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When we last left Luke, the Milliamp Falcon was being pulled down to the open collector of the Imperial Arem Star Workstation. Dec Vadic surveys the relic as Imperial Flunkies search for passengers...

"LS scan shows no one aboard, sir," was the report. Vadic was unconvinced.

"Send a fully equipped Ncheck squad on board," he said. "I want every inode checked out." He turned around (secondary channel) and stalked off.

On board the Milliamp Falcon, .Luke was puzzled. "They just walked in, looked around and walked off," he said. "Why didn't they see us?"

.Con smiled. "An old munchkin trick," he explained. "See that period in front of your name?"

.Luke spun around, just in time to see the decimal point. "Where'd that come from?" he asked.

"Spare decimal points lying around from the last time I fixed the floating point accelerator," said .Con. "Handy for smuggling blocks across file system boundaries, but I never thought I'd have to use them on myself. They aren't going to be fooled for long, though. We'd better figure a way outa here."

<< At this point (.) the dialogue tends to wedge. Being the editor and in total control of the situation, I think it would be best if we sort of gronk the next few paragraphs. For those who care, our heroes find themselves in a terminal room of the Workstation, having thrashed several Flunkies to get there. For the rest of you, just keep banging the rocks together, guys. --Ed. >>

"Hold on," said Con. "It says we have `new mail.' Is that an error?"

"%SYS-W-NORMAL, Normal, successful completion," said PDP-1. "Doesn't look like it. I've found the inode for the Milliamp Falcon. It's locked in kernel data space. I'll have to slip in and patch the reference count, alone." He disappeared through a nearby entry point.

Meanwhile, RS232 found a serial port and logged in. His bell started ringing loudly. "He keeps saying, `She's on line, she's on line'," said 3CPU. "I believe he means Princess LPA0:. She's being held on one of the privileged levels."

<< Once again, things get sticky, and the dialogue suffers the most damage. After much hand waving and general flaming, they agree to rescue her. They headed for the detention level, posing as Flunkies (which is hard for most hackers) claiming that they had trapped the Bookie executing an illegal racket. They reached the block where the Princess was locked up and found only two guards in the header. --Ed. >>

"Good day, eh?" said the first guard.

"How's it goin', eh?" said the other. "Like, what's that, eh?"

"Process transfer from block 1138, dev 10/9," said Con.

"Take off, it is not," said the first guard. "Nobody told US about it, and we're not morons, eh?"

At this point (.), the Bookie started raving wildly, Con shouted "Look out, he's loose!" and they all started blasting ROMs left and right. The guards started to catch on and were about to issue a general wakeup when the ROM blasters were turned on them.

"Quickly, now," said Con. "What buffer is she in? It's not going to take long for these..."

The intercom receiver interrupted him, so he took out its firmware with a short blast.

"guys to figure out something is goin' on," he continued.