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Roa was shaking his head when Han looked at him. “Anobis is only a side-door entry to our final destination. A direct jump might have landed us in the midst of an enemy flotilla or an Imperial Remnant patrol.” He aimed a thick finger out the starboard viewport. “Take a look at that.”

Han swiveled to the right. Almost close enough to touch floated the holed and battle-scorched remains of a Star Destroyer. Listed to port and nimbused by debris, the great ship’s command tower and pointed bow had been blown away. Her once-gleaming aft plating was pockmarked by immense blackened craters. Power cables and ducting trailed from her ruptured innards. Han thought back to the attack on Yuuzhan Vong–held Helska 4 and the Star Destroyer Rejuvenator that had gone down with nearly all hands aboard.

“Do we have a fighting chance against these thugs?” Roa asked.

“The Yuuzhan Vong wouldn’t have it any other way.” Han swung from the view. “So just where are we going, Roa?”

Roa tapped his forefinger on a star chart he called up on a display screen. “Ord Mantell.”

Han’s mouth fell open a bit, then he threw his head back and launched an explosive laugh at the ceiling.

Roa regarded him quizzically. “Worried about running into someone from your past?”

“Someone from the here and now,” Han muttered. “My wife.”

Ord Mantell was still the same undistinguished sphere Han remembered from previous visits, which had been many over the years, some intentional, more by misadventure. But something new had been added since Han’s stint as grand marshal of the Blockade Runners Derby: a small space station of outmoded ring design, pieced together from salvaged and Hutt-supplied parts by a consortium of Mid Rim engineering companies. Parts of the station—two of its spokes and perhaps ten degrees of the outer ring—were still incomplete, and were likely to remain that way for some time to come, since construction crews had abandoned the project after the destruction of Ithor.

The Jubilee Wheel, Roa called it.

“Except for the gravitation debt, the station doesn’t have much to do with Ord Mantell,” he told Han from the pilot’s seat of the Happy Dagger. “It was a free port. A highly successful one, until the Yuuzhan Vong invasion put a damper on trade. Now it’s a transit point, filled with some of the most desperate types you’re ever likely to meet.”

“Long as our business doesn’t take us down the well, I’m ready for anything,” Han said. “It’s Ord Mantell that’s been bad luck for me.”

Roa nodded. “Then we’ll have to do our best to keep our feet from touching the ground.”

Awaiting docking assignments, ships of all types were queued up around the station. Some were empty freighters and barges with nowhere to go—their home ports occupied by the Yuuzhan Vong or their holding companies bankrupted by the war—filled with half-starved spacers caught in a political no-man’s-land. Others were fifty-year-old crimson-red diplomatic cruisers, and warships recently recommissioned from mothballed fleets. Then there were the passenger transports—including several shallow bowl-shaped Ithorian herd ships—crammed with displaced beings from conquered or immolated worlds, also in search of some planet to call home, even temporarily. And catering to the needs of those refugees with credits to spend were aged scows and tenders, crewed by pirates selling dreams of a new life to the blindly optimistic.

Waiting for clearance, Roa and Han passed the time running checks on the SoroSuub 3000’s security systems and generally battening down the hatches. The crowded and filthy docking bay the ship was finally allocated had been salvaged from an MC80 cruiser and, in fact, still bore some of the original Mon Calamari markings.

First down the ramp, while Roa saw to lockdown procedures, Han was confronted by a group of five aliens of a species he had never encountered.

“You need perhaps someone to watch over your ship?” their spokesman asked above the din, in whistling, heavily accented Basic.

Han eyed the alien up and down. “I need perhaps someone