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A feeling of helplessness washed over Seha. This eager young officer clearly intended to jump aboard a white airspeeder and rush off to save the galaxy, and his suppositions were mostly wrong. She mouthed the words, You’re going to get yourself killed.

“No need to whisper.” He gestured around the chamber. “I made sure that the advocate–client confidentiality screens were functioning correctly, and I swept for listening devices.”

“You’re going to get yourself killed. You need to go home and start looking for a job.”

“I have a job. An unfinished job.”

“Look, um, I tried to kill Lecersen and Jaxton and all those Senators because I know the real ones have been kidnapped and these evil duplicates substituted for them, and I’m just trying to get rid of the duplicates.”

“Too late, Seha.” He moved to the door and keyed a code into its numeric pad, then stared into its retinal scanner. “I’m not angry anymore. It’s obvious you were just doing your duty.” The door slid up.

“Idiot.”

“I know you don’t mean that. Good luck.” Then he was gone.

Despairing, she put her forehead down on the tabletop.

That was how they found her, a couple of minutes later, the two security troopers. They hauled her to her feet. One, a dark-skinned human, gave her a close look. “Do you need medical attention?”

“I just need to learn how to keep my mouth shut. Forever.”

HIGH CORUSCANT ORBIT

PERHAPS IT WOULD HAVE BEEN BETTER IF THE GALACTIC ALLIANCE government could have kept the tragedy a secret.

But it wasn’t possible. Thousands witnessed it with their own eyes, as the GA naval frigate Fireborn passed between an orbital Golan gun platform and a hotel space station shaped like a child’s top.

The event was promising to become a media circus. The government had already announced that Fireborn had been diverted from its normal picket routes so it could personally deliver its most famous prisoner, Klatooinian terrorist/freedom fighter Grunel Ovin, to justice. The stargazing decks and lounges of the hotel were packed with the curious—some of them, to the delight of news directors, wearing or waving banners with slogans such as FREE GRUNEL or GA OUT OF HUTT AFFAIRS—as the frigate cruised past.

Then Fireborn exploded.

It was so sudden that for several long moments the witnesses had no idea what had happened. The arrowhead-shaped frigate, headed for a low Coruscant parking orbit, was abruptly replaced with something resembling a tiny white dwarf star. The fireball swelled out as the crowds staggered back from it, many hundreds of people shielding their eyes. Then, as vision cleared, they stared at the spot where Fireborn had been—the spot where nothing now remained.

Moments later the first pieces of heat-warped debris slammed into the transparisteel viewing walls of the hotel. The huge viewports shuddered, some of them dimpling or actually buckling from the impacts. Atmosphere spilled out into space, not enough immediately to endanger the hotel guests, but decompression alarms shrilled their message of impending disaster, adding to the chaos and confusion of the moment.

Terrified guests shrieked and stampeded away from the suddenly fragile-seeming barriers, squeezing in crushing numbers through bulkhead portals that promised to lead to greater safety.

The viewports held, their structural strength witnessed by the bravest or craziest of holocam operators present. Those operators also captured images of the wounded: hotel guests trampled by their fellows in the mad rush to safety.

Within minutes those images were being broadcast across all holochannels, breathlessly narrated by anchors and field journalists, only to be shoved aside by the final message of Grunel Ovin. It was broadcast from an emergency beacon apparently launched from Fireborn moments before the explosion. The message was received, recorded, rebroadcast, and annotated by news services all across Coruscant.

In the message, Grunel Ovin sat, proud and defiant, his green skin clashing with the gray prisoner jumpsuit his naval captors had given him,