Chapter 8: Tatooine's Merciless Sun

The ship dropped out of hyperspace wrong.

Arthur felt it before he heard it — a change in the vessel's voice, something below the range of ordinary sound that lived instead in the soles of his feet and the base of his jaw, a vibration pattern that had been steady and purposeful for hours becoming suddenly ragged, uneven, the rhythm of a horse beginning to favor a foreleg. He straightened from the viewport where he had been watching the hyperspace ribbon draw its impossible geometry across the dark and looked toward the cockpit.

Ric Olié's hands were already moving.