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Bleyd stopped pacing and smiled. Yes. This could turn out to be an advantage after all.

Even a killer storm watered the garden.

But if the spycam’s operator was in the camp, as Bleyd suspected, that was a bantha of a different color. He - or she, or it-might seek to use the information against Bleyd-and that, of course, could not be allowed.

So. The hunter had evidence of prey. Bleyd bared his teeth. Let the tracking begin...

Den Dhur went where he usually went to work out his problems-the cantina. But even sitting there in the semidarkness, feeling the damp sluggish air, reluctantly stirred by the circulators, sliding over him like hot oil, he barely sipped at his drink. Now was not the time to dull his perceptions or his wits. Such as they were.

Filba was history, and so was Den’s story-nobody wanted to read an expose about a dead Hutt on a one-rocket planet. The masses wanted their bread and cir-cuses. A nefarious gangster revealed, captured, and punished-that was the good stuff, that was what sold newsdiscs. But Filba dying of pump failure, or even be-ing poisoned by an old enemy, before he was brought to justice? That wasn’t what the readers wanted, not at all.

As he’d suspected, Bleyd had been in on whatever skulduggery had been going with Filba.

That was a great story-but one he couldn’t dare file until he was at least fifty parsecs away, the enmity of angry, crooked, and feral admirals being generally bad for one’s health. Still, the stone hidden in the stew was that the admiral knew somebody had seen and heard what had hap-pened just before Filba was shuffled off back to the pri-mordial ooze from whence he’d come. It wasn’t the admiral who had poisoned him-Den was fairly sure of that, judging by Bleyd’s reactions. Not that it mattered much, since black marketing during wartime was gener-ally considered treason and was punishable by death. At best, even if Den had all kinds of outstanding favors due him from high places-which he didn’t-his career would be ruined if this got out while he was still in the same sector as Bleyd; at worst, he’d be quietly executed and spaced.

The first thing he had done after he saw Bleyd crush the moon moth was feed the receiver unit into a waste disposal unit that turned it into sludge and piped it off into the swamp with the rest of the sewage slurry. He had cursed at the necessity-the unit had not come cheap-but it wasn’t worth his life. Besides, without the cam, it wasn’t much more than a big flimsiweight while he was here.

The recording from the cam, a disc the size of his lit-tle fingernail, was now glued to the back of a wall brace of the south refresher, just a hand-span above the cat-alytic tanks-not a place where anybody would happen across it, and one where, even if by some miracle it was found, it wouldn’t be connected to him. He needed the recording to verify his story, but he didn’t need Bleyd finding it and having him shot. As long as he kept his mouth shut, he should be safe enough. Bleyd couldn’t know who had been watching, and the admiral wasn’t about to start an investigation that might reveal his own complicity in Filba’s bootlegging activities.

The only problem was, this meant Den was going to be stuck here on scenic Drongar for a while. Any sud-den move to fire thrusters now would certainly throw the hard glare of suspicion on him. If Bleyd were look-ing for the cam’s operator-and you could take it to the First Bank of Coruscant that he was-then anybody from this Rimsoo who tried to leave quickly would probably find himself being brain-scanned, and a re-porter would likely have to endure a harsher exam than most. Den had no desire to be turned inside out by a high-ranking official who knew his life was in the bal-ance if his crimes came to light.

Too bad-it was a great story, far better than if only Filba had been implicated. The rabble did so love to see the mighty brought low, and a fleet admiral stealing was the kind of thing that