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Chewbacca awaited his friend’s decision. Bollux watched impartially and Blue Max with a certain excitement.

“Some forethought might not be out of place here,” Skynx contributed in a very subdued voice.

Han disliked complications and subterfuge, but his hasty action was stayed, for the moment, by the conviction that being dead was the least interesting thing in life. “All right, all right; who’s hungry?” he asked. “I’m sick of ship’s rations. Let’s go see what kind of meal we can get in town. But if nobody thinks of a new one, my plan still goes.” He clipped the flask to his gunbelt while Chewbacca gathered up his bowcaster and bandoleer of ammunition. Badure found the small purse of local currency he had brought, and Bollux shut his plastron halves on Blue Max.

Hasti saw Skynx shedding his instruments. “Hey, I never got to hear anything.”

Badure looked around. “Bring them along,” he bade Skynx. The Ruurian began tucking his instruments into carrying cinches he fastened around himself.

Pulling on his flight jacket, Han shut and sealed the hatch behind them. Storm clouds had moved in, and electrical discharges illuminated the clouds in strange flashes of red. Badure pointed out that the landlord’s cousins had disappeared. “They probably figured out they were guarding empty boxes.”

“More likely they didn’t want to sit around in that leaky barn,” Hasti reasoned. The rest of the onlookers who had been watching the starship from a distance, mostly children and the domestic yappers, were gone as well.

They set off downslope with Bollux bringing up the rear. Up this high, away from the docks, the streets were poorly maintained and lighting was unknown. They didn’t get far.

Han was first to sense something wrong—everything was too quiet, too many ramshackle windows were shuttered. No lights were showing and no voices could be heard anywhere nearby. He grabbed Chewbacca’s shoulder, and the bowcaster came up, the blaster appearing at the same time. By instinct, they stood back to back. Hasti had her mouth open to ask what was wrong when the spotlights hit them.

Han recognized them as hand-held spots and, figuring that a right-handed man would be holding the spot as far out with his left as he could, took an estimated aim.

“Don’t!” a voice ordered. “We’ll cut you all down if anyone fires a shot!”

They were surrounded. Han holstered his side arm, and the Wookiee lowered his bowcaster. Humans and various other beings appeared in the glare waving rifles, riot guns, slug-shooters, and other weapons. Han and his companions were easily disarmed and their equipment examined. Skynx chittered in terror while their captors pawed his delicate musical instruments, but he was allowed to retain them.

Three individuals strode forward to search the captives. The smaller two were mainbreed human—twins, a young man and woman who shared traits of thick, straight brown hair and widow’s peaks, startling black-irised eyes, and thin, intense, pale faces. The third personage hung back, a looming hulk in the light backwash of the spots. Han remembered the name Badure had mentioned: Egome Fass, the enforcer.

The twins approached them, the female in the lead. “J’uoch,” murmured Hasti, shivering.

The twins’ faces held the same rigid, lethal composure. “That’s it,” J’uoch replied quickly. “Where’s the disk, Hasti? We know you went to the vaults.” She gave Han a chilly smile. Then the smile vanished and she turned again to Hasti, “Give it up, or we burn down your friends, starting with the pilot here.”

Chewbacca’s great arms tensed, fingers curling. He prepared to die as he would be expected to, head of a Wookiee Honor Family, his life so intimately intertwined with that of Han Solo that there existed no human word for the relationship.

Han, in turn, was choosing among several tactics, all of them suicidal, when Bollux spoke. “Captain Solo mustn’t come to harm. I will open the Millennium Falcon for you.”

The woman eyed him. It hadn’t occurred to J’uoch that the