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Chenlambec rumbled on. Tinian waited a reasonable time, then said, “He says that you and I must take cover inside a sensor-screened hold while he makes contact.”

Bossk snarled. “You will be my hostage in case he tries anything.”

This time, Chen said something that actually needed translating. Tinian repeated, “You’ll have to show him how to operate your ship’s controls.”

“No, I won’t. My personal cabin is fully shielded, and I can run the Hound from inside it.”

Tinian turned to Chen. “Will that work?” She didn’t relish the idea of being held hostage inside a shielded cabin.

Chen told her it would. Several minutes later, he sat alone on the Hound’s bridge. Bossk had locked down all controls, but Chen laid his forearms in deep troughs on the console and studied carefully. Evidently Bossk used pressure against the trough surfaces to control thrusters in several directions. Main guns must be the right-hand claw hooks. He didn’t see shield controls yet, but finding them would be Flirt’s job.

He had installed her under the navicomputer. By now she should be absorbing data, dumping old memory to make room.

A fuzzy object loomed ahead on the scanners.

That must be the waypost. His contacts back on Kashyyyk had felt it wise not to tell him where to find Lomabu III—a delaying tactic, to give Flirt time to conquer the Hound’s command circuits.

Chen hoped to hear Flirt’s announcement of success at any moment. Plan One was elegantly simple.

The fuzzy object grew and resolved on twin trapezoidal forescreens. A drifting hunk of metal, it looked like a derelict ship. Sparkling microscopic debris swirled around it in rapid, furious orbits. The object seemed to invite scanner probing.

Before he could touch any controls, his scanner screen lit. Up close, it still looked like a derelict ship. This was no waypost: A dim but distinct dance of tiny colored lights would have identified it as genuine. He should have known that Kashyyyk would never risk letting a Trandoshan see the coding ID of the network.

But he had been promised something he would be able to read.

He growled at the bridge’s main microphone: Bossk must focus the scanners into the orbiting cloud and vary scan depth until something readable appeared.

At every depth, it looked like spinning garbage. An eerie howling filled the cabin.

Abruptly, he wurfled soft amusement. Some brilliant underground operative had programmed the whirling debris to give an audible scanner reading. It sounded like hundreds of Wookiees singing simultaneously, each following the others in a spectacularly complex canon. Each voice repeated a series of numbers. Chen isolated one voice and followed it through the series. They were definitely coordinates; but where did the series break and start again?

His young apprentice had worked as a musician during a brief undercover job. He growled at her.

After several seconds, she answered in the language of his people. “Start,” she woofed in an odd soprano. She paused a moment, then barked, “now.”

Chen punched digits into the Hound’s navicomputer. The moment he completed a navigational sequence, its screen lit with a course. A very short course.

The Lomabu system was Aida’s near neighbor.

He whispered to Flirt. Had she …?

“Not yet,” she signaled. “Sorry.”

On to Plan Two, then. According to Kashyyyk’s transmission, Imperial forces were scheming to entrap the Rebel fleet, using several hundred Wookiee slaves as bait. The Wookiees had been shipped to Lomabu III, a world recently depopulated for sedition against the Empire, and imprisoned there. Aida’s Imperial Governor, Io Desnand, intended to ship in dozens of females and cubs and then stage an attack. Rebel ships would probably try to rescue the Wookiees, and Governor Desnand could offer the Empire a mass entrapment. Obviously Desnand was after a fat promotion.

Plan Two involved liberating the Wookiee prisoners at Lomabu III and bringing down Bossk, one task at a time. In Plan Two, Chen (backed by Flirt and Tinian) would still have