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He ducked back below the rim, fighting the urge to wipe his eyes until he could produce enough tears to wash out the sand; lacking bacta, a scratched cornea would be no picnic, either. He took a couple of seconds to retie the scrap of battle-dress blouse that he wore across his face. He held his breath till he got the rag in place, and tight. Breathing that dust was even less fun than getting it in his eyes. But keeping out the dust was only a partial solution; the atmosphere itself was mildly caustic. He’d been dirtside barely a Standard hour before a rasp had begun to scrape inside his throat with every breath.

Terroo-weet-weet-weet-weet-weet!

R2’s insistent warning brought Luke’s head around. “What is it?”

The astromech’s holoprojector lit up trails of blue-tinged fire streaked toward the schematized curve of a planetary surface. Luke bared his teeth and turned toward the south, where the lightning-orange sky already blazed with an incoming meteorite storm.

“Great.” He pulled out his comlink and twisted it to the Justice’s command channel. “Tubrimi, come in. Tubrimi, do you read?”

A burst of static was his only reply. Mindor’s heavily ionized, metal-oxide-charged atmosphere made communications difficult at best; the power of a starship’s comm suite was required to broadcast an EM message more than a kilometer or two, especially during a dust storm, since the dust itself was mostly metal oxides, as well: remnants of meteorites and the barren rock they’d struck. He could actually see the caves where the crew had taken shelter, a couple of kilometers away through the rolling hills, but his comlink just didn’t have the juice to punch through. “Artoo! Tightbeam an alert to Tubrimi and Sthonnart! Tell them to break up the perimeter and retreat into the caves—”

Luke frowned. In the Force, a sudden surge of emotion …

Panic. Terror. Shock and rage—and there, at the crew’s caves, two kilometers away: flares of scarlet, flashes of actinic white …

Blasterfire. Thermal detonators.

Battle.

Terroo-oo-weet?

“Don’t wait for confirmation. Just get under cover,” Luke said, leaping from the crater’s rim. “I’ll tell them myself.”

He drew his lightsaber as he ran.

LIEUTENANT TUBRIMI CRUMPLED THE TRANSCRIPT OF the decrypted burst signal in his good hand as he stood up. “All right, you heard the orders,” he said to the pair of ensigns managing the comm gear, his great black eyes swirling straight forward for emphasis. “Get everything packed up and moved into the caves on the double! Everything out of sight until we get a command-coded recall beacon.”

Every step jabbed a lance through his broken shoulder, despite the emergency foam-cast a marine corpsman had sprayed on. Maybe later, there might be some bacta left after the wounded had been stabilized. “Major,” he called as he approached the cave mouth. “General Skywalker’s orders are to set up a—”

He stopped, and his voice trailed away. The cave was empty.

The corpsmen were gone. Even the wounded had just … vanished, leaving behind only a litter of emergency blankets, water packs, and used bacta patches. Tubrimi gaped. “Major Sthonnart? Hey, what’s going on? Are you in there?”

From behind him, all at once: blasterfire on full auto. The ear-shattering blasts of thermal dets. Shouted orders, and the cut-short screams of wounded marines. He whirled back to where the ensigns had been taking down the comm dish unit. They were gone, both of them; the comm dish lay on its side, rocking in the gritty breeze. “Hey—”

He scrambled over a fold of ground just in time to see one of the ensigns—on his back, eyes wide and staring—sink into the solid stone beneath him as though the volcanic rock were only thick oil. He leapt for the ensign’s hand, but before he could get there the ensign had sunk from view—and the rock that closed over where he had gone was solid and cool. As Tubrimi stood up again, looking around wildly for any sign of the hundreds of sailors and marines, something touched his ankle, and darkness exploded across his brain.

LUKE WATCHED THE BATTLE END WHILE HE WAS ON HIS