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She lit her lightsaber again. Leave it for now. Do the dance you know you can do. The dilemma will still be there when you are done.

Unfortunately …

Kaird was feeling much better now that he had a plan of action in place. In a different and new disguise, that of a corpulent human male, he met with his agents.

They sat together in the crowded chow hall during the midday meal. It was noisy and smelly—a lot of different species eating extremely varied dishes. Nobody was paying any attention to Kaird, Thula, and Squa Tront.

Sometimes the best place to hide was in the middle of a mob.

His thoughtshield solidly in place against mental prying, Kaird explained his desire, quietly and to the point.

As he expected, Thula and Squa Tront had some reservations.

“This will kill the operation here,” Thula said. She nibbled on a greenish blue vegetable cutlet, made a face at the taste. “Gah. What a waste of good spigage. The cook should be boiled in his own pot.”

“Which is exactly what would have happened to him, had his cuisine displeased the tetrarch of Anarak Four,” Squa Tront said. “But he’s not subject to quite such drastic repercussions here as on his homeworld.”

“Lucky for him,” Thula said, shoving her plate aside.

Kaird broke in on the banter. “That the operation will end has crossed my mind,” he said in response to Squa. “We’ve decided that cutting an artery and filling our bucket is better than bleeding a few drops at a time. War is uncertain. Somebody on one side or the other might get stupid and accidentally wipe this planet out, and then nobody makes any profit.”

This was technically true, if it had nothing to do with his reasons. The we in this case was more properly I, since Black Sun knew nothing of his plan.

“True,” the Umbaran replied. “But you would get more the droplet way, in the long run, if things stay the same.”

“Are you going to eat that?” Thula asked Kaird.

Kaird looked at the splatters of viscous brown, green, and white lumps on his plate. He had no idea what it was—some kind of human cuisine, served to him due to his disguise. In Kaird’s opinion it smelled like a stopped-up recycler in an overcrowded spacer bar. “It’s yours,” he said, pushing the swill to the Falleen. He turned back to Squa. “In the long run, we are all dust funneling into a singularity,” he said. “It’s my job to give Black Sun what it wants, and your jobs to give me what I want. Is this a problem?”

Thula and Squa Tront looked quickly at each other, then back at him. They shook their heads. “Nope,” they said in chorus.

The human mask smiled. “Good. You’ll make enough of a bonus that it will be worth the heat if they come after you.”

They glanced at each other again. “Well, the thing is,” Squa said, “we’ll need to be spacing the lanes before anybody realizes the stuff is gone. After all, we’re among the first people they’ll come looking for. I trust you have a way offplanet?”

“Sorry. You’ll have to make your own arrangements,” Kaird said.

The fake flesh he wore itched. He was boiling in this thing! He’d worn it because it had a filtration system that kept those pesky Falleen pheromones from affecting him. That, at least, was working, but the fine skein of heat-exchanging tubules and cavities in the material wasn’t. There was always something in these elaborate disguises that caused problems. The Silent robe was about as good as it got.

Thula swallowed and said, “In that case, timing will be critical. We either have to ship out on civilian transportation at least a couple of days before the offal hits the oscillator, or sneak onto a military transport and be well toward a nexus station when things get leggy here.”

“You two aren’t hatchlings just out of the egg,” Kaird said. “You can work something out.”

“Credits talk,” Squa said. “I can see somebody being bribed in our future.”

“True. And you will have enough credits to drown out a stadium full of politicians.”

The Umbaran nodded. “When, then, and how much?”

“I’ll need fifty or sixty kilos, in carbonite, and