Wennen looked in bad shape. Her eyes were streaming and she curled up into a ball, clutching her chest. Etain had fired the PEP laser at close range. “Republic … Audit … you shoot me, chum … and you're in big trouble …”

“What?”

“Treasury officer?”

“Show me, or you're the one in trouble, ma'am.”

She let out an anguished gasp and fumbled for her pocket. Ordo decided to play safe and extract the contents for her. Yes, it was an identichip: Republic Treasury Audit Division.

“You've nearly fouled up a GAR operation,” he said.

“I was following Jiss.”

“Why?”

“Supplies going missing. So did she. Who are you?” She pulled back her head a little to focus on his bare hand gripping the Verp. “Well, that tells me you're not Trooper Corr.”

“Obviously.”

“Are you the captain who came in the other day? Because you certainly recognize me.”

So much for deniability: this would be all over the Treasury in hours if he let her get up and walk away—not that she seemed able to. “We need to have a little chat.”

“And what's that?” Wennen tilted her head to look at the Gurlanin, lying inert while Etain struggled to stabilize its wound.

Etain opened her eyes a little.

“This,” she said, “used to be one of our allies.”

Operational house, Qibbu's Hut, 0045 hours, 385 days after Geonosis

Skirata assembled a makeshift deployment tote board from three large sheets of flimsi and stuck them to the wall.

It was old technology, real words on real flimsi, not shifting lights and code. He needed its solid reassurance right now. Things were turning osikla.

Corr—assigned to the team on Skirata's whim—stood beside him, dutifully listing target locations by numbers of visits and tagged suspects on one sheet while Skirata kept a tally of which commando was deployed, and where they all were for the next twelve standard hours. Without his armor and bodysuit, Corr was just a very young man with durasteel mechanisms where he should have had real hands, and it broke Skirata's heart.

Droid. They're making you into what they always thought you were, son.

Skirata shook himself out of it and concentrated on the flimsi. He hated holocharts. He liked solid things that he could grab hold of, even if they had their limitations. It also kept his hands occupied when he was reaching the limits of his confidence. He had to stand firm. His men needed to see him in control, reassuring, believing in them.

Believing in them was easy. He had doubts about himself. He glanced over his shoulder. “Is that thing dead yet?”

“Kal'buir, I'm sorry I got this wrong,” Ordo said. Somewhere, no matter how much reassurance Skirata gave him, he still seemed to fear that not being good enough meant a death sentence. Skirata hated Kaminoans with renewed passion. “I should have known what the creature was. I knew they existed.”

“Son, none of us knew any of them were on Coruscant.”

But they were. And that changed everything.

Etain and Jusik were kneeling on either side of the Gurlanin, hands flat on its flanks in some kind of Jedi healing process. Vau watched with interest. He was the anatomy expert, although he was more skilled at taking bodies apart than repairing them. Darman and Niner seemed unwilling to go back to sleep and joined the audience.

They'd become close to a Gurlanin on Qiilura. It must have been very hard to think of them now as possible agents for the Separatists.

It was a black-furred carnivore about a meter high at the shoulder, with long legs, four double-tipped fangs, and hard, unforgiving orange eyes. It now looked exactly what it was: a shapeshifting predator.

“It's recovering,” Jusik said.

“Good,” Vau said. “Because we want a chat with it.”

Etain looked up with that pinched expression she tended to adopt when she was angry in her rather righteous kind of way. “I lived alongside them. We promised we'd give them back their planet and so far all we've done is move in a garrison and train the human colonists to look after themselves.”

Vau stared slightly past her, straight-faced. “I believe that was you personally, General. You and Zey. And you were only following orders. That's it, isn't it? Following orders.”

“Knock it off,” Skirata said. He didn't want Darman pitching in to defend Etain. Everyone's nerves were raw: tired, stressed people were dangerous, and they needed to be dangerous to the enemy, not each other. “Ordo, what are we going to do with Supervisor Wennen?”

Besany Wennen was propped in a chair, arms folded gingerly across what must have been a very painful bruise to her whole chest. She was lucky that Etain's close-range PEP round hadn't killed her, but now the woman was just an extra complication they didn't need. Ordo was looking her over as if she was a new species.

And she was. There was a comfortable zone of attractiveness in females, and then there was a point beyond which it became too much. The very beautiful were intimidating and unwelcome. Wennen had passed that threshold, and Skirata was ambushed by his own unexpected hostility toward her.

“You've probably guessed what we're doing, ma'am,” Ordo said.

“Anti-terrorist operations?”

“Correct.”

“I'm sorry. I had no idea.” But there was no screaming outrage or threats that her boss would rip the guts out of their boss, the usual response of bureaucrats. She just indicated the unconscious Gurlanin with a shaky hand. “Where does the Gurlanin fit into all this?”

“Other than mimicking Jiss, we have no idea.”

Wennen seemed to be taking refuge in investigation, continuing to do her job even though she knew she was in a serious situation. Skirata respected that. “So if you two are Jedi, why didn't you spot the creature?”

“Gurlanins can hide in the Force and shut us out,” Etain said. “When I first encountered them I even thought they were Jedi. They're telepathic, we can't detect them, we don’t know how many there are, and they appear to be able to mimic any species up to tall humanoid size.”

“Perfect spies,” Jusik said. “And perfect predators.”

“And we didn't honor our pledge to help them, so I suspect they've run out of patience.”

“Look, no disrespect to our Treasury colleague, boys and girls, but can we refrain from discussing classified intelligence in front of Agent Wennen?” Skirata said. “I need to talk to CSF. Corr, you call up the recce teams and see how far they've got on the main locations.”

Skirata wandered out onto the landing platform and breathed in cool night air. The strill was curled up under the bench where, true to his word, Vau had slept each night. He probably thought it proved the point that he was a hard case, but there was no doubt that he worshiped that stinking animal and it loved him.

Atin's going to take a knife to him when this is over. I know it. Well, worry about that when it happens…

He raised his wrist comlink to his lips. “Jailer?”

There was a pause and the sound of a woman grumbling and sheets rustling. Of course: Obrim had a wife and kids. Skirata often forgot that other people had lives beyond their jobs. “You know what time it is, Kal?”

“To the second. Look, which of your people was on surveillance in the Bank of the Core Plaza?”

There was a long, sleepy, irritable pause. “What, today? None of my people, I guarantee it.”

“Organized Crime Unit?”

“I could ask, but they play these things close to their chests … getting to be an epidemic, this secrecy, isn't it?”

“Tell you what,” Skirata said, dropping his voice. “Pay your OCU buddies a visit and tell them that anyone we see in our scopes who isn't us gets slotted as a matter of course, okay? You think they'll understand that?”