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It struck him as odd that a large room that was all but empty could seem so decadently opulent. The only thing the room seemed rich in was wasted space. Then it struck him. On a world that is so crowded with so many people, wasting this amount of space is the height of luxury.

Isard’s predatory pacing in the center of the room snatched his attention away from the subtle messages of the architecture and appointments. She wore an Admiral’s uniform, complete with boots, jodhpurs, and a dress jacket, though the garments were red. A black armband circled the upper part of her left arm and the jacket bore no rank insignia or cylinders at all. Yet even without the external signs of rank, her intensity and the deliberation with which she moved radiated power.

Though he would have put her age at a dozen years older than his own, he found her attractive. Tall and slender, she wore her black hair long, and the white streaks descending from her temples made her seem more exotic than middle-aged. Her face appeared classically beautiful to him. A strong jaw, sharp cheekbones, a high forehead, a gracefully small nose, and large eyes were all the elements that most women would have killed to possess, or would have paid to have given to them.

Even as he catalogued all the bits and pieces of her that should have triggered some sort of lust in him—and the aura of power surrounding her was terribly exciting—fear overrode any glimmerings of carnal desire. When she looked at him, with dark brows accenting her eyes, he knew where the menace dwelt in her. One eye was ice-blue—as cold as Hoth and as cruel as a Hutt in a sporting mood. The other eye, the left one, was a molten red, with golden highlights that flashed with fiery determination. The left eye told him that any effort by him that was not fully devoted to her service would be met with the bloodless retribution promised by her cold right eye.

Kirtan shivered and she smiled.

“Agent Loor, your personal file has a number of interesting inputs. You are rated as having a visual memory retention rate of nearly one hundred percent.”

He nodded. “If I read it or see it, I remember it.”

“This can be a useful tool, if applied correctly.” Isard’s expression lost some of its hardness, though this in no way made Kirtan feel as if he were any safer. “In the report about Bastra you mentioned not using skirtopanol during his interrogation because he had been dosing himself with lotiramine. This was a precaution you learned to take because of a case on Corellia where doing just that had negative effects, yes?”

“The suspect died.”

“Your report says you used the fact that the lotiramine masks the presence of blastonecrosis to confront Bastra with his own mortality. When that did not prove effective, you began conventional interrogation.”

Kirtan nodded. “Sleep deprivation, protein starvation, coercive holographic and auditory illusions taken from what I knew of him. It all proved quite promising until the blastonecrosis began to make his whole body septic. I then initiated treatment for the condition.”

“And this treatment killed him.” Her eyes became mismatched slits. “Do you know why?”

“He had a reaction to the bacta used to treat him.”

“Do you know why?”

Kirtan was about to offer her the explanation the Emdee-five droid had given him when Bastra died in the bacta tank, but he knew that she would not accept it. “I do not.”

Isard hesitated for a second and Kirtan knew he had escaped punishment by being truthful. “What does ZXI449F mean to you, if anything?”

He instantly recognized the number, but held back his answer until he could sort out the details and put them in a coherent form. “That is the lot number of a batch of bacta that was contaminated by the Ashern rebels on Thyferra. It made its way to Imperial Center and infected nearly two million soldiers and citizens. It rendered them allergic to bacta.” Kirtan frowned. “But Gil Bastra never was on Imperial Center.”

“You do not know that for a fact. Perhaps he was here.” She shook her head slowly.