Skynx was quiet, almost reverent. He had made the find of a lifetime, a discovery out of daydreams. Badure and Hasti remained solemn, too, as they considered the size and wealth of the place, the impact it would have on their lives, and the memory of what they had gone through to stand here.

Not so Han and Chewbacca. The pilot jumped through the gap in the door, wounded arm held to him by a traction web. "We did it! We did it!" he shouted in glee. The Wookiee lurched after him, tossing his long-maned head back with an ecstatic "Rooo-oo!" They slapped each other, laughter echoing away into the piles of treasure. Chewbacca's huge feet slapped the floors in a thumping victory dance as Han laughed in joy.

Skynx and Badure had gone to open containers with Bollux's help, to examine Xim's spoils. Chewbacca offered to a.s.sist them. "Spread it out here!" Han enjoined him. "I want to roll around in it!"

He paused when he noticed Hasti nearby, eyeing him strangely. "I always wondered what you'd be like," she told him, "when you found your big win, you and the Wook. What now?"

Han still rode the wave of elation. "What now? Why, we'll, we'll-" He stopped, giving the subject some serious thought for the first time. "We'll pay off our debts, get ourselves a first-cla.s.s ship and crew, uh ..."

Hasti nodded to herself. "And settle down, Han?" she asked softly. "Buy a planet, or take over a few conglomerates and live the life of a good man of business?" She shook her head slowly. "Your problems are just beginning, rich man."

His joy was receding fast, replaced by a tangled knot of doubts, plans, the need for forethought and mature wisdom. But before he could berate Hasti for being a spoilsport, he heard Chewbacca's angry roar.

The Wookiee held a metallic ingot, frowning at it in disgust. He dumped a handful of them onto the floor in a chiming avalanche and gave the pile a kick that sent ingots skittering every which way. Han forgot Hasti and went to his friend. "What is it?"

Chewbacca explained with frustrated grunts and moans. Han picked up one of the ingots and saw that his copilot was right. "This stuff's kiirium! You can get it anywhere; Skynx, what's it doing in with the treasure?"

The small academician had located a vault-directory screen at the end of the nearest shelf stack, an old televiewer mounted on a low stand. He brought it to flickering life, and columns of ciphers and characters raced across the screen as Skynx answered distractedly.

"There would seem to be a great deal of it here, Captain. And a huge quant.i.ty of mytag crystalline vertices and mountains of enriched bordh.e.l.l-type fuel slugs, among other things."

"Mytag crystals?" Han repeated in puzzlement. "They run those things off by the carload; what kind of treasure's this? Where's the real treasure?"

A belly laugh distracted him. Badure had found a canister of the mytag crystal and flung a double handful into the air. The crystals rained down around him, catching the light, as he convulsed in laughter. "This is it! Or was, an age ago. Don't you see, Slick? Kiirium is artificial shielding material, not very good by modern standards but a major breakthrough in its time, and tough to produce to boot. With quant.i.ties of kiirium to shield heavy guns and engines, Xim could field warcraft that were better armed and faster than anything else in s.p.a.ce at the time.

"And mytag crystals were used in old subs.p.a.ce commo and detection gear; you needed lots and lots of them for any s.p.a.cefleet or planetary defenses. And so forth; all this was critical war materiel. With the stuff in these vaults, Xim could have a.s.sembled a war machine that would have conquered this whole part of s.p.a.ce. But he lost big at the Third Battle of Vontor, first."

"That's it?" Han bellowed. "We went through all this for a treasure that's obsolete?"

"Not quite," Skynx commented mildly, still bent over the screen. "One whole section is filled with information tapes, art works, and artifacts. There is a hundred times more information contained here than everything we know about the period altogether."

"I'll bet the Survivors have long since forgotten just what it was they were guarding," Hasti put in. "They believed the legends, just like everyone else. I wonder what did happen to the Queen of Ranroon?"

Badure shrugged. "Perhaps they plunged her into the system's primary after she offloaded the treasure, or sent her off with a skeleton crew to arrange misleading sightings of her and create a false trail. Who knows?"

Skynx had left the viewscreen and started a delirious dance, first on his hind limbs, then on the front ones, hopping and capering much as Han and Chewbacca had a moment before. "Marvelous! Miraculous! What a find! I'm sure to get my own chair funded-no, my own department!"

Han, leaning against a wall, slowly sank to a squatting position. "Artworks, hmm? Chewie and I can just stroll into the Imperial Museum with a bunch under our arms and start haggling, right?" He rested his forehead on his good arm. Chewbacca patted his shoulder solicitously, making mournful sounds.

Skynx gradually stopped cavorting, realizing what a disappointment all this was to the two. "There are some things of intrinsic value, Captain. If you choose carefully, you could fill your ship with items you could dispose of relatively simply. There would be some profit." He was fighting the urge to h.o.a.rd the entire find, knowing that the Millennium Falcon could bear away no more than an insignificant part of it. "Enough, I suppose, to get your ship repaired properly and have your wounds looked after in a first-cla.s.s medicenter."

"What about us?" Hasti interposed. "Badure and I haven't even got a starship."

Skynx pondered for a moment, then brightened. "I can write my own ticket with the university, an unlimited budget. How would you two like to work with me? Academic pursuits will be dull after this, I suppose, to a pair of humans. But there'd be generous pay and retirement benefits and quick promotions. We'll be years and years working on this find. I'll need someone to look after all the workers, scholars, and automata." Badure smiled and put an arm around Hasti's shoulders. She nodded.

That made Skynx think of something else. "Bollux, would you and Blue Max care for positions? You'd be of great help, I'm sure. After all, you two are the only ones who interacted with the war-robots at any length. There's certain to be an effort to study their remains; we have a great deal yet to learn about their thought processes."

Blue Max answered for them both. "Skynx, we'd like that a lot."

"If the locals don't march in here and take it all away from you," Han reminded them, as Chewbacca helped him to his feet. Seeing their concern, he added, "I guess we'll leave you a portable defensive generator and some heavy weapons and supplies out of the Falcon. That'll give us more cargo s.p.a.ce."

Badure sounded uncharacteristically angry. "Han, how gullible do you think the rest of the universe is? You always want to do the right things for the wrong reasons. Well, what will you do the day you run out of excuses, son?"

Han pretended not to hear. "We'll punch through a distress call just before we make our jump out of this system. There'll be a Tion Hegemony gunboat here before you know it. Come on, Chewie; let's break out the handtruck and get the ship loaded before anything else happens."

"Captain," Skynx called. Han paused and looked back. "Here's a funny thing: I still think this adventuring was basically just danger and hardship a long way from home, but now that it's ended and we're parting company, I find myself saddened."

"Look us up for a refresher course, any time," offered Han.

Skynx shook his head. "I have much to do here; all too soon I'll be called away by my blood, when it's time to go chrysalis, then live a brief season as a chroma-wing. If you wish to see me then, Captain, come and look on Ruuria for the flyer whose wing markings are the same as my own banding. The chroma-wing won't recognize you, but perhaps some part of Skynx will."

Han nodded, finding no adequate way to say good-bye. Badure called, "Hey, Slick!" Han and his copilot looked to him and he laughed. "Thanks, boys."

"Forget it." Han dismissed the entire incident. He started off again with his sidekick, both of them moving with some pain due to their injuries. "After all, a Life-Debt's a Life-Debt, isn't it, partner?"

On this last note, he poked a knuckle into his copilot's ribs. Chewbacca swung angrily but not too quickly. Han ducked and the Wookiee backed off. "Look," Han said, "that's it for missions of mercy, all right? We're smugglers; that's what we know and that's what we're good at and that's what we're sticking to!"

The Wookiee growled concurrence. The others, surrounded by the endless shelf stacks of Xim's treasure, heard the discussion echo back from the corridor. Han broke into Chewbacca's rumblings with, "When the Falcon's repaired and this wing of mine's fixed, we're going to try another Kessel spice run."

The Wookiee croaked an irritated objection. Han insisted. "It's fast money and we won't have to look at any dirt! We'll get Jabba the Hut or somebody to back us for a cut. Listen, I've got this plan ..."

Just as they were moving out of earshot, Chewbacca's protests stopped. He and Han Solo shared some joke that made both laugh slyly. Then they returned to their schemes.

"There," Badure declared to Hasti, Skynx, Bollux, and Blue Max, "go the real Survivors."

The first time Han laid eyes on her, standing with Lando on one of Nar Shaddaa's permacrete landing platforms a few short years before he had thrown in with the Rebel Alliance, he saw the battered old freighter not only for all she was but for all that she might one day become.

Staring at her like some lovesick cub. Eyes wide, mouth hanging open. Then quickly trying to get hold of himself so that Lando wouldn't know what he was thinking. Dismissing the ship as a hunk of junk. But Lando was no fool, and by then he knew all of Han's tells. One of the best gamblers that side of Coruscant, he knew when he was being bluffed. "She's fast," he had said, a twinkle in his eye.

Han didn't doubt it.

Even that far back it was easy to envy Lando all he already possessed, his extraordinary good fortune to begin with. But luck had little to do with it. Lando just didn't deserve this ship. He could barely handle a skimmer, let alone a light-fast freighter best flown by a pair of able pilots. He just wasn't worthy of her.

Han had never thought of himself as the covetous or acquisitive type, but suddenly he wanted the ship more than he had ever wanted anything in his life. After all the years of servitude and wandering, of close calls and failed partnerships, in and out of love, in and out of the Academy, victim of as many tricks as he'd played on others ... perhaps he saw the ship as a chance for permanence.

Circling her, fairly orbiting her, he nursed sinister designs. The old freighter drew him to her gravity, as she clearly had all who had piloted her and added their own touches to the YT's hull, mandibles, the varied technoterrain of her surface. He took the smell of the ship into his nostrils.

The closer he looked, the more evidence he found of attempts to preserve her from the ravages of time and of s.p.a.ceflight. Dents hammered out, cracks filled with epoxatal, paint smeared over areas of carbon scoring. Aftermarket parts socked down with inappropriate fasteners or secured by less-than-professional welds. She was rashed with rust, bandaged with strips of durasteel, leaking grease and other lubricants, smudged with crud. She had seen action, this ship, long before Lando's luck at sabacc had made her his property. But in service to who or what, Han had no idea. Criminals, smugglers, pirates, mercenaries ... certainly all of those and more.

When Lando fired her up for Han's inspection, his heart skipped a beat. And minutes later, seated at the controls, savoring the response of the sublight engines, taking her through the paces and nearly frightening Lando to death, he knew he was fated to own her. He would get the Hutts to buy her for him, or pirate her if he had to. He'd add a military-grade rectenna and swap out the light laser cannons for quads. He'd plant a retractable repeating blaster in her belly to provide cover fire for quick getaways. He'd install a couple of concussion missile launchers between the boxy forks of her prow ...

Not once did it occur to him that he would win her from Lando. Much less that Lando would lose her on a bluff.

Piloting the modified SoroSuub he and Chewie leased from Lando had only added to his longing for the ship. He imagined her origins and the adventures she had been through. It struck him that he was so accepting of her from the start, he had never asked Lando how or when she had acquired the name Millennium Falcon.

end.