For once Han Solo was going straight. He and his Wookiee sidekick Chewbacca had abandoned interstellar smuggling for the safe, legitimate enterprise of running a holotheater for the insectoid natives of Kamar.

They should have stayed illegal. When they put on the wrong show, the Kamarites destroyed the holoprojector and nearly did the same for Chewie and Han, who had to blast off in their starship Millennium Falcon seconds ahead of a raging mob. They were dead broke.

But there's always work for a space-going freighter captain who doesn't ask awkward questions, and Han quickly got a job that would pay him a cool 10,000. It would also, he discovered when he made planetfall to pick up his cargo, earn him and Chewbacca summary execution. The Corporate Sector Authority could overlook many crimes, but the slave trade carried with it mandatory capital punishment.

Thanks to the quick thinking of Blue Max, computer-partner of Han's work 'droid Bollux, Han was able to turn the tables on the slavers and free their captives. All the same, he and Chewie were still penniless.

Figuring that somebody still owed him 10,000 credits, Han kept a rendezvous the slavers had arranged with their shadowy boss. They lovely girl who kept the date didn't fit his idea of a slave trader, and she wasn't. From Han's point of view, she was almost worse—for Fiolla was a full-fledged officer of the Sector Authority…most of whose laws he had broken or meant to break some day. But Fiolla needed Han and the Falcon for her secret mission to the distant planet of Ammuud, and she was prepared to ignore his past and future transgressions if he cooperated with her.

Still in pursuit of the elusive 10,000, Han accompanied Fiolla to Ammuud, escaping a determined kidnapping attempt on the way—only to find himself pitted against a hired gunman in a duel to the death!

It looked as if those 10,000 credits were going to be pretty hard-earned…