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“It’s hard to accept,” Hasti was saying. “All these years. How could a secret be kept for generations?”

“Secrets have been kept for ages,” Badure pointed out. “It was easy enough in this case; there’re really two strata in the Survivors’ organization. The dupes lived and died there in the mountains, maintaining the war-robots as a religious ritual, holding their ceremonies once in a while. Then there were the others, the ones who knew the secret of Xim’s treasure and waited for the time they could use it.”

“But they all got the conditioning as children, right?” Han asked.

“And when Lanni happened on the mountain base and got her hands on the log-recorder disk and put it in the lockbox at the vaults,” Hasti murmured, her voice thick with sorrow, “she couldn’t have known that the steward was part of the Survivors’ apparatus.”

Such had been the assistant’s testimony once his conditioning had been overcome. The steward had sent the disk back to the Survivors’ mountain warren as soon as it had come into his possession, of course. And he had contrived a nonexistent voice-coder to keep Lanni, Hasti, or anyone else from claiming it. He was aware that J’uoch had learned something about the disk from Lanni before killing her, and that the woman was actively seeking it. He had passed word to her through Survivor double agents that the Millennium Falcon had landed, knowing he couldn’t cope with the starship if force were brought to bear on the vaults. He knew J’uoch could, and hoped that Hasti and the others and their ship would be destroyed in battle, and the matter closed.

But instead, J’uoch had mounted the ambush that had resulted in the capture of the Falcon. Not having found the disk onboard the starship, J’uoch had made pointed inquiries at the vaults. The steward had managed to put her off but, knowing it was only a matter of time until she used force to inspect the lockboxes herself and put him to a more harrowing interrogation, he ordered the long-dormant Guardian Corps sent out against the mining camp. The war-robots, maintained through generations for just such an emergency, had come close to accomplishing their purpose.

“So why are the Survivors still sitting on their money after all this time?” Han wondered.

“The Old Republic was stable and unbeatable,” Badure answered. “They had no hope of moving against it, even with Xim’s treasure backing them. It’s only now, with the Empire having its troubles, that the Survivors smelled a setup they might be able to exploit, especially here in the Tion Hegemony. I bet small-timers everywhere are getting the same sort of idea.”

“A new Xim, and a new despotism,” Hasti mused. “How could they have believed it, even under conditioning?”

“They can believe one thing,” Han said, watching the land roll by quickly beneath them. “The Survivors are about to suffer a capital loss.”

“Shouldn’t we have a bigger ship?” Hasti inquired.

Han shook his head. “First we make sure the treasure’s there, and put what we can in the Falcon. Then we unship a quad-battery and some defensive shielding generators. Gallandro and I will hold the fort while Chewie and the rest of you go find a bigger ship, about the size of J’uoch’s lighter, say. It won’t take too long.”

“And what will you do with your share of the money?” Badure asked casually. He saw doubt and confusion cross the pilot’s face.

“I’ll worry about that when I’ve got a stack of credits so high I’ll have to rent a warehouse,” Han replied at last.

Gallandro, who had just entered the cockpit, carrying the equipment he had gathered, said, “Well put, Solo! Indelicate, but on target.” He checked their progress. “We’ll be there in a moment. I haven’t ransacked a bank in a long time; there’s a certain zest to it.”

Han reserved his reply and put the starship into a steep dive. The Falcon dropped out of the sky ahead of her own sonic boom. Dellaltians near the vaults suddenly saw the vessel appear above them, its braking thrusters thundering, its landing gear extended