Ordo took it personally. He drew on the memory of sharp, cold fear and focused hatred that he had learned on Kamino before a total stranger had stepped in front of him and saved his life.

We can trust nobody but our brothers and Kal'buir.

Over the comlink, he could still hear Niner's exclamations of satisfaction. The six men and women tagged by Fi and Sev were dispersing all over Galactic City, leaving routes and stopping points that Niner and Boss were logging on a holo-chart that showed every skylane, quadrant, and building on Coruscant. Judging by their occasional descent into the rich Mandalorian invective that Kal'buir considered an important part of their continuing education, they were learning more than anyone had bargained for.

Ordo would evaluate it all when he returned, but the number of locations that the tagging had registered had now reached twenty; it was growing into something larger than a fourteen-man team might be able to handle.

Ordo wanted to tell them to concentrate on the clusters, the areas of most traffic, but it would have to wait. The strip cam had yielded nothing, except the fact that females of all species employed in the center seemed to spend a lot of time in the 'freshers rearranging their appearance. Whoever had been used to collecting the data probably knew Vinna Jiss was gone now and was no doubt trying another route. He kept a careful eye on Supervisor Wennen because she seemed to be getting increasingly agitated as the day wore on. He could hear it in her voice. She didn't like Guris. She was checking something: when he went to the 'freshers, she was still on the same screen when he returned, scrolling up and down an inventory.

She was checking rifle shipments going back two or three months. If it's you, Wennen, what is your motive?

He didn't have to stop to read the screen over her shoulder. He could simply glance at it, focus, and walk back to his workstation to close his eyes discreetly and recall what he had seen.

Whatever errors the Kaminoans had made in their attempt to improve Jango Fett's genome, the efforts had not been wasted.

Wennen looked up toward the doors. Her fine-boned face, while still aesthetically pleasing, suddenly froze into genuine anger and lost its prettiness.

“Jiss,” she said sourly. “You'd better have a good excuse this time.”

Ordo fought every instinct to jerk around and stare. He simply turned his head casually to focus on a sheet of flimsi to his right, and there she was: Vinna Jiss.

You're dead.

“I've been unwell, Supervisor.”

But you're dead. So who are you?

“Heard of comlinks? I even had your landlord calling me, complaining you'd skipped without paying rent.”

I know you're dead because you fell a few thousand meters from a balcony after a chat with Walon Vau.

“Sorry, Supervisor.”

Wennen was all acid, lips compressed. “See me first thing in the morning. I'm off shift now.”

She shut down her workstation, grabbed her jacket, and made a move toward the doors. Then she paused and turned to Ordo.

“Corr, it's sixteen-thirty,” she said. “Come on. Time to go. Nobody will thank you for sitting there all night. Want me to drop you off at the barracks?”

Jiss, either you're dead or you're an imposter. So who did Vau kill?

“Thank you, Supervisor.” Ordo logged off and replaced his helmet, suddenly glad of the chance to hide behind an anonymous white plastoid visor and stare horrified at the face of a dead woman who seemed to be doing pretty well for a corpse. “I'm … I'm going to meet some comrades from the Forty-first. Could you drop me off at the first taxi platform in the entertainment sector, please?”

“I'm glad you're taking the opportunity to relax, Corr.” She seemed genuinely pleased. “You deserve it.”

Ordo took one last look at the woman who appeared to be Jiss, memorizing every pore and line, and followed Wennen outside to the speeder bays. He slid into the passenger's seat with a hundred questions that had, for once in his life, yielded no fast answers.

Wennen powered up her speeder and sat still for a moment, staring at the console.

“Honestly,” she snorted, all exasperation. “That's the most unreliable employee I have ever known. Sometimes I could just kill that woman.”

Operational house, Qibbu's Hut, 1630 hours, 384 days after Geonosis

“There they go … ,” Niner said.

Beads of red light were now dotted throughout the blue holochart of grids and lines that had expanded to fill a space a meter high and two meters long. The tracking Dust was transmitting the movements of the six Separatists they had tagged a few hours earlier.

Etain walked around the 3-D chart, studying tracks that were strung like necklaces with occasional solitary beads placed at intervals. The virtual representation of a section of Galactic City spanned the table. Some of the threads crossed and merged. Niner and Boss were still taking data from it and listing each location while Vau watched with Jusik.

“They do get around,” Vau said. “Jusik, my boy, has anyone ever told you you're a genius?”

Jusik shrugged. “And my friends are excellent shots. Good team, aren't we?”

Friends was an unusual way for a Jedi to describe clone troops who were technically his to command and use as he thought fit. But Jusik simply didn't see the world that way. Etain found it deeply touching.

“Yes, excellent team,” Vau said. Boss glanced up, evidently pleased. “It's wonderful to watch a job done well.”

That wasn't quite the Walon Vau that Etain had sensed and found to be sheer passionless brutality. He was no less complex and contradictory than Skirata. Atin, reading from his datapad, ignored him completely; Vau sometimes glanced at his former trainee but got no reaction.

Atin loathes him. He wants revenge of some kind. Etain found it hard to reconcile that with the methodical, considerate, and courageous man she knew, the one who had felt he had no right to survive Geonosis when his brothers had died.

While the locations were collated, another frustrating hiatus had forced the squads into rest and recovery. They seemed to need to be busy fighting, especially Delta. Etain could taste their collective impatience. Maybe it was youth; but maybe it was that they didn't enjoy having time to think.

Fi, Sev, Fixer, and Scorch had gone down to the restaurant to eat with Corr, but Darman was asleep in his room. Etain went to check on him and watched him for a while. He lay on his stomach, head turned to one side, cheek resting on folded arms, and twitched occasionally as if dreaming.

They grabbed every small moment together that they could find. And it wasn't enough. Etain kissed his temple and left him to sleep. Skirata, wandering around with his hands deep in his pockets, gave her a conspiratorial wink.

“Looks like we've got three clusters in residential areas,” Boss said. “And now about twenty-five other places they've at least stopped for a while, including shops.”

Skirata stood looking at the mesh of colored light. “We can't cover them all,” he said. “The clusters are the priority.”

“Probably their safe houses or bomb factories.” Boss indicated a static point of red light that hadn't moved in an hour. “I think that's our marked pack of thermal plastoid.”

“Could well be. Got a list now?”

“It gets longer by the hour. How long did you say that Dust can transmit?”

Jusik cocked his head, calculating. “Four, perhaps five weeks.”

“Well, I say we recce the cluster points for a day or so, confirm the activity, and then decide which are the priority targets and leave the rest to CSF.” Niner jabbed his finger into the holochart again to indicate another thread growing as the tagged suspect moved to a new location. “This target is trailing the other. No idea why. Maybe providing tail cover.”