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The anteroom door swooshed wide at Threepio’s touch. The protocol droid hesitated over the body of Ezrakh, dead now, eyes staring in horror, then turned helplessly away. With the opening of the door into the corridor he stopped in alarm. Two other Noghri lay on the floor, one still breathing with slow, harsh, stertorous gasps, the other utterly still. They bore no marks of violence or struggle.

“Shuttle bay!” cried Threepio, punching the code on the wall comm. “Shuttle bay! They have to be stopped!”

There was no answer but the whine of a signal blocker somewhere in the system.

He hastened after Artoo, who hadn’t even paused, trundling down the corridor and making a little detour around the dead guards. “What can have caused it? Symptomatic analysis indicates …”

Artoo stopped, with such suddenness that Threepio nearly cannonaded into him, over the body of a third Academy guard. He extended his gripper arm to prod the young man’s shoulder, and Threepio saw that this one, the bodyguard Marcopius, bore on the side of his head the mark of a heavy blow.

“Yeoman Marcopius, Master Ashgad has kidnapped Her Excellency!” cried Threepio, at the first sign of reviving consciousness.

Sitting up, the youth said a word that Threepio knew in close to a million languages but was programmed never to utter in any of them. “The whole ship’s been poisoned!” He rolled to his feet with a nimbleness that caused the droid a momentary flash of envy.

“I beg your pardon, sir, but the symptoms are less those of poison than of disease,” reported Threepio worriedly. “Specifically, my databanks show a ninety percent correlation with the Death Seed plague of seven centuries ago. But how such a thing came to pass …”

“Whatever it is, they’re panicking down in the infirmary.” The boy scooped up his ceremonial weapon and strode so quickly along the corridor as he spoke that the two droids could barely keep pace. “The engine crew sealed themselves off. I caught that pilot of Ashgad’s—if he is a pilot—doing something with the transmission records …”

“They’re going to do something to both vessels, something to destroy them!” said Threepio. “They said they had to get their own ship out of range. We’re doomed!”

“Not if we can get to one of the scout boats, we’re not.”

Beyond the vast portal of the magnetic hatch, the stars were already moving when Yeoman Marcopius and the two droids reached the shuttle bay floor. The shuttle brig was already gone, a dwindling gray flake in the blackness. The three bay guards lay dead on the floor, unmarked and peaceful. Far off the Light of Reason was a tiny berry, a cluster of minute bronze, black, and silver minihulls, and farther still the silver arrowhead of the Adamantine could be seen moving, too.

“Where are they going?” cried Threepio, stopping dead in his tracks to watch. He thought he saw something move in the shadows, something tiny scuttling along the wall, and turned his head in an attempt at visual tracking. “There isn’t anyone alive on that ship, I heard them say so …”

Marcopius grabbed his arm and dragged him up the small scout craft’s ramp. “They’re taking it out of the vicinity of the Chorios systems,” said the boy, slamming shut the scout boat’s hatch behind them and dropping into the chair behind the bridge controls. “If Ashgad kidnapped Lady Solo—if he found some way to poison the crews on both ships, or whatever he did—he’s not going to want record of either ship disappearing too soon after the rendezvous.” He was jerking over levers, checking readouts, activating the emergency relays to open the magnetic portal once again, while beyond the portal the stars glided quicker and quicker as the tiny dots of the Chorios systems fell behind.

“He’s going to want to say, Oh, they were all fine when they pulled out of here. Look at this.” He cut into the coded deep-space Net channel. Its screen flashed an image of the two Republic cruisers making their serene way toward the standard Coruscant jump point on the far side of the Chorios systems. Immediately afterward the