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Mara laughed shortly. “You need the practice. But it isn’t always necessary. Jaina and I could use a rest,” she added. It’d been a long day.

“All right.” Luke pointed across the room. “Artoo?”

The little droid gave a rising chirp.

“How many security people are on duty at SELCORE’s transshipping dock, in the next hour?”

R2-D2’s interface slid back into place and rotated. He made contented chuckling noises. Then he peeped a short, cheerful signal.

“Five,” Luke told Anakin.

Anakin straightened his tunic. “We can do that.”

“Without making enemies,” Luke emphasized. “We’re going to be civilized.”

“In other words,” Anakin said, “we’re going to act like Jedi Knights.”

Durgard Brarun embraced his wife, then handed her the controls to their hovercart and said, “I’ll join you as soon as I can.” He hated to lie, but she never would’ve left Bburru for Urrdorf without that comforting falsehood.

She followed their son and daughter-in-law up the ramp, onto the regularly scheduled shuttle.

Now everything was in place. When Brarun had heard SELCORE was looking for a place to locate millions of refugees, he’d had the same reaction as most Duros: Not on my planet! A second reaction formed slowly. If the Yuuzhan Vong ever started looking in this direction for an advance base—and he’d never doubted that day would come—then thousands or millions of refugee lives would make excellent bargaining material.

To his mind, they were doomed anyway. They’d just managed to delay their fate for a month, maybe a year.

So he grabbed the SELCORE contract and bought off a few votes in the Duros High House. He encouraged Ducilla’s theatrics, knowing other Duros didn’t want the refugees here. Someday, his people would thank him. His Peace Brigade connections assured him that the Yuuzhan Vong admiral, or warmaster, probably would spare all twenty orbital cities in exchange for those refugee lives.

Just in case, though, he’d arranged a family vacation on Urrdorf.

The servant who brought Jacen’s next meal wore a CorDuro uniform, but his flattened skull was a brilliant shade of turquoise. Silvery brow ridges tapered into prominent bulges on both sides of his forehead.

A Sunesi?

“Just set it there.” Jacen turned away from the round window and motioned toward a long table alongside his bed. “Who are you? Do you want something?”

The Sunesi set down the covered meal pouch. “My name is Gnosos, though I don’t expect you to remember that. More important, I have a gift.” He held out a turquoise hand.

Jacen gingerly took a data card from the brightly colored alien. “And this is—?” he asked.

“It contains my voiceprint, which will key a hoverpod in slip thirty, in the second-floor garage. I think it likely you will need to leave Vice-Director Brarun’s hospitality in a hurry.”

Startled, Jacen touched his lips with one finger and gestured toward the listening devices he’d found—but hadn’t deactivated.

The Sunesi spread his hands. “My people can overlay our speech or another’s with ultrahigh-frequency noise. That disrupts such devices as the ones that concern you.”

Intrigued, Jacen slipped the data card into a pocket. He tried, without using the Force, to get a read on … Gnosos. The Sunesi carried an air of serenity Jacen hadn’t seen in anyone, even his uncle, since the first reports of Yuuzhan Vong intruders.

“Why?” he asked. As he spoke, Gnosos’s mouth opened slightly, but Jacen picked up no sound in his own range of hearing. “I mean, thank you,” Jacen continued, “but—”

“As the Maker gave me, I give to you.”

“Maker?” Now Jacen remembered. The monotheistic Sunesi went through a dangerous metamorphosis between their juvenile and adult stages. Supposedly, surviving that change predisposed them to believe in life after death.

“Maker and Giver.” The Sunesi spread his hands. “To my people, the universe’s endless variety implies a master Maker, one with a fine and glorious creativity and affection. And a sense of humor, as well.”

Lumpheads, the Imperials had called the Sunesi, for those prominent cranial bulges.