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The scream of laser fire mixed with the dying shrieks of the people, as Greedo and his brother and mother fled into the jungle.

Uncle Nok and Uncle Teeku and twenty others made it to the cave ahead of them. There was a great grinding noise and the roar of a landslide, as the top of the mountain opened, throwing off its burden of earth and stones.

Greedo caught his breath as the three silver ships gleamed in the light of the midday sun. Powerful engines already whined awake.

Uncle Nok greeted Greedo’s mother as he urged everyone to get aboard as fast as possible. “Neela—now you know why I was always visiting the ships! I was keeping them in repair for this very day!”

Greedo’s mother hugged her brother Nok and thanked him. Then they all rushed aboard, followed by a stream of refugees coming out of the forest.

Two of the silver ships lifted easily on columns of repulsor energy, their fission-thrust engines whining up so high that the sound vanished beyond the range of Greedo’s hearing. The third ship was waiting for the last stragglers … the last survivors of the massacre.

A portly Manka hunter named Skee charged out of the forest, screaming that everyone behind him was dead—”Leave! Take the ships away, while you still have a chance!”

The third ship never got its hatch closed. A single bolt of ion energy fused its stabilizers into a molten mass, and a split second later a powerful laser blast blew the power core.

As the first two ships shot skyward, a bright sphere of fusion fire blasted back the jungle, mocking the midday sun. The third ship was no more.

Greedo never heard the explosion. He was in the cockpit of The Radion, gawking at the starlines, as Uncle Nok’s silver ship vaulted into the unknown.

3. Nar Shaddaa

Planning for this emergency, Nok had programmed the Rodian ships to jump to a heavily trafficked region of the galaxy, where the survivors of his little tribe could lose themselves among the myriad alien races engaged in interstellar commerce.

So it was they came to Nar Shaddaa, a spaceport moon orbiting Nal Hutta, one of the principal worlds inhabited by the wormlike Hutts.

There was a continual buzz of space traffic between Nar Shaddaa and the far-flung systems of the galaxy: mighty transgalactic transports and bulk cargo vessels, the garish yachts and caravels of the Hutt ganglords, the battle-scarred corsairs of the mercenaries and bounty hunters, the pirate brigantines, and even the occasional commercial passenger liner, packet starjammer, or massive migration arks. And, of course, the ever-present star cruisers and sleek patrol vessels of the Imperial Navy.

The surface of Nar Shaddaa was an interlocking grid of miles-high cities and docking stations, built up over thousands of years. Level upon level of freight depots and warehouse and repair facilities were linked by gaudy old thoroughfares that spanned the globe, bridging canyons that reached from the upper strata, swarming with life, to the glowing depths where several forms of subspecies thrived on the refuse that fell continuously from the towering heights.

Greedo and his brother and mother and all the pilgrims on those two silver ships came to Nar Shaddaa, merging with the life of the great spaceport moon, finding a home in the huge sector controlled by Corellian smugglers.

The Corellians kept things reasonably under control in their part of the moon. Gambling was an important source of income for them. All races were invited to wander the brightly lit avenues and gawk and eat and drink and throw away money in the sabacc joints. A gun duel or a bounty killing now and then was to be expected, and petty thievery was largely overlooked. But there was an unwritten law in the Corellian Sector, enforced by Port Control: If you want to make big trouble, do it somewhere else.

The Rodian refugees merged with the denizens of the dingy warehouse districts on Level 88. Over the next months they found work as freight handlers and house servants, and went about their lives.

Nok ordered everyone