ONE YEAR AFTER THE BATTLE OF GEONOSIS

"Master Doriana?" Emil Kerseage's deep voice called. "We're here."

Kinman Doriana awoke with a start, blinking his eyes against the sunlight streaming in through the shuttle's viewports. For a moment he gazed at the landscape rolling beneath him, trying to remember where exactly he was. There had been so many systems...

The disorientation cleared. He was on Cartao, major trading center for Prackla Sector, carefully nonaligned in the war between the Republic and the Separatists. And home to...

'There it is," Kerseage said. He turned the control stick delicately, rolling the shuttle slightly to the left to give Doriana a better look.

"Spaarti Creations."

Doriana gazed out the side viewport, impressed in spite of himself.

Situated among a group of forested hills just north of the compact town of Foulahn City, perhaps three kilometers northwest of the equally compact Triv Spaceport, was the unique manufacturing plant known as Spaarti Creations. Over a kilometer across at its widest, it had the patchwork look of something that had repeatedly been added onto over the decades. The roofline echoed the frozen chaos, with towers, heat exchangers, antennas, and skylights poking out at apparently random spots along the building's overall three-story height.

There were no windows he could see, ventilation apparently being handled by a line of small, louvered air vents dotting the outer walls about midway up the sides. "Impressive," he commented.

"You think so?" Kerseage shrugged. "Personally, I've always considered it an architectural version of a weed patch. No order or organization anywhere."

"Ever been inside?"

"No one but employees get to go in," the other said, his lip twisting with disgust and resentment. 'Them, and the high and mighty."

"Like me?" Doriana asked.

Kerseage glanced at him, as if suddenly remembering just who his passenger was. "No, no, I was thinking about Lord Binalie's chums," he backtracked hastily. 'The Prackla Trade Council-that sort of crowd."

"You don't think much of them?"

Kerseage shrugged again, uncomfortably this time. "It's nothing to do with me," he muttered. "I got a shuttle; I fly people places. That's all."

"I see," Doriana said, returning his attention to the manufacturing plant now passing directly beneath them. Clearly, Kerseage didn't want to say any more.

But then, he didn't have to. Like everything else he ever did, Doriana had made sure to research Cartao before coming here and hiring this particular man to bring him across the sparsely settled planet to Spaarti Creations. The cargo transport company Kerseage had once owned had been inadvertently run out of business two years earlier by a poorly worded regulation the Prackla Trade Council had issued after the Battle of Geonosis.

Kerseage's appeal was still crawling its way through the system, but by now the issue was essentially moot. His company was gone, and he clearly blamed Lord Binalie for it.

"What about the plant's satellite facilities?" he asked, his eyes flicking around the forested areas north and west of the main facility. 'The buildings where they store raw materials and finished product."

"You mean the three Outlinks?"

"Right," Doriana said. "Where are they?"

"I don't know, exactly," Kerseage said. 'The closest one's supposed to be about three kilometers northeast, just past that big gray-topped worker barracks thing." He pointed.

"Mm," Doriana said, peering into the distance. There was nothing showing in that direction that he could see. Well camouflaged, either by accident or by design. That could be useful. "Where does Lord Binalie live?"

"There." Kerseage pointed to the left as he brought the shuttle around in a wide semicircle. "You see Foulahn City, just south of that kilometer-wide stretch of grassland?"

"I see it," Doriana said. "I don't think I've ever seen a city come to a stop that abruptly before. Except where there's a lake or cliff to limit it, of course."

"It might as well be a cliff," Kerseage grunted. "That particular line of grassland marks the southern edge of Spaarti land, and no one travels or builds there. The Cranscoc insist on it. Anyway, you see that big open area on the northern edge of the city, butting up against the grass strip?"

"Yes," Doriana said. It looked like a park-grassland, quite a few clumps of trees, large sections of sculpted bushes-with a few small buildings and one very large one. Even from this distance, the place reeked of wealth and power.

On one of the low hills facing the plant, he could see a pair of figures standing together. 'The Binalie estate?"

"You got it," Kerseage said. "You seen enough?"

Doriana took a last look around, fixing the geography in his mind.

Foulahn and Navroc Cities lay to the south and southeast of the plant, with the craggy Red Hills pushing up against the southern ends of both cities. Triv Spaceport was to the east, with low, increasingly forested rolling hills to the north, and a small river winding its way between the two cities and then between Foulahn and the spaceport.

"Yes," he told the pilot, resettling himself in his seat. "Let's go see Lord Binalie."

They're turning around some more," Corf Binalie announced, shading his eyes with his hand as he peered upward into the sky.

"I think they might be coming here."

"Who, the people in the shuttle?" Jafer Tories asked, his white hair blowing past his cheek as he gazed downward at the ground, trying to pick out the particular siviviv vine he and the boy had been following for the past half hour. "Yes, I know."

"You know who they are?" Corf asked, frowning up at him. "Did Dad say something to you about visitors?"

"No, but he didn't need to," Tories assured the boy. "It's been obvious for nearly a minute now."

"Oh, come on," Corf objected in that tone of strained patience twelveyear- olds did so well. "How could you?"

"Simple logical deduction," Tories told him in that pedantic instructor's tone seventy-three-year-olds did equally well.

"There was no reason for them to pass directly over the plant unless that was what they were specifically looking at. After realizing how little that gained them, their natural next step is to want to take a look from the inside. For that, they need to come see your father."

Corf shook his head in amazement. "Boy," he said. "I wish I were a Jedi."

"If you were, you'd probably have to goto war someday," Tories warned.

"You didn't have to," Corf pointed out.

"Not yet," Tories said with a grimace. "But I could be called up at any moment. The Council merely decided to leave a few Jedi where we are for the moment in case of unexpected Separatist moves in our areas. I could get to the scene of trouble anywhere in Prackla or Locris Sectors long before they could send someone from Coruscant or one of the major battle areas. Being a Jedi is never easy, and can be downright dangerous."

"Yeah, but you're real smart," Corf said. Clearly, distant rumblings of war didn't faze him in the slightest. "You're good at figuring out stuff."

"Logical thinking is hardly the exclusive preserve of Jedi," Tories admonished him. "Anyone can learn to put facts together in their proper order.

"

"Maybe," Corf said. "I still think it's a Jedi thing." Tories smiled, shading his eyes with his hand as he watched the shuttle approach. In point of fact, of course, he hadn't really known the shuttle was coming to the Binalie Estate, but had merely concluded there was a high probability of it. If it turned out the pilot was merely showing off Spaarti Creations to some visiting friend, he was going to look pretty foolish.