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The Padawan finished her healing ritual. The trooper’s eyelids flickered. Through the cowl’s mesh, Kaird could see the man’s chest rising and falling regularly and gently, and his eyes moving beneath their lids in healing, dream-filled sleep. Whatever she had done, it had been effective.

As she passed him, she nodded—a gesture of respect and gratitude from one healer to another. Kaird nodded back, keeping his thoughts blank until he judged that she had left the building. Then he smiled.

For now, he decided, it made the most sense for him to concentrate his energy on finding and developing a new partner for Black Sun. Then, once the flow of bota began anew, he could deal with whatever other problems might arise. Black Sun was, after all, nothing if not adaptable.

4

Being a spy in an enemy encampment was not easy. There was nothing particularly original or surprising in this observation—the truth seldom has those attributes. But that didn’t make it any less difficult. To work undercover in an enemy military base, one had to have more eyes than a Gran and be as vigilant as a male H’nemthe. One had to be ever mindful of the fact that a spy was an outsider, an interloper; one could never relax one’s guard, even for a second.

Not that anyone had reason to suspect the spy—less so, now that the Hutt and the former admiral had been shown to be something other than they had appeared, not to mention both of them dying. But this was war, and spies were summarily executed when caught. And they were caught—many of them—in places far less likely than a Rimsoo on some lonely planet way out on the tail end of the galaxy.

Complicating matters further was the fact that there had been deaths. Deaths for which the spy, who served two masters under two aliases—Column to Count Dooku’s Separatist forces and Lens to Black Sun—had been at least partly responsible. Did it matter to the dead that the one known as Column or Lens was responsible? No. Did it matter to one of the two sub rosa personas if the other was found out and executed? That was worth a rueful smile.

Column—the first sobriquet was the one with which the spy tended to identify, having been recruited by the Separatists before Black Sun—liked many of these people. The recent death of one of the doctors had been surprisingly painful, though it was not the result of an undercover operation. Column had thought often about the perils of living submerged amid the enemy. Even if one dwelled among a tribe of murderers, one could develop certain attachments to some of them. And none of the doctors and nurses and staff here were killers—they were healers, all, and if an enemy fell and was brought before them, they tended to the wounded with the same skill and dedication as one of their own. It was their duty to save lives, not to judge them.

That made it hard, too, when, as either Column or Lens, the spy had to offer them harm, as had sometimes become necessary. It was true that the long-anticipated end would come from righteous justification—still painful after decades—but sometimes the goal seemed impossibly far off, hidden in a fog as thick as the vapors that wafted from the endless swamps, and the little details of day-to-day life—as well as friendships, concerns, alliances—tended to get in the way.

Column sighed. One could not build wooden houses without chopping down trees, but that didn’t make it any more pleasant when a giant bluewood fell on those who considered one a friend and colleague. Yet there was no avoiding it—as painful as it was sometimes, it was duty, and it had to be done. There was no help for that part of it. None.

Column stood before the window of the cubicle, looking out at the base. Rimsoo Seven had been mostly rebuilt by now; the move from the lowlands to the highlands had been accomplished with relatively few problems. The admin center, supply buildings, and, most importantly, the medical and surgical structures had been put up by the construction droids in less than two of the local day cycles, a Drongarian day being just over twenty-three standard