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LANDO SAT IN THE CONFERENCE CHAIR HAN HAD ONLY recently vacated. He’d stopped listening to Fenn Shysa argue with the mercenary commander about thirty seconds after he’d finished the introductions; Lando had enough Mando’a to get along in conversation or fleece an unwary Mandalorian over a sabacc table, but he’d seen in those first thirty seconds that the commander wasn’t buying what Fenn was selling—a combination of “Lord Mandalore Commands You” and an appeal to civic responsibility and Defend Our Honor sentimentality. Lando probably should have mentioned to Fenn before they’d gone in that those kinds of arguments worked only on people who already believed in that stuff, and people who believed in that stuff didn’t often end up spilling blood for Imperial credits.

Like most fundamentally decent men, Fenn seemed to believe that down deep, nearly everybody else was fundamentally decent, too. He seemed to think that because he had once been a mercenary, other mercenaries were just like him: a cynical shell over a core of natural nobility. But Fenn had never been exactly your factory-issue mercenary.

Lando, on the other hand, was a gambler. A successful gambler. Like all successful gamblers, he knew that “natural nobility” was more rare than a flawless Corusca gem, and that over the long run, you never lost by assuming that everyone you met was driven by a combination of greed, fear, and stupidity.

After half an hour, he’d found himself wondering how Han had managed to sit through two days of this without taking his own life. After an hour, it became clear to him that neither Han nor Leia was going to be returning to the conference room anytime soon. Nearly another hour had passed before the ensign he’d sent looking for Leia had returned to the conference room door with a look on his face that indicated either failure or chronic illness.

Lando leaned forward to speak softly in Fenn’s ear while the opposing commander was making yet another long, insultingly skeptical-sounding speech. “I have to step out for a minute or two. Cover for me, huh?”

Fenn nodded without hesitation. He must not have been really listening either. “Don’t blame you,” he said from the side of his mouth. “Are you as sick of this fella as I am?”

“I never get sick of people,” Lando said, smiling. “I’ll be right back.”

Out in the corridor, the ensign looked like he was wishing he could be just about anywhere else. “She was last seen, General, getting into Lieutenant Celchu’s B-wing.”

“Really.” Lando was still smiling. He’d been a gambler too long to give anything away. “And where was the lieutenant last seen?”

“Well, I—I mean, General, you would know … wouldn’t you?”

Lando’s smile went wider. “Pretend I don’t.”

“Rogue Squadron lifted off over an hour ago, sir—traffic control says they were on one of your, ah, special missions, sir …”

“One of my special missions?”

“Yes, sir. Commander Antilles gave the verification code.”

“Did he, now?”

“Yes, sir. Is—is there, uh, a problem, sir?”

“Why would there be a problem?”

“Well—the Princess had just been up to ComOps, sir. She was asking about General Solo.”

“Of course she was.”

“And General Solo had been there just a few minutes earlier. He was asking about General Skywalker.”

“And what did General Skywalker have to say?”

“Oh, uh, well—nothing, sir. I mean, he’s out of contact—the whole RRTF has gone dark.”

“Has it? Well, well.”

“Yes, sir. And, um, there is this, as well, sir.” The ensign held out a datareader. “It’s a transcript of an automated burst-transmission that is being fed into the HoloNet over and over again, at five-minute intervals. The transmissions began less than a minute after the RRTF went dark.”

Lando weighed the reader in his hand. “Summarize it for me, will you?”

“Well—it claims to be from Lord Shadowspawn, sir. ComOps hasn’t verified authenticity yet, but—”

“But you thought I might want to know about it. Because you think it might have something to do with