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She nodded. “That’s as I was told.”

“Is there any access you require that is being denied you? A single word from me and—”

She dared to interrupt him. “I know. I’m getting closer. It won’t be long. I can feel it.”

“Through the Force? I didn’t realize you were that close.”

“Not the Force,” she told him. “Instinct. Something different from the Force. Call it feedback from a lifetime of doing this.”

“I know that you live long. May you continue to do so.”

Now she did bow slightly. “To serve you, Lord Vader.”

The helmeted head dipped a bit in return, then drew back. “The dog can learn after all, it would seem. Encouraging. Go now, dog, and return with the bone I sent you to find.”

For a second time she bowed. Then she grinned mirthlessly, turned, and stalked out of the room.

It had not been a conventional meeting, but it had been a useful one. Leaving, she felt she had shown something of herself to the Dark Lord. And any encounter with Darth Vader that did not result in the death or maiming of the visitor could be accounted a successful one.

thirteen

The Ploughtekal Market was probably not the biggest on Imperial Center, but then, it was hard to say for certain, since no one had ever measured its full extent. Furthermore, its physical boundaries and the density of merchants to whom it was home were constantly shifting. Those who did their business there, and often lived there as well, were reluctant to extend much cooperation to the authorities. If they could be censused, they could be taxed.

It was said of Ploughtekal that you could find anything in the galaxy within its hive-like depths. Legal, illegal, unimaginable: it was all there for those who knew how to work the innumerable streets and multiple levels. A large number of shops were not even listed on the electronic registries. You had to find them the old-fashioned way: by walking and asking directions.

Word moved almost as fast by mouth on the streets and avenues of Ploughtekal as it did via holocast. Intel would reach the sector police of an establishment engaged in especially antisocial dealings, and by the time the cools had arrived at the indicated location, the entire business would have pulled up stakes and vanished—only to reappear somewhere else, kilometers away and levels up or down, under a completely different name and appearance. It was a game with hundreds, thousands of continually moving pieces, like a stadium full of dejarik masters all playing on one another’s games simultaneously.

It was, in other words, a place that Den Dhur considered nothing less than designer hell.

The street was narrow and crowded with merchant booths hawking everything from strips of roasted hawk-bat to risqué holos, and made even more crowded by the heterogeneous assortment of sentients appraising these wares. The cacophony of shouts, squawks, hisses, moans, stridulations, and other means of communication made Den fearful of getting an earbleed. Add to that the heady, humid reek of open-air cooking, from Gungan bouillabaisse to Wookiee luau, spices, death sticks, stimsticks, other mind-altering vectors, and, as always, the staggeringly multi-phasic stench of unwashed bodies, and the result was a full-out synesthetic assault. It made his time on Drongar seem pale by comparison.

As he walked Level H-26, Den studied the readout on the compact Multi-Tasking Assistant, or MTA, that he carried. It contained a list of all the components Jax required in order to put together a rudimentary lightsaber. They were the absolute minimum items necessary to construct the elegant and deadly instrument that identified a Jedi. A second list accommodated those components that would make the final construct not just functional, but also worthy of its owner.

The cheap pack that jounced against his back was half full. Certain parts were innocuous enough—focusing lenses and an emitter; a superconductor and a power cell—and therefore comparatively easy to obtain.