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Wailing for revenge, swarms of female Rybets dropped through the ceiling into Doole’s private cell. Each bore a blaster of her own and fired repeatedly at the metal shield Doole hid behind until its center glowed a cherry-red.

The blind larvae targeted on the new noise—but then as if suddenly they understood, as if they could communicate with their own mothers, the larvae turned and directed their fire toward Doole as well.

“Stop, stop!” Doole cried.

Han crept in beside Lando, not wanting to draw fire in the midst of this civil war. Doole yelped and dropped the superheated protective shield. His mechanical eye popped off and broke into a thousand bouncing and rattling components on the floor. His long squishy fingers punched a hidden control button, and a trapdoor opened beneath him. With a mindless squeal Doole leaped through an access hatch into an escape tunnel, down into the cold black mines.

“Hurry, before he gets away!” Lando said. “I don’t want him running around in my spice mines.”

The surviving larvae flowed forward as if they wanted to plunge into the tunnels after Moruth Doole, either to follow him or to chase him. But the amphibious females grasped the larvae and held them back with gentle cooing sounds. Their wide eyes looked on the invading smugglers with apprehension.

Han rushed toward the trapdoor and dropped to his knees, pushing his face into the darkness. He heard Doole’s splatting footsteps diminishing as he ran on webbed feet deeper into the catacombs.

The larvae shot several blaster bolts into the passages after him. Long spears of heat bounced along the tunnel walls, knocking boulders loose. The light sparked a scintillating glare of activated glitterstim.

Then Han heard a new sound that turned his blood cold. A faint but chilling noise, hundreds of sharp legs like ice picks scrambling down the tunnel. Han could still hear Doole’s footsteps getting fainter and fainter as he fled. Han heard the tik tik tik of multilegged creatures, attracted by the heat of a living body … and Doole’s gasping, ragged breath as the Rybet searched blindly for a way out.

Han heard many more sets of pointed legs scrabbling, like a stampede from converging tunnels as the energy spiders found nourishment after the long silence in the spice mines. Han’s skin crawled.

At the tail end of a high-pitched and gut-wrenching scream, Doole’s footsteps suddenly stopped. The scream cut off abruptly, as did the sound of running ice-pick feet. The instant silence seemed even more horrible than the scream, and Han quickly pulled up the trapdoor and secured it before the energy spiders could seek other prey.

He sat back, heart pounding. The smugglers looked grimly satisfied at the battle they had won. The Whiphid leaned against a wall with arms crossed. “A good hunt,” he growled.

The Trandoshan glanced from side to side, as if seeking something to eat.

The female Rybets hauled away the blasted larvae, tending the injured, mourning over the dead.

Han sighed as Lando sank down next to him. “Well, Lando,” he said, “now you can start remodeling.”

Han, Lando, and Mara rode back up to the garrison moon in the Falcon. Mara and Lando spoke more easily to each other, now that Lando wasn’t pushing so hard to get the slightest word or smile from her. Mara had even stopped avoiding Lando’s gaze or raising her chin whenever he spoke. She spent most of her time reassuring him that the Lady Luck would be just fine behind the security fields of the reoccupied prison. Lando didn’t seem to believe her entirely, but he did not want to disagree with Mara Jade.

“We’ve got a lot of paperwork to do,” Mara said. “I have all the standard contracts and agreements up at the moonbase. We can take care of the formalities between us, but there are still a lot of forms to digitize and sign, a lot of records to cross-reference.”

“Whatever you say,” Lando said. “I want this to be a long and happy partnership. You and I need to figure out how we can best implement production on Kessel. It’s in the