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“If you’re right about your arrest, that means he has been keeping an eye on you. Tell me the rest and we might be able to keep you from his long reach.”

“That’s everything!”

“You’re holding something back,” Anakin said in a flat, menacing tone. “I can feel it.”

K’sar gulped, and clutched at his neck. “I built two of them!”

“Who received the second one? One of the Separatist leaders?”

Swallowing with difficulty, K’sar said: “It went to Sienar!”

Anakin blinked in surprise. “Raith Sienar?”

“To Sienar Advanced Projects. It was designed for some sort of experimental spacecraft they were building.”

“Who was the craft meant for?”

“I don’t know—I swear, Jedi, I don’t.” K’sar paused, then added: “But I knew the pilot Sienar hired to deliver the ship.”

“Knew?”

“I don’t know if she’s still alive. But I know where you could begin to look.”

Obi-Wan and Travale negotiated the cofferdam that linked Escarte’s air lock to a docking ring just forward of the cruiser’s tri-barreled thruster fantail.

Stepping into the main hold, Travale gave a shout of joy.

“Good to be alive!”

Obi-Wan glanced at Thal K’sar, thinking the Bith might feel the same. Instead, K’sar was curled up on the hold’s worn acceleration couch. Obi-Wan hurried on to the cockpit and strapped into the copilot’s seat.

“Any problems reaching the ship?”

“The usual close calls,” Anakin said evasively. “Obviously you were successful at disabling the tractor beam.”

“Not a skill I expect to draw on again, but, yes, thanks to Travale.”

Anakin glanced at the console, waiting for the cofferdam telltale to go off, then called on the thrusters to move the cruiser away from Escarte. Off to port, Obi-Wan saw two Guild corvettes dead in space.

“And here I was certain we weren’t out of this yet.”

Anakin shrugged. “Anticlimactic.”

Obi-Wan regarded him for a moment. “K’sar seemed rather … subdued. Were you able to question him?”

Anakin busied himself with the controls. “Briefly.”

“And?”

“We have a new lead.” Before Obi-Wan could reply, Anakin said: “Hyperspace coordinates coming in.”

Banking widely, the cruiser left Escarte and sluggish light behind.

Coruscant had places one couldn’t persuade a droid air taxi driver to take one, even with the promise of a free year of lubrication baths at Industrial Automaton.

The labyrinth of dark back streets south of Corusca Circus.

Daring Way, where it crossed Vos Gesal in upper Uscru.

Hazad’s Skytunnel in the Manarai Uplift.

And just about anywhere in the sector known colloquially as “The Works.”

Foot mat to the Senate District, with its New Architecture spires and domes, its blade-thin obelisks that resembled oft-used candles dipped in gleaming alloy, The Works had been a booming manufacturing area until escalating costs had driven the production of spacecraft parts, labor droids, and construction materials offworld.

Kilometer after cheerless kilometer of flat-roofed factories and assembly plants; towering cranes and enormous gantries; endless stretches of pitted mag-lev tracks that might have been overgrown with weeds if weeds grew on Coruscant; skyscraping clusters of vacant corporate buildings with rocket-fin buttresses … For standard centuries, the sector had been the destination for billions of hardworking immigrants from the Inner Rim and the Colonies, seeking employment and new lives in the Core. Now The Works was a destination for fugitives from Nar Shaddaa who needed a hole to crawl into. A Coruscanti might risk a visit to The Works if he had just been laid off by the Bank of Aargau and was looking for someone to disintegrate his former boss. Or perhaps when death sticks no longer satisfied and a capsule of Crude was in order …

It was the gritty, toxic smoke that still belched from the stacks of factories closed for generations that made for the crimson-and-gold splendor of Coruscant’s sunsets, gawked at by the affluent habitués of the Senate District’s Skysitter Restaurant.

The entire sector might have been demolished if it could be determined with any certainty just who owned what. Rumors persisted