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Jaina switched off the comlink and mouthed a curse. She glanced at Jag. “I'm sunk.”

“Maybe not. Maybe the Empire can rescue a Jedi.” He reached over and plucked the comlink from her fingers, and smiled at her startled expression. He thumbed the comlink on. “Who's out there?” He made his own voice hoarse, sleepy.

Jaina stared at him.

“It's Dab. Dab Hantaq,” Dab said.

“Where's my blaster?”

Jaina caught on and suppressed a laugh. As she'd heard her mother say many times over the years, she said, “It's under your pillow. Where it always is.”

“Give me just a second. All right, let him in. I'm going to burn a hole right between his eyes.”

“Jag, he's only doing his duty—”

“Vape his duty. Come to think of it, vape the neat little hole between his eyes. I'm going to burn his face clean off. Closed-casket funeral for him, diplomatic immunity for me. Let him in.”

Dab's voice emerged from the comlink: “Um, Jedi Solo, I'm satisfied that you're here. I'm just going to mark this one as confirmed.”

Jaina breathed a silent sigh of relief. “Thank you, Dab. Good night.”

“Good night.”

She took the comlink back and switched it off. “Staying ahead of the Moffs is keeping you sharp.”

* * *

Wearing workmen's jumpsuits similar to Seff's, Jag and Winter clambered down through the street-level access hole into the underground just in front of Valin's prison. Jag pulled the hatch closed above them.

This was a well-maintained maze of permacrete tunnels, metal pipes, access hatches, and machinery, some of it ancient. None of the tunnels headed in the direction of the prison.

“Which is as it should be,” Winter said. “Tunnels to and from the prison would mean a higher rate of escapes.”

Jag looked up and down the passageways leading from the access. “So what has Seff been doing? We haven't seen any sign that he's been removing debris.”

“Let's find out.”

Half an hour's exploration revealed some of what Seff had been up to. An electronics junction box that was suspiciously free of grime held an oversized, very powerful datapad recently patched into the box's electronic components. Winter activated it, spent a few minutes bypassing its simple security, and then flipped through the presets in its programming. Each showed a length of permacrete tunnel, walls at right angles to an almost blemish-free floor, dim glow rods in a line across the ceiling. One preset displayed a simple diagram of the underground area, showing the leading edge of the prison and a spot a quarter kilometer away joined by some sort of access tunnel.

“Got it,” Winter said. “It's a riot raid tunnel.”

“Which is what, exactly?”

“It's a tunnel with only two accesses. One is at the prison, and it can't be opened from the prison side. It's probably not even detectable as a door on the prison side—it'd be disguised as a permacrete wall, maybe in a storage area. The other end goes straight to a law enforcement station of some sort and can only be opened from inside the station. If there's a prison riot or mass breakout and the prisoners take over, the authorities have a fast, secret way to get into the prison.”

Jag considered. “So he's sliced into the holocams observing the tunnel and probably subverted them—and he may have already drilled an access into the tunnel itself. He'll be working on a bypass for the prison-end door next.”

“That's it. He goes into the prison from this access, thaws Valin, brings him out the same way. Minimal fuss. But how does he find Valin?”

“Through the Force. Jaina says she can feel him, even in his present comatose state. More significantly, how did he find out about this tunnel?”

Winter shook her head. “I'm not sure. Back in the days of the Old Republic, Jedi sometimes helped the authorities in suppressing riots like this. Perhaps he found a reference to such an event in the Jedi Archives?”

“I'll ask Jaina to look into that … Can you keep Seff's holocams from recording? If there's an access into that tunnel, we need to go down there.”

“I can.”

Seff's access was easy to find. A sheet of durasteel with weld marks all along its