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“It’s a holo—a recording,” Lobot said.

“No, it’s real,” Lando said. “Look at your suit sensors—wait, Artoo, don’t!” He lunged toward the droid, who was busily unlimbering the nozzle of his fire extinguisher. By the time the struggle was over, the entire map had been replaced by a five-sided black scar, and the chamber was half choked by a white-soot smoke.

Lando herded them back into chamber 20, where they waited the two minutes they had learned it took for a room to reset. When they reentered 21, the black scar was gone, and with it the smoke. With their backs practically pressed against the sigil, they then watched a replay.

The initial blast came from the same structure, after the same pulsing glow. As the pillar of fire rose, the shock rippled out through the rest of the city, destroying the neat symmetry. The fire quickly fell back but spread into a firestorm that raced across the shattered city and consumed it. In a matter of seconds the wall was scorched black as before, the map destroyed.

“Artoo, please run an analysis on the atmosphere in here,” Lando said.

Threepio reported the results. “Oxygen five percent—oxygen eight percent—oxygen eleven percent—would you make up your mind?” the droid asked, clanging Artoo on the dome with his working arm.

“It’s not him, Threepio,” said Lobot. “The ship is restoring the chamber to its status before the fire, for the next demonstration.” He looked to Lando. “These are history lessons. Something terrible happened to the Qella city that was under this sign.”

“Maybe this is our first clue about what happened to them,” Lando said. “But there’s something else going on, too. Artoo, what’s the oxygen component now?”

The answer, relayed through Threepio, was fifteen percent.

“Son of a—Lobot, Threepio, you stay here. Artoo, come with me. There’s something we have to check.”

“Where are you going?”

“Back to chamber one, express lane. Sit tight—it won’t be so long. We won’t be sight-seeing this time.”

The patrol frigate Bloodprice bore the colors of the Prakith navy and the crest of Governor Foga Brill. Both were more prominent than the sigil of the Imperial Moff for Sector 5, which was consigned to the armor panel above the frigate’s chin turrets.

The displays mirrored the allegiances felt by Captain Ors Dogot and his crew of nearly four hundred. The officers owed their commissions and their postings to Brill, not to Grand Moff Gann. It was Brill who collected the commission fees and the annual posting assessments. It was Brill who paid off favors to wealthy families with command ranks that drew pay in goods and gold instead of Prakith scrip.

The specialists and ratings, draftees all, owed the security of their families to Brill’s promise of the protection of the Red Police for the daughters and wives of those who protected his power with their lives. To be drafted into the navy was a far better thing than to be drafted into the slit mines or the foundries, or to be one of the hundreds rousted nightly from the riverbanks in Prall and Skoth to dig their own graves.

Graft and fear were inferior flavors of fealty, but they were the best Foga Brill could command, and they sufficed.

“Course change maneuver complete, Captain,” the navigator reported in a clear, loud voice. “Now heading nine-zero, mark, negative four-five, mark, two-two at deep patrol standard.”

“Towmaster, report,” said Dogot.

The listening array Bloodprice towed behind it on deep patrol was a hundred times longer than the ship itself. It was a spiderweb of passive antenna cables, tiny noiseless amplifiers, steering jets, and tension vanes, with a drag gondola the size of a troop transport at the end of the antenna’s main cable. The three crew members in the gondola had the difficult job of flying the array through the turn when Bloodprice changed heading.

If there was too little tension, the elements could tangle, or the whole array could tear itself apart in what the manuals called dynamic destabilization and tow crews called tail whip. If there was too much tension through the turn, the likely result