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Tripp frowned. “What, it’s a trap?”

“Not for us. And we need to make sure we don’t step into it.” Aeona pulled her blaster and checked its charge, then spun it around her finger and let it slip smoothly back into her holster. For an instant, she smiled. But only for an instant. “We’ll wait and watch, but we need to be ready to move.”

GROUP CAPTAIN KLICK STOOD STIFFLY AT ATTENTION, flight helmet gleaming black beneath his black-armored left arm. Oblivious to the pleas and curses, sobs and occasional screams from the captives in the Sorting Center behind him, he faced a huge slab of durasteel that sealed a starfighter-sized archway carved from the wall of this volcanic cavern. Soon enough, the slab would pull aside, and a Pawn would come to beckon, and Klick would be ushered into the Presence of Lord Shadowspawn.

To suffer the consequences of his failure.

Despite the durasteel gray of his little remaining hair, the deeply weathered creases of his face, and the smear of burn scar that rumpled his cheek and swept upward over the remains of his left ear, when he took off that helmet anyone who knew stormtroopers knew they were looking at something special. Klick was one of the original Fetts, a veteran of the Clone Wars from Geonosis to the Jedi Rebellion, and he was proud of it. This was his sole point of vanity; he never minded the slightly silly sound of his call sign, hung on him by a humor-challenged Jedi Padawan some twenty-five years ago. “Klick” was short for “kilometer,” a reference to his crèche identifier of TP—Trooper Pilot—1000.

The vast cavern around him had been expanded and shaped from the local meltmassif stone before being fusion-formed into a vault of black glass. Its walls and roof glimmered with cold green highlights, reflected from the gently bobbing flock of repulsor lightglobes that floated ten meters above the polished floor. Scattered across this floor were clots of prisoners, standing or sitting or lounging in as much comfort as could be had on the bare cold floor.

The prisoners were a motley group, from beggars to aristocrats, thieves to Rebel officers. These prisoners were the actual targets of the raids Klick’s defender wings had been conducting throughout the Mid Rim these past months, taking three or four here, a half dozen there, never so many that the Rebels might suspect. The loot taken on these raids—and the destruction left behind—was no more than camouflage, so that these prisoners would be written off by their families, their friends, and their respective planetary governments as missing and presumed dead in the resulting mass slaughter.

So that these prisoners could be permanently disappeared.

Disappeared here, to Mindor. To the Sorting Center of Lord Shadowspawn.

Behind Klick, four or five of the Pawns drifted among the prisoners, hems of their long robes trailing behind them. Here and there a Pawn might stop, the red-limned shadow of his broad crescent headgear falling across this prisoner or that. These Pawns never spoke, and their expressions never changed—couldn’t change, as their faces were only holomasks projected by their Crowns—but sometimes a pale hand would extend from a darkly voluminous sleeve. If the prisoner was lucky, a slicing gesture would bring a quick burst of blasterfire to the back. If the prisoner was less lucky, a long pale finger, laid upon his head, would indicate that this prisoner had been elected to the Pawns.

From the sudden whine of a neural stunner in the cavern behind him, Klick judged that another captive had just been so elected. Sure enough: shortly a pair of Pawns approached, dragging between them an unconscious human youth of fifteen or sixteen Standard years. The slab of durasteel retreated, then slid silently aside, revealing the fusion-formed corridor beyond. Klick remained at attention, without the slightest flicker of expression, as the Pawns dragged the youth past him, through the archway and down the corridor.

He had been waiting, at attention, ever since the defender wing