amused. “We’ll figure something out.”

“Well, wake me when we get there, whatever-your-name-is.”

EMPTY SPACE ENGINE COMPARTMENT OF THE DURACRUD

Captain Uran Lavint lay on the grimy durasteel deck, half propped up against an almost equally grimy wall, and waited to die. Her tools lay scattered on the deck, along with the deck plates she had pulled up—plates that gave her access to the various components of Duracrud’s hyperdrive.

The only sounds to be heard were her own breathing and the distant, rhythmic noises made by the ship’s life-support system. There were no lights on in the ship except here—mechanics’ glow rods magnetically clamped to offer light to the hyperdrive compartment—and on the bridge, where status lights should still