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Rokur Gepta, traveling aboard the refitted cruiser Wennis, was receiving an alarming report from one of his advance escorts. The flyer had returned in a one-seat fighter approximating the size and combat capabilities of Klyn Shanga’s, but which was equipped—and this was rare, even for the navy—to exceed the speed of light. The little ship was half engine, virtually unarmed, and a tight fit, even for a slender youth. Piloting such a vehicle for more than a few minutes brought new meaning to the word “discomfort.”

It and its occupant had been to the ThonBoka and back again already while the lumbering Wennis, considered a very sprightly vessel for its class, was still many days’ journey from the nebula.

Gepta had such a fighter for his personal use. It had saved his life at least twice. He came as close to feeling fond of it as he came to feeling fond of anything—aside from the grim denizens from the darker recesses of his cavern on Tund. Fondness was not an emotion ordinarily to be discovered within the similarly stygian depths of Rokur Gepta’s soul, although whether it had never lived within him, or had been ruthlessly exterminated early in his life, was a question that perhaps even the sorcerer was not prepared to answer.

Thus it was with something of a shock, in the brief instant before he regained control of himself, that Gepta experienced an unfamiliar, transient, and microscopic pang of personal regret as he learned of the destruction of the Millennium Falcon and her crew by the blockade cruiser. While the sorcerer wasn’t watching, Lando Calrissian had somehow risen unbidden from the ranks of petty annoyance to that of worthy opponent and honored enemy.

“I saw it myself, sir!” the breathless scout gasped as moisture from the surrounding air condensed upon his space-cold armor and trickled off into a little pool on the deck plates. Like those of all his comrades attached to the mysterious Wennis, his gray uniform was unadorned by signs of rank or unit in order to preserve certain political fictions which his masters cherished. That no creature wiser than a sponge was taken in by such an exercise constituted no good reason not to pursue it.

Likewise, the slowly warming pressure suit he wore over his uniform, having just a few moments before leaped out of his cramped, ultrafast spacecraft into the cavernous hangar deck of the supposedly civilian cruiser, was without markings. Most of the personnel aboard the Wennis, being professional soldiers, resented the shallow deception, but, with understandable circumspection, seldom got around to mentioning it aloud.

While in command of the Wennis, Rokur Gepta did not affect the basaltic throne and the splendid isolation he preferred on Tund. He occupied the captain’s acceleration chair (although there was an officer on board who claimed the title) and supervised his underlings on the bridge as they manipulated the controls at his bidding. He pitilessly examined the incoming scout, wondering whether, after all the time, all the effort, someone else had casually robbed him of victory over his prey.

“What ship, again?” the sorcerer hissed, briefly contemplating punishing its captain and crew. “Which ship destroyed the Millennium Falcon, and by what means?” The sorcerer hunched over like a scavenger bird, peering through the windings of his headdress, his eyes a pair of glowing, pulsating coals.

The rest of the bridge crew paid close attention to their consoles, cringing at the pilot’s plight, but unwilling to interfere with his presumed destiny. They had seen a captain stripped of dignity and all but killed in that very place. They held out little hope for a mere lieutenant.

The scout gulped visibly, wishing he was back inside the claustrophobic confines of his craft. He was the best pilot aboard the Wennis, possibly one of the best in the service. That was not going to do him any good with the sorcerer. Nor had he been educated to say or do the diplomatic thing when confronted with malevolent and arbitrary