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Breathing hard, he took another turn around, confirming that there were no threats at hand.

Excellent. He was in. On the other hand, there had been no one there to see his flashy arrival.

He shrugged and holstered his blaster. He’d just have to do it again sometime when he had an audience.

Jaina and Zekk, their StealthXs side by side and mere meters apart, saw the hangar’s blast doors begin to slide open, revealing a large, lit chamber beyond—and Jag Fel standing at one door edge, waving them in.

Jaina goosed her thruster and glided forward, Zekk pacing her. As they approached, Jag waved downward, indicating a litter of items on the floor just inside the door. Jaina saw barrels, wires, electronic components.

Jag held up his hands together, then spread them, miming the effects of an explosion. Jaina nodded. So Alema had left them a trap, a bomb—what looked like an improvised bomb. If it was improvised, the odds were improved that Alema Rar was still here, or had only recently fled.

The Jedi set their vehicles down in the center of the hangar, slowly spinning them on repulsorlifts so they faced the doors, and came to a full landing.

Jag shut the outer doors and approached as they raised their canopies. His visor was up. “Two bombs so far.” He gestured toward the litter on the floor, and toward the edge of the door where it rested on its guiding rail. There Jaina saw more electronic components. “Simple ones, thrown together. But no Sith ship.”

Jaina rolled out of her cockpit and dropped to the floor. There was something malevolent about this hangar, something different from the energy that suffused this place—a different flavor. She searched for it in the Force and found it nearby, a loathing mixed with patience, anger mixed with servility.

Whatever its source was, it had recently rested against a nearby wall and had left only minutes before.

Disappointment weighed down on her. “She’s fled.”

Zekk moved up to join them. He shook his head. “No, she hasn’t. Can’t you feel it?” With a pointing finger, he traced a path from the corner where that patient loathing had waited, out through the hangar doors, and then down—straight down, into the asteroid.

Now Jaina could feel it, could follow that trail. The vehicle, for it had to be Alema’s Sith craft, had been here until recently, then had been flown down through the rift in the asteroid surface. Alema and her craft waited far below.

Jag shrugged. “She knows we’re here. Scratch off the element of surprise. We’ll just have to show her some other surprises. Problem is, though the habitat is pressurized, and the caverns are, there’s about a fifteen-meter gap of hard vacuum between the two.”

“Not a problem.” Jaina drew her Jedi cloak around her. “We have the equivalent of flight suits on under our robes. With flight helmets, or with our emergency masks, we can survive several minutes’ worth of hard vacuum.”

Jag flipped his visor shut. His next words, through the helmet’s speaker, were amplified rather than muffled. “Let’s go, then. Let’s end this.”

ABOARD THE POISON MOON

“It’s a Corellian light freighter. The disk shape is distinctive.”

Dician, jolted by Ithila’s words, looked at her sensor officer. The Poison Moon had crept closer by several asteroids to the habitat location, and now the sensors could pick up the habitat building itself, and details of the other vehicle that waited nearby.

Dician’s mouth went dry. “Compare the vehicle’s distinctive markings and modifications with known records of the Millennium Falcon.” Yes, there were hundreds or thousands of Corellian YT-1300 light freighters still in service around the galaxy…but one, and only one, had a vastly increased likelihood, a greater statistical probability, of showing up wherever trouble was brewing.

With growing impatience, she waited while Ithila tapped her way through a series of screens. Then Ithila looked up, her expression startled. “It’s a match, Captain. Certainty exceeds ninety-eight percent.”

Dician took a deep breath. The Falcon, especially if it was captained