They slammed into each other and fell grappling to the floor of the booth. They rolled toward the door, each man fighting for superiority, the blaster between them, in the clutch of four hands.

Cohl swung his elbow into Havac's face, knocking him sideways, then used Havac's momentum to pitch himself on top of Havac, pinning him to the floor with his knees.

Havac squirmed, but held tightly to the blaster, triggering a bolt into Cohl's abdomen. Cohl fell partially back, then slumped forward, bringing all his weight to bear on the weapon and forcing it down into Havac's chest.

With what little of his strength remained, Cohl squeezed out a final bolt.

Dangling by one hand from the swaying walkway, Qui-Gon looked down at the floor of the hall.

The trumpeters had stopped midfanfare and were scattering for cover, abandoning their horns as they ran. Everywhere else delegates were fleeing their seats, literally climbing over one another in a desperate attempt to escape.

Valorum was on his feet, but completely encircled by Senate Guards and Jedi Knights.

Saesee Tiin, Ki-Adi-Mundi, and Obi-Wan had taken up positions in front of the Trade Federation rostrum, their lightsabers lifted to deflect fire from the droids.

But the directorate members had raised their force field, which meant that no bolts could enter or leave the translucent energy shield.

The thirteen droids reached over their right shoulders for the blaster rifles secured to their backpacks.

The judicials loosed a storm of blaster bolts, which the force field simply consumed.

Then, all at once, the droids pivoted through an ab-face.

The members of the directorate mouthed commands and curses and began to back away from the curved table.

The droids fired.

As the Jedi and judicials watched helplessly, bolts tore into the table and chairs and into the flesh of the members, shaking them about and hurling them to all sides of the rostrum.

The firing ceased as abruptly as it had started.

For a moment, the droids stood with their cooling blasters, then they put them back over their shoulders and turned to face the hall.

Stunned by what he had witnessed, Qui-Gon clambered onto the shaky walkway and dropped cross-legged to the slanted floor, staring off into space.

the inner circle The Nebula Front has largely disbanded," the judicial officer explained to Qui-Gon. "The few we've been able to track down contend that they knew nothing about Havac's plans for Eriadu.

Some of them had never even met Havac, and assert that the name was applied routinely to almost everyone in the Front's militant faction. The Eriadu operation was conceived in great secrecy, in any case, since the militants were convinced that there was an informant among them." "The informant was one of the moderates," Qui-Gon amended. "It was through him that I learned about Cohl's designs to raid the Trade Federation freighter at Dorvalla, and, on Asmeru, about a clandestine operation Cohl was executing for Havac." The judicial, a thin, brown-haired woman with a personable manner, made note of Qui-Gon's remarks on a desktop datapad. It was just the two of them in a small cubicle in the Justice Department's cavernous headquarters on Coruscant. Almost a standard month had gone by since the assassinations.

Deactivating the shield the members of the Trade Federation Directorate had thrown about themselves-unknowingly ushering in their own demise-had required a team of technicians, using a pair of field disrupters. The two Neimoidians who had survived the massacre, Viceroy Nute Gunray and Senator Lott Dod, had not protested when the same disrupters had been employed to dazzle the thirteen droids into states of guaranteed submission. Diplomatic privilege had permitted the Neimoidians to depart Eriadu without answering any questions.

Supreme Chancellor Valorum had ordered the Justice Department to commence an immediate investigation, but the chief investigators had soon found themselves thwarted by Lieutenant Governor Tarkin.

Tarkin insisted that, since Eriadu had failed to provide adequate security, the case should be handled by Eriaduan investigators. There was some concern that Tarkin, fearing retaliation by the Trade Federation, would seek to shift the blame to other parties. But, instead, he had simply impeded the investigation by allowing evidence and eyewitnesses to vanish. Ignored, the judicials Valorum had asked to remain behind on Eriadu had finally decamped.

Qui-Gon had tried to stay abreast of developments in the case, but the chief investigator who served as liaison with the Eriaduan team had only just returned to Coruscant.

"Havac turns out to have been Eriaduan," the judicial officer continued.

"His real name was Eru Matalis, a media correspondent and holodocumentarian, with a long-standing grudge against the Trade Federation. At some point he became the leader of the Nebula Front's cell on Eriadu, and rose through the ranks to a command position in the organization.

"A search of the safe house the Nebula Front maintained in Eriadu City revealed that the Front had contacts in all quarters of government and law enforcement, and presumably knew as much as anyone about security for the trade summit. Evidently, Havac-Matalis-used his contacts to obtain security badges, uniforms, and documentation for the assassins Cohl had hired, and perhaps arranged to have weapons concealed inside the hall, prior to the summit itself." "The operation must have been planned as soon as the trade summit was announced," Qui-Gon said.

"Or soon after the attack on the Supreme Chancellor, here on Coruscant. I don't suppose we'll ever know whether that attack was genuine, or designed from the start to sidetrack us from what was being set in motion on Eriadu."

"Not unless Cohl or Havac learn to speak from beyond the grave," the judicial said.

"What of the assassins who were captured?" "Everyone in custody upholds that Valorum was the target- even the two who you discovered with Havac in the media booth. As they tell it, Havac's goal was to make it appear that the Trade Federation's droids had killed Valorum, at the behest of the directorate. That would have led to the dismantlement of the Federation, which is what the Nebula Front wanted all along.

"We considered the possibility that something went wrong with the droids'

programming, and that the attack on the directorate was a mistake. But Baktoid provided ample proof that that could not have happened." "Could Baktoid have been involved in abetting Havac?" "They vehemently deny any involvement. In fact, their technicians helped us analyze the battle droid-the so-called commander-which was found to contain a mechanism that allowed it to be controlled independently of the central control computer, but only for a brief period. Havac's holocam prompted the commander to act, and the twelve other droids followed the commander's lead. As soon as the central control computer realized what was occurring in the summit hall, it shut down all of them."