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“I’ll tell you when I get back,” Bruit said.

He set off for the landspeeder he had left at the control booth, but he hadn’t gone ten meters when his left boot became hopelessly cemented in the mucky soup. He grabbed the thigh-high cuff of the boot, hoping he could simply pull it free, but he lost his balance and pitched to one side, sinking up to his right shoulder. He maintained that indecorous pose for some moments, while he daydreamed of what life might be like on Coruscant.

“You were right about things getting worse,” Arrant said when Bruit entered the office, muddy and in his stocking feet.

“I was also right about InterGalactic. The guidance droids show exactly what we expected to find.”

A grim expression marred Arrant’s handsome face. “This has gone far enough,” he said after a moment. “Bruit, you know that I’m a patient man, and basically a peaceful one. I’ve tolerated these acts of vandalism and sabotage, but I’ve reached my limit. The loss of those two shuttles … Look. Corellian Engineering just turned to InterGalactic for a shipment we couldn’t provide—no doubt, just as InterGalactic anticipated would happen.”

“It won’t happen again,” Bruit interjected. “I’ve shut down the launch zones, and I’m bringing in replacement crews.”

“You have one day,” Arrant said.

Bruit gaped at him.

“Eriadu has placed major orders with us and InterGalactic,” Arrant explained. “We’re expected to deliver by the end of the week, which gives us just enough time to get the barges loaded and jumped to hyperspace. This is a make-or-break contract, Bruit, and Eriadu is going to award it to whichever one of us can deliver on time and without incident. LL needs to get there first, do you understand?”

Bruit nodded. “I’ll have the shuttles up and running in one day.”

“That’s only the beginning,” Arrant said carefully. “It’s a sure bet you’re not going to root out the saboteurs by then, so instead of that I want you to arrange for us to reply in kind to InterGalactic’s actions.” He waited for Bruit to absorb his intent. “I want to hit them hard, Bruit. But I don’t want us to do the hitting directly.”

Bruit considered it. “I suppose we could turn to one of the criminal organizations. Black Sun, maybe.”

Arrant waved his hands in a gesture of dismissal. “That’s your area of expertise. The less I know about it, the better. I just don’t want us to be in a position where we can be blackmailed afterward.”

“Then we’re better off using freelancers.”

“Do whatever you need to do—and no matter what the cost.”

Bruit took a breath. “I’ve a feeling that Dorvalla isn’t going to be the same from this point on.”

Dressed in a lightweight utility suit and a black overcloak, its hood raised against teeming rain, Darth Maul strode down the main street of the company town Lommite Limited had assembled in the midst of what had once been a trackless tropical forest. Beneath the cloak, he wore his double-bladed lightsaber hooked to his belt, within easy reach should he need it. Dorvalla’s gravity was slightly less than what he was accustomed to, so he moved with an extra measure of grace.

A grid of permacrete streets, the town was a warren of prefabricated domes and rickety wooden structures, many of them lacking transparisteel in their windows. Music spilled from the entrances to cantinas and eateries, and folks of all description meandered tipsily down the raised walkways. The place had the feeling of frontier towns throughout the outlying star systems, with the routine mix of aliens, humanoids, and older-generation droids; sterility and contamination; repulsorlift vehicles operating alongside four- and six-legged beasts of burden.

The residents, all of whom either worked directly for Lommite Limited or were there to defraud those who did, projected the same mix of autonomy from the laws that regulated life on the Core worlds and enslavement to perpetual toil and poverty.

Unlike Coruscant, where beings hustled to and fro with determination, here reigned an atmosphere of purposelessness, of accidental life, as if the pitiful beings who had