"Why did you do it?"

Han stared straight ahead as he piloted the ship and played dumb, "Why did I do what?"

Gwynplaine entered the cockpit and went over to him, "He was going to pay you for me."

"Uh huh," Han said simply.

"A lot of money?"

"Uh huh."

"Why didn't you do it?" she asked him in earnest confusion.

Han drew in a long inhale and sighed it back out. "First of all, I deal in goods, not people. Secondly, nobody tells me when I'm going to deal on anything. I got paid for the job I agreed to do, that's all the further our business transaction went."

Gwynplaine shook her head, "I don't understand. Now what happens?"

He turned his head enough to look at her, "What do you mean?"

"You said I could come with you until you dropped off the shipment...you did...so now where do I go?" she asked him.

He turned his head the rest of the way to make full eye contact with the girl and he told her, "I'm working on that. You opposed to keeping company with me and the big hairball a while longer?"

She shook her head.

"Then it's settled."

"Thank you."

The words were so quiet he almost missed them, but they were loud enough that it caught him off guard and he felt his eyes bulge to their fullest size. He recovered from the shock after a few seconds, and all he said in response was, "We'll be coming up on Aalderon soon, you ever been there?"

She shook her head.

"We're gonna stop there for a while, power up the ship, get something to eat, be a change of scenery," he said.


Aalderon was mostly a desert planet, not as bad as some out there like Tatooine with its twin suns, but it was offsetting to a lot of life forms who would rather take their chances making it to the next planet. There was a small stretch of land on Aalderon though that was an oasis so to speak, civilization, you could get anything you needed, get your ship serviced, get something to eat, a beer, buy clothes, weapons, anything you needed, the locals turned a tidy little profit.

The three travelers were shown in to a dimly lit eatery and to a table currently housing just a pitcher of water and four glasses. From there they had a good view of the floor show over in the corner, three female dancers of various species dressed in see-through clothes dancing with large snakes draped over their necks, every so often one would curl the snake up and toss it in the air and catch it. How nobody died during the act, or even got bitten, was anybody's guess.

Han heard a strange sound over the music playing accompanying the act and looked around trying to figure out what it was. Then he turned towards Gwynplaine when he realized that's where the sound was emanating from.

All she said on the subject was, "I got stomach static, are we eating tonight or not?"

The place was busy and Han had to look around to find someone to take their order. Finally a waiter came up carrying a flaming shish-kebab for another table, stopping to talk to them. Gwynplaine had just started to sip her glass of water when she saw this, spit out her drink and exclaimed, "Hey-hey! The meat's on fire!" and tossed the contents of her glass towards it, but missed the shish-kebab entirely and instead doused Han Solo, who shot up sputtering and fuming. When she saw this, the redheaded girl sank down in her chair, just before Han tried to reach over the table and grab her, but he was reined back by Chewbacca who forced him back in his seat.

Gwynplaine slowly pulled herself back up in her chair and merely offered, "Sorry."

Han picked up one of the large cloth napkins and dried off the best he could. Gwynplaine picked up the large pitcher of water and poured herself another glass. The same waiter came back, carrying another, even larger flaming shish-kebab and told the pilot, "Your food will be out shortly, sir."

"Thank you."

Gwynplaine looked up and shot up in her seat, "The meat's on fire again." This time she grabbed the pitcher and chucked the whole contents towards it, but missed once again and this time soaked Han Solo down to the bones. As he jolted to his feet yelling and cursing, Gwynplaine sunk so far down in her chair she about fell on the floor.


It didn't take long for them to wear out their welcome in the eatery, so before they were thrown out, they got a couple frog-dog bags to go and headed back to the ship, where once there, Han changed into a dry set of clothes, and by that time his temper seemed to have cooled down.

"Where's the kid?" he asked when he returned to the lounge and just saw Chewie there.

He heard a sound behind him and turned to see Gwynplaine poke her head into the room as she asked cautiously, "Is it safe to come in?"

"Yeah sure," he answered.

She entered the room and stood a few feet away from him and just looked at him. Han expected something from her but when a moment passed and she said nothing, he looked at her and asked, "What?"

"I'm sorry," she finally said, a hint of embarrassment visible in her face, "I'd never seen anyone do that before, I didn't know the food was supposed to be on fire."

A few seconds passed before a small, involuntary laugh made its way up from Han Solo's throat, a few seconds after that he was steadily laughing, obviously trying not to but failing. He composed himself and responded, "It's okay, kid, no permanent damage done, I think we'll be allowed to go back there someday."


After dinner, Han headed to the cockpit and got them off the ground and soon out of Aalderon's atmosphere altogether. After a while Gwynplaine entered the cockpit, went over to him and asked, "So where're we going now?"

"Gotta find somebody," he said simply.

"Who?"

"That's a long story."

"Why?" she asked.

"That's an even longer story," Han answered. "Look kid, we got a long flight ahead of us, why don't you head on back and play Dejarik with Chewie?"

"I don't know how," she answered simply.

"He'll show you...just don't try and beat him, wookiees are sore losers. We were in this bar once and he ripped this guy's arm out of his socket for beating him."

"That a fact?" she asked in an unfazed tone.

He merely nodded in return.

"This should be interesting," Gwynplaine remarked as she left the cockpit.


It had been smooth flying for a while, so Han set the ship for automatic pilot and got up to stretch his legs and see what was going on, the long bouts of silence had him curious. He headed to the lounge and was more than mildly surprised to see Gwynplaine and Chewbacca still at the hologame table.

"How's it going?" he asked.

Gwynplaine didn't even look up from the board as she answered, "I've been playing this stupid game for over two hours and it still doesn't make any sense to me."

"I thought you said you were raised by gypsies."

She turned her head and looked at him, puzzled, "What's that supposed to mean?"

"They rig these games and make a fortune off of them."

And he ought to know. He'd lost enough money to pay Jabba five times what he owed him, trying to prove that somebody, not just somebody but he himself, could beat the gypsies at their own games.

"That was their trade, not mine," Gwynplaine answered.

"So I'm starting to figure out," Han responded. In a moment of pure frustration at the whole situation he cynically asked the girl, "Is there anything you're capable of doing right?"

She gave no verbal answer and her eyes slowly looked down towards the table instead of at him and all she did was give a small shrug of both shoulders as an answer. That alone would've been enough to tell Han that he screwed up, as if he needed that fact reinforced, he got it in the form of a short grunting snort from the wookiee seated right behind him.

Gwynplaine got up from the other side of the table and said half under her breath, "I want to go home...I wish I had one to go to," and with that she walked out of the lounge.

The silence that remained after she exited was heavy for a moment, broken only by Han saying to Chewie, "Don't say it."

The wookiee let out a short sound that from any other life form might sound like a whine, but wookiees didn't whine, and anyone who said otherwise was bound to get their arms ripped out of their socket.

"I know," Han replied as he crossed one foot over the other. One side of his face tensed up as he gritted his teeth. "I don't know what to do, Chewie, I don't know anybody who'll take her." It went without saying that his consciences, the one in his head and the big furry one who'd rode with him for several years, wouldn't allow him to just dump the kid off somewhere and run, and that especially limited his options. For the first time in a long time he was starting to wish he hadn't made quite so many enemies in his life, or he might be able to think of someone who could take the girl.

He found himself deep in thought and only realized after a moment that he was absently rubbing his hand against his jaw.

"Mundo said there were places she'd pull in a good price despite being too young," he remembered, "And Voldo was willing to double what Khan was paying me for the weapons just to get her." He was quiet for a minute and shook his head, "It doesn't make sense. If she's so valuable, why was she sold to that gypsy ship? And if she's so valuable, how come there's nobody who can take her?"

Chewbacca snorted and shook his head.

"Something's not right here," Han agreed, "but I don't know what the answer is."

He was drawn out of his own thoughts by a knowing grunt from the wookiee.

"Yeah yeah," Han reluctantly agreed, "I'll go find her."


Han was starting to consider the possibility he was losing his mind. He'd gone over the ship twice and he hadn't found Gwynplaine anywhere, he'd checked back with Chewie and the wookiee hadn't seen her either. He'd gone through every room, every conceivable place that a person could...

He stopped in his tracks as the answer came to him and slapped himself in the forehead. Of course. He doubled back to the main corridor, dropped down on his knees and opened up the floor panel for one of the secret compartments. Gwynplaine looked up at him, a blank expression in her eyes, she said nothing.

"Get out of there," he said, not angrily, but more like he was too tired to fight with her than just mere nonchalance to the situation.

Gwynplaine climbed out of the compartment and said, "If I'd known that these were here when I first got on this ship I could've saved myself a lot of trouble and not about gotten myself killed when we went through that asteroid field."

"If people knew these were here, I'd be out of business," Han replied.

She looked at him and asked, "So now what?"

He didn't have an answer for that either. With a sigh, all he said was, "Look, kid, I'm trying to figure something, but you've got to help me out here, is there anything you know how to do that can point me in a direction what to do with you?"

The redhead seemed to sink into herself and become even smaller as she just shrugged.

Han was starting to feel the situation was hopeless, but he felt a little better finally having the money for this latest haul, there was enough he could put a dent in what he owed Jabba, and he could restock any supplies they got low on what with everything being split three ways for the time being. Maybe because of this, the idea of being stuck with this kid for an undetermined amount of time wasn't as bothersome to him as it was a few days ago. He felt exhausted, like he'd come out of a war zone, but he didn't feel defeated by the current circumstances, and he knew getting mad at the girl wasn't going to help, as tempted as he was.

"I'll be honest, kid, I'm not sure what we're going to do," he told her.

She looked him in the eyes and he could see her mentally bracing herself for what might come next as she asked, "Maybe you'd been better off handing me over to Voldo."

He would've, if he actually thought Chewie would let him live with himself after that, or for that matter, if he'd let himself live with himself, though he still maintained to himself that he was not getting emotionally involved in this matter. Even a bystander on the outside could recognize selling this kid to some piece of scum wasn't an option and neither was abandoning her to fend for herself the first chance he got. It had nothing to do with getting involved in someone else's affairs, it was just common sense to anybody with a brain.

"I'm not giving up," he told her, "I've worked my way out of bigger problems than this. There's an answer somewhere, I just gotta find it."

An alarm going off got both their attention and they both took off running for the cockpit.

"Chewie!" Han spotted the wookiee already there, "What's going on?"

Gwynplaine gritted her teeth until they about broke and pressed her hands against her ears to try and muffle the noise of the alarm. "What's that noise!?"

"We got company!" Han spotted a big angry looking blip on the radar gaining on them. He checked all the monitors to see what it was, and in the midst of the deafening alarm, his eyes bulged slightly as he said in a half whisper, "That's not an imperial cruiser."