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Protas grinned. "I know. What more could we ask for? You led them right to us. Thank you, Anja."

"I'll tell you what more you could ask for." Anja smiled, moving closer to him. The skin under her leather headband itched, but she ignored it.

Her voice was breathless as she spilled out her plan.

"Their village is abandoned now. They left it completely unoccupied.

We can go there tonight, slip in and burn everything down. Not only have we captured them, we can destroy everything they hold dear."

Protas's eyes gleamed, and he placed a conspiratorial hand on her shoulder. "We still have plenty of burrowing detonators, but we could never before get close enough to plant them right in the village. But now, we can rig explosives in all of their homes, make it so that the fanners destroy their own dwellings. Just by going home, they'll bring about their own doom!"

Anja's large, dark eyes twinkled. "That's even better. This way, if any of the farmers survive, they can blame Han Solo and his companions for meddling. I knew I could count on you."

Protas nodded to her. "I'll get the weapons and bring some of my men.

We'll depart as soon as the sun sets."

They did not share their plan with Elis or any of the other miners.

Anja, Protas, and four angry-faced commandos slipped out through one of the smaller tunnels, walking with sure feet on the smooth stone walkways.

Outside, careful but confident, they dashed down the mountain switchbacks, listening to loose rocks clatter behind them as they raced along.

The double moonlight provided but a pale silvery illumination and stole all colors from the landscape, marking the terrain with only lightness and shadow.

As they entered the thick forest, the sounds of night insects and small creatures rustling through the branches did not bother Anja. She had her lightsaber. And minutes before leaving the mountain village, she had gone alone into the Millennium Falcon and taken one of her precious doses of andris. With enhanced senses, she could experience the sharp edges of details around her. She would spot any traps waiting for them. Protas and his fighters had chosen a safe trail that avoided all of the deadly surprises they had themselves rigged.

Heading east, she wondered about the knaars that had swept through the ramshackle village and across the croplands. But that had been a full day and a half before; given slim pickings, the migratory herd's surviving members would have gone in search of other villages or abandoned livestock left to graze by fanners who had been killed during the long civil war.

The group of commandos picked their way across the barren fields.

Protas consulted a diagram of where they had planted burrowing detonators. The tunneling robotic explosives could move about, but only within a certain radius of where they had been buried.

As she trotted along beside the young man, Anja saw blasted craters where detonators had exploded, some triggered by the heavy footsteps of the knaars, others by farmers bumbling into the wrong place.

The stark moonlight shone down, making the croplands look like a moonscape. None of the once-rich fields had been planted for many years.

Perhaps, she thought, the miners could use their new captives as slaves to work the land again and provide food for the mountain villages. Or maybe that was just too much trouble.

She saw a shattered skeleton lying on the dirt, a femur and a hipbone, part of a rib cage. The knaars had stripped all the flesh from the bones of their victims, whether human or reptilian. Anja felt a small twinge of pity. Han Solo and his young companions had landed the Falcon here despite her protests. Though reluctant, she had eaten a meal with these people, had listened to their pathetic sob story of all the trials they'd endured.

The knaars were not part of this war. They had not been sent by the mountain miners, but were simply a vicious vagary of the natural world.

Anja was glad the attack had happened here, rather than in her own village. The knaars had unwittingly helped the miners' fight, removing