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The loss of the bota was not in itself a fatal error, since his vigo would never know it had been on the table. Kaird could twirl it so that the story would not reflect too badly upon him: yes, he had discovered that the plant had mutated, but, unfortunately, by the time he’d found that out, the military had clamped down hard, and there was no way to collect any. The vigos would be disappointed, but it was part of the business, and in the end Kaird was too valuable a tool to punish for a misfortune not of his causing. There was always another way to make money.

Nobody would ever know that he had erred, save Kaird himself and two others.

What it meant, he realized grimly, was that he was still in thrall to Black Sun. Being given leave to retire by a grateful and enriched master was also no longer on the table, and one did not just walk away from Kaird’s kind of work without permission.

There was nothing to be done about that part.

Kaird clenched a fist, looked at it as if it already held the two scoundrels’ fates. He hoped Thula and Squa Tront enjoyed their riches fully, for whatever time was left to them. That time would not be nearly as long as they thought, and their end would be most unpleasant.

Most unpleasant.

Kaird fed the coordinates into the nav computer, then activated the hyperdrive. The ship lurched as its gravity field flickered, the starfield in the forward viewport blue-shifted into long spectral streaks, the engines screamed, and he was gone.

37

Colonel D’Arc Vaetes, as head of Rimsoo Seven, was the highest-ranking military officer close to hand. Barriss went to see him during a lull in the surgeries. It had been suprisingly quiet the last day or two. Was it, she wondered, the calm before a storm?

She could have, even as a Padawan, asked for and probably gotten an audience with the new admiral on MedStar, but there was a long-standing protocol when dealing with the armed services, and Barriss had seen how it worked often enough to know it was smarter to try the chain of command first. The Republic military was many things, but flexible was not the first word that came to mind when one thought of dealing with the army or navy. There was the right way, the wrong way, and the military way…

“What can I do for you, Padawan Offee?”

“This base is in danger, Colonel,” she said.

The colonel smiled. “Really? A Rimsoo in an active theater of war in danger? Imagine that.”

“No, sir. I mean it is in more danger than usual— whatever level ‘usual’ might be.”

Vaetes was a first-class surgeon, a career officer, and nobody’s fool. His smile vanished, and he turned his full attention to her. “Please explain.”

“I believe that the person responsible for the explosion of the bota shuttle some time back is the same person responsible for the attack on MedStar, and that this person is about to become instrumental in an action that will put everybody here at risk. And not just this Rimsoo.”

“The shuttle investigation was closed some time ago,” Vaetes said. “It was determined that Filba the Hutt was a spy, and the one responsible for the sabotage. That was the conclusion of Colonel Doil, the officer in charge of the investigation.”

“I don’t believe that’s so. Or, at least, it’s not the whole story.”

“All right. Then who is responsible? And what is he or she about to do that puts us at risk?”

Barriss sighed. “I don’t know exactly who yet. Nor exactly how it will happen.”

Vaetes looked at her. “How do you know what you do know, then? Intuition?”

“I learned it through the Force. It’s hard to explain to someone who has not felt it, but it is far more than intuition.”

She could hardly tell him that her connection with the Force had been augmented by using a drug—and one that she wasn’t supposed to have access to, at that. Any credibility she might have would evaporate fast if she went down that path. Vaetes was a military man, pragmatic in the extreme, and a surgeon. It had been her experience with most surgeons that, as far as they were concerned, if a problem