"The Rebels didn't have to lift a finger," Disra said coldly. 'The stormtroopers handled it all by themselves."

Caaldra's eyes narrowed. "Stormtroopers?"

"If they weren't, they were a very good imitation," Disra said. "You a.s.sured me that most of the Imperial presence had been pulled out of Shelsha sector."

"It has been," Caaldra said, frowning. "There's the Reprisal and a few antique Dreadnaughts on patrol, the two remaining army garrisons on Minkring and Chaastern Four, and that's it."

"Then maybe you'll explain to me where all the stormtroopers came from,"

Disra countered. "The Reprisal?"

"The Reprisal never gets within fifty light-years of Drunost," Caaldra said, wrinkling his nose in disgust. "Captain Ozzel likes simple, comfortable routines. The man is excruciatingly predictable."

"Well, they came from somewhere," Disra snapped.

"The Commodore says the surviving Barglegs read it as at least three squads, plus heavy-weapons support."

"Called to cry on his shoulder, did they?" Caaldra asked snidely. "I hope they at least used one of the message drops."

"It didn't sound like it," Disra said. "Besides, screaming works so much better when it's done face-to-face."

Caaldra's face went rigid. "They called Gepparin directly?" he demanded.

"Those stupid idiots."

"Those stupid idiots are mostly dead," Disra reminded him. "Taking their million-credit recruitment money with them, I might add."

"Forget the money," Caaldra snapped. "Are you blind and stupid? A direct call leaves a record in the HoloNet system that can be traced."

"Traced by whom?" Disra countered. "And to where? There must be a hundred thousand HoloNet transmissions going out from Drunost every hour. No one's going to be able to figure out which one was theirs."

"It's still sloppy," Caaldra insisted, calming down a little. "But then, what do you expect from a swoop gang?"

"I personally expected to at least get our money's worth out of them,"

Disra said. "Incidentally, the surviving Barglegs want off Drunost, and the Commodore wants compensation for the Barloz freighter they used to get there."

"The ship got impounded?"

"The ship got demolished," Disra corrected. "That's where the heavy-weapons support comes in."

Caaldra made a face. "All right, I'll check it out," he said. "Maybe the damage isn't as bad as the Barglegs think."

"And if it is?"

"Consolidated Shipping has a nice little bank repository near their hub,"

Caaldra said. "I'll organize some people and we'll go collect the Commodore's compensation."

"Well, while you're our that way, you might also take a moment to look in on Ranklinge," Disra suggested. "I got word a few hours ago that the man you set up as patroller chief in Ja.n.u.sar has been deposed. By force."

"Now, that one is impossible," Caaldra said flatly. "Cav'Saran knows his business. The first thing he would have done was confiscate every weapon in the district."

"I'm sure he was very thorough," Disra said. "Unfortunately for him, the stormtroopers were thoughtful enough to bring their own."

A muscle tightened in Caaldra's cheek. "More stormtroopers?"

"Yes, more stormtroopers," Disra retorted. "And given that you told me Cav'Saran had three hundred hardened men on his side, there must have been at least five squads on this one."

Caaldra's gaze defocused slightly. "Yes, well, his men probably weren't all that hardened," he mused. "He wouldn't have hired anyone expensive, not to intimidate a small city full of unarmed civilians. He was always cheap with a credit."

"He'll never learn his lesson now," Disra said. "He's dead, along with six of his men. The stormtrooper squad commander identified his group as the Hand of Judgment, by the way."

"Interesting designation," Caaldra said thoughtfully. "Not really standard format."

"You can file a complaint" with Stormtrooper Command," Disra said acidly.

"I'm still waiting for your explanation of where this Hand of Judgment came from."

"They're certainly not official forces," Caaldra said slowly. "The governor's office is supposed to be informed whenever Imperial military units are operating in his sector, and my own taps into the intelligence systerm haven't mentioned any extra stormtroopers being a.s.signed to the area."

"Are you suggesting the Barglegs and half of Ja.n.u.sar were hallucinating?"

"Hardly," Caaldra said, his voice turning suddenly grim. "I'm suggesting we may have an Imperial agent in our sector."

Disra felt his mouth go dry. "An Imperial agent? You mean Imperial Center's on to us?"

"Not necessarily," Caaldra said. "He might just be going after the BloodScars."

"I thought you said Imperial Center wasn't interested in pirates anymore."

"In general, they're not," Caaldra agreed. "But we have taken eight military transports in the past eighteen months. Maybe Imperial Center finally noticed." "Wonderful," Disra growled. "Those military targets were supposed to be masked by all the civilian targets we were hitting.

That was one of the reasons you gave for sh.e.l.ling out all that money to those other pirate and raider groups, wasn't it?"

"Trust me, when the time comes you'll be glad to have all that extra firepower under a central control," Caaldra said.

"If we get that far," Disra warned. "So what about this Imperial agent?"

"What about him?" Caaldra said. "Imperial Center doesn't know anything-if they did, we'd have a dozen Star Destroyers in the sector instead of an agent and a few squads of stormtroopers. We can afford to let them poke around the edges for a while."

"And if they start poking closer to the center?"

"They have to find it first," Caaldra said. "a.s.suming no one else does anything stupid-like not using the message drops-there's no way even an Imperial agent can tag either the BloodScars or us. Not before we're ready to move."

Disra grimaced. But Caaldra was the one with the military training. He presumably knew what he was talking about. "What about Ranklinge?" he asked. "With Cav'Saran gone, we don't have anyone in easy striking distance of that 1-7 plant anymore."

"Not a problem," Caaldra a.s.sured him. "It would have been nice to hit the plant from the ground, but we can take it from the sky almost as easily.

I'll ask the Commodore to recommend someone to handle that."

"Someone fierce, competent, and expendable?"

"Basically," Caaldra said. "As to the blaster rifles the Barglegs lost, it turns out that's going to be completely irrelevant. I've got a cargo in my sights now that'll work even better to neutralize the Minkring and Chaastern Four garrisons."

"More E-Web repeaters?"

"No, we have plenty of those already," Caaldra a.s.sured him. "I'll tell you after we see if the BloodScars can pull it off-their best ship and crew are on the way right now." He stood up. "But the Commodore might not want to turn it over to us if I don't have their compensation for the lost Barloz in hand. I'd better get that operation rolling."

"Just be careful," Disra said. "With an Imperial agent on the loose, we can't afford any slipups."

"There won't be," Caaldra a.s.sured him. "Relax, Disra. Your governor's about to go down in history. Remember?" With a tight smile, he crossed the room to the hidden door and disappeared back into the secret pa.s.sages.

Only then did Disra permit himself a smile of his own. Yes, Governor Ch.o.a.rd was indeed going to go down in history.

But not under the heading anyone was expecting.

Pirate captains, one of Mara's instructors had taught her, seldom ran their ships on a standard military three-shirt, down-the-chrono system.

More typically they used a single-day cycle, with everyone except a duty pilot retiring to their cabins to sleep during ship's night.

Shakko, as it turned out, was a typical pirate captain.

Mara spent the first two nights roaming freely about the ship, searching everywhere except the cabins and the c.o.c.kpit for Caaldra's data card. The cabins were a trickier proposition, but after a couple of days of studying the pirates' movements she discovered they spent most of their nonmeal waking hours away from the cabin area, either on duty in the c.o.c.kpit or engineering room, or else working on the various weapons in the forward hold. With stealth and the prescience provided by the Force, she was able to find opportunities to slip into and search each of the cabins.

Unfortunately, none of the skulking did her any good. Either Shakko had filed the data card in the c.o.c.kpit, the one place she hadn't yet had a chance to search, or else he was carrying it with him.

And she was starting to run low on time. The search had already cost her nearly four days, with only one left until their scheduled attack. So far she had avoided any further contact with the crew, knowing that two unexplained blackout accidents on the same trip would be something even the stupidest pirate would start to wonder about. But if there was no other way, she would just have to do it.

The fourth ship's day had ended, and she was waiting in her cargo hold burrow for everyone to retire for the night, when she heard the quiet footsteps.

She sat up a little straighter, stretching out with her senses. There had been occasional visitors to the cargo bay over the previous four days, but on those occasions the footsteps had been casual and unconcerned, their owners making straight paths to one or another of the crates and then retreating just as casually. Now, in contrast, the intruders were coming in a group and clearly trying not to be heard.

And they were headed directly toward the stack of crates where Mara was hiding.

She rose silently into a crouch, making sure her blaster and lightsaber were near at hand. Pressing her back against the wide barrel that held up the center of her burrow's ceiling, she prepared herself for combat.

Their first move would probably be some sort of grenade...

And sure enough, a second later a small concussion grenade dropped neatly through one of the air gaps she'd left between the crates and clattered to the deck directly in front of her.

Instantly she twisted to her right, rolling backward onto her shoulders and kicking her legs into a tightly curled tuck over her head. Halfway through the backward somersault she twisted again, this time to her left, bringing her legs down and shoving off the deck with her left shoulder and forearm.

She had just rolled up into a new crouch on the far side of the barrel when the grenade went off.

The blast was deafening, the impact lifting the crates of her roof a few centimeters and driving the supporting barrel hard against her back. The shock was too much for the delicate equilibrium she'd set up, and even as she pushed herself away from the barrel the whole burrow collapsed. The two crates directly above her tipped off their supports and toppled toward her head; stretching out to the Force, she deflected them to either side past her shoulders.

It would have been simpler to use the Force right from the beginning, to grab the grenade and throw it back our of her burrow. But that would have alerted her attackers to the fact that their prey was on to them. Now they would come in less cautiously, expecting to find their victim helpless or dead. Drawing her blaster, Mara stood.

There were four pirates in the attack group, spread out in a semicircle around her, their eyes goggling at her sudden appearance, their blasters still in hand but pointed carelessly at the deck. Raising her own weapon, Mara opened fire.

She dropped the two in the middle before any of them could get their weapons back up to firing position. The man on the far left was the fastest, and Mara had to bend out of the way as his first shot sizzled past her head. She stretched toward him with the Force, and his second shot, to his clearly stunned consternation, took out his fellow pirate on the far right as Mara twisted his gun hand in that direction.

He was still wearing an expression of disbelief at what he'd done when Mara's final shot ended all his expressions forever.

She was working her way out of the ruins of her hiding place when, beneath her feet, she felt a chunk through the hull, a tremor without accompanying sound, followed immediately by a more subtle and stretched-out vibration. She frowned, wondering what the pirates were up to now.

And then, with a rush of adrenaline, she understood. The thunk had been the lowering of the weapons bay's front hull section, the longer vibration the firing of the quad lasers and ion cannon, and the total Jack of sound due to the total lack of air in the bay.

A day ahead of schedule, the pirates had launched their attack.

Mara was halfway to the weapons bay before it suddenly occurred to her that there was nothing she could do there to stop them. With the area already open to s.p.a.ce, breaking in would merely drain the air from the rest of the ship, killing Mara along with everyone else aboard. There were spare vac suits in the engine section, but it would cost her precious minutes to get into one of them.

If she couldn't stop the attack directly, though, maybe she could do so indirectly.

She had expected the blast door leading into the c.o.c.kpit to be sealed, and she was right. She'd also expected her lightsaber to have no problem slicing it open, and was right again. With the blazing magenta blade held in guard position in front of her, she leapt inside.

There were four pirates in the c.o.c.kpit, including both Shakko and Tannis, all four with blasters drawn and ready. But instead of firing in volley, which might have given her trouble, they opened up more or less at random, their bolts ricocheting off her lightsaber blade to sizzle their way into the deck or bulkhead or ceiling. Slowly, Mara moved forward, keeping the blade moving, taking care to keep the deflected shots from hitting any of the controls or, worse, the transparisteel canopy.

"Surrender!" she ordered, the word coming out with difficulty as she shifted just enough of her attention away from her defense to work her mouth.

"Go crink yourself," Shakko snarled back. "Crinking Imper-"

The curse collapsed into a gurgle as Mara sent one of his own shots backward into his throat.

The other three pirates redoubled their efforts, the first hint of fear starting to show through their rage. But neither fear nor rage could help them now. Mara had the timing and the distance, and the next two shots sent two more of the pirates to join their captain in death. The last one, Tannis, hesitated a split second, then lifted his blaster high and fired defiantly straight at Mara's face.

With only one opponent left, Mara could afford a little finesse. Instead of returning his shot to head or torso, she deflected it into his right thigh.

He gasped with pain, stumbling as his leg collapsed beneath him. His blaster wavered out of line; taking a step forward, Mara twirled her lightsaber in a tight cone spiral and sliced the weapon neatly in half.

Holding her left hand toward him, palm outward, she gave him a Force shove that staggered him back into the copilot's seat.

"Stay there," she ordered, stepping up beside him and peering out the canopy. The target ship was a large Rendili freighter, something high-cla.s.s by the looks of it. Or, at least, it had been high-cla.s.s once. With the pirate ship's lasers pounding at its hull and engine section, it was rapidly losing that new-ship l.u.s.ter. Lowering her gaze to the board, she located the acceleration compensator control.

There were fail-safes built into the system to prevent anyone from easily turning it off, so she didn't bother trying. Instead she stabbed her lightsaber into that part of the board, fusing the controls and sending a feedback surge through the system that she hoped would knock out everything in its path.

The compensator indicators went solid red. Mara closed down her lightsaber and put it away. "Better strap in," she advised Tannis as she sat down in the pilot's seat and fastened her own restraints.

Peripherally, she noted that Tannis had stopped clutching his wounded leg and was doing likewise. A survivor type, clearly, and Mara tucked that bit of data away for future reference. Keying in the main drive, she fired a short forward burst.

An invisible hand shoved her hard against her seat back. Tannis gave a strangled gasp, a reaction Mara could completely sympathize with. No one flew without compensators, and even though tight maneuvers could strain them enough to let a little of the acceleration through, even Mara hadn't been entirely prepared for what their complete absence would feel like.

She keyed off the drive, and the backward weight vanished as abruptly as it had appeared. Bracing herself, she keyed the forward thrusters and fired again.

The invisible hand reversed direction, this time pushing her forward against her restraints. With the forward thrusters still firing she keyed in the starboard maneuvering jets, pressing her right hip against the seat's armrest.

The firing from the weapons bay had ceased, replaced by howls and curses of protest from the comm speaker. Ignoring the complaints, Mara shut down all the thrusters, then fired the portside jets, followed by the forward thrusters, then the starboard jets, then the main thrusters, then the forward and starboard jets together. Then, shutting everything down again, she leaned forward and looked out the canopy.