CHAPTER THREE: ALONE

LEIA

The burning horizon. Smoke rising up in towers.

Leia turned and ran, sprinting past Kenobi, the witch, and the droids with Ena loping in her wake and howling at the top of his lungs. Her heart thumped against her breast. Her breath came in great gulping inhalations as her legs ate distance, flying over the uneven hardpan of the mesa. The cries of the hatchling ursai on the cliff above felt like the pulse of some enormous and inexorable alarm, like a warning from the sky that things were going wrong.

I have to go.

"Leia, wait!" the old man cried, but he was far behind and fading, a lonely figure silhouetted against the boundless sky and the black worm of deathly smoke scrawled thin across it. Leia, shoving her father's lightsaber into her belt, barreled heedlessly down the canyon where twelve years ago her uncle had carried her to meet the witch, where Kaliri had stopped her from running away on her first night in the hut. The same cool, focused light that had guided her steps then was with her now as she pelted down the rugged incline, bridge boards shaking under her feet.

The battered two-man airspeeder Uncle Owen had given her on her thirteenth birthday sat concealed beneath camouflage netting in one of the canyon's countless dead-end branches. She flung herself into the cockpit, scrabbling up the flight nacelle and into the sweat-stained seat. She ran halfway through preflight before launching hot, the speeder's protesting repulsors shaking rubble from the canyon walls.

As stone rushed past and gave way to the trackless blue, she glimpsed Ena running in agitated circles below and, further back, Asajj and Obi-Wan making their own way down the canyon's winding course. Tears blurred her vision and she wiped them away, banking in a wide arc and cutting the speeder's engine loose. She shot out and over the mesa, acceleration pushing her back into the seat's reactive padding as the ache in her throat spread to her chest.


The fire was dying when she reached the farm. Leia gunned the speeder and shot toward the dwindling blaze, dropping down and slewing to a halt with tears in her eyes as the wave of sand thrown up by the speeder's repulsor wash drifted away on the wind, disintegrating in an instant. She climbed out, her limbs as heavy as durasteel bars, and stared at the ruin of her aunt and uncle's home. The farm lay blackened beneath a haze of smoke, pale tongues of flame still licking out from its doorways and from the droid pool. The southern wall of the courtyard had collapsed, spilling an ocean of sand into the homestead's interior. Several of her uncle's 'vaporator towers lay like toppled spires of stone around the burning ruins, their precious harvest leaking away into the air and the sand.

Leia walked among the devastation, every step raising puffs of ash from the layers of prefabbed duracrete that had flaked and burned off of the farm's central hab dome. Here and there lay pieces of dismantled farm droids, all with their positronic brains ripped free and ugly cavities left behind in heads and chests. A numbness descended on her as the fire's heat beat against her face. Its colors coiled and rippled, flaring white and red and yellow as it licked the fraying edges of the house where she'd been raised. She walked on, hand over her mouth to keep out the smoke that stung her eyes and burned her throat.

She found them by the gutted frame of the glass garden. The fire had stripped away their flesh. Only bones remained, two skeletons side by side on sand their executioners had turned to glass with the fury of their blaster fire. Their clothes, perhaps their skin, hung from the girders of them in dark swags of soft grey ash so fine the merest kiss of wind blew them to tatters. Heat radiated from their deaths, as though some fissile property within them had been loosed by the flames. Behind them, the glass garden where Aunt Beru had grown gourds and mikel leaf belched black smoke from its devastated innards. Hydroponic tanks shattered, the fish and water within already evaporated or carbonized by the heat. Plants reduced to thin black sticks and leaves disintegrating in the rising air.

Leia sat down without meaning to, her legs folding under her. The sand was hot. The bones of her aunt and uncle swam before her as she dug her palms into her eyes, trying to displace the day's events with sheer force. I should say something, she thought. I should say something over them. A prayer.

Smoke rose from their blackened bones in twists and spirals. It snaked away to join the oily towers that still rose from the droid pool and the farmstead's sunken courtyard and the wreck of the glass garden. Leia rose, teetering on unsteady feet, and staggered through the blowing fumes to the prefab shed beside the gardens. Flames were steadily eating through its south wall, devouring the heat insulation blown between its duracrete layers, but the tools and materials inside were unharmed by the heat and darkness rolling around them. She took a long-handled spade and sprinted back out of the shed's smoky interior, falling to her knees a few yards distant to hack up a lungful of blackened spit. Throat raw, she levered herself back up and stumbled on toward the swath of clear, hard-packed ground just north of the farm.


"Your uncle and I thought this would be a nice place for the addition," said Aunt Beru to Leia as they organized 'vaporator components on the dusty tarp laid out on the hardpan. The older woman's tone was light, but her sidelong look told Leia everything she needed to know.

"I'm not going to live here forever, Aunt Beru," she sighed. "I know you need my help around the farm, but there's a whole world out there.

"We miss you, dear," her aunt replied. "One month a year and a few scattered appearances is hardly enough. And when that...woman is done with you, you'll need time to get your feet beneath you."

Leia nudged an actuator coil with her toe, moving it into alignment with its mates. "Maybe," she said, hoping that a measured surrender would spare her the rest of the conversation. "Are we missing a coolant exchange cell?"

Aunt Beru ignored the question. "That Antilles boy asked after you last time we went up to Tosche Station. He's a looker, that one. You could do worse!"

Leia blushed. "Aunt Beru!"

Her aunt laughed, peeling off her work gloves and wiping sweat from her brow. "I knew I could bring my Leia out," she said, squatting beside her niece and putting an arm around the younger woman's shoulders. She kissed Leia on the cheek, then looked down at the tarp.

"Hmm," she said. "I think you're right, dear. Something's missing…"


Leia sat beside the open graves she'd dug in the hard earth, staring at the second sunset. It looked like blood on the horizon.

The fires had gone out. Her hands were blistered from the shovel's rough grip and from the heat of the bones she'd buried, her face streaked with tears long since dried. She sat with her wrists draped over her knees, the wind driving grit against her as ashes flurried like a sand storm in the gusts that howled out over the wastes. Tatoo II seemed to melt as it set. Its last light spread out thin along the edge of the world, and then it was gone.

Kaliri found her there a few hours later, halfway glare-blind and shaking, her palms oozing clear fluid where she'd dug her nails into them. Leia barely felt it when the rancor, with uncanny stealth for all her massive size, slipped out of the night, scooped her up in one huge claw, and carried her away into the gathering starlight. Kaliri's hide was cool and rough, the bellows rumble of her breathing a familiar comfort. Leia closed her eyes.

Silence came over her.


The world swayed with the rhythm of the rancor's stride as consciousness slowly returned to Leia. She blinked sleep from her eyes, stifling a cry at the stiffness that had settled in her joints and back after her long, brutal labor and the jarring, thumping method of her transit. They were deep in the wastes, by her reckoning, Kaliri loping along easily on three limbs through the last thin light of the moon. I slept through the night, she realized with dulled wonderment. It happened yesterday, now.

Kaliri's grunting cough of greeting stirred her to attention. The rancor halted, sinking down onto her haunches and lowered Leia down close to the ground. Obi-Wan and the droids stood a short way off on the sands of the open wastes, a rustbucket speeder that must have belonged to the old Jedi hovering behind them. For miles around them in every direction, there was nothing.

Leia slid down from Kaliri's massive palm. She swayed. Behind her, the rancor seemed utterly unperturbed by Kenobi's presence, even in the absence of any reassurance from Asajj. With a low roar, almost gentle, she snuffled at the top of Leia's head and licked her hair into a spitty cowlick with her rough purple tongue, and then she rose again and shambled off into the fraying night to resume her hunt. Watching the rancor go, Leia felt a pang of loss so sharp and bitter that she nearly moaned aloud.

"My goodness, Mistress Leia!" C-3PO exclaimed. "Your hands!"

At 3PO's side, the R2 unit made a worried bloop -ing noise.

"They're dead," Leia said. Her voice sounded distant and small. "It's all burned."

Obi-Wan nodded, an ineffable sadness in his deep-set eyes. "The Empire must have tracked the droids here shortly after your uncle gave them over to me. They won't be far; getting off-planet may be more difficult than I anticipated."

Leia hugged herself against the chill of night in the open desert. "Where's Asajj?"

"She has gone ahead to Mos Eisley, to find a pilot." The old man's look of sympathy is enough to turn Leia's stomach. "Thee path we walk is not an easy one, Leia, and what awaits us at Alderaan, the secret we carry, I cannot guarantee—"

"I don't care," Leia interrupted, a tendril of shivering conviction growing steadily from the ashes in her belly as white-hot fury at the witch burned through her. She knew what the smoke meant, and she ran away. Each word she spoke she meant more than the one before it. "I'm ready to go with you. I want to learn the ways of the Force, to become a Jedi, like my father. I want..."

Her voice broke. Back to the north, the last shreds of smoke were blowing away in the thin, cool light of morning.

"I want to leave this place."

DARTH VADER

Through the corridors of the Death Star, each turn and atrium freighted with the ghosts of banished memories, he walked at Tarkin's left hand like a hound at its master's side. It chafed him to do it, to make himself subservient to this gaunt, disdainful man who knew nothing of the Force's mysteries, nothing of the Sith or of the Jedi, this man who had been born to power and had failed at every turn to develop any interests or personality beyond the pursuit of more. But the Emperor had commanded it. His edicts were clear. Tarkin's doctrine was ascendant, Tarkin's star at court doubly so. And Vader was to be his fist.

They walked in silence, Tarkin treating Vader with as much regard as he would give a servant droid scuttling along in his wake. He had forced the Dark Lord of the Sith to stand while he finished his lunch in his elegant drawing room, a holographic view of some bustling Eriadu trade plaza looping behind him. A false window to a dirty world and the sound of the Grand Moff's lips smacking as he slurped down Corellian clams. This was the price of Vader's failure to recover the plans to the Death Star.

The conference room, buried deep in the Grand Moff's apartments aboard the Death Star, was a primer in Imperial decor with its long black table, uncomfortable chairs, and unornamented walls. The entire space called attention to Tarkin's seat, leaving nothing else to which the eye might be drawn. The Joint Chiefs of the Fleet and Army were already present and quarreling, a collection of unpleasant men elevated as often out of expediency as for any innate talent they possessed. Their voices rang from the bare, dull bulkheads.

"Until this battle station is fully operational, we are vulnerable," said General Tagge, pounding a fist on the table. "The Rebel Alliance is too well-equipped! They're more dangerous than you realize."

"Dangerous to your starfleet, General," sneered Admiral Motti. "Not to this battle station."

Tagge flushed. "The Rebellion will continue to gain support in the Imperial Senate—"

"The Imperial Senate will no longer be of any concern to us," Tarkin said crisply as he strode across the room toward his seat, the Joint Chiefs rising with much scraping of chairs and muttering of greetings as he passed. "I have just received word that the Emperor has dissolved the Council permanently. The last remnants of the Old Republic have been swept away."

Resuming his seat, Admiral Thrawn frowned at the news. Thrawn was an oddity among the stiff collars and heavy jowls of the crowd of Moffs and Navy men around the table. First, he was the only alien in the room. Second, he seldom spoke. Third, he knew how to make war. Vader didn't trust the quiet Chiss, his species itself half a mystery, his days devoted to trips to museums of arts and culture and to what Palpatine's spymaster, Cronal, assured Vader was a truly unimaginable number of correspondence games of Dejarik, Intrigue, and Hrovikian Chess. To anyone who had never seen him hold a command, he might have appeared a wealthy, handsome dilettante. Perhaps he cultivated the idea; it would be a dangerous underestimation for an opponent to make.

Tagge looked stunned. "Impossible. Without the bureaucracy, how will the Emperor maintain control?"

Tarkin's jaw worked. From his place just behind the Grand Moff's chair, Vader could see the little bald spot the thin man worked so hard to conceal. "The regional governors now have direct control over their territories. Fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear of this battle station."

Tagge shot a nervous glance at Vader. "And what of the Rebellion? If the rebels have obtained a complete schematic of this station, it is possible — however unlikely — that they could discover a weakness and exploit it."

"The plans you refer to will soon be back in our hands,"

Admiral Motti's perpetual smirk worked itself into a leering grin, the sort of look that Vader imagined would have gotten a man with fewer family connections quietly shoved out an airlock years ago. "Any attack the rebels could mount against this station would be a useless gesture, no matter the data they've obtained. The Death Star is now the ultimate power in the universe. I suggest we use it."

"Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've created," Vader rumbled. "The ability to destroy a planet is nothing next to the power of the Force."

Tarkin looked bored.

Motti, though, his upper lip shiny with sweat, his pate glistening, could not restrain himself. "Your sorcerer's ways don't frighten us, Lord Vader. Your sad devotion to that ancient religion has not helped you conjure up the stolen data tapes."

Family connections or no, it was a miracle that Conan Motti had survived to adulthood. Vader raised his hand and squeezed the air, fingers hooked.

Motti tugged at his collar as an ugly flush spread from his neck to his cheeks. When he spoke, he sounded strained. "Or given you clairvoyance enough to find the hidden Rebel f-f-fortre—" His words trailed off into an airless rattle. His bulging eyes darted around the table at the other men assembled, some of whom looked ready to bolt. Tarkin was inspecting his fingernails. Thrawn looked rather amused.

"I find your lack of faith disturbing," said Vader, wondering idly how long Tarkin would let him draw this out.

Motti gagged, clawing at his throat as his face slowly purpled. Spittle dribbled down his chin as he coughed and wheezed, his breath a horrible, thready whistle. Moff Panaka, a scowl twisting his heavy features, looked ready to intervene at any moment. It felt, for an absurd moment, disquieting to toy with Motti's life in front of Panaka and Tagge, men who had known Vader before his entombment. Before he had come into his power and discarded the weak husk of his old self. What would they think, if they knew who I was?

"Enough of this," Tarkin finally chided. "Vader, release him."

"As you wish," said Vader. He lowered his hand and Motti slumped forward onto the table, gasping and coughing, a look of purest hate etched into his sniveling features. The urge to step forward and break the man's skull against the polished black boma wood was almost too much to resist, but Vader kept his place. He obeyed, for now.

"This bickering is pointless," said Tarkin. "Lord Vader will provide us with the location of the hidden Rebel fortress. Once we have it, we will destroy the Rebellion in one swift stroke."

The room fell silent as Tarkin rose. The Grand Moff surveyed his subjects with icy detachment. "You will be ready for full deployment on my command," Tarkin said to those assembled, ignoring Motti's continued wheezing. "Prepare your men, and do not disappoint me. Any further failures and it is the Emperor's displeasure you'll face. The loss of the plans and Lord Vader's inability to recover them have placed us all on notice."

He strode from the room. Vader stood for a moment and watched him go, ignoring the stares and mutters of the Joint Chiefs.

He wondered, fist clenched and creaking at his side, the place at the Emperor's side he'd lost everything to take now hanging by a thread, how long Tarkin could go without air.

LUKE

Luke was alone. In the bitter cold of his cell, the only light a glaring glowstrip which was never dimmed or shut off, it was hard to gauge the passage of time. Meals came through a slot in the base of the door, or else they didn't and Luke was left to hug his knees and try to focus on anything besides the gnawing hunger in the pit of his stomach or the screams that filtering in from the adjoining cells.

For as long as he could remember, he had been surrounded by people. His mother the queen, his father Bail, her senator and delegate. Tutors, guards, and palace staff. Droids of every type and function. The noise and bustle of the royal palace, built high among the mountains of the Alderaa range, its spires lost among drifting clouds, had been his world for seven years until his father had ushered him onto Alderaan's little corner of the galactic stage. In the Senate he was no less surrounded, though he had learned, he thought, what it was to feel alone in a crowd as endless as the sea.

I've never really been alone, he thought, staring at the bulkhead opposite his narrow cot. Some previous occupant had tried to keep a log there, scratched in tidy columns into the durasteel with a fingernail or some hidden implement. Hundreds of thin scratches marched across the bulkhead before some mania had seized the hand inscribing them and turned the last rows into branching spirals like a deranged map of manmade riverlands. The spirals filled the far left corner of the bulkhead. Staring at them was better than trying to count the days their maker had lasted. Luke imagined it, his life stretching on and on in this place, circumscribed by the crushing vastness of the Death Star. He hadn't seen it; he'd come in blindfolded, but he could feel the weight of it. An ocean of durasteel, a hive that pulsed and teemed with orderly life. It bore down on him when he lay waking in his cot, that weight.

And when sleep did come, he dreamed of his mother's court on Alderaan, of the lacy soapstone filigree that separated the throne where Queen Breha sat with the other Justices of the Planetary Chambers from the deep cylindrical shaft of the audience hall where petitioners gathered each day on the tiered marble steps to lay their cases before their ruler. When she pronounced her rulings, the words echoed and re-echoed from the walls and stirred the kheshi birds that nested in the alcoves of the chamber's uppermost third to flight, and their flight made words that dissolved and repeated in midair. White wings beating in the cross-hatched shadow. And then the dream would change. He saw a woman, dark-haired and lovely, looking down at him as though he lay curled in her arms. The world no more than the smell of her and the warmth of her body.

He saw a garden, trees manicured, little rivers running in neat courses. Unfinished. Loam still waiting for the flowers and ferns it would receive.

She knelt there, by the water.

Praying.


On Luke's fifth day imprisoned, he thought, they opened his cell door and let him watch as two Stormtroopers dragged Melodi Eran, an officer in the Royal Guard serving aboard the Tantive, away down the echoing passageway, twin streaks of blood unfurling where her bare feet slithered over the deck. Her face, a shiny mask of bruises and cuts, nodded slack at the end of her ligature-banded neck, and her sobs echoed loud in the block until the sentry posted outside Luke's cell keyed the door shut, the sight of Eran's lacerated back shrinking to a sliver, and then, with a whine of hydraulics and the hiss of an airseal activating, to nothing.

Luke sank back down onto his cot. He was trembling, his heart pounding in his chest. His soiled and sweat-stained tunic, jacket, and leggings felt suddenly as suffocating as the planetary bulk of the Death Star stretching away in every direction. He yanked at his collar, trying to bring his breathing back under control as the slick, slippery trails Eran's feet had left slithered and hissed through his mind's eye. He knew where that road led. He knew that he would walk it, too.

He'd tried to prepare himself for the possibility. Boarding the Tantive in orbit over Alderaan, the spiral clouds of the planet's southern pole vast beyond the viewports, he'd known. Threading the asteroid fields around Serenno, hearing the long-range com uplink chime as the groundside packet finished transmitting, he'd known. But knowing only got you so far. Now his death wasn't an abstract out there somewhere in the galaxy, or even the random malevolence of the battlefield. Now his death stood just outside the door to his cell, sharpening its claws on the unpainted durasteel.

Somewhere, her voice ringing through the baffled vents or through some hidden vox caster, Eran began to scream.


The cell doors slid open without warning and the bleach-white light of the cell mingled with that of the hall in Luke's blurred vision as he scrambled from his cot and onto the freezing deck, the hour or so of sleep he'd snatched running like sand through his fingers. An ache built in his ears, accompanied by a whine like the buzzing wings of some blood-sucking insect.

In the doorway stood Darth Vader, left hand of the Emperor, fallen master of the Jedi Order. His suit looked like a funerary statue, like something carved to memorialize the life and death of a tyrant rather than to case the flesh and mortal substance of a man. When he stepped into the cell, Luke saw the spherical interrogation droid hovering in the hall behind him, its single red photoreceptor unblinking and malevolent. Syringes and neural probes rose glistening from the smooth black surface of its chassis. Devices to rip secrets out of uncooperative flesh.

"Your Highness." Vader's machine-roughened voice thumped against the bulkheads, filling Luke's cell so completely that it knocked the air from the prince's lungs. "Where is the Rebel base?"

Luke shook his head, retreating before the Dark Jedi's imposing bulk until his back hit the bulkhead. His breath still wouldn't come. On the star destroyer's bridge Vader had seemed distracted, his fury unfocused. Even cracking the bridge viewscreen had seemed more a mistake than a calculated act of intimidation. Unnerving, certainly, to see rage slip the bounds of the mind and twist reality in its shaking hands, but now the full force of that brittle, furious will was directed at Luke, and the simple truth was that no human could survive its weight. For two decades Vader had been the Emperor's hammer, hunting down Jedi across the galaxy, laying siege to Separatist holdouts and brushfire rebels, pounding Imperial space until it took on the desired shape, then quenching each resultant blade in the blood of what few dissidents remained.

"Your resistance is admirable," said Vader, "but useless. Where is the location of the Rebel base?"

His voice was hypnotic, the blank craters of his helmet's eyes like singularities the pull of which Luke could not escape. He could feel the frail bones of his throat bending against the pressure of Vader's sorcerous grip, the arm of the murdered Jedi Order reaching out across the years to throttle him in this dreary box of a room. And something else, like a headache pushing its way into the recesses of his skull, a traveling tremor that made spit run down his chin and sent cold shocks racing down his spine. His eyes twitched. His fingers went numb. A myriad little ills afflicted him as the Force pried at his mind with icy fingers. He could feel the secret bubbling up from somewhere deep within him, could feel his body readying itself to reject it like poisoned food retched up to spare the body worse.

His mother had engaged a tutor for him in his youth, a blindfolded man who stank of whiskey and never trimmed his hair or beard. Their sole endeavor together had been meditation, the emptying of the mind, and the man had pressed his lessons as hard as was possible. Screaming in Luke's ears, beating him about the head and shoulders with a stick, even jabbing him with a stun prod while he tried to keep his focus. The man had vanished in Luke's fifteenth year, disappearing one day from his cluttered apartments in the bowels of the castle, but not before he left a kernel of immaculate silence in his long-suffering student's brain.

It was to that kernel, that knothole in the trunk of his mind, that Luke withdrew before Vader's assault. He felt the monster's questions ring him like a bell, felt the awful pressure on his throat and lungs increase, squeezing breath from him in horrid increments. He heard his own voice answer, heard quavering denial and belligerent rebuke. Through the knothole of his focus he could see the blood unspooling across the deck, could feel the vrelt-shakes-womp-rat violence of Darth Vader's grip on his mind and the burning limbs of the interrogation droid beginning its long and grisly work. He felt the dismal tide of pain roll through him, heard the garbled pleas his body spat and blubbered.

Vader's plucking fingers worked the air and searing light split Luke from jaw to ear as a molar tore free of his mouth and clattered over the deck, strings of bloody flesh pinwheeling after it. Blood drooled from his trembling mouth as he fought upright again, as the ghost guiding his body forced him up on the sweating poles of his arms where needle marks marched in the wake of the hovering droid's attentions.

Death came into the cell, he thought.

"You are strong," came Vader's voice through the fog of agony that still held Luke in trembling thrall. "But you can't last forever. Perhaps when I return, you will be ready to put aside this stubborn foolishness."

The cell doors opened, light melding once more with light, and the black mote of the droid withdrew with a murmur of repulsors, sheathing its needles and its blades as it went. Vader lingered just outside the door a moment longer, the dark hulk of something that had been a man, the tendrils of his power pulling free of the flesh of Luke's thoughts and reeling back into their corrupt host. "I sense much fear in you," he said. "Imagine your mother in your place, and set aside your mistaken allegiance to the Rebel Alliance. They are doomed."

The finality of his words tolled in the stillness.

Luke spat blood on the deck, his self still recessed deep in darkness. Defiance was an instinct, a reflexive shudder of the body.

The doors slid shut, eclipsing Vader's towering frame.

Luke was alone again.

HAN

"So what you're telling me," Han said to the sinuous Sluissi starport bursar staring disdainfully at him from behind the grimy duraplast security screen, "is that my ship, the love of my life, is behind that blast door, and you're not going to open it for me?"

The Sluissi sighed, a sound of supreme boredom like a bellows pumping stale air through a book repository. "Not until all outstanding fines are settled, Captain Solo."

Han glanced over his shoulder as a stormtrooper patrol passed by down the bustling avenue, shouldering their way through bands of Jawa merchants and the dregs of Mos Eisley's cantinas and sabacc dens making their way back to their bolt-holes before the morning heat really hit. The stormtroopers weren't rimward garrison rejects either, the kind Jabba and Tatooine's other crime lords could buy for a bottle of the cheap stuff and a discount at the local brothel. These were hardcases right out of Korriban, son-of-a-bitch bucketheads with kill counts burned into their pauldrons and, probably, Palpatine's face tattooed on the smalls of their backs.

Chewbacca growled at the sight of them. The two-meter Wookiee at Han's side, confirmed by both casual inspection and rigorous testing to be more than capable of cracking a stormtrooper like a whip, had more than his share of reasons to hate the Empire, and their recent run-in with an Imperial patrol had left them both on edge. Being here, this close to what had to be some kind of hush-hush op involving a star destroyer in orbit and the Empire's crack troops combing grimy spaceports and disappearing people left and right, was one more bad idea in a long series of bad ideas.

The last thing we need is to throw down with Palpatine's finest.

"Take it easy, Chewie," Han muttered, scratching his chin. He needed a shave.

Chewbacca bared his teeth, then shrugged his massive shoulders and pointedly turned his back on the stormtroopers. The patrol passed on into the swelling crowds, skull-like masks streaked with grit from the endless Tatooine wind.

"There's a line forming, Captain Solo," the Sluissi droned, the dull slap of its voice dragging Han's attention away from the terrors of life in the Empire. "Unless you plan to render payment on the matter at hand, there's nothing I can do for you."

"Yeah, yeah," Han griped, sweeping his landing ticket off the counter and into his vest's inner pocket. "I'll be seeing you again real soon, beautiful." He backed away, shouldering aside the line of unruly and ungroomed sentients queueing up to speak to the Sluissi in its recessed cubby in the duracrete perimeter wall of the Mos Eisley Spaceport. "That ship leaves this berth without me in it? We're gonna have words. You have teeth? Do Sluissi have teeth? Chewie, do you know if Sluissi have teeth?"

Chewbacca gave a noncommittal grunt.

The Sluissi's long, dour face betrayed no hint of emotion.

"Well, if you do, you can kiss 'em goodbye," Han snarled, turning his back on the bursar's box and the queue for same, some of whom were now eyeing him with what might have been murderous intent. "Try to get a little service around here and they take your ship, make out like you're some kind of crook. Whole damn galaxy's going to the gundarks."

Chewbacca, plowing through a knot of hollering, fist-waving Jawas, offered up a long-suffering roar. He changed course as they left the spaceport behind and headed into the morning bazaar, a roughly informal thoroughfare lined with tents, stalls, and permanent storefronts catering to the needs of sweaty and exhausted spacers from across the sector. Cheap blasters, sizzling meat, twelve flavors of bored dockside working girl—you could have it all for the right price. Chewie bought a skewer of spicy dewback meat from a stall run by an enthusiastic Talz who threw in a little flatbread. A few yards away, a Chevin majordomo in heavy black robes haggled with a pair of Gotal dandies selling imported modules for water pipes.


"It's not my fault!" Han said around a mouthful of flatbread as they trudged back across the city to the flophouse room they'd rented. "How was I supposed to know how close to broke we were running?"

Chewie's answering roar was low, almost gentle.

Han sighed. "Yeah, I know," he said. "I shouldn't have trusted her."

They walked on in companionable silence for a while, admiring the sights and smells of Mos Eisly coming to life. A thousand starports on a thousand worlds, and Tatooine still managed to smell bad enough for the stink to stay lodged at the back of Han's mouth for days after leaving. Jawas in their never-washed robes, offal from a dozen different species of beasts of burden, the mingled garbage of a hundred different sentient races, all of whom had extremely different ideas about what was and wasn't food; the bouquet was something else.

"Listen, all we need is a contract." Han stuffed the last of the flatbread into his mouth as they ducked into an alley shortcut, its stucco walls luridly decorated with suggestive images starring the local sector governors and a pair of amorous banthas. "We do a few favors for that Whiphid bigwig out in the Dune Sea, use the advance to get the Falcon out of impound, get a hookup to run a little spice, maybe some surplus arms and armaments from Tatooine's finest…"

Chewbacca groaned.

"Oh, suddenly you're a critic?" Han kicked at a kreetle scuttling across his path. Ahead, their hostel bulked low on the far side of one of the city's busier arteries. "We just dumped six kilos of Jabba's glitterstim into the Maw Cluster. He's not gonna care we were running from the Empire; he's gonna care about getting paid. We can't do that, we're sarlacc food."

The Wookiee's rejoinder was disparaging. He growled in complaint, then adopted a speculative look, tapping his lower lip with a claw. After a moment, he barked a suggestion.

"Passengers?" Han threw up his hands. "Why don't we just knit doilies for the Falcon 's crash couches and turn her into a day retreat for bored Klatoonian den-wives? It might be faster, but hell, Chewie; I have dignity."

A speeder screamed to a halt a bare few feet from Han and Chewie, its repulsors kicking up dust from the street. The Devish driver leaned out her window, honking the speeder's horn as she did. "Get out of the road, you nerf-herder!"

"I'm walkin' here!" Han shouted back, thumping a fist down on the speeder's hood.

Chewie's hand on his shoulder took him out of the moment. The speeder fishtailed around them, leaving them waist-deep, or knee-deep in Chewie's case, in drifting clouds of grit. The Devaronian's curses faded as the vehicle careened on out of view, frightening a towering ronto into sidestepping onto a fruit merchant's cart. Panic engulfed the sidewalk, but Han barely noticed it. Across the street, stormtroopers were marching a long line of grubby, sleep-fogged sentients out of the hotel in stun cuffs. The flophouse proprietor, a massive woman by the name of Krana, lay face-down on the sidewalk with one trooper kneeling on her back and another busy cuffing her thick wrists.

Han swallowed. "On second thought, let's go with your thing."