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Han stood facing the lift doors. When they parted, he couldn’t see across the lobby for the hundreds of droids that were rushing about and chattering incessantly, many of them hastening for the exits.

“I can’t help thinking you had something to do with this,” Droma said.

“Indirectly.” Han gestured to the closest exit that wasn’t completely blocked by droids. “That way.”

They stepped into the throng and were just short of the transparisteel exit doors when a gruff voice shouted, “There they are!”

Han failed to keep himself from turning around. Zeroing in on the voice, he saw Bow, now in the company of several security guards, pointing at him.

“I thought I told you to lock him away!” Han said.

“I did,” Droma argued. “I stuck him inside a room filled with deactivated droids.”

Han muttered a curse and drew the blaster. “No time for subtlety.”

Scarcely aiming, he placed a quartet of beams close enough to the guards to send them scurrying for cover. Crouching, he and Droma weaved their way through a tight press of droids and stumbled outside. Han spied Bow’s landspeeder and steered Droma toward it, as a mob of prattling droids spilled from the east wing and began to fan out across the surrounding lawns and parking lots. Throwing himself into the driver’s seat, Han grinned broadly.

“One thing you can always count on with farmboys,” he said to Droma, who had removed the cuffs and was settling into the passenger seat. “They never lock their vehicles.”

Han started the speeder’s repulsorlift engine. With both hands clamped on the steering wheel and his feet on the pedals, he maneuvered the speeder through a quick turn and shot for the frontage road.

“No use trying for the main gate,” he shouted above the whine of the triple turbines. “It’s sure to be shut tight by now! We’ll have to use the service roads. Some of them have to lead to the fields we passed on the way to Facility 17!”

“Better choose quickly,” Droma said, studying the small scanner display affixed to the passenger-side console. “We’ve got seven, make that eight vehicles converging on us from north, east, and west.”

Gritting his teeth, Han glanced at the towering stalks of grain that lined both sides of the frontage road. “Ah, who needs a road,” he said at last, veering due south, straight into the field.

The satellite feed to the district headquarters security section provided an unobstructed aerial view of the landspeeder pursuit. It was as if the cams were positioned one hundred meters above the ground rather than in stationary orbit, halfway to Ruan’s closest moon.

“They’re sure making a mess of those burrmillet fields,” the security chief remarked to Bow.

The fat man leaned closer to the flatscreen display. The stolen landspeeder had cut unswerving lines, precise parabolas, and sweeping spirals in the umber sea of grain. In pursuit flew eight speeders, carving out their own streaks and crop circles, if not as conscientiously.

“Talented driver, that one,” the chief said as the lead speeder slalomed through a row of outmoded windmills, then powered through a series of figure eights before racing off on a new vector. “Must have been a swoop pilot. Has he been identified?”

“No,” Bow fumed. “But it’s confirmed he’s the one who crashed the droid-deactivation system on level five.”

The chief, potbellied and mustachioed, smiled lightly. “I heard you were with some of the droids when they came back to life.”

Bow grimaced. “You heard right. But I’ll tell you what: none of those droids unsealed the doors. Somebody with access to the system unlocked them as soon as the droids woke up.”

The chief snorted. “So what kind of guy goes through the trouble of masquerading as both a CCA inspector and a corporate vice president to rescue a Ryn and free a couple of thousand droids?”

“The well-connected kind. The Ryn was arrested at Facility 17 when he and the human showed up looking for the Ryn’s clanmates. But it turns out they’d already gotten themselves offworld on