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To make things worse, one of the largest male larvae had freed all of Doole’s specially picked females! The females had fled into the labyrinth of the prison, so that during this time of greatest terror, Doole couldn’t even relieve his tension with an occasional visit to the harem.

He had no choice but to remain locked inside his office cell, pace the floor, and be alternately bored out of his mind and scared out of his wits. When he did make his way to the storerooms, he emerged heavily armed, waddled quickly down the corridors, and came back with as much food as he could carry.

He had an escape tunnel, of course. He had blasted a channel into the spice mines directly under the prison. Doole could lose himself for a long time in that network, but he still couldn’t get off-planet. And lately the tunnels had become a far more dangerous place.

After Daala’s attack most of the spice miners had fled. Without guards and construction and loud machinery, the spiders had surged upward to lay down their glitterstim webs along the walls. Looking with specially adapted kinetic energy detectors, Doole had spotted swarms of the monsters in the deepest shafts, migrating closer to the surface.

In despair Doole sat on his bunk and smelled the dank air of the dungeon. At another time he might have found it comforting and cool, but now he just rested his sucker-tipped fingers against damp jowls and stared at the monitors.

He was astonished to see a ship land outside. And even though all humans generally looked alike to him, Doole was certain he recognized one of the three intruders pummeling his armored door: Han Solo, the man he hated most in the entire universe, the man who had caused all this misery!

At the ominous prison gates Han watched as Ghent the slicer worked diligently on the problem. He jacked in all manner of equipment, components stolen out of other systems, barely functional combinations that somehow found loopholes around defense systems.

Ghent raised a triumphant fist into the grainy sunlight. The reinforced latticework of the defensive portcullis rode up on invisible tracks. With a hollow clunking sound the shipping and receiving gates split apart, squealing and creaking as they lumbered into the thick walls. A gust of higher-pressure air bled out of the prison.

The four large smugglers shouldered their weapons and plodded forward, crouched over and ready to fight. The two Mistryl guards took the lead, sliding along the walls. The burly Whiphid and scaly Trandoshan strode brashly down the middle of the hall.

No attack came from the dark passageway. “Let’s go find Moruth Doole,” Han said.

None of his options looked good, but Doole had to make choices. He had watched Han Solo and his group of commandos force their way in—and Kessel was supposed to be the toughest prison in the galaxy. Hah!

Doole didn’t know how to use the built-in defense systems, the external laser cannons, the disintegrator fields. He was helpless without his right-hand man, Skynxnex, but the scarecrowish fool had gotten himself killed chasing Solo through the spice tunnels, devoured by one of those energy spiders.

As a desperate measure Doole had come to the conclusion that he must trust his own children, the blind larvae he kept in blackness since the moment they writhed out of the gelatinous egg mass in the harem wing’s breeding pools.

Doole rushed down the corridors, gathering weapons from the prison’s armory. He carried two satchels of blaster pistols over his shoulder as he opened the protective vaults. Suddenly exposed to the light, the larvae reared back like caterpillars, blind eyes bulging as they attempted to sense the identity of the intruder.

“It’s only me, only me,” Doole said. Bright light stabbed at them, illuminating their pale skin. Damp vestigial hands reached up, small fingers and arms short and weak, not completely formed. Wormlike tendrils quivered below their mouths as the larvae made soft burbling noises.

Doole herded the oldest and strongest