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She crouched down in front of him. "We tried every-thing, Jos. He took a piece of shrapnel in the brain stem. All his autonomic functions went out at once. He-" She swallowed, and bright tears overflowed her eyes again. "He just shut down-it was instantaneous. The last thought he must have had was that his que-tarra had been saved. He was..." She swallowed again. "He was smiling."

"Let me help you, Jos," a soft voice said. Jos looked up, saw the Jedi standing beside him. Behind her, leaning in the canted vehicle, watching soberly, were I-Five, Klo Merit, and a few others. Barriss put out a hand toward him. "I can’t bring him back. But I can help you deal with-"

"No," he said between clenched teeth. "No. I don’t want to feel better. My friend is dead.

Nothing can change that. Nothing is going to make that right, or bet-ter, or easier." He looked up at her. "Do you under-stand? I won’t be anesthetized. I owe him that much."

Tolk’s tears flowed freely now, and she reached out to touch Jos on the shoulder, but that wasn’t going to help, either. Blast this war! Blast the governments and the corporations and the military!

This could not go on. Something had to be done. He had to make sure that something was done.

Zan. Ah, Zan! How could you leave?

Column stared through the viewport in the transport, watching the militantly verdant swamp pass beneath them. The air scrubbers were strained to capacity, and still the stink of pollen and stagnant water seeped into the fetid atmosphere. Zan Yant was dead, and Jos Von-dar was injured. A shame. Yant had been an excellent artist, and a most likable fellow as well.

A shame. A real shame.

The message the spy had not gotten around to trans-lating earlier had been, of course, a warning of impend-ing attack. Column sighed. Would it have made any difference if the attack had been known of in advance? Maybe. Maybe not. It would have been nice to have been prepared mentally, even if there was nothing phys-ically that could have been done.

There was, and probably never would be, an answer to that. Column, Lens, the spy-use whichever name you liked-they all lived in a subtle, shirting world, a world in which black was far too often white, a world where loyalty could change on an almost quotidian basis, where friendships were both luxuries and liabilities - risks too great to be considered, much less taken.

Column frowned. Still objective enough, hopefully, to realize when procedural mistakes were being made. Was this one of those times? Was paranoia encroaching, gaining a foothold in that heretofore magnificently ob-jective brain? If so, it had to be resisted, fought against, and, ultimately, triumphed over.

Perhaps it was time to step up the plan. After all, it would do neither Dooku nor Black Sun any good to have their behind-the-scenes endeavors exposed.

Column nodded. It was a narrow strand of web to be walked, over a chasm deeper than time itself. But fail-ure, now more than ever, was not an option.

Barriss could not recall ever feeling more helpless - more useless-since she was a child.

She had saved Ji, had felt virtuous for that, only to have him wade back into the thick of battle as a berserker and be claimed by death anyway. True, it had been his choice, but still, the question would not leave her: could she have saved him? Would she have worked harder if he had been somebody she had liked, instead of somebody she de-tested? Personal involvement wasn’t supposed to matter to a Jedi. A Jedi was supposed to be able to control her feelings and do the right thing for the right reasons.

Would she ever be able to function at that level?

She had not been able to deflect the attack that had killed Zan-she hadn’t even felt it coming. And after the metal splinter had lodged in the base of his skull, she had still not been able to save him, though she had used every bit of the power supposedly under her control.

She could not even soothe Jos’s grief over the death of his friend. Even if he would allow it, did she have the ability? A few hours ago, she would not have doubted