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“What is it, Vuffi Raa—and how many times have I asked you not to call me master?”

They were both whispering against a noisy background.

The droid held up the oddly shaped clump of debris for his master’s inspection. “There wasn’t any spontaneous breakdown in the phase-shift controls aboard the Falcon, Master. I’m afraid you were right, that this makes two such incidents.”

His master nodded grimly. “So it was a bomb.”

“Yes, Master, someone is trying to murder you.”

• II •

LANDO CALRISSIAN SHOOK his head ironically and grinned.

He had good reason. His first evening in the Oseon, his first sabacc game, and already he was ahead some twenty-three thousand credits.

The dashing young gambler stood, dressed impeccably at an hour when most people were rumpled and tired, before a full-length mirror, stroking the brand-new mustache he’d begun only a few weeks ago, when things looked so much bleaker. Yes, by the Core, it did give him a certain panache, a certain elan, a certain …

And without filling out so much as a single form in triplicate (if that was logically possible)—his mind was drifting back again to the money tucked into the pockets of his velvoid semiformals—without acquiring a permit, easement, license, variance, or Certificate of Mother-May-I.

Here was one fat bankroll that wasn’t going to evaporate when he wasn’t watching it!

What added amusement to triumph was that sabacc was a game considerably more complex and infinitely riskier than the entrepreneurship he’d been attempting since he’d acquired the Millennium Falcon. It called for quicker judgment, greater courage, and a more sophisticated understanding of human (in a broadly tolerant manner of speaking) nature.

So why was he so casually accomplished at the former and so miserably rotten at the latter?

He shrugged to himself, crossed the hotel room from the door he’d closed and locked securely not very many moments before.

Let’s see—just the most recent example. He’d won the Falcon and Vuffi Raa, then proceeded to earn a handsome fee (work he’d been coerced into doing) that, by all rights, ought to have set him up for life. Orchard crystals from the Rafa System had never been cheap to begin with. Humanoids who wore them found their life spans extended, their intelligence somewhat enhanced. They were both valuable and rare. They grew in only one place in the universe.

Lando had known, when he and the bot had quit the Rafa, that there would be no more life-crystals, at least for a while. The colonial government there had been overthrown by insurgent natives. Thus, he’d held out for the highest possible prices. Yet, somehow, the money—several millions—had seemed to disappear before his very eyes, eaten up in spacecraft maintenance, docking charges, taxes, surtaxes, sursurtaxes, and bribes. Every time he closed a deal, no matter what margin he’d built in at the beginning, he wound up losing. It didn’t seem sensible: the more money he earned, the poorer he became.

If he got any richer, he’d be broke.

Perhaps he simply hadn’t been playing in the right league. One of the rules of this new game (new to Lando, anyway) was that they didn’t tell you the rules until it was too late. His figurative hat was off to anyone who could survive in the world of business, let alone prosper.

A small noise in the next room alerted him. He peeked in: Vuffi Raa was laying out tomorrow’s wardrobe for him. He’d told the little fellow a hundred times that it wasn’t necessary. He needed no valet, and long ago had begun thinking of the robot as a friend more than anything else. But exactly like a good friend (or consummate servant), the droid understood the gambler’s need for some time alone without conversation, while he unwound from the evening’s tense preoccupations. Lando suspected that Vuffi Raa actually wanted to discuss the bomb he’d discovered—the second since their last planetfall. Well, morning was time enough for that. He closed the connecting door softly and returned to his private thoughts.

A second irony