DELLALT had, in its heyday, been a prominent member of a strategic cl.u.s.ter during the pre-Republic phase known locally as the Expansionist Period. That importance had run its course. Altering trade routes, increased ships' cruising ranges, intense commercial compet.i.tion, social dislocation, and the realigning power centers of the emergent Republican had long since converted the planet to a seldom taken side trip, isolated even from the rest of the Tion Hegemony.

Dellalt's surface boasted far more water than soil. The treasure vaults of Xim were located near a lake on the southernmost of the planet's three continents, a hook-shaped piece of land that crossed Dellalt's equator and extended almost to its southern pole. Around the vaults stood Dellalt's single large population concentration, a small city built by Xim's engineers. The travelers studied it during their approach.

Heavy weapons emplacements and defensive structures around the city were now gutted ruins filled with crumbling machinery. Broken monorail pylons and once grand buildings, falling back to dusk, were overgrown with thick dendroid vines. Recent construction was spa.r.s.e, poorly planned, and done with crude materials. There was the wreckage of a sewage- and water-treatment plant, indicating just how far back Dellalt had slipped. Badure mentioned that the planet harbored a race of sauropteroids, large aquatic reptiles that lived in a rigidly codified truce with the human inhabitants.

Port officialdom was nonexistent; a bureaucracy would have been an unprofitable expense, something the Tion Hegemony avoided. Han and Badure, intending to attract attention, made a show of stretching and pacing as they came down the ramp to a landing area that was no more than a flat hilltop showing the scorches of former landings and liftoffs. Their breath crystallized in the cold air. Han had donned his own flight jacket. Glossy, cracked, and worn with age, it showed darker, unweathered spots where patches and insignia had been removed. He pulled his collar up against the wind.

Below them the decaying city spread out along slopes leading down to the long, narrow lake, part of Dellalt's intricate aquatic system. Han estimated from the condition of the landing area that it saw no more than three or four landings per Dellaltian year-probably just Tion patrol ships and the occasional marginal tramp trader. The planet's year was half again as long as a Standard one, with a shorter-than-Standard mean day. Gravity was slightly more than Standard, but since Han had adjusted the Millennium Falcon's gravity during the flight, they scarcely noticed it now.

People came running up from the little city, laughing and making sounds of greeting. The women's attire was like Hasti's, with variations of color, layering, and cut. Male dress tended toward loose pantaloons, padded jackets, all manner of hats and turbans, and pleated, flowing cloaks and robes. Children copied their parents' appearance in miniature. All around these humans were packs of yipping, loping domestic animals, grainy-skinned quadrupeds with needlelike teeth and prehensile tails.

Han asked who owned the single building on the field, a decaying edifice of lockslab that might be used as warehouse or docking hangar. The owner appeared quickly, making his way through the mob with curses and insults that no one seemed to take personally. He was small but heavily built, and his scraggly whiskers failed to hide pockmarked cheeks and throat that had been ravaged by some local disease. His teeth were yellow-brown stumps. Crude or nonexistent medical care was too common on fringe worlds for Han to feel disgust anymore.

He inquired about the building. The language of Dellalt was Standard, distorted with a thick accent. The man insisted that rental terms were so minor a problem that there was no reason to waste Han's time, that the outloading of cargo could begin at once. The pilot knew that to be a lie, but confrontation was a part of Badure's plan.

Bollux appeared and began making trips between the starship and the building. At first the perplexed droid found himself surrounded by screaming, laughing children and snarling, snapping domestic quadrupeds. But the cousins of the building's landlord threatened, cursed, and slapped them away, then formed an escort to see to it that the labor 'droid could work in relative peace. Still, many eyes followed the gleaming Bollux; such automata were unknown here. The landlord's cousins opened one of the building's doors just wide enough for the 'droid to enter and leave. He began stacking crates, canisters, pressure kegs, and boxes inside.

The crowd milled around and under the Millennium Falcon, timidly touching her landing gear and gawking up at her in amazement, yammering among themselves. Then someone noticed the Wookiee, who sat looking down from the c.o.c.kpit. Shouts and shrieks went up; hands were thrust at the Wookiee in gestures meant to repel evil. Chewbacca gazed down on all the activity impa.s.sively, and Han wondered if it had occurred to any in the crowd that his first mate was manning the freighter's weaponry.

A considerable pile of cargo containers had already acc.u.mulated in the building when, with his cousins stationed around its main doors, the landlord abandoned his effusive welcomes and named an enormous rental fee. Badure shook his scarred first under the landlord's nose, and Han shouted a threat. The landlord threw up his hands and besought his ancestors for justice, then insulted the offworlders' appearance and the circ.u.mstances of their birth. His cousins let the 'droid continue stacking cargo in his building, though.

Each time Bollux left the outbuilding, one of the cousins swung the door shut with a creak of primitive hinges. Waiting until she had heard that sound for the third time to be certain of the routine-and having timed the 'droid's purposely slow trips-Hasti pushed the lid off her shipping canister and stepped out, lifting her hem carefully and rubbing her cramped neck.

Anyone seen leaving the starship would have been trailed all over town by the crowds. That in turn would have made recovery of the log-recorder impossible. Badure's plan had circ.u.mvented all that.

The building had a small rear door. Everything was as Badure had predicted-on a backward world like Dellalt, the landlord could ill afford expensive locking systems on each door. Therefore, this rear door and the larger hanging door were secured from the inside, with only a smaller door set in the larger one equipped with a lockplate. Not that that mattered. Han Solo had given Hasti a vibrocutter in case she had needed to force her way out. But she needed merely to move the bolt and then emerged into the light behind the building, shouldering the door closed again.

Peering around the corner, she could isolate at least three different centers of furor. In one, Han Solo and Badure were squared off with the landlord, insulting one another's antecedents and personal hygiene in best Dellaltian haggling style; in another, people were pointing at and debating hotly over Chewbacca's origin; and finally, the landlord's cousins were battling the crowd so Bollux could keep filling the building with the containers they would later confiscate if the offworlders didn't meet the exorbitant rental fee. All the Dellaltians seemed quite happy with their unscheduled holiday.

At that juncture another distraction, also planned by Badure, occurred. Skynx ambled down the ramp, ostensibly to confer with Han and the old man. An astonished shout went up from the crowd, and most of the people tagging along after Bollux went at a run to see this new wonder.

Making sure her compact pistol was safe in an inner pocket, Hasti set off, keeping the building between herself and the field. She had draped the cowl over her head and went unnoticed. She had been in the city before, sent from the mining camp with Lanni to make minor purchases. Recalling the layout of the place, she set out for Xim's treasure vaults.

Pavement laid when the vaults were new had been chewed and disintegrated by use and time. The streets were rutted and hard-packed in the middle and muddy along the sides where slops had been dumped from overhanging windows. Hasti prudently kept along the middle way. Around her people ran, limped, or were carried toward the landing area. Two cadaverous oldsters, members of the local aristocracy, were carried past in an opulent sedan chair borne by six stooped bearers. A buckboard drawn by two skeletal, eight-legged dray beasts followed.

Three drunks lurched out of a drinking stall, arms around one another; they were waving ceramic tippling bowls in the air, sloshing liquor. They regarded her for a moment, then elbowed one another. Under the native code of ethics a woman was fairly safe, at least in town, but Hasti kept her eyes to the ground and her hand near her pistol. But the celebrants decided that the starship merited their attention first, or they would be excluded from an event the rest of the city would talk about all year.

Picking her way through a city that seemed to be falling apart before her eyes, Hasti as last came to the vaults of Xim the Despot. The vaults were contained within a sprawling, cameral complex of interlocking structures, immensely thick-walled and, in its day, impervious to forced entry. Still, thieves had gotten in over the years and, finding only empty vaults, yawning treasure chambers, and waiting bins and unoccupied shelves, had soon departed. Only the occasional wanderer or scholar of the obscure came here to tour Xim's barren edifice now. The galaxy was rich in sights and marvels worth the seeing and easier to reach; there was little of allure in the haunted emptiness here.

In the vaults' worn and pitted facade were engraved Xim's insignia of the starburst-eyed death's head and characters from an ancient language: IN ETERNAL HOMAGE TO XIM, WHOSE FIST SHALL ENCLOSE THE STARS AND WHOSE NAME SHALL OUTLIVE TIME.

Hasti paused for a glimpse of herself in the gleaming stump of a fallen column, hoping she resembled her sister sufficiently. She fumed at the memory of Han Solo's sudden change of att.i.tude toward her-first fussing over the buckling of her seatbelt and then his reckless-but expert-planetfall, done to impress her. Either the oaf couldn't see how much she disliked him or, more likely, refused to accept it.

At the top of the steps she crossed the wide, roofless portico and pa.s.sed through the vaults' single, gigantic entrance-way. The interior was cool and dark. There was a vast circular chamber under a dome half a kilometer in diameter, a mere vestibule to the huge vault complex.

But this outermost chamber was the only part of the vaults in use anymore. Hasti's eyes adjusted to the light of weak glow-rods and tallow lanterns guttering smoke into the cavernous room designed to be lit by monumental illumi-panels. Farther in toward the center of the place was a small cl.u.s.ter of work tables, part.i.tions, and cabinets-the administrative annex for the minor activity the vaults still housed.

A few Dellaltians, carrying data plaques, old-fashioned memo-wire spools, and even a few sheafs of paper computer-printout, pa.s.sed by her. Hasti shook her head at the primitive operation. But, she remembered, the vaults had very few tenants. The Dellaltian Bank and Currency Exchange, a minor concern, was one, while the Landmark Preservation Office, charged with looking after the abandoned labyrinth with almost no resources, was that grouping of desks and part.i.tions.

A man approached her from the semigloom-tall, broad-shouldered, his hair as white as his forked beard. He moved briskly; at his heels was an a.s.sistant, a smaller, grimmer man whose long black hair was parted down the middle and showed a white blaze.

The tall man's voice was hearty and charming. "I am steward of the vaults. How may I help you?"

Holding her chin high, Hasti answered in her best approximation of a local accent. "The lockboxes. I wish to recover my property."

The steward's hands circled one another, fingers gathered, in the Dellaltian sign of courtesy and invitation. "Of course; I shall a.s.sist you personally." He spoke to the other man, who departed.

Remembering to walk on his right, as a Dellaltian woman would, Hasti followed the steward. The vaults' corridors, musty with age, displayed mosaics of colored crystal so complicated that Hasti couldn't interpret them. Many of the pieces were cracked, and whole stretches were missing; they arched high overhead into shadow. Here, their footsteps resounded hollowly.

At last they came to a wall, not the end of the corridor but a part.i.tion of crudely cut stone that had plainly been mortared into place after the original construction. Set in the wall was a door that looked as if it had been scavenged from some later, less substantial building. Next to it was an audio pickup. The steward pointed to it.

"If the lady will speak into the voice-coder, we can proceed to the lockbox repository."

When Hasti's sister had told her and Badure about depositing the log-recorder disk she had told them the box-rental code and retrieval combination, but had mentioned no voice-coder. Hasti felt the pulse in her forehead and the thumping in her rib cage quicken.

The steward was waiting. Leaning to the audio pickup she said, as if in mystic invocation, "Lanni Troujow."

"My last offer," Badure threatened for the fourth time, resorting to hyperbole common on Dellalt, "is ten credits a day, guaranteed three-day minimum."

The landlord shrieked and tore hairs out of his beard, beat his chest with his free hand, and vowed to his ancestors that he would join them before letting plundering offworlders steal the food from his children's mouths. Skynx took it all in, amazed by the carefully measured affrontery of the hagglers.

Han listened with one ear, worried that Hasti might not have been able to get away from the landing area undetected. There was a tug at his shoulder; it was Bollux. "I noticed this altercation, sir. Shall I continue to outload our cargo?"

That meant Hasti was away. Badure heard and understood. "Get everything back onboard until this son of contaminated genes, this landlord, bargains reasonably."

"Unthinkable!" screamed the landlord. "You have already made use of my precious building and diverted me from my other pursuits. A settlement must be made; I hereby hold your cargo against the arrival of the Fact-Finders." He and Badure swapped deadly oaths.

The landlord called the old man a horrible name. Skynx, quivering in excitement, immersed himself in the spirit of the thing, antennae trembling. "Devourer of eggs!"

Everyone stopped, glancing at the diminutive Ruurian, who swallowed, appalled at his rash outburst. The landlord departed, along with much of the crowd, hurling back epithets and leaving his cousins to guard the outbuilding. From somewhere, the cousins had produced bolt-operated slug rifles with hexagonal barrels and long, lens-type scopes.

Back onboard the Falcon, Badure threw himself into a chair. "That landlord! What a freighter b.u.m he'd have made!"

Han grabbed Bollux. "What happened?"

"The men guarding the building entrance kept looking through the door after me as I deposited the cargo. It was some time before they became bored and gave all their attention over to Badure's performance and Skynx's appearance. Hasti was no longer in her crate, and the inner door was unbarred. At Blue Max's suggestion I resecured the door."

"Tell Maxie he's a good boy," Badure said. "I like you two; you've got a touch of larceny in you."

Bollux's chest plastron swung open, the halves coming apart like cabinet doors. Blue Max's photoreceptor lit up. "Thanks, Badure," he said, sounding smug. Han told himself. I should keep an eye on that computer or he'll end up wearing juvie-gang colors and packing a vibro-shiv.

Just at that moment, Skynx appeared with Chewbacca, who had just left the c.o.c.kpit. The Wookiee was holding the metallic flask of vacuum-distilled jet juice the partners kept under the control console for special occasions. "Skynx," Badure said, "I think it's time to strike up the band."

Skynx flowed to the acceleration couch and on up into his nook. He began taking objects from his treelike storage rack. "If you have no further tasks for us, sir," Bollux told Han, "Max and I would like to continue our study of Skynx's tapes."

"Whatever you want, old-timer."

Bollux crossed to the tech station, where he and the computer resumed their perusal of the ancient records Skynx had brought along. The labor 'droid, who had worked his way across the galaxy and had already outlived one body, possessed an almost sentient streak of curiosity, and Blue Max was always ready to absorb new information. The two mechanicals were particularly interested in technical data and other references to the giant war-robots of long-dead Xim.

Skynx, sitting up on his rearmost two sets of limbs, took and held a miniature amplified hammer dulcimer in the next set and two hammers in each digital cl.u.s.ter of the next. He strapped a pair of tympanic pulsers around himself, tapping experimentally with the digits of his next-higher limbs. Above those he fastened a pair of small bellows to pump air to a horn held in his uppermost-but-one set of extremities. In the uppermost he took up a flute of sorts and tried a few runs. The sound was like the wind cones Han remembered from his own homeworld. He wondered what kind of brain could coordinate all that activity.

Skynx launched into a merry air, full of sudden runs, bright interplay and humorous progressions, and impudent catches made to sound as if the instruments or Skynx's limbs were getting out of hand and taking their own course. The Ruurian made a great pretense of distress and bewilderment and a desperate effort to bring his extremities under control again. The others laughed, particularly Chewbacca, whose Wookiee chortles made the bulkheads ring. Badure rapped time on the gameboard and even Han was tapping a toe or two. He opened the flask, took a swig, and pa.s.sed it to the Wookiee. "Here, this'll put some curl in your pelt." Chewbacca drank, then sent the flask along. Even Skynx accepted a drink.

They demanded another number after that, and a third. Badure eventually jumped up, both hands over his head, to demonstrate the Bynarrian jig. He capered around the compartment as if he were twenty kilos lighter and as many years younger.

At the height of the Bynarrian jig the ship's hatch signaled. Badure and Chewbacca rushed off, eager to see what Hasti had brought back. Bollux and Blue Max looked up from the strobing rapid-readout screen, and Skynx began extricating himself from his instruments.

"Step one completed!" he said in his quick fashion. "Skynx, of the K'zagg Colony, off on a treasure hunt! If my clutch-siblings could see me now!"

But when the Wookiee reentered the compartment, he slumped dejectedly over to his partner and sank into the couch, head in hairy hands. Bad as that? thought Han. Badure followed, one arm clasped around a despairing Hasti. She took a sip from the flask, coughed, told her story quickly, then took another.

"Voice-coder?" Han exclaimed. "n.o.body said anything about a voice-coder."

"Maybe Lanni never realized her voice was being printed," Badure replied.

"That steward," Hasti muttered. "I should've jabbed my gun into his bellyb.u.t.ton and offered to glaze his gallstones for him."

Han handed the half-empty flask to his copilot and rose. "Now we do it my way." He headed for the c.o.c.kpit, pulling on his flying gloves. Chewbacca fell in behind. "Want to know how to make a withdrawal? Stick around."

Badure hurriedly interposed himself between the two partners and the main pa.s.sageway. "Steady there, boys. Just what've you got in mind?"

Han grinned. "Swooping down on the vault, blowing the doors with the belly-turret guns, going in, and taking the disk. Don't bother getting up, folks; it'll all be over in a minute."

Badure shook his head. "What if a Tion patrol cruiser shows up? Or an Imperial ship? Would you care to have a hunter-killer team on your neck?"

Han made a move to step around him. "I'll chance it."

Hasti jumped up. "Well, I won't! Sit down, Solo! At least consider the options before you risk the death penalty for all of us."

Chewbacca awaited his friend's decision. Bollux watched impartially and Blue Max with a certain excitement.

"Some forethought might not be out of place here," Skynx contributed in a very subdued voice.

Han disliked complications and subterfuge, but his hasty action was stayed, for the moment, by the conviction that being dead was the least interesting thing in life. "All right, all right; who's hungry?" he asked. "I'm sick of ship's rations. Let's go see what kind of meal we can get in town. But if n.o.body thinks of a new one, my plan still goes." He clipped the flask to his gunbelt while Chewbacca gathered up his bowcaster and bandoleer of ammunition. Badure found the small purse of local currency he had brought, and Bollux shut his plastron halves on Blue Max.

Hasti saw Skynx shedding his instruments. "Hey, I never got to hear anything."

Badure looked around. "Bring them along," he bade Skynx. The Ruurian began tucking his instruments into carrying cinches he fastened around himself.

Pulling on his flight jacket, Han shut and sealed the hatch behind them. Storm clouds had moved in, and electrical discharges illuminated the clouds in strange flashes of red. Badure pointed out that the landlord's cousins had disappeared. "They probably figured out they were guarding empty boxes."

"More likely they didn't want to sit around in that leaky barn," Hasti reasoned. The rest of the onlookers who had been watching the starship from a distance, mostly children and the domestic yappers, were gone as well.

They set off downslope with Bollux bringing up the rear. Up this high, away from the docks, the streets were poorly maintained and lighting was unknown. They didn't get far.

Han was first to sense something wrong-everything was too quiet, too many ramshackle windows were shuttered. No lights were showing and no voices could be heard anywhere nearby. He grabbed Chewbacca's shoulder, and the bowcaster came up, the blaster appearing at the same time. By instinct, they stood back to back. Hasti had her mouth open to ask what was wrong when the spotlights. .h.i.t them.

Han recognized them as hand-held spots and, figuring that a right-handed man would be holding the spot as far out with his left as he could, took an estimated aim.

"Don't!" a voice ordered. "We'll cut you all down if anyone fires a shot!"

They were surrounded. Han holstered his side arm, and the Wookiee lowered his bowcaster. Humans and various other beings appeared in the glare waving rifles, riot guns, slug-shooters, and other weapons. Han and his companions were easily disarmed and their equipment examined. Skynx chittered in terror while their captors pawed his delicate musical instruments, but he was allowed to retain them.

Three individuals strode forward to search the captives. The smaller two were mainbreed human-twins, a young man and woman who shared traits of thick, straight brown hair and widow's peaks, startling black-irised eyes, and thin, intense, pale faces. The third personage hung back, a looming hulk in the light backwash of the spots. Han remembered the name Badure had mentioned: Egome Fa.s.s, the enforcer.

The twins approached them, the female in the lead. "J'uoch," murmured Hasti, shivering.

The twins' faces held the same rigid, lethal composure. "That's it," J'uoch replied quickly. "Where's the disk, Hasti? We know you went to the vaults." She gave Han a chilly smile. Then the smile vanished and she turned again to Hasti, "Give it up, or we burn down your friends, starting with the pilot here."

Chewbacca's great arms tensed, fingers curling. He prepared to die as he would be expected to, head of a Wookiee Honor Family, his life so intimately intertwined with that of Han Solo that there existed no human word for the relationship.

Han, in turn, was choosing among several tactics, all of them suicidal, when Bollux spoke. "Captain Solo mustn't come to harm. I will open the Millennium Falcon for you."

The woman eyed him. It hadn't occurred to J'uoch that the 'droid would be cleared for ship access. "Very well. All we want is the log-recorder disk." Han, in the grip of adrenal overload, stared at Bollux and wondered what was going through the old labor 'droid's logic stacks. One fact did not escape him: he had heard high-pitched communication bursts exchanged between Bollux and Blue Max.

Their captors herded them back toward the Falcon. Too late, Han understood why the Dellaltians had scattered. He just hoped the two machines had a workable plan.

Bollux, climbing the ramp, was at the main hatch lock with several of J'uoch's people near. Strangely, just as the main hatch rolled up into its recess, the 'droid chose to swing his chest panels open. Then Han and the others heard Blue Max's high-speed burst signals.

An ear-splitting hiss of a hurtling object echoed through the air. One of the men who was guarding Bollux was lifted off his feet by terrific impact, and in the next moment was stretched headlong on the ramp. Another captor, farther down the ramp, was slammed in the shoulder and knocked through the air.

"Run for it!" Blue Max shrilled. As suddenly as that, chaos broke loose.

VII.

THE two strongarm specimens still standing at the top of the ramp ducked instinctively. Something small and fast swooshed past Han, knocking the humanoid who had been guarding him off his feet. Bollux pivoted to follow the action.

From the now-exposed Blue Max more high-pitched beeps issued forth. Han realized with some amazement that the computer module had managed to summon the remote target-globe from the Falcon's interior and was using it as a weapon.

Before J'uoch's people could react, Han yelled, "Hit 'em!" He grabbed the nearest opponent's weapon, a slug-shooter carbine with a drum magazine and, twisting his leg behind the other's, toppled him over.

Badure rammed his elbows back into the face of his guard and turned to grapple with him. Chewbacca was less fortunate. Preparing to enter the fray, he was unaware that the ma.s.sive Egome Fa.s.s had stolen up behind him. The enforcer's hard fist crashed into the base of the Wookiee's skull.

Chewbacca staggered, nearly falling to his knees, but his tremendous strength bore him up again. He turned groggily to give battle, but Egome Fa.s.s's first blow had given the enforcer a formidable edge. He avoided Chewbacca's slowed counterpunch and landed another blow, bringing his fist down on the Wookiee's shoulder. And this time the Falcon's first mate went down.

Badure was having a difficult time with his second guard, who was young and fast. They struggled, feet shuffling in the dry dust, but just as the older man was gaining the upper hand by dint of weight and reach, he was tackled low around the knees and went down.