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This time he struck upward, an open-palm blow that caught her on the chin. He felt her jaw break under the impact. She went down as limp as a cloth bag full of bantha fodder, her datapad clattering against the duracrete beside her.

He felt bad, even nauseated, for a brief moment, then elation replaced that feeling. There, he told himself. Not too much damage. Jacen would have forgiven me if I’d killed you, and I didn’t even do that. Moving quickly, he hoisted her up to a sitting position, then drew her up and onto his shoulders, a basic rescuer’s carry that all Jedi apprentices were taught.

He carried her around to the side of the building, into the narrow alley between two hangars, and laid her down there. Then he went back to the front of the hangar, retrieved the woman’s datapad, and got behind the controls of the refueling tanker.

In the few moments it took him to familiarize himself with the controls, the droid tweetled at him.

“Everything’s set up,” Ben assured the R2 unit. “She’s doing the last details and asked me to move this.” He powered up the vehicle, then carefully backed out of the hangar and immediately parked the tanker where it would block any line of sight on the unconscious woman.

He had a stroke of luck then. The woman had apparently opened her datapad to the job file for the task of maintaining the Y-wing. All the data he needed, including full maintenance specifications for the Y-wing and data on the R2 unit, was there.

So he was whistling when he returned to the hangar. He used the woman’s own tools to remove the restraining bolt from the droid. “I’m supposed to take the Y-wing out on a test flight,” he told the R2. “That way, if it blows up, the owner isn’t inconvenienced.”

The droid whistled and chirped at him, its musical tones suggesting that it was indifferent to the change in plans but more than happy to go.

“Good. Let me get my backpack and we can start the preflight checklist.”

CORELLIAN SYSTEM EXCLUSION ZONE ERRANT VENTURE

In the first few days after Errant Venture was authorized to ply its trade for Alliance military personnel in the Corellian system, its casinos and other entertainments did great business. Booster Terrik, the Grand Old Man of the operation, though he was theoretically retired from day-to-day duties, was often seen in the casinos, flitting around in his hoverchair, greeting patrons and encouraging workers, his eyes alight in the way that only commerce could make them.

His new, unpaid workers didn’t hurt things, either.

Iella and Myri worked as dealers. Iella wore enough makeup to disguise her true identity; Myri did not need that precaution, but did change her hair color with spray-on hues and combinations each day, just because it was her custom. Two attractive women a generation apart, skillful conversationalists and card handlers, they drew good-sized crowds at their tables each day, and their tips were grand enough to make Myri wonder whether intelligence was the career she wanted for herself after all.

Lando and Han worked the casinos, too, but not as dealers. Each day they set up, in different casinos, at sabacc tables. Lando maintained his Bescat Offdurmin identity, and Han continued to put on his yellow-skinned, thin-mustache makeup each morning. At the end of each day they compared their winnings; after the first week Lando was slightly ahead.

Mirax spent most of her time with her father. During years of retirement on Corellia, she had cheerfully ignored her father’s efforts to bring her to the Errant Venture to learn and perhaps take over its operations. Now her homeworld was for the time hostile to her and she had nothing to do more suited to her talents, so she threw herself into these new studies with typical Mirax obsessiveness, delighting her father.

Leia, Wedge, and Corran concentrated on the data interpretation side of things. Seldom venturing into the ship’s public areas—each such trip, however short, would cause them to have to don disguises—they confined themselves to an auxiliary computer cabin provided