"Okay Dinner at eight. Set in permacrete."

Luke walked down the corridor with her in silence and she gave him a conspiratorial grin as the turbolift doors closed. He opened his secure comlink and called Han.

"I'm not in mourning," Han said, utterly callous in that charming way he had. Luke knew he didn't care for Gejjen and never had: it was hard to weep for a man who approached you to kill your own cousin, even if that cousin was a grade-A scumbag. "No need to spare my feelings. He was a

head shot waiting to happen."

"What's the public mood like over there?"

"There hasn't exactly been a run on mourning clothes, but folks are nervous."

"So who's at the helm in Coronet now?"

"They're slugging it out. For the while, it's going to be a committee job."

"Who do you think did it?"

"The biggest task CorSec has is to work out how to manage the lines of suspects. Not that they need to dig up any—two different terror groups here have already claimed responsibility for it. Yes, we have 'em, too."

"I never realized how divided you all were."

"We're never divided about Corellia. Just who's the best candidate to run it."

"Are you and Leia okay?"

"Yes, we're fine, and no, I'm not telling you what we're doing at the moment. Stop worrying."

Luke almost raised the topic of a GA smokescreen. It was fairly common to carry out a hit and set it up to look like another faction to achieve maximum discord. But he thought better of it, because it smacked of Jacen, and Han didn't need to hear that his best friend thought his son—stranger though he was—had a hand in it. Some things were best dealt with by friends, cleaned up, and smoothed over. When Lumiya was finally brought down, Luke would spend his time putting Jacen back on track. It was the least he could do for Han.

Omas couldn't have picked a worse day to visit his doctor, but it was unusual for him to be so reticent about routine arrangements. Luke hoped

it wasn't something serious.

It was bad enough losing Gejjen, because at least he was a known quantity, and Luke had become used to his way of thinking. If Omas's future was in doubt, too—well, that was one unknown too many.

CORUSCANT MILITARY SPACEPORT

Ben sat in the cargo hold of the ship long after the ground crew had secured the landing dampers and the drives had cooled completely.

He was almost comfortable staring at the bulkhead opposite, in the sense that he feared taking his eyes off it. If he did that, the numbing meditation he'd slipped into would be broken, and he'd have to think.

Jori Lekauf was gone. It was one of those facts he couldn't take in even when he saw it happen. The guy had been alive and well the night before, even hours ago, and now he didn't exist. Ben simply couldn't feel death.

It was more than the biological facts, and he knew those all too well. The former CSF officers in the GAG had regaled him with fascinating stories from the police forensics labs, but knowing how to cause death and what it looked like, and being able to feel a life wink out of existence in the Force did nothing to hammer home the fact that his friend was gone forever, and that he wouldn't see him again, and all the things that made Jori Lekauf part of the fabric of the universe, someone who mattered, were so far beyond his reach.

And it was Ben's fault. Lekauf had died to protect him.

"Come on, Ben. The techs want to start stripping down this crate."

Captain Shevu stood in the hatch, fingers hooked over the top edge of the coaming. Ben felt that if he moved, the whole world would come unraveled.

"I'll be along in a minute."

Shevu waited for a moment and then came to sit down with him. Ben

suspected that if he'd been a grown man, Shevu might have been harsher, but he thought Ben was still a kid, too young to be on this kind of mission whether he was a Jedi or not. In many ways, Shevu was right. But nobody was ever old enough to lose a friend and not feel it cutting through to the center of his chest. If Ben ever got that old, he didn't want to carry on.

"We don't lose many troopers in special forces. It makes it harder when we do, I think. It's hard for me, anyway."

Ben gambled on whether to speak or not. He took a breath and waited to feel everything around him shatter.

"He didn't have to die, sir." Once he heard his own voice, Ben just felt like he couldn't breathe, nothing worse. "He could have taken off.

We could have run for it, or even been captured, and the job would still have been done."

"Ben . . . our orders were to make it look like a Corellian schism, and not to get caught or leave a trail. Can't have Jedi exposed as assassins, especially not you. We had to get you out of there."

"It didn't have to be me. Any trooper could have done the job. I wanted to do my duty, but if it hadn't been me, if Jori hadn't felt he had to protect my identity, he'd be alive."

"Ben, what do you think would have happened to him if he'd been taken back to Corellia?" Shevu lowered his voice. "You saw what we do here to prisoners. You think worse than that can't happen in Coronet?"

"So what if I had been caught? My dad would have been humiliated?

So what? Jori's life for Dad being upset?"

"I could give you a list of reasons why having Corellia think their own kind did it helps the GA. But you don't want to hear that right now."

Shevu stood up and beckoned to Ben to follow. He meant it. "There are

anti-Gejjen factions claiming responsibility, so the mission worked fine —strategically. Now go home and take a couple of days off. If you can't stand being around your folks, or . . . or around Colonel Solo, come over to my place. My girlfriend won't mind."

It was the first time Ben had heard Shevu hint that being around Jacen wasn't necessarily the best thing for him. Ben didn't care about Jacen right then, but the rational bit of his mind that wasn't drowning in shocked grief made a note of it.

"Thanks."

"Now I've got to tell his parents. I'll have to come up with a really good cover story, and thank providence that there's no footage of him splashed all over the news right now, because that'd be a really lousy way to find out your son was dead."

Shevu sounded beaten. He was probably pretty close to Lekauf, but he'd never said. Ben had learned a lesson about being an officer today, and it was that lives were to be spent in pursuit of an objective; it might have seemed obvious, but when you worked alongside the people who might lose their loved ones because of your decisions, it acquired a whole new meaning.

"I don't think I'll ever stop feeling guilty about this," Ben said, relieved that he had so far managed not to burst into tears.

"Me neither," said Shevu. "Because it was supposed to be me who blew the ship if things went wrong."

"We never planned that—"

"You didn't. We did. Need to know, and all that." Shevu stopped a passing ground crew speeder and told the driver to get Ben back to HQ.

"Wash that stuff out of your hair and go home."

An hour later, Ben found himself staring at his familiar reflection in the HQ

refreshers, toweling his hair and wondering if Jacen had set him up.

I didn't have to do the job. Any one of us could have passed unnoticed at a spaceport.

But it was hindsight. Jacen had tasked him to do it before anyone knew where the meeting would take place. Ben still felt something was wrong, but couldn't pin it down.

He'd just lost his buddy. Maybe that made you think crazy things.