The fabled hoard of the mad tyrant Xim was beyond measure—it was also, as far as Han Solo and his Wookiee partner Chewbacca were concerned, strictly legendary. But the pleadings of an old spacebum who had once saved his life—plus the fact that a trifling misunderstanding had set the deadliest gunman in the galaxy on his trail, making a secret expedition to almost any place seem highly desirable—were enough to grab Han Solo's interest.
But within hours of landing on the planet rumored to hold the treasure, Han's beloved spacecraft Millennium Falcon was hijacked, and his party had to content with assassins and an army of killer robots.
This was no way, Han Solo felt, for a pair of honest smugglers to make a living…
Han Solo and Chewbacca are back on hard times, having squandered their "reward" for breaking up the slavery ring within the Corporate Sector Authority. Once again, the smuggler duo is teamed with the elderly labor droid, BLX-5, and the computer probe, Blue Max.
A quick job nets the smugglers 1,500 credits and lands them on the University world of Rudrig in the Tion Hegemony. Here, Han and Chewie encounter Alexsandr Badure, an old smuggler who had once saved their lives. Badure has fallen on hard times himself and has been working contract labor at a quasi-legal mining camp on the planet Dellalt, where he has befriended two sisters, Hasti and Lanni Troujow. Lanni, a pilot, has discovered what they believed to be the log-recorder disk from the long-lost Queen of Ranroon, the fabled treasure ship of the warlord Xim the Despot. Millennia earlier, the Queen and her cargo of treasure, and a legion of Xim's war-robots, were lost en route to Xim's sprawling treasure vaults on Dellalt.
Badure needs Han and Chewbacca for a mission, taking himself and Hasti back to Dellalt, along with the Ruurian professor Skynx, whose job was to translate the disk and lead them all to the treasure. Lanni stashes the disk in a lockbox at the vaults, before being murdered by the mine operators, who pursue Badure and Hasti to claim the disk and treasure for themselves.
Han is being pursued by Gallandro, the deadliest gunman in the galaxy, who was bent on avenging a point of honor with Han over their dealings in the Corporate Sector. Shortly after arriving on Dellalt, the mine operators manage to steal the Millennium Falcon and take it back to the mine to search for the disk. Han's party decides to hike across several hundred kilometers of Dellatian open country to reclaim her. Along the way, they met up with the Survivors, a clan of inbred Humans who have evidently lived in the mountains for generations and kept their existence secret.
The 2018 film Solo: A Star Wars Story references Han Solo and the Lost Legacy; in the film, the mytag crystal masthead of Xim the Despot is one of the artifacts aboard the First Light.
- ISBN 9780345287106; August 12, 1980; Del Rey; US paperback
- 3398; October 1980; Del Rey; US hardcover, Book Club Edition
- ISBN 9780345345141; December1997; Del Rey; US paperback, reissue
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