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Too much thinking, she realized too late. Ji leapt in again and, in a fast series of open-hand techniques, slapped her head, her torso, and her hip. The last hit was coupled with a foot hooked around her ankle. Bar-riss went down, hard, and the wet ground was only a lit-tle forgiving as she slammed into it.

Whatever might have happened next, as she scram-bled back up into a defensive stance, was interrupted by the too-familiar drone of lifters arriving. People came boiling out of their quarters, heading for their stations.

Those who noticed Ji and Barriss at all spared them lit-tle more than a glance.

"I think we’re done," Ji said. "My point has been made."

Barriss said nothing-she did not trust herself to. Her rage enveloped her like the mud.

She trembled under the weight of it. She could feel the dark side surging within her, whispering to her of how good it would feel, how easy it would be to let her rage fuel it and send it raven-ing for her enemy, to seize her lightsaber, leap after him and bisect him with a single downward slash of the singing energy blade...

Phow Ji had no idea how close to dying he was just then. Her rage was such that a flicker of a finger would suffice. He’d never know what hit him-and it would even be justice, in a fashion-was he not, after all, a killer?

Yes, he was-but Barriss Offee was not. It was one of the hardest things she’d ever done, but she did it-she re-sisted the dark side. She lost the battle, but won the war.

This time...

25

Admiral Bleyd paced. The chill he felt in his spine seemed as cold as interstellar space.

He had immedi-ately regretted crushing the spycam disguised as an in-sect; had he simply kept it, he might have been able to backwalk the guidance system memory and find out where it had come from. As it was, all he had for certain was the knowledge that somebody was spying on either Filba or him. Given the nature of the device, the opera-tor could be anybody within ten kilometers of the camp. Maybe Black Sun had an operative here? Or maybe it was one of his own people...

Bleyd growled deep in his throat. Somebody had poi-soned Filba, the autopsy had confirmed that, and Bleyd was not a believer in coincidences that large. The Hutt is murdered and there just happens to be a miniature spy-cam there to witness it? The probability of it wasn’t quite as high as that of a rogue planetoid smashing into Drongar in the next five minutes-but it wasn’t far be-hind. No, the two events were surely linked.

Filba had enemies, of course, and it could be possible that one had just happened to choose this time to repay an old debt, and then used the spycam to make sure it went down smoothly. But whoever had done it, and for whatever reasons, that person now had information linking the dead Hutt with Bleyd in a criminal enter-prise. No matter how he scanned it, that was bad. He had to find out who it was, get whatever recording there might be, and eliminate it-along with whoever had it.

He considered the possibility that it might be one of the enemy, but quickly dismissed the notion. It did not seem likely that a Separatist spy had managed to sneak into camp, poison Filba, and then hurry back to hide out in the marsh among the slitherers and saw grass, and watch it happen via the spycam. And what spy would have any interest in the goings-on at a Rimsoo? Nothing strategic happened here, save for the occasional ship-ment of bota. It was true that one of the transports had blown up, and, while there was no reason to assume Filba had anything to do with it, the rumor floating about the unit was that he had. Filba had been as warped as an event horizon-a fact that had evidently been fairly common knowledge. That could serve him, since he had been keeping the Hutt in reserve in case something went wrong with their black-market operation. He could have blamed the big slug for everything, and then Filba could have had an "accident" before his trial. And now...

Now that