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She started for his fighter, walking tiredly. “Lucky for me.” Jessa said over her shoulder.

V

“WHAT’D you say, Bollux? Quit whispering!”

Han, seated across the gameboard from Chewbacca, glared at a crate on the other side of the Millennium Falcon’s forward compartment, where the old ’droid sat. The compartment’s other clutter included shipping containers, pressure kegs, insulated canisters, and spare parts.

The Wookiee, seated on the acceleration couch, chin resting on one enormous paw, studied the holographic game pieces. His eyes were narrowed in concentration and his black snout twitched from time to time. He’d spotted Han two pieces, and was now on the verge of wiping out that advantage. The pilot had been playing poorly, his concentration wandering, fretting and preoccupied with the complications of the voyage. The new sensor package and dish were working perfectly, and the starship’s systems had been fine-tuned by the outlaw-techs. Nevertheless, Han’s mind couldn’t rest easy as long as his cherished Falcon was hooked up to the huge barge like a bug on a bladderbird. Furthermore, the trip was taking far longer than the Falcon alone would have required; the barge wasn’t built for speed.

Han could hear the barge’s engines now, their muffled blast vibrating through the freighter’s deck and his boots, into the soles of his feet. He hated that barge, wished he could just dump it and zoom off; but a bargain was, after all, a bargain. And, as Jessa had explained, the Waiver for the Falcon was being arranged by the people he was to pick up on Orron III, so it behooved him to hold up his end of the agreement.

“I didn’t say anything, sir,” Bollux replied politely. “That was Max.”

“Then what did he say?” Han snapped. The two-in-one machines sometimes communicated between themselves by high-speed informational pulses, but seemed to prefer vocal-mode conversations. It always made Han nervous when Bollux’s chest was closed up, with the diminutive computer’s voice rising spectrally from an unseen source.

“He informed me, Captain,” Bollux replied in his slow fashion, “that he would like me to open my plastron. May I?”

Han, who’d turned back to the gameboard, saw that Chewbacca had sprung a clever trap. While his finger hovered indecisively over the programming keys controlling his pieces, Han muttered, “Sure, sure, go on, you can fan the air for all I care, Bollux.” He scowled at the Wookiee, seeing there was no way out of the trap. Chewbacca threw his head back with a toss of red-brown hair and woofed with laughter, showing jutting fangs.

With a soft hiss of escaping air—his plastron was airtight, insulated, and shockproof—Bollux’s chest swung open as the labor ’droid moved his long arms back out of the way. Blue Max’s monocular came alive and tracked over to the gameboard just as Han punched up his next move. His gamepiece, a miniature, three-dimensional monster, jumped into battle with one of Chewie’s. But Han had misjudged the two pieces’ subtle win-lose parameters. The Wookiee’s simulacrum-beastie won the brief fight. Han’s gamepiece evaporated back into the nothingness of computer modeling from which it had come.

“You should have used the Second Ilthmar Defense,” Blue Max volunteered brightly. Han swung around with murder in his eye; even the precocious Max recognized the look, hastily adding, “Only trying to be of assistance, sir.”

“Blue Max is quite new, quite young, Captain,” Bollux supplied, by way of mollifying Han. “I’ve taught him a bit about the board game, but he doesn’t know much yet about human sensitivities.”

“Is that so?” Han asked, as if fascinated. “So who’s teaching him, Mr. Pick and Shovel, you?”

“Sure,” Max bubbled. “Bollux’s been everywhere. We sit and talk all the time, and he tells me about the places he’s seen.”

Han swiped at the gameboard’s master key, clearing it of his defeated holo-beasties and Chewbacca’s victorious ones. “Do tell? Well, now, that must be some kind of education: Slit Trenches I Have Dug—a Trans-Galactic Diary.”

“The great starship yards of Fondor was