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“Caf, please,” Ben said. “And kruffy pot pie.”

“Tap it out, son. And put in your credcard. No mistakes that way.” The proprietor tapped his ear as if suggesting he were hard of hearing. “You sound Coruscanti.”

Ben entered his order and slid his credcard into the slot at the table’s center. “I am. Mostly.”

“Two kinds of Coruscanti there are. Those that are happy for big open spaces, and those who can’t stand not being surrounded by close walls and tight streets.”

“I suppose so.” The table surface went ding and the word DECLINED, in red, was superimposed over the menu. Below it, more text read, ACCOUNT NOT FOUND. PLEASE INSERT ANOTHER CREDCARD.

“Hey,” Ben said. “Your table is broken.”

The proprietor moved over to look. He pointed at a symbol at the menu’s lower left corner, an animation of tiny blaster bolts crisscrossing, right to left and left to right. “No. Holocomm data link’s live. That means it’s checking all the way back to wherever your account’s supposed to be. And there’s no account to find. Got another credcard? Or coin?”

Ben felt in his pocket. There was one credcoin there, his last. He’d planned to get local coins through his credcard. He shook his head.

The proprietor gave him a sympathetic look. “Well, go ask your mother or father for more.”

The hunger Ben was feeling was graduating from mild to sharp and painful. “Maybe,” he said, “you could let me have my breakfast, and I’d get Dad to pay you back later today.” To his suggestion he added a sizable push through the Force.

The proprietor laughed. “I could. But after a year of doing that, I’d be out of business. Off with you, son.”

Ben sighed and left the table. He really was hungry now, and perhaps, he reflected, the hunger had kept him from concentrating and being able to affect the man. Or maybe Ben was just too weak because, like his father said, he hadn’t had sufficient Jedi training. Or maybe the proprietor was too strong-willed.

It didn’t matter. Ben resisted the urge to stomp his frustrations away as he left the café.

And now his plans needed further revision. Before reconnaissance, he needed food. And he needed to find out what had become of the special account that was supposed to be available to him for this mission.

Banking kiosks turned out to be no help. Twice he inserted his credcard in their slots and tried to access his account, but all he received was a cryptic ACCOUNT NOT FOUND screen. He tried to send a message to the establishment, but even a tiny data query would cost money if sent over a holocomm connection, and he had no money to draw on.

Well, that had to change. He had to, as his mother had put it so many times, acquire resources. And in this situation, that meant…stealing.

He hesitated over that. Stealing was wrong. Sure, everybody in his family had hijacked ships at one time or another, but those were always emergencies. Nobody stole for breakfast credits.

But this wasn’t just breakfast credits. He was on a mission, one he was proud to have been assigned, one that was important and might save the lives of Jedi and Guards…didn’t that make it an emergency?

He decided it did.

He drifted across the street to stand near the doors into the Crossroutes building. Perhaps someone would flash a credcard, Ben would see where he pocketed it, and he could follow the owner—

And what? He didn’t have his mother’s skills. He couldn’t pick someone’s pocket clean without that person feeling it. He could follow his target into a lonely corridor or alley, hit him over the head…but Ben’s already upset stomach rebelled at that notion. Suddenly he was a mugger, injuring or possibly killing someone in an effort to obtain pocket credits.

He shook his head. Hitting someone over the head for breakfast credits would be a mistake, and he couldn’t afford to make a mistake right now.

The answer came to him a moment later. A public conveyance airspeeder, striped red and yellow to make it even more conspicuous than the glowdot marquee reading FOR HIRE on