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Qui-Gon inhaled through his nose. “Did he bear any special grudge against the Trade Federation?”

Luminara shook her head. “No more than anyone else in my home system. The Trade Federation brought us into the Republic, though they did so at the expense of my world’s resources.

“In the beginning, Arwen Cohl would hire himself out only to those whose cause he felt was justified. But over time—no doubt because of the blood he shed—he became nothing more than a pirate and a contract killer. He was said never to have betrayed a friend or an ally.”

She paused for a moment, then added, “It is regrettable that history will remember the criminal Cohl rather than the exemplary Cohl. I was sad to hear that he had perished at Dorvalla.”

When Qui-Gon didn’t respond, Luminara asked, “Did he not?”

Qui-Gon appeared preoccupied. “For now, I’ll grant that he vanished at Dorvalla.”

Luminara nodded uncertainly. “Whether Cohl is dead or alive, the matter is in the hands of the Judicial Department, is it not?”

Again, Qui-Gon took a moment to respond. “All that is certain is that Cohl’s destiny is in hands other than mine.”

Carbon scored and blistered by the explosion that had sundered the freighter, an arc of the Revenue’s starboard hangar arm hung over Dorvalla’s wan polar cap. Just outside the reach of the planet’s shadow, the great curve of durasteel appeared to have been there forever. Perpetual sunlight poured in through the main hangar portal—where the arm’s hand might have been—illuminating a shambles of cargo pods and barges.

Affixed like a barnacle to the inner hull, however, sat a lone battered shuttle. Inside the shuttle, and even the worse for wear, sat her crew of eight.

“I’m still waiting for that pardon you promised,” Cohl said to Rella.

She shot him a look. “If and when you get us out of this, and not a moment before.”

They were each in their chairs, as were the others, some of them asleep, heads pillowed on folded arms or hung backwards with mouths ajar. Lighting was faint, the air was frigid, and the scrubbed and rescrubbed oxygen had a distinctly metallic taste.

The much-abused refresher was rank.

They had been inside the arm for almost four standard days, subsisting on food pellets and relieving the boredom by putting on EVA suits and venturing out into the hangar. Where the shuttle had artificial gravity, moving about in the arm was like exploring a deep-sea wreck. Many of the cargo pods had massed along the outer wall of the arm, but clouds of lommite and tangles of droids drifted about like flotsam and jetsam. Boiny had even discovered the body of one of the Twi’leks who hadn’t made it back to the rendezvous point, burned almost beyond recognition by blasterfire.

They hadn’t planned on remaining in the hangar arm after the explosion. But once it had been determined that the arm was just outside the tug of Dorvalla’s gravity, Cohl had decided that the hangar would be the best place to bide their time. The Hawk-Bat and the Nebula Front support ships had fled, and even the Acquisitor had disappeared—a fact that Cohl found curious, since it was unlike the Neimoidians to leave cargo behind, jettisoned or otherwise.

Another option would have been to race for Dorvalla’s surface, to what had been their base before the boarding operation. But Cohl suspected that the base had been discovered and would probably be under surveillance. When Rella and some of the others had suggested striking out instead for nearby Dorvalla IV, it was Cohl who reminded them that salvage and relief ships would be on their way to Dorvalla, and a lone shuttle, crawling through space, would certainly attract unwanted attention.

In fact, salvage crews had arrived within local hours of the explosion. Since then, Dorvalla Mining had been employing their ferries to gather up what cargo pods they could, though much of the lommite had plunged into the atmosphere, as if bent on returning home. The detached centersphere and the