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As she dashed inside the shaking building, Zekk ran toward her, but his legs wobbled and jerked as the ground bounced beneath him like a vibrodrum.

Rastur stood at the command center door, his face as ash-gray as the volcanic dust that filled the skies. His drawn lips mouthed one word as he watched Shinnan disappear inside the stone house. "No."

With a great seismic heave, the ground split in front of Zekk like a torn sheet of paper. He toppled to the cobblestones as the fissure widened, trembled, then stopped.

Zekk looked up, getting himself to his hands and knees, ready to jump across the meterwide crack that hung open like a yawning, jagged mouth.

Then another shock struck through the ground. This time, the stone buildings did not survive-none of the remaining warehouses. And not the place Shinnan and Rastur had called home. The heavy roof collapsed, the walls buckled outward, and the entire structure fell in upon itself...

crushing the young woman inside.

As the tremors subsided, Zekk finally got back to his feet. He jumped across the broken fissure and staggered to the ruins of the building.

'Shinnan!" he called out.

He reached the rubble and tried to pull stone blocks away. Within moments Rastur and the remaining workers appeared at his side, instinctively knowing what to do, digging through the rubble. Rastur moved mechanically, in a daze, as if he had turned off all of his emotions. He had lost too much already to feel any greater despair.

Zekk strove with his mind, trying to find some trace of Shinnan. 'Are you there?

Can you hear me?" But only a cold, disturbing silence came back at him...

When they found Shinnan's body half an hour later, Zekk slumped in grief, but Rastur just stood, unmoving. In the young woman's hands she cradled an electronic datapad and a sheaf of paper.

'@at were they?" Zekk said, picking them up, looking at drawings and handwritten notes. Somehow, she had considered these items important enough to die for.

'They were our plans," Rastur said, 'our architectural designs for the new house we intended to build, once we moved back down to the surface...

during resettlement."

His words were choked off, and then he spoke in a flat voice as if repeating a memorized litany. "We anticipated casualties. We always knew people would die." He whispered again, "We anticipated casualties."

Then he straightened, smartly gesturing to the other workers. "We're done here on Ennth. Load up the last ships."

Rastur looked up at the sky. "It's time to leave this place to its own destruction."

NLJDGING THE ROCK Dragon's controls, Jaina and Lowie worked together to land the Hapan passenger cruiser on what had once been the core of Alderaan. Em Teedee added his tinny voice of encouragement.

"Steady, steady... oh, very well done, indeed!"

Jacen glanced out the windowport, his fingers pressed against the transparisteel.

"Looks like you picked the right one, Jama."

The surface of the asteroid had a rippled appearance, pitted from the rigors of space and dusty from the powdery debris that flew like a storm through the rubble field.

Craters had been gouged out by smaller rocks that had slammed like orbiting bullets into the asteroid.

The Rock Dragon shuddered as its landing pads settled onto the surface.

"We're secure," Jaina said. Lowie rumbled his agreement.

"'Bine to get into our gear,' Jacen said.

He rushed back to the storage compartment to prepare for their outside expedition, slid open the sealed door, and inspected the environment suits dangling there. "Never seen this design before. Tenel Ka, are you sure these suits are going to work for us?"

"My grandmother packed them herself," Tenel Ka answered. 'She would naturally be most concerned for our safety."

"Yeah, that's a fact," Jacen said with a faint grin, thinking of the hard old woman and her unbridled ambitions.

The Hapan environment suits were sturdy but flexible, a tightly woven and completely sealed fabric that would protect them from the vacuum of space while allowing them freedom