Quickly she laid out her experiences, telling her Master the story, trying to keep it coherent. Trying also to convey, not just what had happened, but also how she had felt, the sense of total connection to the Force, the wonder of it all.

Master Unduli listened without interrupting. Now and then she would nod encouragingly, but she remained silent, not prompting Barriss whenever the latter paused to collect her thoughts.

"-and that's pretty much all there is to tell," Barriss finished. "Well, except that a protocol droid called I-Five will likely show up there eventually with an encoded message covering what I've just said. I was worried that something might happen to keep me from pa.s.sing this along, I've been unable to reach you via comlink, and I-Five needed a reason to get to Coruscant anyway, so we joined forces. He's a most unusual droid, and he has a connection to the Temple-he once belonged to the father of one of our Padawans. You may find him useful." She realized that she was babbling somewhat, and stopped.

Master Unduli stood quietly for another moment. Then she said, "You feel certain that what you experienced was not some kind of ... illusion?"

"It was no illusion, Master," Barriss said. "It was a joining with the Force more powerful than I could ever imagine possible. It was real. Of that, I am as sure as I am of speaking to you now," More so, she wanted to add, but didn't.

Her Master nodded. "An extraordinary event." After a moment, she added, "Master Yoda and several others on the Council mentioned recently that they sensed-not a disturbance, exactly, more like a surge-in the Force. Perhaps this is the explanation."

Barriss waited a moment, but the other woman remained silently preoccupied. At last the Padawan said, "I feel great danger for these people, Master. As I told you, the 'accident'

aboard the MedStar was no accident. Whoever is responsible will strike again, and I also feel-no, I know-that, using this new connection, I can prevent it. I have not the least doubt of that. The power is staggering. Even now, I feel the echoes of it reverberating within me.

"Why have you not already used it toward this end, then?" Master Unduli asked.

"Because I'm not qualified-I don't have the experience or the wisdom to make this kind of decision, or to take this kind of action." Barriss spread her hands. "Master, what should I do?"

The small hologram of her Master stood silent for a moment. Her expression, given the image's size and resolution, was hard to fathom. Then she said, "This is not an easy question to answer, Barriss. You are there, I am here, and I cannot know your situation as you know it. But, taking that into account, I think that you should-The hologram wavered, blinked, and scan lines ran up it in a pulsing wave. Master Unduli's voice warbled, cutting in and out: "-try-find-know the truth, because-" Then the image vanished and the voice stopped.

No Barriss wanted to scream. Come back!

She tapped the controls on the unit, her movements just short of frantic, but it was no use. The connection was sundered. Gone. ' Gone.

Barriss ran her fingers through her hair distractedly. The weight of responsibility she had thought she was about to have lifted, or at least part.i.tioned, settled down on her again, even heavier than before.

What was she supposed to do? Had any Padawan ever been given such a th.o.r.n.y problem to solve?

There was but one bright spot, and that one wasn't as bright as all that-at least the Jedi now knew the situation with regard to the bota. Whatever happened here on Drongar, they would be able to consider and make a decision, backed by the wisest and most adept of the Jedi Council. That didn't make her personal choice any easier, of course, but it was something.

And, she reminded herself, eventually l-Five will get there with the full story, and the vial full of extract. Surely I have fulfilled whatever my obligation is regarding the Council's knowledge of this. It isn't just on me anymore.

But the weight she felt seemed no less. Indeed, before it had seemed like a yoke of wood; now, like one of stone.

She wondered how much longer she could stand beneath it.

36.

Once he had cleared the last of the picket ships, Kaird felt a definite sense of relief.

Yes, he was a professional, and facing death was ever a part of his life. He wasn't afraid of the return to the Egg, Sooner or later, all must make that journey, and he had put the trip off many times more than most. Still, being in deep s.p.a.ce and about to make the jump to lightspeed meant that he had once again survived, and feeling a certain pride in so doing was permissible.

He was going back to Coruscant, bearing an extremely valuable gift for his chosen flock.

There was a sense of accomplishment in that, as well. He had made the best of a bad situation, had managed to salvage something out of what had initially seemed to be complete disaster. Truly, it was as the old saying put it: there was no carrion so bad but that it offered some scavenger sustenance.

With the ship on automatic pilot, Kaird refreshed himself, ate a meal of synthesized bool grubs, and went through a short series of martial exercises. Feeling less stale with his muscles warm and his breath deepened, he went back to the entry lock in which he had left the faux case with its precious cargo. He would rather have it where he could see it, even though he was alone on the ship. The fewer things left to chance, the fewer things that could go wrong.

The case was where he had left it. It was heavy-not so much that he couldn't lift and haul it, but enough so that the set of wheels on it was useful. Kaird rolled it back toward the control cabin.

The ship boasted a series of pressure doors down the main corridor. In the event of a hull breach, these doors would quickly and automatically seal to maintain integrity in the separate compartments. Each had a slightly raised threshold to better effect an airtight seal. The ridges were only a couple of centimeters high, but he had to remember to step over them to avoid tripping when the A-Grav field was on. Kaird did this almost unconsciously after years of s.p.a.ce travel. Luggage makers were well aware of these threshold obstacles, and thus standard luggage wheels were of a flexible compound that would roll over the pressure door lips with ease.

Not so the wheels of the fake case. Kaird didn't know where his former partners in crime had found these wheels, but they were definitely made of harder stuff, for when he hit the first threshold, the case stopped with a jolt, and one of the wheels broke.

Kaird shook his head. He'd have to carry it after all.

He lifted the case-and both the wheel and its axle fell off, taking with them a fist-sized chunk of carbonite that dropped onto the deck with a clunk!

Something metallic glinted from the edge of the broken case.

Kaird stared at it. A sudden jolt of hormones raced through his system, erecting his featherettes in atavistic fear, fluffing them to make him look larger to any predator that might be considering him prey. The fact that there was nothing even remotely resembling a predator within the several thousand cubic kilometers of empty s.p.a.ce surrounding him did nothing to allay his instinctive fear.

There was not supposed to be any metal inside the carbonite.

Bota was fragile. Even when packed into compressed bricks, it would rot eventually, which was of course why the contraband was transported in carbonite-the carbon-freezing process suspended nearly all organic molecular action. Bota did not become really stable until further processing made it into an injectable or tablet form. In the compressed-brick form normally used for shipping, anything packed along with it might cause unwanted chemical reactions. Great pains were taken at this stage to make sure the product was shipped as pure as possible, and he had insisted similar care be taken by the black marketeers.

So why was he staring at something made of metal within the carbonite block?

His featherettes began to smooth as Kaird took several deep, calming breaths, making sure his exhalations were a second or two longer than the inhalations, so as to flush carbon dioxide from his system. It worked; he felt his pulse rate starting to slow as his anxiety level dropped.

He considered the possibilities. First possibility: something was inside the carbonite with the bota.

Second: something was inside the carbonite instead of the bota . . .

The a.s.sault ship had an onboard medical unit, and it included a diagnoster. Kaird carefully lifted the case in both arms and made his way to the autodoc. In the course of his profession, he had, on occasion, needed to use such devices to attend to injuries, either his or those of his comrades. He was no expert, but the machines had been designed to be used by those with minimal medical training, and they came equipped with simple instructions.

This model had an axial image resonator built into it.

Kaird carefully put the case onto the diagnoster's table. He called up the instructions for the device on the computer, scanned them, and found the maximum settings. He touched the proper controls.

A clear, hoop-shaped transparisteel radiation shield lowered over the case. There came a power hum. It was but the work of a moment for the medical device to produce an image of what was within, and what the scanner showed was not bricks of compressed bota.

What it showed was a bomb.

Kaird studied the image that floated in the air over the computer with a practiced eye. He saw four thermal detonators linked in series with a timer-more than enough to vaporize the carbonite and everything between them and the ship's hull if they went off together. Maybe even powerful enough to blow the ship itself apart. It was the corner of one of the detonators that had showed where the carbonite had chipped away next to the wheel and axle. Since carbonite did little to suspend electronic or mechanical processes, there was every reason to expect that it would go off as planned.

Thula and Squa Tront had betrayed him. They had taken the bota for themselves and given him a death sentence instead. And he had paid them well to do it!

Luck was a funny thing. Had he chosen to carry the case instead of rolling it-and had it not been for that poorly made wheel, and the hatch lip that broke it, then the bomb would almost certainly have been sitting right next to him in the control cabin when it went off.

It had been a bold move. Had it worked, the pair would have been very rich, and n.o.body anywhere would be the wiser.

It might still work, if you just keep standing there staring at it like a sunstruck fledgling-/ Kaird lifted the case and headed briskly for the nearest airlock. He did not know when the timer was set to detonate the device. He could feel himself beginning to sweat as he deposited the case in the lock, stepped back to the other side of the hatch, turned off the A-Grav in the airlock and slapped the cycle b.u.t.ton.

The winds were at Kaird's back this time. The rush of air from the depressurized lock carried the bomb away from the ship, into vacuum. He returned to the cabin, and in a few seconds he had accelerated enough to leave the case safely behind. It might not go off for hours, days even-The soundless flare was picked up by his rear array less than two minutes after jettisoning the bomb. The readout showed a yield of half a kiloton. The bomb would have turned him and the ship into a cloud of incandescent plasma.

Kaird leaned back in the seat. He had made a mistake, a large one, and it could easily have cost him his life. He had succ.u.mbed to hubris. He had a.s.sumed that Thula and Squa Tront were smart enough to realize that crossing him would be foolish; that he would hunt them down and make them pay in blood, no matter how long it took, no matter how far they fled. Black Sun had eyes and ears everywhere, and sooner or later, he would find them.

What he hadn't counted on was the pair having the nerve to attempt to a.s.sa.s.sinate an a.s.sa.s.sin. They were low-rent, small-time criminals, with no history of violence. He hadn't guessed that they'd had it in them, and that had very nearly been a fatal mistake. It was always better to overestimate a potential enemy's strength than to underestimate it. If one was prepared for the worst, the least was easy to manage.

What really stuck in his craw was that he had very nearly proven them right in their estimation of him. He had been lucky, and as everyone knew, there were times when luck was better than skill. He accepted this.

The loss of the bota was not in itself a fatal error, since Ms vigo would never know it had been on the table. Kaird could twirl it so that the story would not reflect too badly upon him: yes, he had discovered that the plant had mutated, but, unfortunately, by the time he'd found that out, the military had clamped down hard, and there was no way to collect any. The vigos would be disappointed, but it was part of the business, and in the end Kaird was too valuable a tool to punish for a misfortune not of his causing. There was always another way to make money.

n.o.body would ever know that he had erred, save Kaird himself and two others.

What it meant, he realized grimly, was that he was still in thrall to Black Sun. Being given leave to retire by a grateful and enriched master was also no longer on the table, and one did not just walk away from Kaird's kind of work without permission.

There was nothing to be done about that part.

Kaird clenched a fist, looked at it as if it already held the two scoundrels1 fates. He hoped Thula and Squa Tront enjoyed their riches fully, for whatever time was left to them.

That time would not be nearly as long as they thought, and their end would be most unpleasant.

Most unpleasant.

Kaird fed the coordinates into the nav computer, then activated the hyperdrive. The ship lurched as its gravity field flickered, the starfield in the forward viewport blue-shifted into long spectral streaks, the engines screamed, and he was gone.

37.

Colonel D'Arc Vaetes, as head of Rimsoo Seven, was the highest-ran king military officer close to hand. Barriss went to see him during a lull in the surgeries. It had been suprisingly quiet the last day or two. Was it, she wondered, the calm before a storm?

She could have, even as a Padawan, asked for and probably gotten an audience with the new admiral on Med-Star, but there was a long-standing protocol when dealing with the armed services, and Barriss had seen how it worked often enough to know it was smarter to try the chain of command first. The Republic military was many things, but flexible was not the first word that came to mind when one thought of dealing with the army or navy. There was the right way, the wrong way, and the military way . . .

"What can I do for you, Padawan Of fee?"

"This base is in danger, Colonel," she said.

The colonel smiled. "Really? A Rimsoo in an active theater of war in danger? Imagine that."

"No, sir. I mean it is in more danger than usual-whatever level 'usual' might be."

Vaetes was a first-cla.s.s surgeon, a career officer, and n.o.body's fool. His smile vanished, and he turned his full attention to her. "Please explain."

"I believe that the person responsible for the explosion of the bota shuttle some time back is the same person responsible for the attack on MedStar, and that this person is about to become instrumental in an action that will put everybody here at risk. And not just this Rimsoo."

"The shuttle investigation was closed some time ago," Vaetes said. "It was determined that Filba the Hutt was a spy, and the one responsible for the sabotage. That was the conclusion of Colonel Doir, the officer in charge of the investigation."

"I don't believe that's so. Or, at least, it's not the whole story."

"All right. Then who is responsible? And what is he or she about to do that puts us at risk?"

Barriss sighed. "I don't know exactly who yet. Nor exactly how it will happen."

Vaetes looked at her. "How do you know what you do know, then? Intuition?"

"I learned it through the Force. It's hard to explain to someone who has not felt it, but it is far more than intuition."

She could hardly tell him that her connection with the Force had been augmented by using a drug-and one that she wasn't supposed to have access to, at that. Any credibility she might have would evaporate fast if she went down that path. Vaetes was a military man, pragmatic in the extreme, and a surgeon. It had been her experience with most surgeons that, as far as they were concerned, if a problem couldn't be excised with a scalpel, it didn't exist.

Vaetes said, "Padawan Offee, I know that the Force is a big part of your organization's .

. . operational method, but ..." He shrugged. "What am I going to tell the admiral to justify any action? And given the, uh, lack of specific information, even if he agreed to trust you on this, what exactly are we supposed to do?"

Barriss felt a sense of frustration envelop her. What could she say? He was right. And if she couldn't convince Vaetes-a man who knew her and, she felt, liked her-what were her chances of convincing somebody who didn't know her at all? It did sound all too vague.

"Colonel, would it be possible for you to contact Cor-uscant? My comm unit can't seem to hold a sustainable connection."

He shook his head. "It's supposed to be a military secret, Padawan Offee, but at the moment, we can't call home, either. Some kind of subetheric disturbance, jamming long-range communications. Our comm-techs can't seem to get a grip on it."

Barriss nodded. She had hoped that if the military could talk to the Jedi Council, they might vouch for her, at least enough to justify an alert. But that apparently wasn't going to happen.

"Listen," he said, "I tell you what-I'll talk to the commander of the troop unit attached here, tell him we heard something from an enemy patient who died that something is up, and that he should ramp up his patrols. I'm afraid that's the best I can do unless you can give us something solid we can check out."

Something was better than nothing. "Thank you, sir."

As she left his office, she saw Jos Vandar walking away from the landing pad. It was cloudy, probably going to rain again soon, but Jos's aura was lighter, his energy higher, than she'd felt it in a long time. Certainly lighter than her own at the moment.

She moved to intersect his path.

"Jos. How are you?"

He grinned at her. "Better than I've been in a while, I think. I hope, anyway. I'll find out soon enough."

"I'm glad to hear that."

He looked at her. "What's bothering you?"

She was surprised at his question. "What makes you think something is bothering me?"

"You do-your body language, facial expression, general demeanor, all tell me you're distressed. What's up?"

It wouldn't hurt to tell him, and he already knew about her having access to the bota.

Maybe another mind working on the problem would help. At this point, any help she could get, she would take.