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Hollowed by the mournful outpouring, he supported himself against a broken column for what seemed an eternity.

The chirping of the comlink on his belt returned him to the present, and after a long moment he activated it.

From the device’s small speaker issued the urgent voice of the Internal Security Bureau chief, Armand Isard, communicating from the Temple’s data room.

Someone, Isard reported, was attempting remote access of the Jedi beacon databanks.

In the dimly lighted corridor of a forlorn Separatist facility far across the stars, Shryne stopped to gaze at one of the niched statues that lined both walls.

Six meters high and exquisitely carved in the round, the statue was equal parts humanoid and winged beast. While it might have been modeled on an actual creature, the deliberate vagueness of its facial features suggested some mythical creature from antiquity. The indistinct visage was partly concealed by a hooded robe that fell to taloned feet. Identical statues stood in identical recesses for as far as Shryne could see in the wan light.

The complex of ancient, geometric structures the Separatists had converted into a communications facility had certainly stood on Jaguada’s moon for thousands of standard years; perhaps tens of thousands of years. Scanners classified the metal used in the construction as “unidentifiable,” and lightning fissures in the foundations of the largest buildings indicated that the complex had suffered the effect of the small satellite’s every tectonic shift and meteor impact.

The light of Shryne’s luma revealed details of the statue’s intricately rendered wings. Locally quarried, the worked stone matched the striated rock of the sheer cliffs that walled the complex on two sides, from which had been carved statues thirty meters tall, the gaze of their time-dimpled faces directed not down the narrow valley over which they stood silent guard, but toward the moon’s eastern horizon.

Based on similarities to holoimages she had seen of statuary on Ziost and Korriban, Starstone believed that the site could date to the time of the ancient Sith, and that the Separatists’ reoccupation of the complex was in keeping with the fact that Count Dooku had become a Sith Lord.

The moon was arid Jaguada’s sole companion in a desolate system slaved to a dying star, far from major hyperlanes. The fact that remote Jaguada should host a garrison of clone troopers in the desert planet’s modest population center struck Shryne as something of a mystery. But the troopers’ presence could owe to plans to salvage the Separatist war machines that had been left abandoned on the moon, as troopers were known to be doing in numerous Outer Rim systems.

This wasn’t the first time Jula and her band of smugglers had visited the moon, but the secrecy that had attended the recent arrival had less to do with prior knowledge of the terrain than to the Drunk Dancer’s jamming capabilities. The ship had inserted into stationary orbit on the moon’s far side without being detected by the Imperial troops on Jaguada, leaving Shryne, Starstone, and Jula, along with some of the crew members and Jedi, to ride down the well in the drop ship, slipping into the moon’s thin atmosphere like a sabacc card up a gambler’s sleeve.

Heaped with windblown sand, the facility’s retrofitted landing platform appeared not to have seen use in several years. Shryne’s estimate was borne out by the fact that the hundreds of deactivated droids that welcomed the drop ship party were early-generation Trade Federation infantry droids, of the sort controlled by centralized computers rather than super battle droids equipped with autonomous droid brains. As if the surfeit of silent war machines didn’t render the place ghostly enough, there were the fanged carvings affixed to each doorway lintel, and the kilometers of parched corridors studded with gruesome statuary.

Access to the structure that housed the communications center hadn’t been a problem, since whatever remote transmissions deactivated