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They were wrong, thought the governor, those “experts.” He watched the Falcon detach itself from the accordion tube beneath it and seal up its belly hatch. Lesai didn’t stop you from caring.

Lob Doluff wished it did.

Several thousand kilometers away, a missile streaked past an odd conglomeration of battered and obsolete fighting craft attached with long and brightly pulsing cables to the core of a starship engine.

It was a signal, the only means of conveying information across space during the Flamewind of Oseon. Klyn Shanga watched it sizzle past his canopy, began punching buttons to place himself in wire-communications with his companions.

“That’s it, men,” he said in a grim, determined voice. “Now it begins, and it will not end until we have ended it. Call off your status when I say your name. We have to get this damned mess synchronized just right or we’ll wind up slamming into a rock somewhere between here and there.

“Den Sait Glass!”

“On the tick,” came the reply.

“Glee Jun!”

“Hot and ready!”

“Stec Eddis!”

“On the mark!”

“Mors Eth!”

“Item two twenty-three,” Lando read. “At long last. Landing tractors out, prepare to lift.”

“Landing tractors offline,” Vuffi Raa answered. “Zero weight on the landingjacks, negative weight, we’re clear! Ease forward on the throttle, sublight drives engaged at three percent power. Altitude—if that’s the word for it—twelve thousand meters and rising.”

“Good!” the gambler/spaceship captain replied. He hit a button, spoke toward a small grill in the arm of his acceleration chair.

“This is Captain Calrissian speaking. Hope you two are thoroughly uncomfortable over there. We’re off the ground and headed toward the Fifth Belt. If we arrive in one piece, it won’t be any fault of yours!”

• X •

VIOLET FRINGES LASHED at the Millennium Falcon, purple flames licked at her hull as lavender-colored lightning flashed in a sky that was infinitely mauve.

“Vuffi Raa, according to these instruments, we’re spinning like a top and following a course that’s essentially a giant figure eight!” Lando shook his head. The plum-colored glare through the cockpit’s canopy was souring his stomach, and the hard vacuum of space, which supposedly was incapable of conveying sound waves, rocked as if with the laughter of malicious giants.

He could scarcely hear the droid’s reply.

“I’m sorry, Master, there isn’t any help for it. We must trust the program I fed into the engines and attitude controls. I can’t see a single instrument on the panel that’s reliable.” Even the robot’s voice had the faintest hint of an hysterical edge. Or perhaps it was Lando’s ears, battered by the screaming of a universe tearing itself into bits.

In the passenger lounge, Waywa Fybot was aroused from a sleep unusually deep even for his deep-dreaming species. He stirred, felt the feathers on his long neck ruffling themselves, and tried to close his eyes again. A glimpse through a small round port across the room caught his attention. His gaze became involuntarily fixed upon it, as, one by one, his feathers lifted, stood perpendicular to his body.

Bassi Vobah’s hands covered her eyes.

Had she been capable of a single linear thought, she would have wished for a second pair to cover up her ears. It seemed to her that the very Core of the galaxy was shrieking at her for some terrible thing she’d done and somehow forgotten. With a sob, she collapsed sideways on the curving couch, squeezed herself into a huddled ball, knees up to her chin, eyes shut so tightly that they were slowly blackening under the self-inflicted pressure.

Her hands were on her ears, now, so that the titanic bellowing of a sun gone mad and its resonating orbital companions transmitted itself through her very bones.

Beneath her face, the cushion of the couch was soaked with tears.

What end was there to madness?

Starboard, in the cockpit, Vuffi Raa switched off another bank of useless instruments. They were distracting and therefore worse than useless. In a similar disgruntled humor and for identical reasons, he had shut off his hearing,