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As soon as he turned the comer, though, Boman Thul nearly ran into a lumbering Gamorrean guard, who appeared to be lost. The guard grunted at him in surprise and blinked stupid-looking eyes. Boman Thul snatched out the blaster pistol he had taken from the munitions room and shot the guard twice before the piglike brute could make a move.

Raynar gasped.

"I can't believe how fast you reacted!" he said to his father. "You protected us all."

Bornan looked at the dead Gamorrean and sighed.

"I used to be a merchant lord. My entire battlefield was in trade negotiations. I was able to pull a faster trick than even the great Lando Calrissian." He drew a long, heavy breath, and then shook his head. "At one time I thought I could sell sand to Jawas-look at how I've changed."

Raynar put a comforting hand on his father's arm.

"Maybe it's because you're concerned with more than just the Bomaryn fleet this time. Maybe you're thinking on a much broader scale, and your priorities have changed."

Thul looked at his son and smiled.

"That's very perceptive, Raynar."

Zekk looked down at the fallen Gamorrean guard and urged them to move again.

"I admire your reactions, Boman Thul." He tossed his long dark hair behind him. "This means we're not alone on the asteroid. Nolaa Tarkona and the Diversity Alliance must be here already."

They hurried along the corridors as rapidly and as cautiously as they could. They reached the plague chamber without incident, but they did not see Lowie when they surreptitiously peered through the transparisteel windows into the collection of plague containers. Instead, they looked down in astonishment to find Nolaa Tarkona standing triumphant in the middle of the chamber.

She held a control box, the central connector for all the incinerators and thermal detonators Lowie had dispersed among the plague cylinders.

Her single head-tail thrashed, making the tattoos ripple. Flashing her pointed teeth and looking utterly confident, Nolaa disconnected the explosives. Boman Thul watched with cold anger on his face. Raynar stifled a soft moan of despair.

Zekk gritted his teeth.

"Looks like we need to try something else then-if it isn't already too late."

Surrounded by hundreds of liters of concentrated death, Nolaa Tarkona experienced the thrill of long anticipation, the payoff of years of searching. At last she had a weapon to exterminate the human vermin for all time. Then alien races could be free. They could work together. They could reclaim their stolen worlds and live with all the glory they were meant to have. As she stood among the transparisteel containers, she breathed the oh-so-clean-smelling air, sterilized and disinfected. But she knew something was terribly wrong. The sealed door had already been opened, and her guards scoured the plague chamber, searching for evidence of sabotage. They had shouted in outrage when they found dozens of incinerators and thermal detonators strung together, planted at strategic points. Nolaa had moved to the center of the room and found the control box.

She could smell Wookiee in the air, and she knew that Lowbacca, one of the great traitors to the Diversity Alliance, had been here already. He wanted to destroy this stockpile in the war for alien freedom. With her rose-quartz eyes, she studied the control box now that she had disconnected the sabotage devices. Then she yanked out the remaining cables before tossing away the useless box. It made a resounding, satisfying clang on the metal floor. Nolaa glowered down at it, her sensitive head-tail twitching. The Twi' leks had an extensive but subtle language that depended on the movements of their head-tails. But she had only Diversity Alliance soldiers beside her, none of her own Twi'lek people to understand her thoughts and her emotions.

No race could truly comprehend the downtrodden hopelessness the Twi'leks had endured-centuries of slavery, technological inferiority, hellish environmental conditions, even treachery from their own race. Now that she had control of the Emperor 's plague, though, Nolaa could