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The lieutenant’s words came out in a desperate, disorganized string: “Didn’t. Predict. Regulations. Fire.”

Smoke, pooling up against the permacrete ceiling, triggered the hangar’s fire-control system. Articulated tubes descended from the ceiling, aimed, made a coughing noise, and emitted a tremendous quantity of gray-white fire-smothering foam.

Seha and the lieutenant were drenched in it. Seeing his uniform suddenly become matted with material the approximate consistency of dessert topping, seeing his once-natty hat adorned with a large triangular quantity of the stuff, Seha burst into laughter and couldn’t stop.

The lieutenant managed a few more disjointed words and then heaved a sigh. The tubes ceased spewing. The lieutenant’s pose of military competence irreparably shattered, he gave Seha an apologetic half grin. “All right. Start over. What do you need?”

Seha managed to bring her laughter under control. “Um, extend my access until I can get a mechanic in to look her over?”

“Consider it done. Twenty-four standard hours, maybe more pending your mechanic’s report.”

“And take a lady out to dinner? Once she’s cleaned up, that is.”

“Also done.”

“What is your name, anyway?”

“Javon Thewles. Lieutenant, GA Security.”

She held out a hand lightly insulated in foam. “Sela Dorn.”

OBRIDAGAR’S SIMULATOR PALACE, CORUSCANT

THERE WEREN’T MANY PLACES, MOFF DRIKL LECERSEN REFLECTED, where an aging man, far older than any active-duty starfighter pilot, could dress up in the uniform of a TIE fighter pilot with a unit designation forty years out of date and attract absolutely no attention.

Obridagar’s Simulator Palace was one such place. Lecersen, clad head-to-foot in that black uniform, wearing the unit patch of one of the squadrons that so famously and unsuccessfully defended the original Death Star in the Yavin system before most of the Palace’s patrons were born, walked the aisles of this curious establishment and nobody gave him a second look. The forbidding but anonymous helmet he wore concealed the gray hair, fierce bristly mustache, and military manner made famous by his many appearances on HoloNews broadcasts and addresses to those he governed within the Imperial Remnant.

The Palace’s main room and many of the branching side rooms were, of course, dominated by gleaming banks of the highest-quality civilian-grade flight simulators. The carapaces enclosed cockpits featuring state-of-the-art vidscreens and sound systems; their bases and ceilings were implanted with acceleration/deceleration simulators similar in design to the inertial compensators found in starfighters. Slide into a cockpit, issue a verbal command indicating which vehicle was to be simulated and which mission was to be flown, and the simulator would do the rest, reconfiguring the cockpit components and throwing up the video images appropriate to those choices. Elsewhere in the establishment, a patron could find room-sized simulators, rented by teams, that replicated the interiors of capital ship bridges and famous fleet actions.

Obridagar’s went a step beyond many similar businesses by encouraging costumes. So long as the uniform a customer wore was either from a decommissioned service or was more than twenty years out of date, it was permissible. So, in addition to tourists in glaringly mismatched colors or anonymous traveler’s robes and university students in whatever style had been predetermined to represent rebellion and individuality on a universal basis this season, there were customers in the uniforms of pilots, ship officers, and infantry of the Empire, the Rebel Alliance, the Old Republic, the Alderaan Royal Guards … Lecersen continued to be amazed at the variety of styles and the attention to detail that went into some of them.

He turned left down a side corridor. Five paces behind, two similarly anonymous TIE fighter pilots, not obviously accompanying him, followed. A few steps more and Lecersen reached a door flanked by potted plants and a handful of costumed ersatz pilots standing in a group and talking