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The droid acknowledged with a musical chirp. And fewer than ten minutes later, just as Ben was finishing a chilled can of nerf steak stew, Shaker beeped again, a complex series of notes.

Ben pulled out his datapad and read:

YOU JUST SENT A COMM SIGNAL.

Ben scowled. “I did?”

OF LESS THAN ONE HUNDREDTH OF A SECOND’S DURATION.

“Was there a return signal?”

NO.

Ben glanced at the time in the corner of the datapad’s screen. There were two listings there, one local and one Coruscant, and the local time was exactly one standard hour short of noon.

Could his own datapad be betraying him? Or some other item of his gear? Quickly he unpacked everything from both backpacks, segregating the items into two stacks—everything he had examined before, and everything he hadn’t. He attacked the second pile, minutely scrutinizing each item.

He could probably find out the next day if his datapad were the tracking device. Assuming that the communications were taking place at the same time each day, he’d set his datapad aside just before noon, and he and Shaker would move several meters away. If the datapad sent a signal, Shaker could determine that it was that device and not something else on Ben’s person.

He methodically checked all the other items, too, to the point of shaking out his belt pouch over the pile of goods to make sure it was empty.

It wasn’t. Nothing more fell out, but the bottom of the pouch sagged oddly in his hand. The pouch seemed to weigh more than it should, if only fractionally.

He turned the pouch inside out and found the tracking device.

It looked like a small steel marble, albeit one with spindly spider legs that were threaded into the cloth of the pouch, holding it securely in place. One leg stretched to a length of six or seven centimeters.

Ben stared at it, perplexed. When had this been planted on him? Or, more to the point—since it looked like a mobile unit—when had it crawled into his pouch? It could have been at any point between the Jedi Temple and his arrival at Faskus’s camp. His mother’s words about spies accomplishing their tasks without ever being noticed came back to Ben, and he smiled. “Good job, spy,” he said.

Then he felt the eyes in the sky again. He checked his datapad. High noon exactly.

Except this time, the sensation of being watched did not fade after a few seconds. It intensified, and Ben could feel something with it, emotions of wicked amusement, a desire to commit mayhem.

He glanced up. There was a tiny dot up in the sky, in the center of the cloud cover blocking the worst of the sun’s rays from reaching the ground. “Shaker,” he said, “get under cover!”

Kiara, who had been disinterestedly finishing her can of spiceloaf sausages, looked up. She hadn’t said much in the last few days and didn’t say anything now, but she hopped up as Ben reached her.

That was when the first streaks of laserfire scorched the ground. Green bolts strafed the stand of stones a few meters to Ben’s right. Kiara shrilled a scream. Ben caught her up and leapt leftward, toward the near line of trees, sixty or more meters away.

The TIE fighter screamed past and began to loop around for another strafing run. Ben saw it as a blur—it was black, with some details, such as the ribs separating the panels on the solar wing arrays, in gleaming bronze.

He stopped. If he continued toward the trees, he’d be caught out in the open for the next pass. He reversed direction and ran toward the mound of stones; it offered the only protection close enough to reach.

He leapt behind a partially intact stand of rocks and peeked over. The TIE fighter was low, barely fifty meters aboveground, and coming straight at them. Shaker, waddling back toward the flat roadway, was an easy target, but the starfighter pilot ignored the droid.

Ben ducked down again as the TIE fired. The stones immediately to his right rocked and fell backward, landing next to him, propelled by the tremendous energy of the fighter’s turbolasers. Black smoke,