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“We have constitutional means for choosing a new leader,” Leia reassured. And thought, Not that they’re working so far, with Pwoe proclaiming himself Chief of State with the Senate deadlocked on Mon Calamari.

“I wish you a smooth transition,” Commander Dorja said. “Let’s hope the hesitation and chaos with which the New Republic has met its current crisis was the fault of Borsk Fey’lya’s government, and not symptomatic of the New Republic as a whole.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Han proclaimed, and drained his glass.

“I can’t help but wonder how the old Empire would have handled the crisis,” Dorja continued. “I hope you will forgive my partisan attitude, but it seems to me that the Emperor would have mobilized his entire armament at the first threat, and dealt with the Yuuzhan Vong in an efficient and expeditious manner, through the use of overwhelming force. Certainly better than Borsk Fey’lya’s policy—if I understood it correctly as a policy—of negotiating with the invaders at the same time as he was fighting them, sending signals of weakness to a ruthless enemy who used negotiation only as a cover for further conquests.”

It was growing very hard, Leia thought, to maintain the diplomatic smile on her face. “The Emperor,” she said, “was always alert to any threat to his power.”

Leia sensed Han about to speak, and this time was too late to stop his words.

“That’s not what the Empire would have done, Commander,” Han said. “What the Empire would have done was build a supercolossal Yuuzhan Vong–killing battle machine. They would have called it the Nova Colossus or the Galaxy Destructor or the Nostril of Palpatine or something equally grandiose. They would have spent billions of credits, employed thousands of contractors and subcontractors, and equipped it with the latest in death-dealing technology. And you know what would have happened? It wouldn’t have worked. They’d forget to bolt down a metal plate over an access hatch leading to the main reactors, or some other mistake, and a hotshot enemy pilot would drop a bomb down there and blow the whole thing up. Now that’s what the Empire would have done.”

Leia, striving to contain her laughter, detected what might have been amusement in Vana Dorja’s brown eyes.

“Perhaps you’re right,” Dorja conceded.

“You’re right I’m right, Commander,” Han said, and poured himself a glass of water.

His brief triumph was interrupted by a sudden shriek from the Falcon’s hyperdrive units. The ship shuddered. Proximity alarms wailed.

Leia, her heart beating in synchrony to the blaring alarms, stared into Han’s startled brown eyes. Han turned to Commander Dorja.

“Sorry to interrupt dinner just as it was getting interesting,” he said, “but I’m afraid we’ve got to blow some bad guys into small pieces.”

The first thing Han Solo did when he scrambled into the pilot’s seat was to shut off the blaring alarms that were rattling his brain around inside his skull. Then he looked out the cockpit windows. The stars, he saw, had returned to their normal configuration—the Millennium Falcon had been yanked out of hyperspace. And Han had a good idea why, an idea that a glance at the sensor displays served only to confirm. He turned to Leia as she scrambled into the copilot’s chair.

“Either a black hole has materialized in this sector, or we’ve hit a Yuuzhan Vong mine.” A dovin basal to be precise, an organic gravitic-anomaly generator that the Yuuzhan Vong used for both propelling their vessels and warping space around them. The Yuuzhan Vong had been seeding dovin basal mines along New Republic trade routes in order to drag unsuspecting transports out of hyperspace and into an ambush. But their mining efforts hadn’t extended this far along the Hydian Way, at least not until now.

And there, Han saw in the displays, were the ambushers. Two flights of six coralskippers each, one positioned on either side of the dovin basal in order to intercept any unsuspecting transport.

He reached for the controls, then hesitated,