This isn't exactly Tosche Station, huh?

Luke tossed his bag onto his bed as Artoo made concerned little noises and circled around him.

"I'm fine," Luke told him for the hundredth time. "The med droid wouldn't have let me go otherwise." He smiled. "And neither would Jo or Leia. It's just a little scrape."

Artoo let out a low whistle that showed Luke how unconvinced he was about that.

Luke peeked into the mirror. "You can hardly tell," he said, running his finger down the new scars on his face.

Stupid wampa.

He flopped down onto the bed and started catching up on the holodramas Leia had loaned him. The door was open.

Blood Brothers - Color Green

It turned out that the mission to Mustafar had been kind of a waste of fuel.

It'd taken the folks in Intelligence months to crack the coding around a captured Imperial file that mentioned the planet, so they'd figured that it must have held a weapons cache of some kind.

A dozen snubfighters had blasted into the system to discover...nothing. Well, a lot of volcanoes, but other than that nothing.

"I don't get it," Wes complained when they'd finally landed on Hoth to refuel. "Who puts that much effort into trying to make a planet that boring disappear?"

Luke shrugged, half to keep warm, half in agreement. "Is there a colder spot in the galaxy?" he asked Wedge in an undertone as his teeth beginning to chatter. "Seriously. This is a ball of ice."

Wedge laughed. "You missed the first time we were here," he said. "Bespin's close, too, but it has a nasty Imp infestation we're trying to avoid. Unfortunately Hoth gets better. We have to go out in the cold and put up sensors to make sure no one's sneaking up on us."

Ten voices behind them spoke in unison, "Not it!"

"Sorry, my friend," Wedge said, clapping Luke on the shoulder. "Do you mind?"

"Of course not!" Luke lied, climbing onto a tauntaun and heading outside. "Why would a guy from a planet with two suns mind being sent outside on the coldest planet in the history of anything?" he whined to himself when he was safely out of earshot. He slammed one of the sensors into the snow. "I love it when my nose might fall off."

The wind was blowing in the wrong direction for him to hear the wampa approaching, and the little prickle the Force sent him as a warning was hidden among all of his shivers.

The last thing he saw before everything went black were claws.