"[Yes, it will take effect quickly. He should be coming around any moment now.]"

With the same effort it would take to pry open a rusty garbage hatch, Kyle Katarn opened his eyes to the shaft of silver that enveloped him like a profane halo. Dust motes roiled in the stuffy air. The words had been in Sullustese, and their meaning crossed a fathomless abyss before what remained of Kyle's mind could apprehend them.

The binders securing his wrists were maglocked to a battered metal table which, along with his chair, had been welded to the floor. The job had been done recently. The stink of molten metal was fresh. His blast jacket was gone.

An open medkit sat on the table as the Sullustan packed it up, a burning cigarette wedged into the corner of his thick lips. Among the various items was a depleted stimpack injector. There should have been stronger drugs in the kit, but Kyle figured asking for them would be a waste of breath.

Not that he wasn't tempted to anyway. Kyle Katarn had not known what a headache was until he took a stun bolt between the eyes at a range of zero-point-zero meters. For many injuries, a stimpack would get you somewhere close to comfortably numb. Right now, though, the throbbing in his temples was so horrendous that even the broken nose and other injuries were afterthoughts.

The Sullustan snapped the medkit shut, gave Kyle an inscrutable glance, and withdrew. The room was blotchy and indistinct. Kyle had looked into the light too suddenly.

A male human stepped into that uncertain glow. Kyle stared, blinking, straining to clear his vision and to keep his skull from falling to pieces again. Half-jumbled details of his surroundings fell clumsily into place: the man's dirty blonde hair, his steely blue-gray eyes. To the right, the Sullustan liberally breathing puffs of smoke into the air. In a far corner, the R2 unit's blinking indicator lights. Another human leaning against the left wall, his arms crossed. Their brown uniforms, the style of their rank badges, the dirty-blonde man's field jacket in the Corellian-cut style. They—

The entire incident in the hangar jolted through Kyle's mind anew, as if he'd forgotten it. There had been no time to think during the fight, no time for reasons or implications, only to react. But now...

That fracking happened, Kyle realized with ghastly amazement, and this is happening. I've been arrested by Alliance Intelligence.

"It seems you were very keen on getting your ship fixed, Kyle Katarn," said the blonde man. "Any particular reason?"

"I wasn't aware AI needed to be informed," Kyle answered, reading the man's rank patch. "Captain."

"You can call me Shaparo." With a gesture, Shaparo indicated his dark-haired colleague. "I know Troomis and my other boys got a little carried away back in the hangar, but you weren't exactly being the most approachable man, either. We have questions for you—about Crix Madine."

"I'm sure you do. Everyone does. What's it got to do with me?"

"Wise up, smartass," Troomis snapped. "We've done our research. We know you worked with the groomer at Vergesso, and before that you sprang him from an Imperial prison on Orinackra."

Kyle kept his eyes on Shaparo. "Is that how this works? A bunch of frackheads start talking skrag about me on FleetNet, so you drag me in here?"

"I never needed to read those nodes, Katarn," the captain replied coolly. "Not only do we have access to a lot more than FleetNet, but I know some things about you already. You see, in a way we've worked together before."

Kyle gazed up at him, bewildered, trying to peg the name or the face, but came up short.

"The Anoat operation. Moff Rebus. You extracted him, and we—" Shaparo nodded sideways at each of his companions. "—made him talk."

It clicked. An eccentric Imperial scientist, Moff Rebus had been employed by General Mohc to design prototype weapons for his dark troopers. A clue on Talay had led Kyle to the Moff's secret lab on Anoat, hidden in a gargantuan sewer system beneath the planet's only city. That day had been horrible. The first half had consisted in a series of close encounters with vicious dianoga and relentless sentry droids, while wading through toxic sludge as Kyle tried to make sense of the sewer's labyrinthine layout. The second half had been retracing his steps out to the extraction point, while dragging his corpulent, belligerent captive the entire way. Rebus would prove no more cooperative in Alliance Intelligence's custody, but eventually he let slip the existence of a testing facility for the dark troopers on Fest.

Kyle supposed he might well have met Shaparo after delivering Rebus to the Alliance fleet, but he simply couldn't remember. He'd taken no part in the interrogation, only hearing the results when Jan briefed him on the mission to Fest, and so—

"I remember," he murmured, trying to keep the dread from taking over his face.

Either he failed or Shaparo was telepathic. "You don't need to worry about Lieutenant Ors. We're not interested in speaking with her—today. But like you, and like Crix Madine, she has her own past with the Empire. Your answers here will help us decide whether that is a lead worth following up on."

Shit.

They knew about Jan... but of course they did. Jan was part of Intel, and she'd told Kyle that people there were looking at her differently. Dangerously.

The realization triggered something in Kyle Katarn. The biting pressure of the binders on his wrists grew more acute. His vision sharpened, bringing Troomis and the Sullustan into greater focus, as well as the astromech droid in the far corner. The room, Kyle realized, was much smaller than he had supposed. The exit was dead ahead, right behind Shaparo, and the panel had no visible lock. If Kyle wasn't bound, if he could just stand up, he'd be able to reach it in three strides.

No, not in three strides. Getting out of this room would take longer than that.

It would take however much time he needed to beat these three men until their own mothers couldn't recognize them.

With every erg of self-control he had left, Kyle subdued the blinding rage, compacted it down within the core of his being. Even so, its repressed energy put a black, humming charge into his next words. "I'm not answering a damn thing you ask me."

Shaparo's face was like gratenite, his unblinking eyes like a droid's photoreceptors. "One way or another, we will get the answers we're after. The one who decides how difficult this will be is you."

"You're not doing this to me, or Jan," said Kyle, shaking his head. "This is ronto skrag, all of it. We haven't done anything. Nobody's ordered me to stay with the fleet. And something tells me that if you blaster-brained meatheads had a warrant to drag me off like this, you'd have shoved it in my face by now. There's no way on Mustafar that this is within regulations. Whoever ordered you to do this, they're gonna be vaporized, and so are you."

"[They probably would be, if we were acting under orders,]" the Sullustan clarified.

Kyle's goggle-eyed stare shifted to the alien, then back to Shaparo. That... would explain quite a bit. Jumping him so eagerly in the hangar, not presenting a warrant, and holding him someplace that very obviously wasn't used for AI interrogations.

"You've been following FleetNet very closely," said Shaparo, not making it a question. "You've read the accounts, the witnesses, and the rumors. The men and women at Kolaador Base who knew what Madine was doing and looked the other way—or helped him, and may have shared in his, ah..." For the first time the man's expression altered. A flicker of visceral disgust. "...proclivities."

"Yeah, so what? AI's investigating, and I think whoever they've got on the case is smart enough not to believe every nikkle nut-brained subcomment they read. In fact, I'd think anyone who's actually helping get to the bottom of it is probably on Kolaador." Kyle winced as the pain in his head pulsed to a higher note. As for his doubts about Intel's competence, and that of the Alliance hierarchy in general, he wasn't about to share those while inside this room with these people.

Shaparo flicked his hand dismissively. "Intel has a lot of beings on this investigation, Katarn—and nearly all of us are chasing our own tails. Still, it's like I said: we have access to much more data than is in the nodes on FleetNet... though we have to tread carefully and cover our tracks."

Kyle thought of everything they must have done to cover the tracks left by this incident. Aside from scaring poor Molindi into silence, there was the matter of hauling their unconscious prisoner from the hangar to wherever this room was. Any security cams along the way would need to be messed with, any guards on patrol diverted. That would have taken some real work. Still, if they were smart enough to do all that, why weren't they concealing their faces or their names?

Again Shaparo uncannily seemed to read Kyle's thoughts. "Do you have any idea how hard it is to prosecute an Alliance Intelligence agent?"

If looks could kill, the one on Kyle's face would have reduced the other man's body to a carbonized aggregate of its base chemical components.

Unlike his companion Troomis, though, the Intel captain did not look smug at all. "We have no need to hide ourselves from you. In fact, the opposite was necessary in the hopes of establishing trust."

"Trust? You want me to trust you?"

With a nod toward the smoking Sullustan, Shaparo said, "It's a very rare and precious commodity these days. As Garek said, we're not acting under any orders. General Cracken and his staff have made many... questionable decisions in recent weeks. About which agents are assigned to what teams. Which leads to follow, which to ignore. Who is a suspect, who isn't. What information makes it into the reports to the Chief of State, the Advisory Council, and so on. To ensure that this ends with justice—justice for all—it is necessary that steps be taken without the knowledge of our superiors."

The captain licked his lips. "We may need your help, Kyle Katarn."

Kyle began to question if his headache was so bad that it had sent him into delirium. He couldn't think of anything saner to reply with than, "Help with what?"

Shaparo's hands folded behind his back. The glowbulb's silver light ran along the creases of his face, and his brows cast pools of darkness over his steel-colored eyes. Quietly he asked, "What if I told you that Crix Madine was only the mass shadow of a supergiant? That his predations were not isolated to Kolaador or to him? That men and women like him are everywhere, and have positioned themselves on the Advisory Council, the Cabinet, High Command—that they already have partial control over the Rebel Alliance itself?"

"I'd say you're insane."

Kyle's invective landed like a dud concussion missile against quadanium steel armor plating—not a scratch. Shaparo's reply came slow, soft, almost bored. "The way I see it, there are only two possibilities, given your Imperial past and your connection with Madine. Either you are a part of it, or you are one of the only men in the Alliance who can help us fight it.

"You're in this room so that we can find out which is the case."

Shaparo stood there, effortless and immovable, a weightless glacier in the unreal light of that little room. Troomis glared hungrily like a rabid kath hound pup. The blaster pistol he had stunned Kyle with was strapped to his hip. The Sullustan, Garek, took a long draught. The astromech's lights blinked—red to blue, blue to red. The exit was three paces away. More than likely, the outside was being guarded by the other human from the hangar (and perhaps also the Twi'lek, if he was up for it).

Kyle Katarn looked down at the binders shackling his wrists, saw the metal gleaming like polished chromium, and realized then that his life truly was in danger. That he was at the mercy of people who did not inhabit the coordinates he commonly thought of as reality, and that he might never see that place again.

This was exactly what he had feared, and what Jan had warned him about: Somebody might do something. All the unregulated gossip and commiseration on FleetNet, the hysterical rumors and baseless allegations, the tough guys posing with their blasters, flapping their gums about how useless High Command was... It had finally broken the threshold that so many beings falsely tried to erect around the realm of subspace communications, saying that it was only text on vidscreens or holographic images, that it "wasn't real" or "didn't matter." That barrier was finally gone, and the contents of FleetNet had come flooding into the "real world," into the galaxy full of real people, where every word and action mattered a great deal more than anyone was willing to admit.

Shaparo and his colleagues had looked at the scandal which was shaking the Rebel Alliance to its foundations, and decided to take the initiative. To look around, see what was happening, and connect the dots. To act on their own judgment without being prompted or given permission by any authority.

Somebody in the Rebel Alliance had finally done something—just as Skorg Jameson had decided to do something about Arze and Nanak Surraj, all those years ago on Sulon.

The difference being, while Jameson was undeniably a man given to skepticism and suspicion, he had only acted after a careful investigation and sober assessment of the facts, and with the support and guidance of other men from his community. He had executed justice in accordance with the universal principles of natural sentient morality—the same principles that had been enshrined in the Galactic Constitution of the Old Republic, twenty-five thousand years ago, and which the Rebellion hoped to restore.

Whereas Shaparo was a dead-eyed motherfragging lunatic, and his colleagues were rabid psychopaths.

Somebody had done something, all right. These somebodies had scared Molindi out of his wits, then assaulted a Rebel-employed mercenary before falsely imprisoning him for an unlawful and insane "interrogation." And when they were done with Kyle, whatever was left of him, they would go after Jan.

And after they were done with Jan, when would it stop? Would it ever stop? If the Alliance was too incompetent to keep a blasted recreational comm network regulated, how would it stop a team of rogues within its own ranks?

What if Shaparo and his cronies weren't a flash in the vacuum? Paranoia over the Madine scandal had spread like a virus. What if this vigilante impulse did the same?

The Rebellion would eat itself alive.

Kyle didn't lose often. He didn't completely frack things up often, either. It wasn't easy, admitting it, but he was deep in the bantha shit, and this time he'd gotten there all on his own. He had seen what people were saying on FleetNet and known what it might lead to. Jan had even warned him, but he still hadn't taken the danger seriously. He'd been so cocky, gotten so excited to leave with her... He'd never considered that when somebody in the Alliance finally snapped and did something, the something might be done to him.

Still, wasting energy on self-pity also wasn't a common activity for Kyle Katarn. Cynical though he was, he could look on the bright side of just about anything. For instance, he had been captured before, like on Jabba's star yacht, and so far he had yet to see any kell dragons, Gamorreans, or vibro-axes here.

He'd take whatever he could get. Like his father, he was a practical man.

Shaparo pulled out the chair across from him and sat down. "So. About Orinackra."

"It's a very windy planet. Lots of valleys. Great place to fly one of those Selonian hover-kites, if you have one."

"[You had better cooperate with us, Katarn,]" Garek warned. "[There is a lot more at stake here than you realize.]"

So the joke didn't land. Fine—Kyle hadn't expected it to. "[The grin of a sandcat is never friendly,]" he replied.

The Sullustan's little nod of respect told Kyle that his electives back at the Academy had paid off. On the other side of the room, Troomis narrowed his eyes.

"What was the nature of your contact with Madine before his defection?" asked Shaparo.

"There wasn't any," said Kyle. "He leaked information to the Rebellion for a couple months, confirmed the existence of the testing facility on Fest. But none of his transmissions came to me. Alliance Intel handled all that."

The Intelligence captain frowned. "Weren't you two classmates in your Imperial Academy days?"

"No. I attended Carida. Crix went to Raithal."

Shaparo mumbled something unintelligible and chewed his lips as if truly pondering it. It was patently obvious to Kyle that the captain had just asked him two utterly nonsensical questions on purpose. The interrogation had begun, and while his captors were obviously unhinged, Kyle held out hope that they would still be following the tactics and protocols used by Alliance Intelligence.

Kyle had never sat in to observe an entire interrogation, but Jan had told him a few things about how prisoners were handled once they were "in the box," as the saying went. Rebel inquisitors had a lot of tricks up their sleeves. If you were a captive Imperial, they could and would lie to you—coldly, expertly, for hours on end, leading you around in circles until you were so dizzy that you couldn't tell up from down. They would feign sympathy or aggression, patience or boredom—or insanity. They might badger and threaten you, or they might cozy up to you. They might change their own names in the middle of a session, then deny they had done so when called out on it. Anything to get inside your head. Anything that might knock you off balance so that your precious secrets might start to spill out.

Kyle was in the box now. Reality here was whatever the agents told him. At least, that was their goal.

He had no guarantee that Shaparo was sincere—about anything. The whole spiel about them acting outside of orders? Given the details of what had just happened, it seemed probable... but considering how insane things had gone since the Madine scandal first broke, maybe Shaparo had been ordered to say that. The rogue agents story, his crazy theory about the Alliance itself being subverted—it could all be a ruse, bait to lure Kyle into thinking they were underdogs that he could trust.

There was no way to be certain. Kyle was in the box. Unless Shaparo got sloppy and accidentally dropped the binder keys onto the desk, there was nothing Kyle could do—except try to keep the show going for as long as possible, and hope Jan found him before it got too ugly. She always had been the one to get him out of trouble at the last minute... most of the time.

Shaparo blew out a breath. "Well, all right then. What about Vergesso? How would you describe Crix Madine then?"

Kyle swallowed. The headache, the bruises, the smashed nose, the dirty light, the dried blood and phlegm that he couldn't wipe from his face—all continued to scrape away at his calm, his control, and having to think about Madine was not going to make it easier. "Alliance Special Forces was adding a training facility to the asteroid base. I was considered an expert in stormtrooper tactics, so they hired me to help set up security protocols and install defense systems. If the base came under attack, they wanted to know how best to hold off a stormtrooper boarding party."

"He asked you about Madine, Rimmer," Troomis barked. "Not your resumé."

It didn't take a genius to read the dynamic of this room. Shaparo was playing the straight man, the reasonable authority figure. Troomis was the one who would step in if threats or spittle needed to be spewed in anyone's face. As for Garek and the droid, they were little more than decorations.

Kyle said, "Madine seemed sharp. Professional. Focused. Far as anyone could tell, a model officer. He knew how to use my skills and didn't waste a minute."

Shaparo nodded. "Did you notice anything... peculiar about the major general? His mannerisms, his speech, items in his office?"

Kyle tried to remember, tried to call up memories and details to share. When that failed, he tried to invent some, and failed at that as well. That part of his mind was still in pieces. He had no interest in being helpful, only in keeping things going—and in keeping Troomis stuck to that wall. "No, he... I was focused on my work. Crix and I pretty much only talked professionally. I was in his office a few times, but there wasn't much to see."

His right palm burned, remembering Crix's handshake—a solid moment of masculine camaraderie, now turned odious and corrupted.

Did you notice anything? was a question Kyle had asked himself at many odd hours over the past few weeks—chasing sleep in his quarters, wandering quiet corridors of the Independence, staring in the refresher mirror. There was good no answer he could give, true or untrue.

Shaparo shrugged and glanced away from him, feigning thoughtfulness. "So you thought highly of Madine. A model officer and all that. At that time, were you aware of his record of service to the Empire? His formation of the storm commandos? The plague released on Dentaal?"

Kyle hesitated, but only because that was the sort of question nobody should answer immediately. "I had heard the talk, yeah. I heard rumors. But he never brought it up, so I figured it was none of my business. I was a defector, too, after all..." For effect, he rolled his eyes. He couldn't look like he was taking this too seriously. "And in case you forgot, I was on Vergesso to do a job, not to socialize, and not to go digging spice out of other people's cargo compartments."

Shaparo's mouth formed a thin line. "Have you ever seen the effects that the Candorian plague has on a victim?"

"No, I haven't."

"Pray you never do."

Meters away, Garek gave a final puff, dropped the nub that remained of his cigarette, and ground it under his boot.

"Why'd you save Madine's life, Katarn?" asked Shaparo.

All of a sudden they were back to Orinackra. "It was my mission," Kyle said. "He'd been a valuable spy for the Rebellion. We owed him for all he had done, and we still needed his help to stop the dark trooper project. Even with Rebus, the trail would have gone cold without Crix's help."

"That Imperial detention facility was well-guarded. It must have taken a lot of determination and firepower to break in and extract a high-level prisoner. You would do all that for a man who helped wipe out an entire planet's population?" Shaparo raised a brow. "Someone you didn't even know?"

"Like I said, it was my mission," Kyle retorted. "I was paid to do it by the Rebellion. And I wasn't involved in vetting the guy. Doesn't Alliance Intelligence have a branch that handles that?"

"It just seems a little peculiar. One former Imperial is caught, scheduled for execution, only to be saved by another."

More of this bigoted anti-defector crap. "If you've got a problem with ex-Imperials, then I've got news for you: that's over half of the Alliance Advisory Council and High Command, not to mention Senator Mon Mothma."

Shaparo didn't blink. In fact, he hardly had blinked at all during this whole conversation. His blue-gray steel eyes were like windows into an empty sky. "Does it bother you at all, Kyle Katarn, knowing Madine's crimes? Knowing what he did to all those poor children?"

Against Kyle's will, the disgusting images he had seen in the FleetNet node, the leaked ones that had been taken from Madine's datapad, rose to the forefront of his mind. His face went rigid as he forced them back down and silently cursed the indecent, bantha shit-brained gravel-maggot who had leaked them. "Yeah, it bothers me. You got any other dumb questions?"

"It must disturb you very greatly, to think that he was only able to carry out those horrible deeds because of you. Because you rescued him from Orinackra."

Kyle headache got worse. The binders felt like teeth biting into his flesh. "I didn't know what kind of man Crix was or what he was going to do in the future. You didn't know. Nobody in the Alliance could have known."

Garek lit another cigarette, his alien face flickering like a mirage in the lighter's orange glow. "[Funny how many people you hear that from, these days. Can it be true every time? I didn't see anything, I didn't know anything, I couldn't have known— What are you supposed to think when everyone says that?]"

"You're the investigators. You tell me," said Kyle.

Shaparo opened his mouth yet again, but Troomis's voice sliced through the room like the report of an E-17d sniper rifle. "You a faggot, Katarn?"

Kyle shifted toward him. "Why, Troomis? You scanning for an open exhaust port?"

"I'll tell you what happened, Katarn." Troomis detached from the wall like a veermok leaving its branch and sauntered over. "There was more between you and Crix Madine than just the Empire. You two were boyfriends. That's the kind of shit you were up to in that asteroid base at Vergesso, all alone together." He was leaning over the desk now, leering, the words rolling from his tongue like he was savoring the taste of each one. He had a thin nose, thin ears, and a pale face so clean-shaven that it looked like raw Endorian chicken meat. "And when you found out he was into little kids? You wanted some of that too, but he wanted 'em all to himself, so he broke up with you—and you were so pissed that you wrote in the first tip about Kolaador. You ratted him out 'cause he wouldn't let you in on the contraband."

Kyle stared back at him in disbelieving contempt. He'd never heard such a thing spoken out loud: not by the raunchiest of his adolescent ne'er-do-well friends in Barons Hed, not in the locker rooms, mess halls, or dorms of the Imperial Academy. It galled him how, everywhere he went, there were strutting coreward folk who would ridicule Rimmers like him at the drop of a hat, more often than not with real or implied adjectives like inbred or bantha-kriffing. Yet it was apparently those same allegedly respectable, civilized, and productive members of galactic society who had such things on their minds and were eager to speak of them—not the Outer Rim dirt farmers who they saw as backward mouth-breathers.

A soft laugh of embarrassment sounded from Kyle's throat. He was too repulsed to be truly mad. All he could say was, "You are sick."

Even as he said it, he was bracing himself, the binders tight on his wrists like Gen'Dai vibro-binding wire. Troomis's squarish white teeth clamped onto his lower lip as he cranked a fist back.

The pervert's monologue hadn't prevented Kyle from sizing him up. The stick-shaped body, the untested muscles. This was a man whose violence was not accustomed to challenge—in one word, a bully, who would put his whole mass into a punch as long as his victim couldn't defend himself.

Unfortunately for him, they had only bothered to secure their prisoner by his wrists. Though the table wouldn't budge, Kyle still had some freedom of movement, and he had calculated several options for defending himself.

His favorite equation was this one: Troomis's all-in haymaker plus the base of Kyle Katarn's skull equals one shattered hand.

But Troomis's arm was intercepted mid-flight in a dark blur, and the next thing Kyle knew, his assailant was being wrestled away by none other than Garek. Off in the far corner, the astromech squealed, rocking back and forth in dismay.

"Let me at him! Let me at that son of a—"

"[Settle down, Troomis!]"

"Shut the frack up! Let go of me!"

"[No, you shut up!]"

Troomis was pinned against the wall now, the burning end of Garek's cigarette waggling centimeters before his chicken-meat face. "[You think you've got a right to blow your engine core here? YOU?!]"

Garek was noticeably stockier than his counterpart, but his grip was sloppy. Even as he bellowed, Troomis was wiggling loose.

"Get your stinking hands off me, you damn, dirty—"

Garek's backhand took him in the cheek like a Zygerrian electro-whip and sent him staggering. The room went quiet, and Shaparo regarded the two men. It was the first time he moved since Troomis had interjected himself. "Are you quite done, both of you?"

The Sullustan was already pacing away, taking a hard draft on his cigarette. Troomis was braced against the wall, one hand rubbing his face. "Yeah, boss, I'm done." No tension in his voice. Garek had slapped the belligerence out of him.

"Doo-wee zooree-errr," went the droid.

"Well, this has all been very entertaining," Kyle said, nodding genially down at his binders, "but look, I should probably be going—let you take care of the kids and all. They need your attention, and I'm only getting in the way."

By way of reply, Captain Shaparo stared at him as if... Well, it was impossible to describe because his face had not visibly changed in any way, and yet Kyle knew, without knowing how he knew, that something in the room had just been altered.

"You had a reason for this interrogation, right?" Kyle demanded impatiently. "What else can I tell you that—"

"Garek." Shaparo took a deep breath. "Would you bring us the folder?"

Kyle frowned, not recognizing the word. Meanwhile the Sullustan opened the satchel he had left on the floor, beside the medkit. The item he drew out was thin and rectangular, made of some coarse material that audibly crinkled when it was bent slightly. Kyle realized with amazement that it was paper. A primitive material made from vegetable fibers, sheets of paper had once been collected into bound stacks known as books. Despite being absurdly out of date, Kyle happened to know that intelligence organizations sometimes used it to store highly sensitive data in blastproof bio-hexacrypt vaults. Unlike data tapes or holorecordings, information was encoded onto paper by physically engraving or coating the sheet itself with a chemical substance. There were no mechanical components at all. Thus, since the data was not electronically stored, it could not be electronically stolen by slicers.

Whatever they wanted to show him, it was high-level stuff. Kyle could not totally hide his curiosity—or his unease. Shaparo took the "folder," opened it, and (quite unlike him) spilled its contents across the table. It was more paper, dozens of smaller squares, overlaid with some glossy protective material that sharply reflected the glowbulb above them. High-detail printouts, static images of—

Of—

This time Kyle didn't freeze, gaping. He threw himself backward with all of his strength, propelled by sheer, overwhelming disgust. His restraints, however, would not budge a millimeter, and he all but broke his wrists trying to yank them free. He would have shouted at the pain, except that his back hit the chair so hard that it knocked the wind out of him.

"By the— Force, Shaparo, what the frack?" he coughed when his breath and wits had partially returned. "What is this? What the frack is wrong with you, showing me this—"

"This is a selection from the Crix Madine case files."

"I know what they are— Get them away!"

"A few of them were leaked onto FleetNet a short time ago." The voice of Captain Shaparo, Rebel Alliance Intelligence, remained exactly as steady and even as before. With horrifying nonchalance, he gingerly sorted the pictures and began arranging them in a neat grid across the table, each one facing Kyle Katarn. "There are nearly a thousand more, recovered from Madine's portcomp and datapads."

The phrase nearly a thousand was mind-boggling enough to stop Kyle short. Jagged bolts of lightning-hot agony clawed from his wrists to his arms and down his spine, then back up again. Fighting to steady his breathing, he clamped his eyes shut. He wasn't sure he wanted to open them ever again.

Why look when the universe was so ugly?

As though a demon awaited Kyle behind his eyelids, Troomis's voice found him in the dark. "What's the matter, Katarn? You're supposed to be so tough—blasting through all those stormtroopers and dark troopers. People say you stole the Death Star plans single-handed, saved the Rebellion. I even heard you lived through a shootout with Boba Fett once. What'd he do, disintegrate your balls?"

Kyle had nothing to say, no retorts at the ready. He was too busy trying not to get sick.

Shaparo spoke—bored, chastising. "Open your eyes, Katarn. Look at me."

Against his better judgment, Kyle did so. The Intelligence captain's fingers were steepled beneath his chin. His unblinking eyes were steel-gray blue, bright and empty and gaping and silently screaming. The table between them, and the walls on all sides, seemed to be moving subtly—vibrating, tingling, writhing, breathing.

"General Cracken wants his people to be very thorough in their investigation. Every single... incriminating image is an assignment in itself."

The astromech droid warbled.

Troomis stalked over and leaned in, putting himself at eye level with interrogator and interrogatee. "And that's where we come in: Garek and me, Vewin and Bertos, even R2-Q8." The man was seething with restraint, his laser-shaved face waxing from chicken-meat white to red before Kyle's haggard eyes. "Someone's gotta find all the details. Command wants to know when these were taken. They want to know where—Kolaador or someplace else. They want to know who those children are. They want to know which ones Crix Madine took and which ones came from Force-knows where. Do you understand, Katarn? We have been staring at this shit for weeks. Weeks. If we've got to see it, then so do you."

Again Kyle said nothing. Everything in the room was too close. That crawling mass of pictures. The dirty silver glowbulb was like a starship's c-beam projector. Troomis's head looked as big as a moon.

Without warning, a hand took the back of Kyle's skull and cranked him down toward the table. "C'mon, look! Look at 'em! Still feel like a hero of the Rebellion?!"

Gasping, Kyle struggled to resist Troomis's grip, tried to keep his vision unfocused, but it did him no good. It wasn't enough to look away. The things that no one should ever see were still there, stabbing him through his eyes with a million white-hot needles. His gut churned and tumbled, like a faulty compressor unit shaking itself to pieces. He didn't feel that he belonged in a universe where things like what the pictures showed could happen.

Shaparo's finger tapped at the table's edge. "Look at them, Katarn."

"Why?! What am I supposed to see?!"

The finger drifted like an Imperial probe droid over a flat-blasted terrain of inhumanity, then traced a loop over four particular squares. "You see that little boy?"

Kyle could not control his eyes. He could not control his breathing. He could not control anything. "WHY?!"

"He's my son."

The sheer understated agony of that sentence, delivered with such mildness, had the density of a singularity. Kyle Katarn fell still at last, locked in place by the hollow man's gravitational pull, as the riddle of his abduction and this farcical interview was solved.

It wasn't information that this man wanted from him.

In a way, this was the most human thing in the galaxy: a man suffers something unbearable and decides that somebody needs to pay.

The somebody in this case being Kyle Katarn.

"It's your fault, Katarn," Troomis growled into his ear, then drifted beside the table. "All of it, you Rimmer piece of shit."

On the other side of Shaparo, Garek stood motionless behind a shroud of smoke. He wasn't going to rein his partner in this time. This moment was what they were here for.

"No. No it's not." Kyle's voice sounded wrong. Thin. Shaking.

"You saved Crix Madine," Shaparo repeated gently, and the entire shifting room reverberated with the words.

Kyle's last meal was swimming inside him like a dianoga being rudely disturbed from slumber, squirming with a dozen upset tendrils. "I had to save him! We needed him to stop the dark troopers!"

"Was that worth it? Is anything worth letting this happen?!" Troomis's face was a caldera, spewing rage and spittle. Massive sweat stains darkened the armpits of his crumpled brown shirt. "You knew he was a freak! You knew he was into little kids!"

"NO, I DID NOT!" Kyle bellowed.

"YOU DID!"

"WHAT THE HELL DO YOU WANT FROM ME?!"

Suddenly Troomis was nose to nose with Kyle, fists balled around the front of his bloodstained shirt. "TAKE IT BACK, YOU NERF-FRACKING SCHUTTA-SPAWN! SAY YOU TAKE IT BACK!"

"ALL RIGHT, I'LL SAY IT!" Kyle heard his own frenzied voice as if it belonged to someone else, like it was a death rattle echoing down the shaft of a lightless tunnel. "If I knew what kind of sick frack Crix Madine was, I still would have fought my way through that detention facility—so I could blast his fracking head off myself! IS THAT GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOU?! LET ME OUT OF HERE! LET ME OUT OF HERE!"

Everything was so loud and so close and so ugly and so awful that all meaning had dissolved. This was not an argument. There was a man screaming at Kyle for no reason, so Kyle was screaming back. What else was there to do? The universe was gone. Nothing was left except growls and obscenities and black, gibbering madness.

Troomis scrambled back as Kyle yanked himself forward by the binders. His broken nose exploded with fresh pain as he dragged his face against the table, trying to rid it of the hideous pictures, wrenching himself back and forth, writhing and kicking as an ice-cold mass of something surged up from his guts—

"[He's gonna pop!]"

Shaparo leaped to his feet and swept the table clean, scattering the stiff paper squares as a discolored stream erupted from Kyle's throat. With the eruption went his rage, his madness, and his strength, and when the stream had run dry, he dropped his head to the table so hard that he saw stars.

Moments passed—dark, quiet, empty, so blissfully empty. Gradually Kyle realized that his eyes were open, watching the puddle he had made begin to drip from the table's edge and splatter to the floor.

He felt a hand settle onto his shoulder—warm, almost fatherly. "Congratulations, Kyle Katarn—you've proven that you are a man like us. You have experienced a bare fraction of my pain. We are bonded now..." At first Shaparo's voice seemed to come from every direction at once, but that mystical quality rapidly evanesced. "Garek, give me the key."

A click and a beep, and Kyle gasped with relief as the binders opened, freeing his hands. He had just enough strength to push himself off from the table and collapse into the chair.

Troomis and Garek were moving: putting away the binders, collecting the scattered pictures. Shaparo stood still, beaming down at Kyle as though he had accomplished something laudable. "We have to go now," he said, "but you'll hear from us again soon."

Returned to sanity at last, Kyle felt all of the rage rekindle within himself again—but his body was still battered and ragged and it withered in its flame, and he found himself sluggish as a drunkard as he tried to stand up. "You... Are you kidding me?"

"I'm sorry about this, but it had to done." Shaparo's familiarly cold, standoffish manner returned. "Besides—we do worse to Imperials, and you know it."

Moff Rebus hadn't been beaten, or forced to look at images that made him want to burn his eyes out with a plasma torch... Or had he?

Kyle's death-glare went from one tormentor to the next. His fists shook. "I am going to nail your hides to the wall. Every one of you," he said through gritted teeth. Glowering at R2-Q8, he added, "And as for you, you're scrap."

"Dwee-ZEE roobee TEE!" retorted the droid defiantly.

Troomis and Garek were flanking the door now. The Sullustan had the medkit in one hand and the satchel around his shoulder.

"I suggest you think twice about reporting this," Shaparo warned. "It'll be a mistake if you do."

A surge of effort got Kyle to his feet. Even as the room spun around him, he took a step toward Troomis, with his laser-shaved, chicken-meat face. "Threatening me again? If you've got a move to make, I'm right fracking here."

Troomis's blaster cleared his hip holster, but Shaparo stayed him with a gesture. "Set it to stun level two—that'll put him down for a few hours," the captain instructed. "You should have a seat again, Katarn. We can't have you following us. When the time's right, you'll hear from me again. In the meantime, keep this to yourself. Crix Madine is only a sacrificial nerf. No one of high rank in the Alliance can be trusted, do you understand?"

"You think I believe you now?" Kyle spat.

Shaparo hesitated, then shrugged and gestured to Garek, who pressed the wall panel. As the door hissed open, the remains of Kyle's rage ripped away all restraint and vaulted him over the table, but Troomis's stun blast caught him in midair, sending him barreling back into the darkness beyond stars.