Maze was an iceberg on legs, and a grumpy one at that. "Now you're the one drinking coolant..."

"I can have crazy theories, too. Can't get any crazier than that. I win. Now eat."

They grabbed their trays and made their way to the table occupied-in the full military sense of the word-by Boss and Sev. Omega might have mixed with other brigades and ranks, but Delta still liked their own company, and whatever mood they conveyed to other clones usually made them want to sit somewhere else. Scorch wanted to wander over to the white jobs with the unit badge he didn't recognize and ask a few questions. But it could wait. He wedged his Deece and helmet between his feet and tucked into a mountain of noodles.

"So what's the General here for, then?" Boss worked his way through a pile of oozing red-fruited pie. "Other than visiting her favorite squad?"

"She hands out candy," Sev said. "Every time she visits a squad in the field, she takes treats for them. Just like Skirata."

"Maybe he'll teach her to garrote folks as well as he does, too."

"She's been bleating about the number of men they've committed to this dump," Sev said. "I overheard General Mlaske say she's nagging Zey and Camas to withdraw the garrison and leave the locals to sort themselves out, because they'll be as much trouble for the Separatists as they are for us. Might tie them up here for free."

Fixer chewed. The table was silent except for the faint wet sounds of eating for a few moments.

"There's a sort of logic to-"

That was as far as Boss got. One moment the mess hall was lit by sunlight slanting through blast shutters set high in the walls, and the next Scorch was blown backward by an instant whirlwind of shattered duraplast into darkness and sheets of flame. Something smashed him full in the chest and winded him. It was the table. He groped for his rifle, but his helmet had gone flying, and he lay on his back trying to suck in breaths, succeeding only in swallowing dust that choked him. He couldn't breathe-But he could hear. That was something.

The yelling began right away; no screams, just shouts to do this, check that, get medics. Scorch made a few attempts to sit up before he realized the table was still on top of him. Then the weight suddenly lifted. He was looking up at Sev through a haze of settling permacrete dust, so unsure of how long he'd been on his back that he checked the chrono display on his forearm plate and then realized he couldn't work it out from that anyway.

"Direct hit on the front entrance." Sev wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. His face was peppered with tiny beads of blood as if he'd had a bad time shaving. "You okay?"

"What happened to the perimeter defense systems? We're supposed to be secure here."

Sev hauled him to his feet but there was nowhere clear to stand. The mess hall was a mass of upended tables and chairs. It hadn't taken the full force of the missile, but the shock wave and debris had punched out the hall doors and flung anything that wasn't secured across the room.

It had flung metal trays like Kaski throwing-blades, turning them into lethal weapons. Scorch had that moment of trying to make sense of what he was looking at but not wanting to, because his brain was saying Horrible, look away-no look, you have to, even if it makes you sick. The trays had hit two men standing near the racks where they'd been stored, and one of them was in just his fatigues; a tray had taken off his leg at the knee. His buddies were kneeling beside him, giving him first aid. The other-they'd given up on him. The impact had sliced off the top of his head.

Some things in battle you shut out, and some you couldn't and would never stop seeing. Scorch felt this scene slot into his memory as if it would never fade. It was the incongruity of it, a scene of carnage with food and cups spread among the blood.

Then rage took him. He felt himself go from stunned slow motion to off the scale in a blink. Nobody expected to have to die while they were off duty trying to grab a meal. Out of all the death he'd seen so far, this was different, he was different, and he felt he'd tipped over an edge that he would never be able to draw back from again. He started sorting through the debris, flinging aside the plastoid tables, oblivious to everything around him except finding his Deece, locating the scum who did this, and blowing their brains out.

He was nearly at the shattered doors when he felt someone grab his right shoulder plate from behind.

"Scorch!" It was Boss, with Sev right behind him. Scorch was aware of frantic activity all around him and an alarm klaxon screaming close by, but he couldn't pay attention to it. It felt like it was all happening behind a transparisteel barrier. "Whoa there. You don't know where you're heading yet." Boss spun Scorch around and handed him his helmet. "And you'll probably need this."

Just being stopped in his tracks was enough to jerk him out of the blind rush to exact revenge. He found himself panting. The hall came back into focus; the sound was making sense now. The rest of his squad looked a mess, covered in fine dust, and then Omega came scrambling over to them, kicking chairs aside. Etain appeared from the other side, hair in a tangle but very alert.

"Everyone okay?" she asked. "Scorch, did you get hit by anything? Did you lose consciousness?"

"I'm not concussed," he said firmly. His voice sounded odd to him. Maybe he looked crazy to her. "I just want to kill the shabuir who did this. How did they get past the missile defenses?"

"I just raised the base security team," she said. "The security scanners show the trajectory of the missile, and it came from inside the city. Not from the rebel positions."

"Have they calculated a location yet?"

"To within one block," Niner said.

"Good." Scorch felt that they were staring at him, but even though he was back in control again, he still knew that only one thing would let him sleep tonight. "Time for house calls."

Treasury offices, Coruscant "Ooh," said Jilka. She took Besany's wrist as if arresting her and yanked her hand up to inspect it. "That's nice."

Besany should have known she could get nothing past Jilka Zan Zentis. The woman was a tax investigator. She could assess a defaulting taxpayer's net worth to the last cred just by sniffing him-blindfolded. She zeroed in on the ring that Besany had thought was discreet and understated.

"It's nothing."

"Doesn't look like nothing to me," Jilka said. Besany made an effort to herd her into a quieter corner of the archive area. "Looks like top-grade sapphire. Looks like you ditched soldier boy for a more upmarket model."

"Soldier boy," Besany said feeling her throat tighten with temper, "has not been ditched. And I'm going to get Ordo out of the army." She swallowed hard knowing it was unwise to say it, but she would not cover him up like some guilty secret simply because he was a clone. "We got married."

Jilka looked as if Besany had told her she was joining a Jabiimi terrorist group for a lark. "Can you even do that?"

"No law against it." At least it had distracted Jilka from a full assay of the stone. Besany willed her not to say that she couldn't marry a clone, because then she wouldn't be able to bite back a retort. "And I know what I'm getting into, before you ask."

Record droids whirred past in the corridor. "I haven't a clue what you're getting into, so I wouldn't ask," Jilka said. "And you don't talk about him much, so there's not much for me to warn you about anyway. Boy, are you edgy lately." She shrugged. "Well, congratulations. No nuptial cake to share?"

Besany was edgy all right. It wasn't just the small matter of slicing data from the Republic computer network on a regular basis. She'd almost grown used to the constant anxiety about that. It was the kriffing shoroni sapphires that were uppermost in her mind, possibly because they were so visible, and her data theft wasn't. She thought she'd put the problem to rest when Vau had the three gems recut into smaller stones for her by one of his dodgy Hutt contacts. That had shaved a lot off the value. But they were still worth millions, and they were almost impossible to trace. She'd weakened and had one made into a ring, to stop Ordo from feeling he'd been rejected. Once he was reassured that she'd have been as happy with a plastoid band, she'd sell it to raise hard credits.

It's wrong. I shouldn't benefit from this.

She kept the rest of the stones in her jacket, wrapped tightly in a small flimsiplast bag, because she wasn't sure what to do with them. One idea nagged at her like a begging child.

It's crazy. But someone I know has a very good use for those creds, for clones even Skirata won't be able to help.

"It's the war," Besany said which was true.

"At least it'll be over." Jilka's eyes still strayed to the sapphire, but it was the cold appraisal of a professional calculating unpaid tax, not a woman admiring a bauble. "And it won't reach Coruscant."

"What makes you say that?"

"It just won't."

"I meant why you think it'll be over."

Jilka shrugged. She seemed to be picking her words, but Besany knew her well enough to know she was trying to avoid saying the obvious: that the Republic might have to give in to Separatist demands, because the war was stretching it thin. She would stop short of saying that clone casualties would be too high to carry on. That was too crass an observation, true or not.

At least she kept up to speed with the progress of the war. That was more than most.

"Costs too much," Jilka said at last. "Senator Skeenah's raised a question in the Senate about the large numbers of gunships being ordered that are taking too long to get to the front line. I think they've got a budget crunch, but the accounts are such a mess it's hard to know where to start."

Ah. Skeenah was a decent, moral human being who cared about the treatment of clone troopers. He was a few months behind Besany on this one; she wished he was less diligent. She didn't want attention drawn to the very area she was investigating. Maybe giving him the proceeds from selling the sapphires was too risky.

Start. Start?

"What do you mean, start?" Besany asked.

"Well, if he gets the Senate to back his call for a full audit, some unlucky person's going to have to do it."

Besany had always been good at covering her tracks.

For the past fifteen months or so, she'd mined the Republic's financial network for apparently routine data on exports and defense procurement, patiently piecing together a complex picture of ships being ordered from KDY and laboratory supplies heading for Centax 2.

"It'll be me," she said wishing Skeenah had either shut up or started his finance crusade a lot earlier, when it would have given her better cover for her own activity. "And I could do without an extra project right now." Besany looked at the chrono on the archive wall and edged toward the doors with her box of datachips. "Got a lot to catch up with. See you later."

"Did you ever find that medical supplies company you were trying to track down?"

"No, I had to admit defeat on that one," Besany said far too quickly.

Jilka would know that wasn't like Besany at all. Besany hoped she'd put it down to worrying about Ordo. When she was safely in her own office, she went through her daily routine of running a search for all new transactions on the Treasury ledger-sometimes as many as a million line items a day-and set it to look for defense and medical product codes. Anyone hiding those items probably wouldn't use them, but she had to start somewhere each day. She could refine them farther by delivery target dates; any expenditure was sorted by the quarter in which it was due to be drawn down from the budget.

What was she really looking for now, anyway? Timetables. She knew what was happening. She just needed as many clues as she could get for Skirata to decide when the time would be right to pull his boys out.

And me.

She'd never been to Mandalore, and she hadn't the first clue what a frontier existence on a backward rural planet might be like. As she glanced at her office-worker hands, soft and manicured, she decided it was too late to worry about that now, and concentrated on the scrolling lines of data in slight defocus, letting her eyes scan rather than trying to read.

The medical items weren't showing any pattern, but the defense procurement codes were clustering around the same period about a month or two away. On its own, that was nothing; added to what she already knew, it just reinforced the time period that was becoming more apparent as the likely time for the big push. She made a copy of the defense budget data-perfectly legitimate in her current role-but transferred it onto her private datapad rather than her Treasury one for transmission to Skirata.

How much does he tell Etain?

Besany hardly saw her. It was just as well, because she wasn't sure what she could safely discuss with her. The two women could hardly sit down over a cup of caf and chat about the various scams she'd pulled. It was one deception layered on top of another, even within their own circle.

Besany stuck to her routine, going out at lunchtime to stretch her legs and transmit the data clear of the building. As soon as her encrypted system indicated that the data had been received she deleted the files; the less time she had them on her 'pad, the better. A brisk walk around the plaza and a little window-shopping created the illusion that life went on as it always had for her, instead of the minutes ticking down toward the time when she would have to leave everything she knew.

As she walked, she felt the hairs on her nape prickle, as if someone was behind her again. She really had to shake this off. If she didn't, she'd be completely nuts soon. A casual glance over her shoulder confirmed as it did almost every time, that there was nobody around but office workers on their meal break and shoppers, just like her.

These days, she saw clone patrols on the streets. It had started with a few outside main government buildings, and now she was seeing them daily, the same white armor she was used to, but some with blue sigils and plate detail, some with red. She made a note to ask Ordo who they were, and carried on shopping.

What matters more? An easy life, or doing what's right? You can make a difference. So it's your moral duty to do it. That's what Dad would have done.

She'd cope, because Etain would, and so would Laseema. They were all in this together. Back in the office, she leaned back in her chair and unlocked her terminal to begin today's task-real work, the stuff she was paid to do-checking a tip-off that catering contracts were being awarded to nonexistent companies, the credits pocketed by someone in the procurement service. It was a common scam in a big, complex budget.

"Just can't get the staff these days," she muttered to herself. "Okay ... let's see ..."

She accessed the Treasury database of registered companies, which was simple enough, but when she tried to crosscheck an entry with a CHA food hygiene inspection she hit a problem. Instead of lines of names, addresses, and registration numbers, she got only a portal screen; access was denied.

The system was usually more reliable than that. "Jay-Nine," she called. "Jay?"

The support droid was usually wandering up and down the corridor on this floor of the building, ready to be summoned to fix computer problems. He rarely had to be called. Normally, the sound of distant swearing was enough to summon him. She heard the faint hum of his repulsors as he glided down the corridor, the top of his dome just visible above the rail in the transparisteel wall.

"Agent Wennen," said the droid hovering in front of her desk. "Problem?"

"I can't get into the CHA network, Jay. It's locked me out."

As soon as she said it, her gut knotted. They've caught me. In the weeks after Ordo had killed the Republic spy trailing her, she'd waited for that knock at the door or a hand on the shoulder to tell her the game was up, but nothing had happened.

"Central Tech took down the network during the meal break," the droid said. "They found what appears to be a virus in the system, so they activated the departmental firewalls. Nothing to worry about. All requests for data will have to be via comlink for a few days, that's all. Did you not receive notice of the shutdown?"

"Obviously not," she said. Relief of a kind flooded her, but it didn't stop that churning sensation that spread from her stomach and became a feeling of cold tension in her thigh muscles. "And why does neutralizing a virus take days?"

"We've never seen this before. It's very sophisticated. We're not even certain what it's doing, because it causes no disruption, but there's definitely something running across the network that wasn't installed by the Treasury and shouldn't be there."

I'll bet. Jaing and Mereel were gifted slicers. And she'd watched Ordo hack into the Republic Intel system with the ease of someone checking his stock prices. There was no magic or mystery in it, just the right inside information; almost every breach of security she'd ever investigated came down not to brilliant computer skills-although the Nulls were brilliant-but to someone being careless with passwords and verifications.

I opened the door.

I let the Nulls into the system within hours of meeting them.

She didn't regret it, but it didn't stop her from being scared.

And now she had a problem. Her access was severely limited and the Treasury computer team had spotted that something was wrong. There'd be an investigation. Things would get too close for comfort. She was qualified in computer auditing, but the stuff Jaing could do-that was well outside her league, and she had no idea what he might have introduced into the system.

"Well, I'll just have to work around it, Jay," Besany said. "Have other departments been infected?"

"Still looking, Agent Wennen," said the droid.

It was all Besany could do to stop herself from making an excuse to leave the building to warn Skirata. She waited an hour so that if she was being watched she didn't look as if she'd rushed to call someone as soon as she found her network access was down. Walking across the plaza in front of the Treasury building, she bought a mealbread stick from a vendor; then, casually as she could she munched on it while she commed Skirata.

"Kal?" she said. "I've got another one of my problems ..."

Hadde, capital of Haurgab, half an hour after the missile attack Hadde was now enemy territory.

After months of regarding the capital as a safe haven, the GAR could no longer be relaxed about watching its back here. Darman provided top cover on Omega's patrol vehicle as it sped down the main road behind Delta's, both of them flanked by new Nek Pup armored gun platforms of the 85th Infantry as fire support.

"More of those guys from the Fourteenth," Corr said quietly. On either side of them, life seemed to be carrying on as normal, with shop awnings pulled down against the blistering afternoon sun and few citizens on the streets. The launch coordinates for the missile were in this neighborhood. "Look. Manning the right-hand gun."

The man looked like any other clone trooper, except for the discreet brigade markings. Darman tried to get a closer look. But his attention was needed on the street, to keep an eye out for trouble at ground level while the others scanned rooftops. The remote that Atin had sent out in front of them checked the route ahead for ambushes, trip wires, and disturbed ground, relaying images to their HUDs. The Hadde militia and civilian police had swept through a few minutes ahead of them.

"Are they some kind of special unit?" Niner asked. "Because I've only seen them in ones and twos. And that's odd. And we didn't know about them. That's even odder."

Etain, crammed into the seat behind Atin on the open-bay speeder, made a noncommittal grunt. "The Nulls weren't told about them, either."

"Is that a problem?" Corr asked.

"Well, it bothers me" Darman said. "Seeing as they seem to know every time the Chancellor changes channels on HNE..."

"That's just talk to scare you, ner vod."

"It's true."

"If the Nulls were Force-sensitive, too," Etain said carefully, "they'd be terrifying."

"Like they're not already?" Darman turned as far as he dared to look at her. Fierfek, that's my girl. I've got a girl. I matter to someone in the outside world. The heady sweetness of it distracted him for a moment. "I mean, they're our brothers, and we love 'em now that we know them better, but when they get that red mist-well, they scare me."

Corr sighted up fast on an apartment building, making Darman think he'd spotted something through the cloud of dust kicked up by the speeders. "They're only a danger to aruetiise."

"Yeah, I'm more scared of Scorch at the moment," Atin said but he didn't sound as if he was joking. Delta's speeder was fifty meters ahead in a wake of dust. "I think he's feeling it."