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Han was the one who couldn’t believe it. “Now, hold on a minute—”

“Han—” Leia caught his arm. “Look over there—isn’t that Artoo?”

Sure enough, against the far curve of wall a couple of the Mindorese were trying to install a restraining bolt on a blue-domed 4-series astromech that looked suspiciously familiar. Leia moved toward them. “You—you there, where did you get that droid?”

“We found it abandoned. It’s salvage,” one of them snapped back.

“Salvage? Excuse me?” Leia drew herself up in a way Han recognized all too well, so it was his turn to catch her arm.

“Play it smooth, Princess,” he said softly from one side of his mouth while the rest of it gave the Mindorese a reassuringly stupid smile. “Low and slow. I don’t trust these jokers.”

“Han, I told you, these aren’t the enemy—”

“And they aren’t old friends, either.” He caught Chewie’s eye, over where the Wookiee was spraying foamcast around a Mindorese’s injured ankle, and rolled his eyes with a slight sideways nod toward the number-six hopper. Before he turned back to his task, Chewie let one eyelid droop into half a wink. “Listen, how hurt are these guys, really?” Han asked Leia. “How long before we can dump them and get on our way?”

“Well …” Leia tilted her head, considering. “They’re not as bad as you’d expect. Mostly superficial burns—it looks like that crude armor they make out of lava isn’t so crude after all.”

Han nodded grimly. “So: head shots.”

“Han—”

“See what they’re up to with Artoo,” he said. He looked down with distaste at the KYD-21 in his hand, then jammed it into his holster.

Leia nodded. “Maybe I can help you with your salvage,” she said in a friendly way as she came up to the men tinkering with R2’s restraining bolt. Without waiting for a reply, she reached over and put her hand on the bolt—and on his hand, where he held it—and gave him a maybe overly warm smile. He flushed, just a bit, and smiled back.

“Uh, better be careful, lady,” he said. “This little grubber may look harmless enough, but it can deliver a nasty shock—”

“Oh, nonsense,” Leia said briskly as she deactivated the bolt with a decisive twist. “This droid’s been with my family a long time. Artoo, power up. What happened to Luke?”

R2-D2 whistled an affirmative, and his dome swiveled to angle his onboard holoprojector toward the floor. It flickered to life—but the image was of Aeona Cantor. “No,” Leia said. “We know about her. Where’s Luke?”

The little droid whistled again, more insistently, and again showed Aeona.

“Artoo—”

“No, let him run it,” Han said, instinctively lowering his hand to his blaster—and then grimacing at the unfamiliar feel of the KYD’s grip. “I want to see this.”

A recorded voice came from R2-D2’s speaker. “What if whoever shows up isn’t a Jedi?”

The Aeona-image answered, “Then we take their ship and leave ’em to the Melters. Saves having to kill them ourselves.”

Han snarled something that would have been a curse if it had come out in words as he whirled, drew the KYD, and squeezed the trigger just as the emitter centered on Aeona’s forehead.

It made a dry click.

“Say, you are fast.” She grinned at him. “Sorry about the blaster—somebody must have pulled the power cell. So I guess it wasn’t exactly a fair trade after all, huh?”

She drew his beloved BlasTech and leveled it at Han’s face. “This next trade won’t be exactly fair either,” she said. “Because I also really like your ship.”

CHAPTER 10

DEEP IN DARKNESS, LINGERING IN THE SHADOW CAST BY the holoeditor’s imaging screen that was the chamber’s only light, an old, old man practiced his Luke Skywalker impression.

“Listen to me, Blackhole or Shadowspawn or whoever you are,” he murmured, forcing his leathery mouth to shape the rounded vowels and mushy consonants of Skywalker’s barbarous Outer Rim accent. “I’m a Jedi, but I never had time for all the training some of the old Jedi were supposed to get … No, no no. Not geht. Almost git—really, barely a vowel at all. G’t.”

The old, old man sighed. To spend the balance of a human lifetime pretending to be a half-educated rube … ultimately,