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As if he could possibly forget?

The Force allowed you to be a powerful fighter, but it also leavened your impulse to do violence. When you knew what you could do with your lightsaber, knew how deadly you were, it gave you pause. Because you could do a thing did not mean that you should...

She shook her head. Phow Ji was a killer, a seeker and savorer of violence, and whether he did it as some per-sonal challenge or because he enjoyed it really didn’t matter-it was a sickness. If she could touch his mind, bring the Force to bear upon his psyche, maybe she could cure him of this sickness.

Or maybe he could infect you with it.

She shook her head again, this time against her own thoughts. The constant pressure here, the intensity of the work, the lack of real rest... all these things took their toll. A Jedi who was worried that the Force couldn’t protect her against a trained thug was defi-nitely overfatigued. She should get to bed and sleep - she needed it.

In the distance, the thunder grew louder. Good. Maybe the rain would wash away some of these dark thoughts along with the spores and rot in the air...

15

Getting rid of the body on board the MedStar would have been easy. A little messy work with an industrial vibroblade, then a trip down to the waste station with a bulky, liquid-proof bag, and hatoo! Mathal, the dead human, would be no more than garbage by now, indistinguishable from the rest of the all-purpose trash that was sieved from waste disposers and even-tually spaced. But Bleyd knew that to have an agent of Black Sun mysteriously disappear, especially when he could be traced as far as Bleyd’s ship, would be bad. They would automatically suspect him-rightly so in this case-and having Black Sun turn a quizzical frown in his direction was not even remotely appeal-ing.

The problem was, there was no flunky Bleyd could trust to help him. The troops owed their fealty to the Republic, not to him personally. Droids’ cognitive mod-ules could be probed, and even after extensive repro-gramming their data banks might retain residual quantum imprints. Some of the ship’s personnel might be amenable to bribes, but there was no way to know if their loyalty would stay bought.

Which meant he had to do all that needed to be done himself.

Fortunately, he had considered his actions for some time and in detail; this left only the actual execution of his plan. It entailed some risks, but Bleyd felt it could be managed, with sufficient attention to each element.

The admiral first treated his own wounds-Mathal had been skilled enough with a blade to mark him. Bleyd had known that would be the case going in. It was the way of knife fighting-only a fool believed that fac-ing an opponent with a knife would end without blood-shed. In his case, the injury was not serious-two long, shallow cuts on his right forearm. The pressure of his thumb for a few minutes on the proper nerve ganglion had stopped the bleeding temporarily, and an applica-tion of synthflesh would finish the job.

His injuries attended to, Bleyd then put Mathal’s corpse into one of the carbon-freezing chambers in the quarantine section and sealed the body into a rectan-gular carbonite block big enough to show no sign of what was contained within. This he then holostamped with markings indicating that the block contained a set of defective harvesting enzyme converters. Sealing such volatile and active catalytical components for transport was normal enough. Then, with the help of a small antigrav generator, he moved it via the service lift tube to the aft cargo hold’s trash lock.

In theory, he could have shipped the dead agent to a chemical storage warehouse and had him shelved. As long as he paid the pittance of a fee, the block of densely interlaced carbon and tibanna atoms containing Mathal’s remains would sit stacked there forever, un-molested and uninspected.

But the body itself was of no consequence. The trick was to convince a skeptical Black