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When she entered the deck-nine break room, Sergeant Wover’s first sight was of the palely flickering blue on blue of the infolog screen. “Blast it, Koth, I told you …”

Then she saw the young man stretched unmoving on the far side of the screen, head on the break table, eyes shut. Even at a distance of three meters Wover didn’t like the way he was breathing.

“Koth!” She rounded the table in two strides, sending the other chairs clattering into a corner. She thought his eyelids moved a little when she yelled his name. “Koth!”

Wover hit the emergency call almost without conscious decision. In the few moments before the med droids arrived she sniffed the coffeine in the gray plastene cup a few centimeters from his limp fingers. It wasn’t even cold. A thin film of it adhered to the peach fuzz beginnings of what Koth optimistically referred to as his mustache. The stuff in the cup smelled okay—at least as okay as fleet coffeine ever smelled—and there was no question of alcohol or drugs. Not on a Republic escort. Not where Koth was concerned. He was a good kid.

Wover was an engine room regular who’d done fifteen years in merchant planet-hoppers rather than stay in the regular fleet after Palpatine’s goons gained power: She looked after “her” midshipmen as if they were the sons she’d lost to the Rebellion. She would have known if there had been trouble with booze or spice or giggle-dust.

Disease?

It was any longtime spacer’s nightmare. But the “good-faith” team that had come onboard yesterday from Seti Ashgad’s small vessel had passed through the medical scan; and in any case, the planet Nam Chorios had been on the books for four centuries without any mention of an endemic planetary virus. Everyone on the Light of Reason had come straight from the planet.

Still, Wover pecked the Commander’s code on the wall panel.

“Sir? Wover here. One of the midshipmen’s down. The meds haven’t gotten here yet but …” Behind her the break room door swooshed open. She glanced over her shoulder to see a couple of Two-Onebees enter with a table, which was already unfurling scanners and life-support lines like a monster in a bad holovid. “It looks serious. No, sir, I don’t know what it is, but you might want to check with Her Excellency’s flagship, and the Light, and let them know. Okay, okay,” she added, turning as a Two-Onebee posted itself politely in front of her. “My heart is yours,” she declared jocularly, and the droid paused for a moment, data bytes cascading with a faint clickety-click as it laboriously assembled the eighty-five percent probability that the remark was a jest.

“Many thanks, Sergeant Wover,” it said politely, “but the organ itself will not be necessary. A function reading will suffice.”

The next instant Wover turned, aghast, as the remaining Two-Onebee shifted Barak onto the table and hooked him up. Every line of the readouts plunged, and soft, tinny alarms began to sound. “Festering groats!” Wover yanked free of her examiner to stride to the boy’s side. “What in the name of daylight …?”

Barak’s face had gone a waxen gray. The table was already pumping stimulants and antishock into the boy’s veins, and the Two-Onebee plugged into the other side had the blank-eyed look of a droid transmitting to other stations within the ship. Wover could see the initial diagnostic lines on the screens that ringed the antigrav personnel transport unit’s sides.

No virus. No bacteria. No poison.

No foreign material in Koth Barak’s body at all.

The lines dipped steadily toward zero, then went flat.

“We have a complicated situation on Nam Chorios, Your Excellency.” Seti Ashgad turned from the four-meter bubble of the observation viewport, to regard the woman who sat, slender and coolly watchful, in one of the lounge’s gray leather chairs.

“We meaning whom, Master Ashgad?” Leia Organa Solo, Chief of State of the New Republic, had a surprising voice, deeper than one might expect. A petite, almost fragile-looking woman, her relative youth would have surprised anyone who didn’t know that from the age of seventeen she’d been heavily