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Bassi Vobah didn’t seem to be having much luck.

Cycer was dealing the cards when a small spherical droid rolled up beside Lob Doluff and whistled imperatively, then split into a pair of hemispheres.

Doluff looked up from the screen and keyboard thus revealed, all colored drained from his face.

“Captain Calrissian, I believe you’d better hurry to the spaceport. I have a message here that your ship, the Millennium Falcon, is on fire.”

• VI •

THE ASTEROID OSEON 6845 had been artificially accelerated to complete a rotation every twenty-five hours, giving its inhabitants a comforting sense of day and night—and those whose task it was to land spaceships there a severe headache. Touching down upon a surface moving at eighty-eight kilometers an hour in the tight and tiny circle that was the planetoid’s circumference doesn’t seem a difficult job until one tries it.

Consequently, from the Administrator Senior’s equatorial garden home, Lando took a pneumatic tubeway to the north pole of Oseon 6845. There a small and relatively stationary spaceport had been leveled out of the barren rock.

Unfortunately, the tube car had no communicator of its own, nor did Lando make a habit of carrying one. Momentarily, he regretted it: he could learn no more in transit about the fate of the Millennium Falcon. All he had with him was the forty-seven-odd thousand credits he’d acquired that evening, and a tiny, unobtrusive five-shot stingbeam pistol tucked into his velvoid cummerbund.

It was all the personal weapon he allowed himself in a dark and perilous universe; he preferred to rely on his brains for the heavy firepower.

The tubeway shot him northward through a chord beneath the curvature of the asteroid’s surface at several thousand kilometers an hour. Lando fidgeted every second, every centimeter. He’d sent Vuffi Raa to the space terminal to continue repairs on the Falcon. And to keep a big red glassy eye on her.

What had gone wrong?

The little robot was a pacifist by nature, it was ineradicably programmed into him. Could some saboteur have taken advantage of this handicap, overpowered him, and set fire to the ship?

With a plastic-gasketed wheeze, the tubeway lurched to a halt. Its transparent doors opened to let Lando out into a maze of service corridors underneath the landing field. He ran down seemingly endless crossing and countercrossing passageways until he reached one numbered 17-W. A temporary holosign in a bracket on the wall displayed in six languages the legend:

MILLENNIUM FALCON

LANDO CALRISSIAN, CAPT. & PROP.

Overhead, a large circular pressure door hung open, connected by a short, accordion-pleated tube to the underside of the Falcon. A metal ladder led upward through it. Oddly, there was no one else about in the harshly lit cylinder of the service corridor. The only sounds Lando could hear were those of small mechanical things going about their business.

Shaking his head, Lando climbed the ladder.

He emerged in the curving companionway of the Falcon, the somewhat dimmer light and familiar clutter something of a comfort after the stark, brightly lit port corridor. Everything was perfectly quiet. He stalked along the passage until he came to the first intertalkie panel he found set in a bulkhead.

Nervously, he pressed a button. “Vuffi Raa?”

“Yes, Master?” a cheerful voice replied. “I’m out on the hull, finishing up with the phase-shift adaptor.”

“Oh. Well, I’m aboard, very confused. You didn’t happen to have a fire here tonight, did you?”

“Master? Why, no, aside from some welding—and that was vacuum-synergetic, no open flame of any kind. Why do you ask?”

Suspicions of several and various distinct flavors began to fill Lando’s mind. “Er, this may sound silly, but how do I know it’s really you I’m talking to?”

“Master, what’s wrong? Of course it is really I. Please come to the starboard gun-blister and I’ll show you.”

That could be an altogether different kind of invitation than it sounded. Lando drew his stingbeam,