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Around the starship seethed the turbulent atmosphere of Lur, a planet quite close, as interstellar distances go, to the Corporate Sector. Its ionization layer was interacting with the Falcon’s screens to create eerie lightninglike displays. The shrieking of the planet’s winds could be heard through the vessel’s hull, and the fury of the storm had cut visibility virtually to zero. Han and Chewbacca paid scant attention to the uproar pounding at their canopy with rain, sleet, snow, and gale-force winds.

They lavished closest attention on their instrumentation, courting it for all the information it could provide, as if by concentration alone they could coax a clearer picture of their situation from sensors and other indicators. Chewbacca growled irritably, his clear blue eyes skipping all over his side of the console, leathery snout working and twitching.

Han was feeling just as cross. “How am I supposed to know how thick the ionization layer is? The instrumentation’s jittery from the discharges, it doesn’t show anything clearly. What do you want me to do, drop a plumb line?” He went back to closely monitoring his share of the console.

The Wookiee’s rejoinder was another growl. Behind him, in the communications officer’s seat that was usually left vacant, Bollux spoke up. “Captain Solo, one of the indicators just lit up. It appears to be a malfunction in some of the new control systems.”

Without turning from his work, Han uncorked some of his choicer curses, then calmed down somewhat. “It’s the miserable fluidics! What timing, what perfect timing! Chewie, I told you there’d be trouble, didn’t I? Didn’t I?”

The Wookiee flailed a huge, hairy paw in the air by way of dismissal, wishing to be left to his tasks, rumbling loudly.

“Where’s the problem?” Han snapped back over his right shoulder.

Bollux’s photoreceptors scanned the indicators that were located next to the commo board. “Ship’s emergency systems, sir. The auto-firefighting apparatus, I believe.”

“Go back and see what you can do, will you, Bollux? That’s all we need, for the firefighting gear to cut in; we’d be up to our chins in foam and gas before you could ask the way to the exit.” As Bollux staggered off, barely staying upright on the bucking deck, Han resolutely thrust the problem out of his mind.

Chewbacca yowlped. He had gotten a positive reading. Han dragged himself halfway out of his chair for a look as another spitting globe of ball-lightning drifted out and spun off the Falcon’s bow mandibles. The ionization levels were dropping. Then he threw himself back into his seat and cut the ship’s speed back even further. He had terrible visions of the ionization level extending down, somehow, to the surface of Lur, blinding them right up to the time of collision.

Of course, the party who had hired the Millennium Falcon for this run hadn’t mentioned the ionization layer, hadn’t mentioned anything very specific for that matter. Han had put the word abroad that he and his ship were available for hire and disinclined to ask questions, and the job had come, as Sonniod had predicted it would, from unseen sources in the form of a faceless audio tape and a small cash advance.

But with creditors hounding them and their other resources exhausted in the wake of the debacle in the Kamar Badlands, Han and his partner had seen no alternative but to ignore Sonniod’s advice and accept the run.

Was I born this stupid, Han asked himself in disgust, or am I just blossoming late in life? But at that moment both the storm and the ionization layer parted. The Falcon lowered gently through a clear, calm region of Lur’s atmosphere. Far below, features of the planet’s surface could be seen, mountain peaks protruding through low-hanging, swirling clouds. Another light flashed on; the freighter’s long-range sensors had just picked up a landing beacon.

Han switched on the Terrain Following Sensors and poised over the readouts. “They picked us a decent spot to land at least,” he admitted. “A big, flat place slung between those