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His time was up. If Flirt silenced the Pup any longer, Bossk might suspect her existence.

Tinian leaned toward the pickup. “We’re going to singe a little fur,” she answered. “Shall we bring some back?”

“If you know how,” said Bossk. It sounded like a challenge.

“Brace yourself, Chen,” Tinian muttered. “We’ll land in about one minute.”

She wasn’t confident of her landing skills, and this was an unfamiliar ship, even though she liked it. Chen flipped her small hands off the controls and grasped the rods. He feathered the main engine and set down the Pup near a cliff along the waterside. The compound would lie on a peninsula just north of that rocky promontory.

“Impressive,” Tinian said wistfully.

He cuffed her shoulder and ordered her to thaw the lockers. They must be blood-warm before returning to the Hound.

She gripped his forearm. “Be careful, Chen.”

He crooned a soft good-bye. Her concern pleased and honored him.

He popped the hatch and climbed down onto Lomabu III. A cool damp wind blew across his nose, and he felt its chill in his furless palms. Its salty smell had an organic overlay of dead fish and floating plants. Beneath a brilliant blue sky, close to the site where the Pup sat grounded, waves lapped at the jagged line of a long, broken wall. Green algae almost obscured a tracework of filigree just above waterline. Farther out in sapphire-blue water, other ruined walls formed a right-angled maze. The ruins barely broke the water, topped with broken stone and steel.

He and Tinian had landed near an abandoned city. Within a few years, decades at the most, the vast sea would dissolve these remaining walls and wash them away, and all evidence of the Lomabuans’ civilization would vanish.

Chenlambec wondered what the Lomabuans had looked like, and what crime they had committed that drove the Empire to depopulate the entire world. Were the Lomabuans slaves, like his own people … or dead?

He checked his bowcaster. Each piece fit again. It bothered him to know that Bossk was so familiar with Kashyyyk’s weaponry.

The rocky promontory that shielded the prison compound from his view would also keep prison guards from spotting the Pup. He strode forward, staying inside a narrow grove of twiggy brown trees that grew between the cliff’s foot and a pale, sandy strand.

Once he rounded the promontory, the prison compound became visible. Its gray walls rose in straight, perfect lines, freshly built and maintained by slave labor. It hunched at the other end of a slender peninsula, surrounded by a high metal fence. Four tall blocky towers loomed at the corners of its perimeter, and pale sand covered the peninsula’s narrows between compound and mainland.

Only one turbolaser emplacement was in bowcaster range. Destroying that weapon would help set the stage for an uprising. He crawled forward, staying low. Rocky soil scratched his palms.

As he began to set his right palm on the sand, he realized that the sand was also crawling. He bent down to peer closer. What he had taken for a sandy beach was a vast colony of tiny creatures. Each was no larger than a grain of true sand, with legs or flagella so small he could only guess that they existed. The colony roiled as creatures climbed over each other and were climbed in turn.

He judged from the damp rocky soil above the crawling sand that the tide was going out Although the creatures’ movement seemed random, the colony slowly retreated, following the tide.

He dangled a bit of fur over the colony. It vanished where it touched down.

Ravenous little beasts! Chen groped behind him into the glade, found a leaf-covered stick, and tossed it onto the crawling sand.

It dissolved from beneath.

This explained why the Imperials had selected this peninsula for a prison colony. Surrounded by voracious sand—even at low tide, he guessed—it could cage Wookiees who laughed at most weapons. Chen wondered if the Imperials had allowed one prisoner to “escape” in order to demonstrate the sand’s appetite—

But that was idle speculation. Now to create some heat for Bossk to see, so it