The training facility was extensive enough that an unoccupied shooting range was easy to find, especially this early in the day when most of the Independence's personnel were on duty. The ceiling was low, the floor scuffed. The air smelled of ozone and old cigarettes (forbidden in training zones by dead-letter Alliance regulations). Lighting was poor, except for the blazing c-beams that washed the target zone actinic white and highlighted the walls' many blast marks.

The RSO on duty was named Sticks, a human with skin as dark as vine-caf, a goatee, and a shining skull hard enough to crack one of the bulkheads. Kyle flexed his fingers as he waited for Sticks to get him checked in. An electric charge sizzled in his blood.

Sticks wasn't a man of words, and Kyle was thankful for that as he waited for the RSO to decharge his blasters. Alliance regulations prohibited using weapons on full power in training, supposedly to reduce damage to equipment.

Sticks's mouth barely opened when he said, "All yours, Katarn. Good luck."

Each power pack came into place with a crisp, heavy click-hum. Just the sound and the feel of it lit Kyle's face up like a power coupling. He took the center booth, raised his E-11 blaster rifle, and its electroscope became his third eye.

Class-five droids lined the wall at the end of the range. Half a meter in height and shaped like plasteel road-blockers, they projected life-sized holo-images of stormtroopers and other Imperial personnel, as well as low-power ray shields to catch incoming shots. A satisfying chime played over the room's speakers whenever Kyle scored a hit.

Everyone's performance in the various training rooms was logged on the Independence's scoreboard. The name currently sitting at the top belonged to another merc named Rianna Saren. Kyle kept getting asked if he knew her subspace comm frequency, usually by greenhorn cadets and recruits who had seen her FleetNet profile and were too thirsty for their own good. Out of curiosity, Kyle had taken a look himself, exactly once, and the kind of holopics that Twi'lek took of herself was a proximity alarm. Major daddy issues for sure.

The targets began to strafe back and forth on their repulsorlifts, but Kyle kept up his rate of fire, not wasting a shot, and the score chimes formed a jaunty tune.

Unlike many Rebels, he was fond of the E-11, and not out of sentimentality from his Imperial Academy days. It was a well-designed, reliable blaster model, better than the cumbersome A280s that the Alliance Army was always handing out. Yet on every Rebel starship or installation Kyle went to, he always overheard at least one guy laughing about how inaccurate the E-11 supposedly was, and how stormtroopers were a bunch of poorly-trained mudlickers who couldn't shoot straight even if they had decent weaponry. The same beings would swear up and down that Imperial combat armor was useless too, but in Kyle's experience most stormtroopers could take a bolt or two before going down.

You should talk to the Rebels at AX-456, he wanted to tell them. Tell all those dead men and women what a joke Imperial training and equipment is. For the most part, he was fine letting other beings believe whatever ronto skrag they wanted. Nobody paid him to correct idiots. But when you were in a war, believing that the other guy was bad at his job just because he was on the other side? Great way to get yourself killed, along with anyone stupid enough to listen to you.

The E-11's grip pulsed with a silent vibration, warning of a critical power pack. Kyle emptied the last three bolts into the targets and dropped the rifle. By the time the E-11's three-point sling caught it against his body, he'd already drawn his bryar pistol and introduced it to the faux-stormtroopers up ahead.

Moments later an artificial bell tolled and the holo-images dissolved. A single point of sweat had beaded on Kyle's forehead. "Another round?" called Sticks from the control booth.

Kyle holstered the pistol and faced him. "That was just warmup."

The Close-Quarters Urban Combat Training Simulator Concourse was a lot bigger, more exclusive, more interesting: a randomized maze of structures and obstacles, easy to disassemble and rearrange.

Kyle stepped into an ersatz town square, bryar pistol at the ready. Comm speakers hidden across the concourse kept him on his toes with recordings of footsteps, voices, weapon fire, equipment being moved, and other sounds.

The front door of a house on his right snapped open, revealing a stormtrooper with blaster rifle in hand. "Stop, Rebel scum!" bellowed a synthesized voice.

Kyle blasted the holographic figure twice in the chest plate before it got the word scum out. He'd heard it before enough times. The speakers gave a chime and the trooper vanished, but another one appeared in a window to the left. Kyle fired, getting him first in the gut, then the helmet. Another chime. He swept his aim over the house. There were two other windows, and the door had not closed.

A target flashed into view in the loft window. Kyle's arm snapped up like a lever, but his finger was steady, and a microsecond later it registered: a Bothan in civilian clothing, arms crossed as though posing for a holomagazine pic. Friendly. If you blasted a friendly in the simulator, your score went down—which was less dire than if you did it in real life.

Seconds passed and the Bothan disappeared. Kyle moved on past the house, his heart pounding like a hydraulic jack. He loved this. The blaster in his hand, the almost tectonic pressure within and without, the push, the need to be smart enough, quick enough. Knowing he was the best—and that he needed to stay the best or die.

Ahead to his left stood a pure white fountain. It was dry, but a nearby comm speaker was looping a noisy rush of water. On the other side an Imperial scout trooper appeared, head and shoulders poking up over the rim. Kyle fired, heard the chime. Too easy.

Past the fountain lay a few battered old shipping crates. Kyle made his way over and crouched behind them, ignoring the droid which had projected the scout trooper as it scooted away. Dead ahead, another droid crossed the street from left to right, carrying a projection of a Rebel soldier—frozen in the act of running to the left. The poor guy faded out when he reached the curb.

Behind Kyle, the fountain's fake bubbling faded, and the phantom running of booted feet drew his eyes leftward: two more buildings pocked with windows, an alley running between them. The sound effects were semi-randomized. Sometimes they indicated a target about to appear, sometimes not.

Funny. The concourse was brightly lit, all sterile whites and mauves and grays from the old sheets of durasteel and plasteel used to make up the phony structures and obstacles. People liked to joke that it was like blasting your way through a giant refresher, pool, or locker room. But that alley—unlike the other tight spaces, even the interior of the structures, for some reason they forgot to put a light there. It stood as a rectangle of starless void, like a hole sliced right through the actinic glows of the overhead c-beams.

Like a hole in the universe.

Soundlessly, a holo-image shimmered to life in that abyss, and others too in the windows above. Pulses of illusory blaster fire showered from the speakers. Kyle's aim locked onto the alley figure, then, a full second later, wheeled diagonally to pour laser shots into the gaps above. Imperial officer commandos, black-uniformed barves with open-face blast helmets and repeater guns. Kyle took them down, but one of his bolts splattered into a black star just a handspan from a window's edge. Chimes played.

Kyle did not hear them.

He lowered his aim. The alley still shone with a soft, phantasmal glow which poured out from the hologram suspended over the droid there. It was a friendly.

It was a child. A little human girl with messy hair and messy clothing, her mouth open in giddied laughter as she played with a jumpline. She could have been any runt from a scruffy nerf-herder's family you'd see on the Rim, on planets like Talay or Kolaador.

Or Sulon. She could have been one of the Surraj kids.

That surname, forgotten for so long, expanded in Kyle's mind to a low, infinite ringing that sucked all hearing and meaning away into itself, drowned them under its mirrored liquid surface.

"...to Katarn. Repeat, Calamari Cruiser Independence to Kyle Katarn. Are you still with us, man?"

The holo-child disappeared, plunging the alley back into nothingness. Released at last, Kyle snatched the comlink from his belt. "Yeah, Sticks, I'm fine down here."

"Hrng. Glad to hear it," the RSO grunted. "For a standard time part there You were looking like a Cracian thumper caught in the c-beams. Maybe lay off the skefta before you come in next time?"

Rolling his eyes, Kyle snapped the comlink back onto his belt, checked his blaster's power pack, and moved on down the street. More targets appeared: strutting Imperial officers in doorways, storm and scout troopers popping up from behind fences or sliding around corners. Friendlies too, of course: Alliance soldiers or technicians, civvies of a dozen species. Blasting his way down the fake city block, Kyle felt the rush, the electric charge in his veins again, but it wasn't as strong as before. Not so pure and uncomplicated.

It was only a simulation, a facsimile. A pretend-landscape of metal and plastic, sound recordings and holograms, smoke and mirrors. The danger wasn't real. The competition wasn't real. Who gave a handful of snot if Rianna Saren got to straddle the top of the scoreboard? Not Kyle Katarn. What mattered was, he wasn't ruining any Moff's day. He wasn't saving anyone from Imperial captivity or oppression. Worst of all, he wasn't getting paid. When was he finally going to get off this blasted Calamari Cruiser and back where the action was? He was getting fed up with waiting.

He passed through an alleyway (brightly lit, like they were supposed to be) and emerged into a courtyard, low walls framing empty spaces where gardens might have been.

Blast Mon Mothma, he thought as he looked for fake Imperials to blast. If the Chief of State took too long washing her hair, Kyle could always go on leave from the Rebellion and find a client himself. The Outer Rim was brimming with groups who would pay him to hurt the Empire—local resistance cells, pirates and petty crime lords... Hell, there were even a few Imperials who might hire him. Low-level governors and bureaucrats who could use a mercenary to undermine their rivals or superiors.

The problem was, finding a job on his own meant more work for Kyle Katarn, and it would also mean not being able to see Jan for weeks. Maybe even months.

More fake stormtroopers, more blasting, more chimes. The little projector droids skittered about as Kyle picked his way through the courtyard, resisting the temptation to blast them or give them a good stomping with his shock boots. The door on the other end led into a mock-up house, and he started clearing it out, room by room. There were no decorations or furniture, only regular crates and the like stood in for couches and tables and beds.

Reflexively, Kyle hugged cover as much as possible as he swept through the house, blasting motionless Imperials around corners or over containers. The cracking pulses of his bryar pistol echoed loud and harsh in the tight, mostly empty space. There were plenty of glowrods, so sight wasn't a problem, but unease crept over him like a Kessel energy spider. Fighting inside a home, even a pretend one, was an unwelcome reminder of his mission to Talay. Mohc's dark troopers had decimated the city as well as the Alliance's Tak Base there. Kyle had only seen the aftermath while skirmishing with a stormtrooper detachment left behind on cleanup duty, chasing and being chased through those mangled, burned-out houses and shanties...

It was only the aftermath, but that aftermath was bad enough that the charred bodies and the debris and the smells from Talay seemed to bleed through the stark walls in that surreal imitation of a building. No hallucinating, no flashing back—just intimations, funny feelings that he had seen something out the corner of his eye.

Mainly, though, what Kyle saw was targets. Lots of them. An improbable number of friendlies were mixed in with the Imperials: humans, Twi'leks, Rodians. Rebels, civvies. And sure enough, a few children. Like the one in the black alley, the kids stopped him cold for a few seconds at a time, skewering him with an icy, nerve-dulling remembrance that took all of his concentration to wrench himself free of. Each time it happened, he clenched his jaw and waited to hear Sticks's voice buzz over the comlink. The channel was silent, but he knew the projector droids all had holocams built in. The RSO had to watch the whole time, just in case someone got hurt during the course.

The building had two floors. Kyle slapped a new power pack in, then thumped his way up the stairs to what might have been a living room. A big rectangular crate sat before a smaller square one which was nestled against the wall. A couch and a holovision set, maybe. An empty room lay through a wide doorway to the left. Unintelligible voices murmured. Target droids gave low, innocuous hisses as they slid surreptitiously into position.

This time Kyle actually heard the holo-projectors hum as three figures materialized—staggered, not all at once—one in the far room, two by the "holovision set." His bryar pistol blurred to the right, locked on. It was a Gran woman in a dress, holding a crumpaper bag of groceries. One meter to the left: a black-armored storm commando, crouching, peering down an assault rifle's electroscope.

Kyle fired twice, heard the chime as the commando vanished. He stepped into the room and swung left, toward the third hologram.

It showed a male human in a confident posture—chin up, hands behind his back. Polished boots, starched light brown trousers and command jacket. A steel-blue undershirt. Immaculate hair. Kyle read the uniform, the pips on the crisp collar, the badge on the left breast. Major General, Alliance Special Forces.

Kyle Katarn read the uniform and remembered.

He remembered Major General Crix Madine's new office in the Rebel asteroid base at Vergesso, remembered feeling good as the man inside briefed him. The perfect uniform, the smart face, the trimmed beard. There had been nothing stuffy or pretentious about that little room, nothing but hard-nosed, unstated respect as Crix shook his hand, promising that they were only here to get things done.

He remembered the Imperial detention facility on Orinackra. The door grinding open and a battered, wild-haired, haggard man blinking in astonishment as light surged into his cell and the Alliance's best mercenary beckoned him out to safety, freedom, and a new life with the Rebellion.

You've done more for the Alliance than you know, Commander Katarn, Mon Mothma had told him after that mission. The Alliance needs all the good men it can find, and ones such as Crix Madine are hard to find in this galaxy.

Kyle Katarn fired. Condensed plasma splashed scarlet light against the major general—two shots in the head, one in the heart. A different chime sounded, low and forlorn, promising a subtraction from Kyle's score. The major general disappeared into ether. Kyle lowered his pistol, one millimeter at a time, and waited.

"That was a friendly, Katarn," intoned Sticks.

"Yeah, it was a friendly." Kyle said it to himself, not into the comlink. Blood roared in his ears. The Gran was absent when he turned around. Holding the bryar pistol at his side, he stalked down the stairs and back out to the street.

He went on with the course, a little winded but just about as sharp as before. There were more streets, alleys, buildings, corridors—it was pretty much all the same. The only difference now was that Kyle didn't care so much whether he hit friendlies or enemies. He blasted everything in sight except for the children. Civvies, Imperials, Rebels—who decided all this? What did it matter which side everyone was on? His father had told him years ago: You can't tell good from evil by a uniform.

Sticks was in his chair smoking a cigarette when Kyle finally returned to the control booth. Pointedly, he arched an eyebrow at a nearby viewscreen. "You did a number on your score today, Katarn. Trying to prove something?"

"Just warming up."

Kyle wasn't sure why he said that. Sticks looked like he'd just walked in to find Kyle chewing on a power cable. "Warming up for what?"

"I'm going to the dojo," said Kyle, shrugging.

The dojo was wide open, zero privacy, with close to zero organization. Sparring mats, racks of power weights, turbo-sprint pads, and every other piece of exercise equipment imaginable were laid out haphazard in a field that must have been deafening when aurek shift got off. This early in the day there were only a few people in the dojo, but the after-stench of sweat from hundreds of beings of a dozen species had seeped into the very metal of the equipment.

Kyle strode through the room with the singular focus of a war droid until he reached a four-meter square mat with a training dummy at the center. With a calculated restraint which was the mark of a true killer, he carefully removed his gun belt and blast jacket, setting them on a nearby bench.

The dummy was a balsatic frame coated in self-moulding quadrafoam. Smooth and featureless, it was navy blue and already in humanoid configuration. Squatting to reach the controls at its base, Kyle set it to Crix Madine's size and mass—about 77 kilos—and went through some stretches. He cracked his knuckles, waiting for the dummy to finish adjusting its shape.

Then he got started.

Like Madine, Kyle had graduated at the top of his class in the Academy (though it was Carida, not Raithal). You couldn't be a slouch and get through hand-to-hand training, not with the Imperials. He'd since learned plenty more tricks (dirty and otherwise) in his career as a mercenary. In a life like that, the training had a way of getting into your body, your reflexes, your eyes—what you noticed when you looked at someone. When Kyle Katarn looked at someone, he could mentally catalog a dozen parts of his or her body that a good, sharp blow would bruise, break, shatter, or merely excruciate.

There were many ways he knew of to kill a man. Some would get the job done in seconds. Others minutes, depending on the circumstances. In the course of the next quarter of a standard hour, that quadrafoam dummy received a thorough and unalloyed demonstration of every single lethal unarmed technique known to the mind of Kyle Katarn. The thuds of his fists echoed through the dojo as the dummy rocked and shuddered under a tidal wave of brute physical assault. In under a minute he did so much that a real humanoid would be barely recognizable, and he was only getting started.

It all came down to this.

Crix Madine was a predator of children. A degenerate. A horrible, vicious kretch of a sentient being. He had scarred those poor children for life. Forever. Pure evil. He didn't need to be removed from his post. He didn't need to be detained and held for questioning. He needed to be put out the nearest kriffing air lock. What he had done on Kolaador was abominable. Unforgivable.

And if it had not been for Kyle Katarn, it wouldn't have happened. None of it.

Kyle took the quadrafoam dummy by the shoulders and drove a knee into its pseudo-groin, over and over again. The inner knees of his combat pants were padded with plates of ballistic snapweave—flexible, but very hard when it needed to be. The pain inflicted by a blow from this kneepad to an unprotected male humanoid's genitals would be truly legendary. Obligingly, the dummy sagged and emitted pained wheezing sounds from a simple vocoder installed in its head.

Kyle had broken into the Imperial base on Orinackra, fought his way through the guards, pulled Madine out of his cell, and whisked him away to the Alliance. And so the dark trooper project had been destroyed, saving the Rebellion.

And so Crix Madine had lived to molest dozens of innocent children.

Kyle'd had to rescue him. He'd had to. When he told people he'd saved the Rebellion (Death Star plans aside), he wasn't bragging. Intelligence had come up with a dossier on the dark troopers, estimating the threat level if they ever entered full production like Mohc wanted them to—if they were added to every Imperial space station and ground base, every Star Destroyer's ground complement. The casualty rate for Rebel infantry, marines, and field operatives would triple in a year, and that was from the most conservative projections. It would have cost them the war for sure.

So Crix Madine's rescue had been necessary. Indispensable. That was the cold, hard fact. The thing was, Kyle didn't feel much cold.

He was boiling. Fuming. Erupting.

Sweat ran into his eyes, flecked from his shining forehead as he circled around the dummy, dodging imaginary counters as he savagely pounded its head and shoulders. His white quicksynth cotton shirt was soaked through and clung to his torso like a slurping, scratching body glove, and he hated the feel of it against his skin, but he couldn't be bothered to remove it. He couldn't be bothered to do anything except beat that dummy until he heard it scream for mercy. A few times he actually felt the balsatic rods creak and bend under his blows. The standard model of dummy was designed more to practice your technique on. You weren't supposed to actually try and dismember it.

Another cold, hard fact: Madine was a monster, a psychopath, and Kyle had had no idea. None. Only a week ago, he would have sworn to anyone that Crix Madine was as solid as it got. In fact, just from talking to the guy a little (first after his defection, then later at Vergesso), Kyle had gotten the sense that they were kindred spirits in a way, despite the fact one was a well-off Core World military brat and the other was a dirt farmer from the Outer Rim. Crix had a day's work for a day's pay outlook, a fundamentally Rimmer attitude, the same type of grit that Kyle had seen in his own father and that he had spent his entire life trying to emulate.

So it had seemed, anyway. The reality was that Kyle hadn't known Crix at all. There had been no warning signs, nothing ominous, not the slightest hint that anything was off about this man. Kyle hadn't suspected a thing. That was truth, solid as a block of duracrete, but when he repeated it to himself it turned his mind black with loathing. Because a hundred-odd people on FleetNet were saying the same thing in their stupid little discussion nodes. I didn't know, I couldn't have known, I had no idea.

Just because it was true didn't mean it was good enough. Just because it was true didn't mean the guy saying it wasn't as useless and stupid and blind as an Orkellian slime-cave slug.

Kyle turned to a statue before the wobbling mannequin as a new revelation struck him like a neural scrambler beam: hadn't his father been here before—all those years ago on Sulon, the summer before Mom died? Hadn't Morgan Katarn found a way to carry this weight without it crushing him?

Could his son find the way? Would he?

Everything in the dojo was red now. Kyle hadn't noticed when the change took place. All the feeling in his body was a distant, roaring, weightless tingle of energy. He kicked the dummy in the gut so hard that his shock boot left an impression in the quadrafoam. It was still reeling when he stepped in and drove an elbow full-force into the protrusion that served for a head. There was a deep popping noise as the balsatic rod connecting it to the torso broke. He slammed it again, felt it snap loose completely, and imagined Crix Madine's head coming off, spewing blood and viscera from a ruptured throat.

The dummy twitched and quivered as the damage took its toll, the pneumatic gases which powered the quadrafoam's self-moulding technology escaping in an insentient death rattle. The head hung by a thin strip of foam from its shoulders, its featureless face grimly staring into nothingness. The vocoder sputtered a fading recital of gibberish.

Kyle backed away with heavy steps, watching in dull astonishment as the red haze over the world drained away and exhaustion crumpled his muscles like flimsiplast. Without trying to be obvious about it, he had a look around the dojo. The closest being was a Weequay running on a turbo pad nearly twenty meters away. The guy didn't even glance in Kyle's direction.

Huffing out a breath, Kyle gathered his jacket and gun belt and started toward the exit.

He only lasted a few hours before checking FleetNet again.

Finally, there was a new official dispatch about the Madine case. This time it was a holomessage from General Cracken, the head of Alliance Intelligence. Mainly it was about the node Kyle had seen while in the docking bay with Molindi.

"We're prepared to disclose to the Alliance at large that those images were authentic," Cracken rumbled. Deep furrows in the human's cheeks accentuated his deep eyes and thick eyebrows. "They were taken, without authorization, from the investigative files that were and are still being compiled in connection with our investigation of the Madine situation. The personnel responsible for the leak have been suspended and will face severe disciplinary action. Alliance High Command is taking this investigation very seriously, and Intelligence is cooperating in every possible way. In the meantime, we ask that all Alliance personnel remain patient. Transparency is a very high priority for us, but there is still the matter of security—"

It was exactly what Kyle expected: bloated and self-important, clear as the sewage rivers that ran beneath Anoat City. Normally he could put up with it, just like he'd put up with the endless hand-holding and document-signing aboard the Redemption—but the unerasable memory of those kriffing images was keeping him precariously perched on the very razor's edge of civility. Who knew what would happen to the leakers? Who knew that anything would?

The endless fear-ragefleet circlejerk in the nodes and subcomments didn't help his frame of mind either, that was for fracking sure.

Lovethwart Chunger, whose profile was a picture of Luke Skywalker, wrote, They put this fatass in charge of the investigation, and expect us to believe there's transparency? How kriffing retarded do they think we are?

Its not just that, added Andren33. If you've got freinds who are close to the High Command Advisory Council you know that Crumblebun Cracken and IS BEST FRIENDS WITH MADINE. They were in constant contact since Crix's defection. No matter what they tell us now he is going to get off with a reprimand for 'disorderly conduct'. Mark my words.

The subcomment below that from BlueBactaBurps: Oh so we're so worried because of Madine and the children on Kolaador. Well okay but how about General Rieekan and the Alderaani refugees he's settling on Delaya? Everyone knows that Rieekan is a massive flaming homosexual. Why the frag isn't he being investigated?

The character of the discussions had changed fundamentally. Everyone was as rabid as ever, but the figure of Crix Madine was slowly shifting into the background, becoming a single star in a constellation of corruption. It was about Madine and his accomplices now—the people who'd known what he was up to, or who'd covered for him and looked the other way, or who were satisfying the same kind of horrifying lusts at other Rebel Alliance facilities. Why wasn't this guy under investigation, why hadn't that guy been suspended, and so on.

By this point, Kyle could believe that Madine did have accomplices. He knew enough about how life on military bases worked—every part of the system depended on several other parts, and there was no way one man could have carried out these sick, elaborate predations and deceptions single-handed. At the very least, he had to have bribed a few people into turning a blind eye.

That was reality. Recognizing reality, however, was a far cry from what these blope-heads were doing on FleetNet, pointing fingers with no proof or evidence whatsoever. They were all firing blind in the twilight forests of Umbara. The list of Rebel officers suffering random accusations in these nodes was staggering. Some were obviously outlandish, directed at Cracken or Rieekan or even members of the Advisory Council—but those weren't what Kyle found the most concerning. It was the middle and lower-level people, the colonels and sergeants, clerks and captain-supervisors. A general had a security detail with him twenty-four standard hours a day. But suppose some skraghead accused a flight officer or supply agent of raping children, or covering for Madine. Suppose the rumor found traction. Suppose an otherwise normal Rebel soldier or agent took the rumor seriously, then got worked up enough to take matters into his own hands.

Kyle shook his head grimly as he continued to scroll through the feed. Aside from the datapad screen, his quarters were dark.

The answer to his question was plain as a pummelstave: someone would get killed.

There was reason to believe somebody in charge was aware of this. The monitors were working double-time. Kyle saw a lot of subcomments and even entire nodes deleted for breaking the Terms of Use, and accounts were paying for their reckless speculation with suspension... but only some of the transmissions got this treatment. Others were left alone, allowed to fester. Had the monitor droids slipped their programming, or were they working according to parameters that an observer like Kyle couldn't know?

Why wasn't High Command dealing with this? Why were they allowing this cancer of frenzied paranoia to spread? The sooner they got their act together and clamped down hard on FleetNet, the better. What's more, once the investigation was completed, Madine couldn't just disappear. His punishment needed to be seen. They would need to release all of the documentation about him, at least everything that wouldn't compromise Alliance security or the privacy of his victims and their families. And they needed to do the same thing to whoever had covered for him. Nothing else was going to restore trust in the hierarchy. They had to put a stop to this morbid, wild-eyed, ridiculous speculation orgy, for good.

Kyle read until his head started to split with aching. Then he read some more, until finally he shut the datapad down, plunging the room into full dark. Phantasms swirled in his head. The targets in the training concourse, the obscenities leaked from Intel—Madine himself, that sick, sick bastard, shaking Kyle's hand and smiling like they belonged in the same universe.

The fields of Sulon, parched bronze in the shimmering heat of a rough summer. The swarms of pincher flies. The sun's rays blazing gold as they fell on the chromium finish of a fancy sport landspeeder. The same light at break of dawn, turning Morgan Katarn to a shrinking dark shape as his battered repulsor sled carried him away...

Kyle slowly shifted his chair to face the door to his quarters across the heavy gloom. 1900 hours, and dinner with Jan, was still a long way off. He wasn't sure what he'd do with himself until then, but he had that to look forward to.

He would have a story for her then. Something he hadn't shared with anyone before.

It wasn't gonna be a nice story, but sometimes, more often than not, that was the way it went in this galaxy.