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"Tell me about it," Han said, as Chewbacca issued a long string of angry barks. Han suppressed a grin. No need to translate exactly what Chewbacca thought of this Imperial slug. Even a stormtrooper was likely smart enough to figure that one out on his own.

"Meet you in the cargo bay," Lore murmured, as Han escorted Chewbacca to the Wookiee labor unit. The Wookiee wore a thick, ill-fitting tunic that looked ridiculous but was loose enough to hide the bowcaster tucked beneath it. When the time came to leave, he'd hopefully have no trouble. "And we'll get to work."

The Imperials thought their newest maintenance team would be repairing the docking racks in the shuttle staging area.

But that wasn't exactly the kind of work Han had in mind.

Han had long ago learned that wearing a maintenance uniform was the key to getting pretty much anywhere you wanted to go. While high-profile visitors to an Imperial satellite station had to pass through any number of security checks as they wandered from one sector to another, no matter how important they were, maintenance workers quickly faded into the background. These days the Empire was doing so much construction work that most new projects were staffed by prisoners. There was little time or energy left over to guard the crews who kept the place running. No one cared what happened to the guy who fixed the plumbing or took out the trash. Which meant, thanks to their orange maintenance uniforms, no one gave Han or Avik a second look at they hurried away from the docking bay toward the aft cargo hold.

It had taken a good twenty minutes on the station's nearest computer terminal to determine where the shipment of glitterstim—confiscated from a rogue transport ship and en route to a legitimate distributor in a nearby star system—was stored. Not for the first time, Han found himself missing that annoying little astromech droid, who would have been able to ferret out the information in seconds. Still, they found it and easily slipped into the empty cargo hold. It was at least a hundred square meters in area and filled with stacks and stacks of shipping containers. There were no humans inside, only a few binary loadlifters, none of whom were sentient enough to note the presence of a couple unauthorized visitors.

"So far, so good, Chewie," Han said into his comlink. "Now we just need to dig up the shipment and we'll get out of here."

Avik dropped the two large tool cases he'd been carrying on the ground and flipped them open. Both were empty. Han glanced up at the giant piles of crates lining the walls of the cargo hold. He groaned. "This could take a while."

They began searching through the stacks, prying open one crate after another. Han found several cases of Whyren's Reserve (its amber color marking it as a particularly valuable vintage), kilograms of ionite (enough to retrofit the Falcon and several other ships), and a month's supply of bacta. But no glitterstim. They'd been at it for about fifteen minutes when the door to the cargo hold swished open. A stormtrooper in white armor clomped into the room, looking suspiciously back and forth between Han, Lore, and their empty toolboxes.

Han clambered off the crates of fusioncutters he'd been sorting through and ambled over to the guard. His hand strayed toward his blaster, but he kept calm.

It was important not to act suspicious.

"What are you two doing in here?" the stormtrooper asked. "All maintenance crews were to report to sector seven."

Han shrugged. "No one told us, buddy," he said. "They sent us here." He jerked a thumb at Lore, who was fiddling with some exposed wiring in the far corner. "Told us we needed to repair the, uh, gyrostabilizers in the cargo lifts,"

he said, taking a wild guess at something that might need repairing.

The stormtrooper raised his comlink. "I'll have to check on that," he said.

"Don't bother," Han retorted, throwing all his weight against the stormtrooper and knocking him to