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Leia put her head down in her hands. “That wouldn’t hurt so much if I didn’t suspect you were right.”

LUMIYA’S SATELLITE HABITAT

Alema felt a little ripple in the Force. It was of no more consequence than if a normal person had had a dream in which a menacing shape stood over her bed as she slept.

But Alema had long ago learned to trust incidents that seemed to be of little consequence. She threw off her bed-sheet and rose, then dressed hurriedly—as hurriedly as a being could with only one working arm.

The habitat was silent except for the hiss of atmosphere conditioners. Her chambers—rooms that had once been Lumiya’s—were dimly lit by night-intensity glow rods and held no terrors for her while she was awake. Casting out in the Force, she could feel nothing but the beautiful, malevolent furnace of power hundreds of meters beneath her, the wellspring of energy with which she would someday be able to balance the galaxy.

There was nothing to cause the ripple she had felt, but she had felt it.

She took one of the few working turbolifts up to the habitat’s top level, the observatory, with its curved shelves full of artifacts and its transparisteel dome facing the stars.

Reclining on a comfortable sofa, she relaxed into the Force, seeking any hint, any anomaly that would explain what she had felt. It was at times like this that the vast amount of dark side power down below was an impediment instead of a blessing—like a racing thruster engine, it offered many resources but tended to drown out all lesser noises around it.

Then she felt it again, the ripple.

Someone was hunting her. Someone was here to kill her.

She smiled. She had been hunted many times, but this was the first time she had ever been hunted in a place where she made the rules—all the rules.

ABOARD THE FRIGATE POISON MOON

Dician stared through the bridge’s forward viewports, which offered a view of stars—and irregular black patches obscuring expanses of stars. The black patches, she knew, were the largest of the asteroids in this field, receiving little or none of the light from this system’s sun.

Navigating an asteroid field in a 150-meter-long frigate using only passive sensors was not the easiest of tasks. Dician did not unnecessarily intrude on the concentration of Wayniss, her chief pilot. A male human, gray-haired and bearded, Wayniss was an aging pirate and smuggler who knew nothing of the Force, and who would have reacted incuriously to the news that his commander was a member of the Sith Order. He gave good value for his pay and remained loyal so long as the credits kept coming, making him reliable and predictable. Dician approved of him.

Now Wayniss tapped a command sequence into his keyboard. The main bridge monitor, just above the forward viewports, darkened into a view of the starfield before them, then began zooming. Moments later, it displayed a view, heavily pixilated at extreme magnification, of a roughly spherical asteroid—visible only as a crescent of faint sunlight.

Wayniss looked up to catch Dician’s attention. “Your target, Captain. Confirmed as the source of your tracer transmissions.”

“Excellent. Plot a course to the vicinity of that asteroid. Keep other asteroids between it and us as long as possible—I want little or no direct line of sight on us.”

“Stealth approach. Understood.” Wayniss turned back to his keyboard and began plotting out the complicated approach.

“Sensor reading.” That was Ithila, the Poison Moon’s sensor officer. A Hapan woman of middle years, she was lean and beautiful—but for the pattern of livid burn scars that crisscrossed the right side of her face, the result of an explosion aboard a Battle Dragon during the Yuuzhan Vong War. An allergy to bacta had prevented her from eliminating the scars, and the Hapan cultural revulsion for anything damaged had sent Ithila into self-imposed exile.

Dician cleared her throat. “Perhaps some more information would be in order.”

Ithila glanced at her captain, evidently trying to gauge whether