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Switching off his suit lamps, Lando looked out through the blast hole at the star patterns beyond, seeking a familiar pattern, a recognizable star or distinctive spiral nebula. The odds did not favor him. Even after a lifetime roaming the spacelanes, there was far more unknown than known in a galaxy of a hundred billion stars.

But if there was any way he could, he needed to touch the familiar, and remind himself what it was he was fighting to live long enough to see again.

Lady Luck dropped back into realspace just shy of a light-second from Anomaly 1033 and just more than a light-year from Carconth.

At those distances, the anomaly was invisible except to sensors, but the red supergiant star was still a spectacular sight. Five hundred times as large and a hundred thousand times as bright as the sun Coruscant orbited, Carconth commanded the sky like few other stars. At the peak of its fluctuations, it was the second largest and seventh brightest of the known stars. The Astrographic Survey Institute and its predecessors had been maintaining a supernova watch at Carconth for more than six hundred years.

The chances were that Anomaly 1033 was something left behind by an alien expedition to Carconth. There had been many such, most unrecorded in Old or New Republic records. But Colonel Pakkpekatt and his volunteers would have no chance to find out, and little opportunity to gawk at the galactic spectacle visible off the yacht’s port beam.

Within moments of their arrival, Lady Luck’s controls went dead under Pakkpekatt’s hands. Accelerating as it turned, the yacht veered sharply some sixty degrees to starboard and twenty degrees toward galactic north, pointing its bow in the general direction of Kaa. The displays churned as the autonavigator ran through its calculus and sent the results to the hyperspace motivator.

“What’s wrong, Colonel?” Bijo Hammax asked.

“Something has activated a slave circuit,” said Pakkpekatt, lifting his hands from the panel and sitting back in the pilot’s flight couch. “The yacht is no longer under my control.”

“But you’re not trying to get control back.” The whistle of the yacht’s hyperdrive winding up to a jump was now clearly audible to both officers.

“That is correct.”

At that moment, Pleck and Taisden joined them on the flight deck. “Colonel—” Pleck began.

Hammax turned his couch toward Pakkpekatt. “Colonel, I don’t understand why you’re letting us be hijacked.”

“It is very difficult to defeat a well-designed slave circuit without doing extensive damage to the vessel,” said Pakkpekatt. “They would be of little use if they could be easily overridden.”

“But that doesn’t explain—”

Taisden shouldered forward past Pleck. “Colonel, I can have the hyperdrive offline in thirty seconds.”

“I doubt very much if you can, Agent Taisden. I also doubt very much if you have thirty seconds.”

“Let me try.”

“No,” Pakkpekatt said.

“You think she’s going to take us to them,” Hammax concluded.

“The most likely person to have installed the slave circuits is also the most likely person to have activated them,” said Pakkpekatt. “We will know in”—he glanced down at the nav display—“six hours if that person was General Calrissian.”

Seconds later, Lady Luck vaulted forward through a tunnel of stars.

* * *

“Where are they?” Captain Gegak screamed at the bridge crew of the destroyer Tobay. “Where is the target? Where is Gorath?”

“There is no sign of either ship, Captain,” the sensor master ventured. “I do not detect Gorath’s transponder.”

“Idiot! Do you think I cannot read a tracking screen?” Gegak bellowed, balling both hands into fists. His rage was indiscriminate and comprehensive, leaving no one on the bridge feeling safe enough to move or speak. “I am betrayed! One of you is in league with Captain Dokrett. Someone has conspired to steal our share of the prize.”

Gegak stalked behind the officers at their stations. “Who is the thief? Who is the traitor? Is it you, Frega?” He seized the hair tuft of the navigation master and used it to roughly yank his