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I shuddered and drained my brandy snifter. “I saw him. He was that guy we took, the one we tried.” I fingered the coin. “You put this in his mouth.”

Jacob snatched the coin from my grip and held it aloft. “Right, I put this in his mouth.”

“But we left him in space.” I poured more brandy into my snifter and looked up at Jacob, ignoring the tightening knot of people closing in on us. “What did he mean, ‘Doom is coming to Courkrus’?”

Jacob snatched my brandy away from me and swallowed it all in one gulp. “I don’t know.” He put the snifter down again and tapped the rim for a refill. “I don’t know, but it is not good. Not good at all.”

Within twelve hours the story of the visitation had spread all over Vlarnya and had taken on a life of its own. I had people tell me what they had seen and got to listen to them describing a vision I know they never saw. Even when I said that was different from what I’d seen, they told me I was misremembering because I’d been drunk at the time. They knew what the truth was, and it really seemed to scare the bone right out of their spines.

No one was quite certain what it was they’d seen. Some thought it was a ghost, pure and simple, come back to haunt Nive for killing him. Others took the warning into account and wondered why a ghost would warn when he could have just struck and killed us all—if a ghost could actually do that. The warning seemed to worm its way into the minds of many, which was my intent. I wanted them to have been warned so when things started to happen, they would link them back to the warning.

I was pleased the first effort had so grand an effect, but I knew I couldn’t do that sort of thing again. While I might be able to use an illusion to throw off pursuit, simple ghostly comings and goings were not going to convince the Invids that it was time to abandon Tavira. The palmed coin provided solid evidence that convinced a lot of people of the veracity of the visitation. Because of that I decided that the next actions I took required physical proof of something going on, and a coin wasn’t going to do it. It was time for something a bit more direct and painful.

I waited until after Timmser and Caet had dragged me home from Crash and turned me over to Elegos before acting. Mumbling how he hoped I wouldn’t vomit on the bedsheets again, the Caamasi hustled me off and the two of them escaped lest they be asked to help clean me up. Once they were away, I slipped into the Jedi uniform, donned a hooded cloak and slipped out into the night. Using the Force I was able to blank the short term memory of those hotel staffers who did see me, leaving them with an innocent eight-second gap in their memories that covered my passage through the lobby.

Using the Force both in Crash and in the lobby was taking a risk at detection by Tavira’s advisors, but I was fairly certain there were none on Courkrus. She’d never given us one before and she had no reason to assume there was going to be a problem on Courkrus. To leave one here “just in case” would be to provide any of these groups with a chance to learn her secret and strike out on their own. For that reason alone I felt very safe in using the Force as I hunted.

My previous sojourns into the city served me well as I moved through less populated alleys and byways to reach some of the seedier areas of the Aviary. I reached inside to tap the Force, so I could expand my sphere of responsibility and locate someone who needed help. My intention, of course, was to help that person and take the criminals involved out of the holograph. It was like being back in CorSec, making a sweep through Treasure Ship Row, just without all the lights.

The difference was, this time, I had the Force as my ally. My sense of the city and the area around me became acute, allowing me to register the various life sources. Had I wanted to, I could have taken a census of crunchbugs or feral tuskettes in seconds. I didn’t, though—other data drew me on into the night.

When on patrol for CorSec, I’d been a predator