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“Ev’ryone ’cept you. ’S’no good. Gotta fix that.”

“Assuming for a moment that intoxication is a state to which I aspire,” the droid said, “I see a number of problems that must be solved. Not the least of which is, I have no metabolism to process ethanol.”

“Right, right.” Den nodded. “Gotta work aroun’ that. Don’ worry, I’ll think of somethin’…”

“At this point you’d be hard-pressed to think of your own name. No offense, but I wouldn’t trust you to rewire a mouse droid’s circuits right now. Maybe later, when you’ve—”

The Sullustan suddenly fluttered his dewflaps in excitement. “Got it! ’S’ perfect!”

“What?” The droid’s tone was wary.

Den knocked back the rest of his drink, then had to hang on to the edge of the table for a moment until the entire cantina, which had suddenly and unaccountably launched itself into hyperspace, steadied. “W’do a partial power-down on your core. Scramble th’ sensory inputs a li’l bit, loosen up those logic circuits.”

“Sorry. Multiple redundancy backups. They’re hardwired—I could no more voluntarily interfere with them than you could stop breathing.”

Den frowned at his empty mug. “Blast.” He brightened. “Okay, how ’bout we realign the circuitry directly? Jus’ temporarily, o’course…”

“That might work—if you had the picodroid engineers needed to do the realignment. Which are only available at Cybot Galactica repair centers or their authorized representatives. I believe the nearest one is approximately twelve parsecs from here.”

Den belched and shrugged. “Well, we’ll figure som’thin’ out. Don’ worry—Den Dhur’s no quitter. I’m on it, buddy.” His head dropped to the table with an audible thud, and a moment later he began to snore.

I-Five stared at the unconscious reporter, then sighed. “Something about this,” the droid murmured, “feels so familiar.”

3

Jos wouldn’t have started the kid off this way, had there been any choice, but the operating theater was full of wounded clone troopers, the drone of the medlifters bringing in new injuries seemed as constant as a heat exchanger as they arrived, and anybody who could lift a vibroscalpel was needed. Now.

He didn’t have time to watch the kid—he was up to his elbows in the chest cavity of a clone full of shrapnel. Count Dooku’s weapons research group had come up with a new fragmentation bomb, called a weed-cutter—a smart bomb that, when launched, arced up and over any and all defensive grids, came down in the middle of a trooper force, and exploded at thoracic level above the ground, sleeting tiny, smart, razor-sharp durasteel flechettes in a circular pattern. The weed-cutter was deadly for two hundred meters against soft targets, and the clone trooper armor didn’t stop much, if any, of it.

Whoever had designed and produced the clone armor had much to answer for, in Jos’s opinion. The Kaminoans might be geniuses when it came to designing and sculpting soft tissue, but the armor was, as far as he could see, practically useless. The nonclone field troops referred to the full-body suits as “body buckets.” It was an aptly descriptive term.

He started to ask for the pressor field to be stepped up a notch, but Tolk beat him to it: “Plus six on the field,” she said to the 2-1B droid managing the unit.

Tolk le Trene was a Lorrdian; her kind had an uncanny ability to read most species’ microexpressions and to somehow sense emotions, to the extent that it almost seemed like telepathy. She was also the best surgical nurse in the Rimsoo. And more, she was beautiful, compassionate, and Jos’s sweetheart, despite her being ekster—non-permes, an outsider, not of his homeworld clan—which meant there wasn’t supposed to be any future for their relationship. The Vandars were enster, and that meant marriage had to be with someone from one’s own system, preferably one’s homeworld. There were no exceptions.

Temporary alliances with eksters were allowed, with a wink and a nod about sowing-one’s-wild-grains and all, but you didn’t bring a non-permes girlfriend home to meet your kinfolk, not unless you were willing to give up your