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  She put one hand on the back of his and seized his index finger with her other hand. She bent his finger up, a sudden, all-out effort, and bones snapped.

  He started to look at his stricken hand, started to make a pained noise, but she immediately drew her blaster, thumbed its side switch to make sure it was still set on stun, and fired into his stomach. The stun bolt briefly illuminated the alley and his shocked expression. Then he fell.

  She looked down at him and holstered her weapon. “Sorry, Army. My heart belongs to Starfighter Command.” Then she stepped over him and returned to the street.

  It took her quite a while to get home. She took a circuitous route, making sure she was not being followed. In another dark alley, sure she was not being watched, she discarded her wig and outer garments, shoving them deep into a waste bin. She broke the seal on a packet, half the size of a deck of cards, that was always to be found in her footwear, and unfolded its brown polyfilm contents out into a voluminous hooded robe. She left the alley a different woman—hair black, garment brown, feet bare.

  There were more trooper patrols out on the streets, joined by Pop-Dog patrols, as she traveled the rest of the way to the Wraiths’ rented shop. Several of them looked at her as she passed, but none spoke to or followed her. She entered the office building sure she was in the clear.

  After a quick sanisteam to remove the last traces of her disguise, she checked her datapad for messages and found one—a large file, encrypted, from Bhindi.

  The text portion merely said, “This needs to get on the general’s desk fast. Mysteriously.”

  The video file attached to it showed an elegant Imperial Navy commander, as white-haired as Myri had been an hour earlier. He looked straight into the holocam and spoke, his voice cultured, confident, and cool. “General, in the recent past you have done some excellent work in the support of certain parties. I am the new intermediary on these issues. My name is Commander Avvan Hocroft. We need to speak face-to-face. The embedded time and location coordinates are where you can find me. I’ll be there with a small patrol vessel. Please try not to awe me with matériel superiority. This is a friendly conversation.” Hocroft offered a smile that was not entirely friendly, and the message ended.

  Myri pondered the message. That had to have been Turman on the recording, but she could see no sign of the Clawdite she knew in the commander, which was a good thing.

  Getting the message onto Thaal’s desk would not be difficult. She’d transmit instructions to the growing legion of housekeeping droids now serving the Wraiths. Then all she had to do was get close enough to the army base’s outer perimeter to throw or launch a datacard past those defenses so that one of the droids could pick it up and transport it.

  Wouldn’t Thaal research the Commander Hocroft name? Well, Bhindi had to have thought of that. If she, Myri, wasn’t supposed to address that issue, perhaps Face was.

  GALACTIC ALLIANCE NAVY COMMAND COMPLEX, CORUSCANT

  The naval lieutenant was a Bothan. He had nearly pure-white fur, rare for his kind; that and his build, lean and muscular, had to have made him very popular on the social scene, Face thought.

  But now, if Bothans could sweat, he’d be sweating. He glanced up and down the corridor, lightly trafficked by other uniformed naval personnel. “If I get caught ...”

  Face grinned at him. “You’re twenty times as likely to get caught because you look like you’re going to be caught than you would be if you looked like you had nothing to be caught about.”

  The Bothan paused before a closed door; its sign read archive routing. He frowned. “I have no idea what you just said.”

  “Davian, forget it. If they catch us, you tell them that I’ve volunteered to give you an application that scans unclassified reports for embedded language used to convey secret information to enemy spies.”

  “But you haven’t.”

  “It’s on my datapad. It’s twenty years old ... but the navy doesn’t have it, so they won’t know that.”

  Davian frowned, considering that, and pressed his palm to the biometrics plate beside the door. A moment later he put his left eye up to the tiny red peephole at the top of the plate. The door slid open, and both men went through. Beyond was a brightly lit, shiny-clean, impersonal office—one desk, two chairs, wall-mounted shelves sagging under the weight of stacks of flimsi.

  When the door slid shut, Face sat at the computer monitor. “You have the records handy?”

  “Queued up in the search box labeled TUBER SPOILAGE.”

  Face snorted. “Good choice. Not many people are going to be curious enough to give that a close look.”

  “Right. But first ... your datapad. The application.”

  “Oh.” Face drew the device from his breast pocket and slid it across the desktop. “Top menu, JABBEER SIX.”

  “Thanks.” Davian sat at the opposite chair and fumbled in his own breast pocket for a datacard, which he slid into the appropriate slot on the datapad. He selected functions to transfer the application to his card. “We have only until my captain gets back. Less than an hour.”

  “I’m not going to get you in trouble.” Face began flipping through onscreen records—cargo manifests from the naval cargo vessels that had disappeared during the last few years.

  “I can take trouble if I have to. Thirty years back, you did my parents a big favor, and I’m happy to pay it back. I just want to keep my commission, too, if at all possible.”

  “Fair enough.” Face reached the last manifest. “Fewer than I’d thought. Eighteen.”

  “Eighteen in three years, Alliance vessels. That’s a fivefold increase from the three years before CivWar Two.” Davian ejected his datacard and pocketed it. He shut Face’s datapad. “But the cargoes themselves were pretty valuable. These pirates weren’t stealing canned bantha-meat hash.”

  Face flipped back through the manifests more slowly, giving each a closer look. “Can I get printouts of these?”

  “No, sorry.”

  “No matter. Your people haven’t found any connections among the missing ships or their cargoes?”

  “Plenty of connections. All Alliance cargo vessels. All of ship classes that require small crews for their tonnage. All traveling solo or with escort vessels only, not as part of a matériel convoy. There’s always some real value in the cargo.”

  “But no type of matériel, or manufacturer, or receiving base common to all of them? Not every crew has a Hutt navigator from the Backstabbo family?”

  Davian snorted. “No.”

  Face remained silent for several minutes. Then a manifest entry he didn’t understand fell under his eye. “What’s a secure privacy type?”

  Davian shrugged. “I have no idea.”

  “One secure privacy type, origin Badfellow Station, destination Coruscant naval yards. Manufacturer, Sub-Capital Division.” Face frowned. “I don’t recognize that manufacturer. And isn’t Badfellow Station just a cargo-routing hub?”

  Davian nodded. “A civilian routing yard that does some contract warehousing and redistribution for the navy.” He stood and moved to stand behind Face, staring over his shoulder. “It shouldn’t be the origin of anything. Oh, look.” He pointed at the on-screen field that read BADFELLOW STATION. “You see the little number one at the upper right corner of the field? That’s a subfield reference number. Tap that.”

  Face did, and the field changed, the words in it being replaced with a new one: KUAT.

  Davian smiled with the pride of a middle manager who had solved a problem no lesser person could unravel. “That happens sometimes. The idiot who put together this manifest typed the secondary data in the primary field and vice versa. The item, whatever a secure privacy type is, originated on Kuat and was routed through Badfellow Station, not the other way around.” He returned to his chair.

  Face stared at him, silent, for a few seconds. Then, troubled, he began tapping other fields on the screen. “Seems to have happened a few times here. Secure privacy type—aha. It’s a s
hip’s hypercomm system. Secure privacy type now makes sense. It has to be a one-person enclosed model, so the ship’s captain or comm officer can enter it and not be observed by the rest of the bridge crew.”

  “That does make sense.”

  “And the manufacturer, Sub-Capital Division—again aha. The subfield says HyperTech Industries. Look that up for me, would you?”

  Davian patted himself down, scowled, and, realizing that Face’s datapad was still on the desk before him, opened it. He tapped his way through a quick search. “An Alliance military contractor based out of Kuat.”

  “Can you run a search on all these manifests and include all the subfields?”

  “Of course.”

  “Can you first swap the data between the primary fields and the subfields?”

  “I am the living master of the database, Face. Trade places with me.”

  Five minutes later they had their answer. Every Galactic Alliance Navy cargo vessel that had disappeared in the last three years had in its cargo manifest a HyperTech Industries device of one sort or another, usually a hypercomm unit, sometimes a hyperdrive or a power booster.

  The two men stared at each other.

  Davian no longer looked nervous. Now he looked regretful. “I have to tell my superiors.”

  “Yes, you do. But not yet. I have friends in the field looking into this issue.” Face pitched his voice to its most persuasive tones. “If you tell your superiors, and an investigation starts, the people my friends are looking at will get nervous. They’ll cover their tracks. They may even turn lethal.”

  “But—”

  “I’m not saying you have to bury this information. You just have to sit on it for a while. Until I give you the go-ahead. Then you ‘discover’ it and hand it over to your superiors. All credit goes to you, the investigation starts, the piracy ends, and the naval brass knows who to reward for it. But not yet.”

  Davian winced. “How long are we talking about? A few days?”

  “A few days.” Six months at most. Face didn’t add that qualifier. Davian would have to accept his restraints a bit at a time, leading him down a slippery slope of cooperation with Wraith Squadron.

  “Well ... all right. Done here?”

  “I’m done here.” Face pocketed his datapad. “Thanks for everything.”

  “I’ll walk you out.”

  As they left the archive room, Face, last out and unseen, slipped another device from his trouser pocket—Davian’s missing datapad. He left it on a shelf.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Face’s stylish black airspeeder, its viewports tinted almost to opacity, at least as seen from the outside, rose from the naval command center’s landing area. It glided slowly above the field of parked speeders until it entered a traffic lane, then accelerated.

  A few hundred meters away, an innocuous blue speeder, also closed-top, rose from a landing area atop a shops-and-restaurants building and entered the same traffic stream from above.

  The pilot, an adult human, blond and boyish-looking, kept his eye on the black speeder ahead. “I say a kilometer.”

  The individual in the passenger seat beside him, a squat Sullustan, his face looking even more like sagging, melted layers of a dark dessert than was usual for his species, frowned. “Wait, wait. How soon do you sample after it goes off? Time plays a role here.” He spoke in his own language. To most ears it would have been mere musical jabber, but the pilot understood and shook his head.

  “Assume optimal time for maximum expansion.”

  “No wind?”

  “For this hypothetical example, no wind.”

  The passenger in the rear seat, a large Aqualish covered in a cumbersome brown robe, leaned forward, thrusting his head between those of the two speakers. His tusks, his insectile eyes, and the scales of his body, which were waxed and buffed to a high sheen, gave him a ferocious aspect. He, too, spoke in his own language. “What’s the bet?”

  The pilot smiled. “Sit an Ortolan on top of a thermal detonator—standard yield—and set it off. How high up in the atmosphere will you then be able to detect traces of the Ortolan?”

  The Aqualish turned toward him. “Traces? You mean pieces? There would be no pieces left.”

  “No, no. I mean chemical traces.”

  The Aqualish growled, a deep rumble in its chest. “Chemicals are a myth.”

  The pilot paused, considering how best to offer a negative reply to that assertion.

  The Sullustan saved him from the awkwardness of his situation. “Tell him you mean dust.”

  The pilot nodded. “I mean dust.”

  The Aqualish seemed to accept that answer. “No wind?”

  “No wind.”

  The Aqualish pondered. “Betting is stupid. Only way to find out for sure: get me an Ortolan and a thermal detonator.”

  “Well ...”

  “We do it right after we kill Face Loran.”

  The pilot nodded. “Good idea. I’ll find us an Ortolan. You find us the thermal detonator.”

  “All right.” The Aqualish settled back in his seat.

  Face glanced at his control console, at the small monitor showing the rear holocam view, and continued dictating. “I pulled the old Here, hold my recorder and speak clearly scam. With a twist—I’d palmed his datapad, so when he needed to look something up he used mine, entering passcodes that gave my application access to the computer system. Which put me past most levels of security right there. So the Commander Hocroft references are planted and propagating. What’s funny is that my cover story may have yielded useful results, too. I actually found a link between the cargoes of all Alliance Navy vessels hijacked since the end of the war. Each was carrying a large, expensive electronic component, usually a hypercomm unit, manufactured by HyperTech Industries of Kuat. Since Jesmin has been looking into that issue, you might pass that fact on to her.” Face changed his voice from a narrative tone to a conversational. “Got all that?”

  “Transcribed.” It was a female protocol droid’s voice, affected and precise.

  “Good. Where was I? Oh, that was the end. No, add this.” He changed back to a narrative tone. “My asset tells me that HyperTech landed its military contract well before the exposure of the Lecersen Conspiracy, so it’s unlikely that this has anything to do with the general. Still, one member of the conspiracy, Haydnat Treen, was the Senator from Kuat and had a lot of influence there. She could have helped the company land that contract, so there may be some connection of some sort. I just don’t know why she’d do that if all the conspirators wanted the company for was to commit acts of piracy.” He paused, deciding whether he needed to add anything, and chose not to. He switched back to conversational tone. “End message. Standard closures. Encrypt and transmit it immediately.”

  “Yes, sir. Encrypted. Transmitted.”

  “How’d I do?”

  “Three you knows, four where was I’s, and not a single um or uh.”

  “Better than usual, then. You know, the other day I met a protocol droid who wasn’t allowed to talk.”

  “Terrible. That would be like an astromech with its mathematical functions disabled.”

  “Wouldn’t it? So there’s a protocol droid who can’t talk, and I have a speeder with the brain of a droid who can. I think I like my way better.”

  “You say that, but you don’t let me follow you around in your quarters.”

  “True. Bad for the furniture. You understand.” Face cast another look at his rear holocam view. The blue speeder was still tailing him, not closing, far enough back that even some practiced eyes would miss it. “Tell me, have I backed you up lately?”

  “Not in eight days.”

  “Commence remote backup immediately. Also, run a search and tell me the nearest high-density pedestrian zone—a walkway market, a music festival in a plaza, anything crowded and confusing.”

  “Which has priority?”

  “The search.”

  “Hey.” The blond human pilot frowned as th
e black airspeeder dropped out of its traffic lane, banked, and descended into a lane headed to the right. “Wonder if he’s made us.”

  “Hunh.” The Aqualish’s noise was a grunt of disagreement. “You’re too good.”

  “But it’s clear he’s not headed for home any longer.”

  “I don’t like that.” The Aqualish sounded even more disagreeable. “I want to kill the wife and daughter, too.”

  The pilot chose another speeder taking Face’s route. He moved up close behind the vehicle, using it to obscure Face Loran’s view of him until he entered the new traffic lane. “Why?”

  “Those tail-things on their heads.”

  “Brain-tails. Or lekku, in the Twi’lek language. What about them?”

  “I always wonder, if you pull on them hard enough, will they rip right off? Arms and legs do.”

  “Well, I tell you what. Kill Face Loran nice and neat, and you can kill one of the Twi’leks, too. Find us a thermal detonator for our experiment and you can kill both.”

  “You are a good man. I like working with you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But I want more money.”

  The pilot sighed.

  Face’s speeder banked again, darting between two widely spaced apartment blocks. The blond pilot saw a bright patch ahead, what had to be a comparatively open area. He followed Face’s speeder and emerged from between the buildings onto the edge of a vast plaza. The plaza’s rim was gridded off into landing areas and loading zones for speeders, while the center was crammed with portable durasteel-and-duraplast stalls, brightly decorated with flashing signs and colorful banners. At this midday hour it was thick with shoppers on foot. The pilot considered what he was seeing. “A pedestrian market,” the pilot said.

  “I expected a market like that to be bigger on Coruscant. It should be kilometers long!” There was a note of contempt in the Aqualish’s voice. “I’ve seen bigger on itty-bitty worlds.”