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Han yanked himself free of the guards and rubbed his split knuckles. Anger continued to seethe through his mind, and he had to work double time to calm himself so he wouldn’t get shot.

“Everybody to the bunks! Now!” Boss Roke said. His lip curled; bluish-black stubble looked like a smear of dirty oil on his chin. His lumpy body seemed coiled and dangerous.

Kyp Durron lifted himself up, but as he caught Han’s gaze, he flashed a smile. No matter what their punishment would be, Kyp had enjoyed lashing out.

Two very uneasy guards hauled Chewbacca to his feet, draping his hairy arms over their shoulders. Another guard wearing a battered old stormtrooper helmet trained his gun on the Wookiee. Chewbacca’s arms and legs twitched as if still trying to struggle, but the stun bolt had thrown his nerve impulses into turmoil. The guards tossed him into one of the holding cells and activated the door before Chewbacca could engage his muscular control. He sagged to the ground in a flurry of mussed brown hair.

His eyes dark with anger, Han moved with taut readiness. He followed Kyp to the line of metal bunks. The guards brushed themselves off and glared at him. Han climbed into his uncomfortable sleeping pallet. Around him the metal rods holding the mattresses and bunks apart seemed like another cage.

Kyp climbed to the upper bunk and leaned down. “What was that all about?” he said. “What set you off?”

One of the guards rapped a stun stick against the side of the bunk. “Keep your head inside!”

Kyp’s face popped back into his own area, but Han could still hear him moving. “Just touchy, I guess,” Han mumbled. He felt a hollow sorrow inside. “I just realized that today is the day my kids are coming home. I wasn’t there to be with them.”

Before Kyp could acknowledge, Boss Roke flicked on the sleep-generating field that pulsed around the bunks and sent Han, still resisting, on an endless plunge into dull nightmares.

Standing outside the doorway of the spice-processing annex, Moruth Doole fitted an infrared attachment into place over his mechanical eye. He hissed in his own uneasiness, flicking his tongue in and out to taste the air, to keep himself safe.

The recent transmission from Solo’s woman made him very nervous about what the New Republic might do to him. In the warm darkness of the spice-processing rooms, he could relax. Looking at the blind and helpless workers that did his bidding hour after hour made him feel stronger, more in control.

The heavy metal door thudded into place, sealing out the light. The secondary entrance slid open to a womblike vault that glowed in his IR attachment, warm and red from the body heat of the workers. Doole took a deep breath, sniffing the musty dankness of the gathered life-forms.

He looked at the blurry orange images crouched over the processing line. They stirred, silently afraid of his presence. That made Doole feel good. He strode in among them, inspecting their work.

Hundreds of blind larvae, pale and wormlike with large sightless eyes, fumbled with four slender arms to handle the delicate spice crystals. They wrapped the fibrous segments in opaque paper and loaded them into special protective cases, which would then be ferried up to the shipyard and transfer base on Kessel’s moon. With the larvae working comfortably in the total darkness necessary for spice processing, Doole’s operation ran much more smoothly than it had under Imperial control.

The brief telepathic boost offered by glitterstim spice had made the substance a valuable commodity tightly controlled by the Empire. Other planets had a weaker form of spice, sometimes known as the mineral ryll, but Kessel was the only place where glitterstim could be found. The Empire had kept an iron fist around Kessel’s spice production, keeping the glitterstim for espionage and interrogation purposes, as well as checks on loyalty and the granting of security clearances.

But there had always been a vast demand on the invisible market: lovers