"We are," says Riyana Torr. She's young. Too young to be here, Gale thinks. But when the Empire destroyed their world, what was left but those who were living offworld? Riyana was with her missionary parents, part of a roving school dedicated to helping those in the galaxy who could not so easily help themselves. Now she's back and fulfilling a similar mission, isn't she? We can't help ourselves, Teven thinks. He reminds himself: We are all just asteroids, tumbling into one another. Riyana continues, visibly nervous as she says, "We are a member of the New Republic! Leia is one of their most vital members."

"And yet, we have no senator," Orliss says. "We've no representation. We've no vote. What has Leia given us? Is she even truly our princess? None of us are royals. Why do we think she would listen to us?"

It's time to speak up. Gale turns and offers words in a stern tone when he says, "Leia has already listened to us! She's given us this flotilla. Four of these ships are from her. The supplies we use to survive are from her. We exist, gathered together because of the efforts of her and Evaan Verlaine and the other Alderaanians working on Chandrila. I'll not have her name sullied in this room."

That earns murmurs and mumbles of both agreement and dissent.

He hopes the dissenters will change their tune soon enough.

As if on cue, the center of the korabite table-a table carved from one of the asteroids and formed of Alderaanian bedrock and schist-lights up with an incoming message. Above the table floats Rickert Beagle, one of the comm officers on the Sunspire.

"We have incoming ships," he says, visibly worried.

"Who is it?" the regent administrator asks, leaning in.

"I...we don't know. But the ships are big."

They damn well should be, Teven thinks. Hauling cargo that big, well, you can't just pull it along with a couple of tug-tugs.

The worry rises in the room. Whispers of pirates or bandits. Fear of a resurgent Empire-or, perhaps worse, some brutal fragment of what remains of the Empire. Certainly rumors have persisted of various worrisome remnants of the Imperial forces that have gone mad out there in space.

Rickert suddenly says: "Wait. We have a signature-code clearance says it's New Republic."

Beyond the asteroid field, ships begin to pop out of hyperspace. Big ships-cargo freighters whose cargo will not fit within those ships' bellies. Cargo so big it must in fact be contained in its own shield, lashed to the ships with magna-beams. The scrap they haul is epic in size: huge curved slices like the rind of some fruit designed only for the massive hand of an old god. Those with Teven gather at the glass, staring out.

"What...what am I looking at?" Valmor asks.

"It's a gift from our princess. I had to pull quite a few strings just to get this on the table, but as it turns out, nobody was really doing anything with it-it was just going to end up as scrap elsewhere. I started the ball rolling, but it was Leia who really made it happen. Her and Evaan."

Orliss growls, "I still don't know what that is or why we'd want it."

But Tanzer sees it. He smirks. "It's pieces of that damnable Death Star. Isn't it?"

"It is, it is." Teven laughs and nods. "They reduced us to scrap. Now we get their scrap as reparations for war. This is just the first lot of it, too. Quite a bit more coming if we say the word."

"We could build a whole space station of our own," the regent administrator says, beaming. She presses her hands against the glass, and therein lies the wonderment of a child, even though she is one no longer.

"That's my hope," Teven says. "What say the rest of you?"

Orliss grumbles some kind of reluctant acquiescence, then stomps off. Pol, another dissenter, shrugs. "We can try this. But resettlement will still be on the table. And we must be afforded a voice in the Senate if we are to aid the New Republic in any of its efforts to secure the galaxy."

Their conversation fades as Teven looks at the regent administrator-an untested, untrained, politically nave young woman whose eyes are as big as moons and whose heart is as bright as ten suns. The awe in her eyes is so tangible, Teven thinks he could bask in it. Drink it up, even.

"This is our future," she says not to him, not to any of them, but to the glass and to the space beyond.

Yes, he thinks. I hope it is.

The Moth drops out of hyperspace into the open black of nowhere-for a moment, Norra finds the open emptiness overwhelming. As if it's going to swallow her whole. Once upon a time, she found the expanse of space comforting: so much potential, so much freedom. These days, it only offers her terror, from which she must wrest her own respite.

She tries Leia's trick: closing her eyes, drawing a deep breath, exhaling slowly. Norra tries to reclaim that feeling of freedom, and, finding even that difficult, she just lets herself sit there.

In, out. Clear the mind. Become one with the stars.

And then- It helps. She feels less...lost. Less overwhelmed.

More centered.

Thanks, Leia.

She cuts the engines and the ship floats there.

The Moth once belonged to the smuggler Owerto Naiucho, but he lost his life during the rebellion on Akiva after helping Norra get planetside. That left the MK-4 freighter up for grabs. Norra considered selling it...

But, truth is, how long can she live this life? She was a pilot for the Rebel Alliance and now leads a team of Imperial hunters for the New Republic. This work has to have an expiration date, she tells herself. (And yet she keeps coming back for job after job...) Either way, it seemed like a good idea to have a ship of her own for once. Something that belonged to the Wexley name. If she dies-or when, since immortality is not likely-then Temmin will have something to call his own. He is becoming a good pilot. He deserves it. Especially since his father is gone. He should have something of his own.

Right now, though, Temmin isn't here.

Though she's not alone, either.

"See anything?" Wedge asks, hobbling into the cockpit.

Norra points at the viewscreen. Out there, in the foreground of the glittering stars, float bits of gleaming metal. Wreckage.

"Giving her a little thrust," Norra says, and she does. The Moth eases forward. Wedge leans over her, accidentally bumping into her-they share an awkward laugh as he clears his throat and sets up the scanner.

After a few key-taps, a green beam-glittering like precious stones flung onto a cloth of black velvet-sweeps the void in front of them. First a vertical scan, then horizontal. Pulsing as it searches and catalogs.

This space represents the coordinates of the Millennium Falcon when Solo and Chewie were trapped by the Empire. "The Falcon wasn't destroyed here, was it? There's a lot of debris," Norra asks.

"I doubt it," Wedge says. "Leia didn't say as much. Besides, the Falcon has gotten out of more scrapes than the galaxy has stars, I think."

Norra can personally attest to that-she remembers watching the blue burn of the freighter's engines as it whipped through the narrow channels and conduits inside the belly of the second Death Star. The ship clipped a pipe and lost its rectenna array, the dish spinning off as Norra's Y-wing went past. Wedge goes on to say: "Something sure happened out here. Look at this." Data scrolls on the nav screens. "Wreckage from at least...four different ships. None of them the Falcon. Let's see what we have...three freighters, one fighter. Wait. Imperial wreckage, too. Scrap from a TIE's wing panel. What a mess. I don't know that we're going to find any clues to Chewie's whereabouts out here, Norra."

"Let's pull in the scrap, see if we can't eyeball something."

"I'll get the tractor beam cooking," he says. Wedge eases into the copilot's chair. As he spins up the beam controls, he looks over at Norra. "Thanks for having me along. It's nice being out in the black again. Planetside's all right, but out here? This is home."

"It won't be long before you're back in action."

"I hope so." He hesitates. He looks like he wants to say something.

"What is it?"

"After this, after...we find Han, because I know we will, do you want to..." He coughs into his hand and wets his lips. "You wanna go out and get a drink sometime? I know this little cliffside cantina-"

Movement on the viewscreen. They both see it.

Norra says, "Did you see that?"

Something darts from one piece of scrap to another. It moves like a squid through water: tentacles pushing off, legs like a blooming flower whose petals are closing. There's a red glow before the shadowy shape is again behind another piece of scrap. Hiding there. Where the sensor beam wouldn't have found it. Wedge says, "Let's see what we've got."

The tractor beam hums as it fires up.

- "I'm not your babysitter," Sinjir says.

"Good, because I'm not a baby."

Temmin and Sinjir head down the hall toward a door guarded by two New Republic soldiers with vibro-staves crossing the door.

"I never said you were a baby."

"Good, because I'm not."

Before they get to the door, Sinjir stops and plants a hand on Temmin's chest. "Listen. The pouty, angry teenage thing? It's tiring."

"I know. Does that mean you're going to stop doing it?" Temmin asks, crossing his arms and cocking his eyebrows.

The smirk that crosses Sinjir's face will not be denied. "Oh, ho, ho. You think you're clever, do you?" He sighs. At least the boy told that mad droid of his to stay home when asked. "Believe me. I speak from experience when I say that cleverness will earn you as many enemies as it does friends."

"So?"

"So, take it down a notch. We've got work to do."

"It's just-" But then the boy shuts up.

Sinjir knows he's going to regret this in much the same way one might regret sticking a hand into a hive of redjacket wasps in the hope that they make honey (hint: They don't), but he asks anyway: "Oh, fine, what is it?"

"I don't know what I'm doing here."

"We're here to visit one of our estimable prisoners."

"No, I mean like, here-here. Like, nnngyah." The boy makes a wild, frenetic gesticulation. That sound, that movement, perfectly articulates a specific feeling. That's when Sinjir understands the problem.

"Ah. The existential 'here.'"

"I don't know what that means."

"It means you're having a crisis of identity."

Temmin fidgets. "Yeah, I guess."

"Congrats, my boy. It means you've become a proper adult."

"So you don't have it figured out?"

"Hardly. I'm utterly bewildered nine times out of ten. I just happen to make it look good. I don't know what I'm doing here, either. I suspect that the moment I have it figured out, I'll probably die half a second later. Because if there's one mystical energy that powers the galaxy, it's not the Force. It's pure, unadulterated irony. Now let's go talk to General Shale. See if she can't help us in our foolhardy quest to locate the errant smuggler."

- "I hate this place," Jom says, following Jas through a narrow, crooked alley on Nar Shaddaa. Behind them is the mouth of one of the moon's countless black markets. This one is lorded over by the maven, Nyarla the Hutt-a slime-dripping slug-woman whose red tongue slathered the nozzle of a bubbling spice-drip while she told them she didn't know a damn thing about Solo, his Wookiee, or Imperial prisons out in Wild Space.

"You want to hang with me," Jas says, "you should get used to places like this, Barell."

At that, Jom feels mighty conflicted. He does want to hang with Jas. His attraction to her is something on a whole other level. It's practically feral. His greatest desire right now is to grab her and pull her into some dark alcove and have another go. And yet, why? She's nothing like him. He's a man of order and principle. She's a fragging bounty hunter of all things. A criminal haven like this is second nature to her. Meanwhile he feels like a Mon Cala out of water-like he's drowning in open air, totally exposed.

"This is a strange place for a date," he says.

"You're funny. It's not a date. Don't think that what we had will happen again. It was just a bit of fun, is all."

They pass a stall full of wide-mouthed toothy aliens barking about a table full of strange oils and unguents. He slaps their hands away as they reach for him and he calls after Jas: "No reason the fun has to end."

"Fun always has an end, Barell."

They push on toward the spaceport-really it's just a ship receptacle carved out of the urban sprawl. Jas paid some crumple-headed Weequay too many credits to keep their ship hidden and off syndicate registers. She told Jom that Black Sun operates out here and the last thing she wants is to be on their screens. Them or the Crymorah. I have debts, she told him. He asked her what kind, but she didn't elucidate.

As they duck under a ratty tapestry hanging from a fraying rope and enter the spaceport, Jom says, "This is the third time we've come up empty, Emari. Maybe it's time to realize that your underworld connections here are drying up. Time to go back to Chandrila and-"

The air warbles and something hits Jom in the back, knocking the air out of him. He pitches forward, chin hitting the ground and teeth biting into his tongue. Blood fills his mouth as he tries to summon his limbs to move, but they don't respond to his commands. I've been stunned. He barely manages the will to lift his chin off the dirty ground- And he sees Jas pinned down by a series of red lights-beam-sights, he realizes. Dozens of them. All from weapons threatening to fire. Her hands are up in surrender as enemies close in from the shadows.

Frag.

- The air lock shudders as the Moth's oxygen cyclers pump air into it. Wedge steps forward, leaning hard on his cane. He and Norra share a look, then she jams the big red button with the heel of her hand. The door slides open with a rattle-bang.

There, inside, sit heaps of scrap drawn into the ship with the tractor beam. Already she sees plasma scoring and char marks.

What she doesn't see is anything moving.

"I know I saw something out there," she says.

Wedge nods. "We both saw it."

Just then-a piece of hull scrap shifts, groaning against the floor. Then all is silent once more. The two of them draw their blasters- A faint scuttling and scraping.

And again, nothing.

Moments pass. Wedge starts to say, "Maybe together we could lift-"

The scrap piece flips up suddenly, slamming against the wall with a deafening bang. A dark shape, big as an astromech, takes flight, slamming into Wedge. He screams as he falls.

- "The tea here, right?" Sinjir says, holding up his steaming cup as if to demonstrate. He takes a noisy sip while Temmin stares disappointedly down at his own cup. "It's a far sight better than what we got at the Imperial commissary, that's for certain."

Jylia Shale was once a general in the Empire's army-and legendarily one hell of a strategist. Sadly, her legend was habitually ignored by those above her. She sits with both of her small hands around a cup of her own. "It is something. But I had my own supply during the Empire days."

The apartment is spare, but functional. It's more than she'd get in a prison cell-she has a food prep station instead of a protein recycler, a proper bathroom instead of a vacu-suck porthole, and no interrogator droids hovering about. All because she has played along and given the New Republic true answers to the questions it has posed.

House arrest is quite nice, Sinjir thinks. I should've gotten arrested. He could live a comfortable life in one of these boxes. As long as they delivered liquor. Did they? He makes a mental note to ask.

Then he sets the tea down because tea is disgusting.

"So, nothing?" he asks, rapping his knuckles gently on the low table between them. He gestures toward the star map hovering there holographically. "You don't know anything about this space? We're looking for Imperials-any at all-you think might be in that area."