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There was an eerie deliberateness to his self-abuse, and his face remained expressionless throughout. He did not stop until the pads were swollen and pulpy-soft, and the pain shooting up through his arm and deep into his chest had bled off the restless need that impatience and frustration had bred in his pedrokk gland—the fighter’s heart.

By that time Marauder was ready to depart, and Pakkpekatt waited until he had watched it go, jumping toward Krenhner the moment it cleared convoy radius.

Then he turned to his recording log and began at last to dictate a report he did not want to make for a supervising committee he no longer could say he respected.

Four little ships, groping through the dark for a few short days. That is all your lives are worth to them. I never would have thought I would see such dishonor. I never thought I would feel such shame.

Over the next several hours, Artoo added twenty chambers to his map of the vagabond, numbering each in turn as the team visited it. To help them remember where they had been, he also recorded for each a fish-eye holo of what Lando had dubbed “the pop-ups.”

So far, they had discovered two basic patterns for the pop-ups. Eight of the chambers were like the first—one side of the chamber would reveal a large figure that might have been a sigil, a sculpture, or symbolic writing. The opposite face would reveal a finely detailed geometric design that Lando and Lobot both were convinced was the map of a temple or small city. Somewhere in every map room was a key that triggered Qella music, though every “song” was different from the others.

Apart from the music, the pop-ups in the map rooms appeared to be static. They remained on display as long as the team lingered; when the team moved on to another chamber and the connecting portal closed, the pop-ups collapsed and vanished as quickly as they had appeared.

Next in sequence after every map room came one or more of what Lobot dubbed “gadget rooms.” In them the team found a variety of mostly mysterious pop-ups that might move, change color, hum, or change shape when touched. But with a very few exceptions, the gadgets had no decipherable function, and none caused any detectable change in the status of the ship.

“I still think these could be control rooms,” Lando said as they prepared to leave chamber 20. “We just don’t know what we’re controlling. We could be driving the custodian crazy, lowering the heat in the ’freshers and changing the channel on his CosmiComm service.”

One welcome discovery was that when they entered a chamber by conventional means—through the portals—the chamber provided its own illumination. Power had become critical enough for Artoo that, back in chamber 11, Lando had coupled him to Threepio for an energy transfusion. The protocol droid, carried everywhere by Lobot or Artoo, was consuming very little power directly.

“Yes, by all means. You should take it all,” he said, looking down at his chest as Lando snapped the transfer cable into the recharge coupling. “I’m nothing but a burden to you. I don’t know why you ever brought me on this mission, Master Lando. I’m completely useless to you. Give all my power to Artoo and go on without me. Leave me here in the dark.”

With a will, Lando resisted the temptation to take the droid at his word.

Chamber 21 was another map room, the ninth. The sigil resembled a feathered V embracing a cluster of fist-size spheres. The map was an irregular pentagon, with one side twice as long as the others and the same shape echoed in the open area at the very center. Neither Lobot nor Lando could find a music key, but their attempts seemed to trigger something quite different, and startling.

At first, there was just a pale pink glow slowly pulsing in a structure near the long outer wall. Then, suddenly, that part of the map erupted in a gout of fire that leaped a full meter up from the wall.

The team fell back in surprise. “They’ve found us!” Threepio cried. “Artoo, save yourself!