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“Lando, it’s me,” he called. “Han.”

The Corellian heard steps, then suddenly Lando jerked the door open. Before Han could utter a single word, the gambler’s fist lashed out in a vicious sucker-punch, catching Han in the jaw and sending him flying back across the hallway. The Corellian slammed into the wall, then slid down, landing on his rear.

Han grabbed his jaw, spots dancing before his eyes, struggling to speak. Lando loomed over him. “You have got to have the most colossal nerve in the entire galaxy, coming here after what you pulled on Ylesia!” he yelled. “You’re lucky I don’t just shoot you, you lousy, lowlife, double-crosser!”

“Lando …” Han managed to croak, “I swear, I didn’t know what she was plannin’. I swear.…”

“Right,” Lando sneered. “Sure you didn’t!”

“Would I have come here like this if I wasn’t innocent?” Han mumbled. His jaw wasn’t working very well. He could feel it swelling. “Lando … she did it to me, too. I didn’t get nothin’ from that trip. Nothin’!”

“I don’t believe you,” Lando said, coldly. “But if I did, I’d say, ‘good!’ You two deserve each other!”

“Lando,” Han said, “I lost a load of spice I was carryin’ for Jabba. I’m desperate, buddy. I need to borrow—”

“What?” Lando grabbed Han’s jacket in both hands and yanked the pilot to his feet. He slammed the Corellian against the wall. The gambler’s dark face was barely a handsbreadth from Han’s. “You came here to ask me for a loan?”

Han managed to nod. “I’m good for it … honest.…”

“Get this through your head, Solo,” Lando snarled. “We’ve been friends in the past, so I’m not going to do what you so richly deserve and blow your head off. But don’t ever come near me again!”

Slamming Han against the wall one more time, Lando let the Corellian go. Han slid down the wall again, as Lando stormed back into his flat. The door banged shut, and Han heard the lock click.

Slowly, painfully, Han got to his feet. His jaw was throbbing, and he tasted blood.

Well, that’s that, he thought, staring at the closed door. Now what?

“We’re not going to get out of here, are we?”

Commander Bria Tharen ignored the barely audible question as she ducked down behind the pile of rubble and ejected the spent power pak from her blaster. Or tried to. The pak was jammed. Looking at her weapon, she saw that the constant firing from the past few minutes of battle had fused the power connectors together, making it impossible to remove the empty pak.

She swore under her breath, and crawled over to the body next to her. Jace Paol’s features were frozen into an expression of tight, concentrated anger. He’d died fighting, the way he would have wanted to go. Grabbing his weapon, she eased it out from beneath his body, but before she had it all the way out, she saw the barrel was fused. It was as useless as her own.

Glancing over at the pitiful remains of Red Hand Squadron, Bria said, “Anyone who can, give me cover. I’ve got to scrounge me up something to shoot with.”

Joaa’n nodded and gave her a thumbs-up. “Ready, Commander. I don’t see anything moving out there at the moment.”

“Okay,” Bria said. Tossing the useless weapon aside, the Rebel commander peered carefully over the rubble, then stealthily slid around to the side, out from behind her cover. She didn’t bother getting to her feet, not sure that her wounded leg would support her. Instead, she scuttled forward on hands and knees, keeping low, through the ragged hole in the outside wall of the half-destroyed Imperial comm center where they were making their last stand.

A few meters away, an Imperial trooper lay, a hole still smoldering in his breastplate.

Quickly, Bria crawled over and stripped the dead man of his weapon and spare power paks, noting wryly that the trooper must have used all his grenades before he’d been shot. Too bad … I could have made good use of a couple of grenades.…

Bria thought about taking the man’s body armor, but it hadn’t done him any good, had it?

Here, outside the remains of the Imperial comm center on the restricted world of Toprawa, she could hear better. And