BRIEFING

LORZ GEPTUN STOOD OUTSIDE THE COMMAND CABIN door and tried to swallow. Really, this was too much: to be summoned before Luke Skywalker, of all people. A Jedi. Not only a Jedi, but the son of Anakin Skywalker. And now Geptun had to meet him. Face-to-face!

He tugged at the collar of his dress-blue uniform tunic, slid a finger behind it to try to stretch the fabric just a hair more. He grimaced at how difficult he found this simple task to be; surely his tailor had miscalculated—again—because he couldn’t possibly have put on so much weight since he’d had this made. Could he? In, what had it been, three Standard months? A man of his admittedly advanced age—he would never see seventy again—should have settled on a size, and left it at that.

Geptun was not much in favor of dress uniforms, anyway. He’d left his own behind on his homeworld decades before, at the beginning of the Clone Wars, trading it in for mufti; in those days, Republic Intelligence had been a largely covert service, and had had no use for uniforms. He’d left Republic Intelligence not long after it had become Imperial Intelligence; his investigation of the so-called Jedi Rebellion had uncovered entirely too much of certain truths that the Imperial Executive had preferred to conceal, and for a number of years he’d been forced to make a living as a freelance broker of information while doing his best to avoid attracting any official Imperial attention.

Eventually, he’d offered his services to the Rebel Alliance. Though he had little interest in politics—his primary political conviction was a profound interest in his own safety and comfort—he’d recognized that the prospective government the Rebels planned to install would, owing to its youthful amateurish untidiness, afford him a great deal more opportunity for the freedom to make his own way in his own way. Which was another way of saying: to live and work in the lucrative shadows outside official scrutiny.

Which made his current situation all the more ironic.

He sighed. Nothing ever works out how we wish, yes? Doesn’t mean one can’t turn it to one’s advantage. He sighed again and raised a finger to trigger the cabin’s door chime … but before he could, the door slid open, and a voice that sounded a great deal older and wearier than Geptun had expected said, “Inspector Geptun. Please come in.”

Geptun grimaced again. He’d become accustomed, this twenty-plus years past, to a galaxy without Jedi. He wasn’t at all sure he was looking forward to their return.

He took a deep breath and waddled through the door. “General Skywalker,” he said with a slight bow—no salute, as the Judicial Service was outside the military chain of command—and a pleasant smile. “How may I be of service?”

The young general sat on the edge of his desk, head lowered and hands clasped before him. He wore close-fitting civilian clothing of a somber black, very much in the style his celebrated father had made famous. Geptun reflected with a flash of annoyance that if he’d known Skywalker would be out of uniform, he would have come to this meeting in a comfortable blazer instead of this bloody jookley suit.

Skywalker lifted his head as though he had felt Geptun’s annoyance—and he might very well have, Geptun reminded himself. Bloody Jedi. “Inspector Lorz Geptun,” Skywalker said slowly. “I know a little about you, Inspector. You were a military governor and director of planetary intelligence for the CIS during the Clone Wars.”

Geptun’s too-tight collar suddenly seemed to tighten further. “Briefly. At the beginning of the—”

“Then you were a Republic spy.”

“Well—”

“And after that, you made your living tracking targets for bounty hunters.”

“Not specifically for—”

“And now you’re a JS investigator. Through all this, there’s a running theme. You have a talent.”

Geptun said carefully, “Do I?”

“You seem to be pretty good at finding the truth.”

Geptun relaxed. “Oh, well, thank you for—”

“And at making money off it.”

“Erm.” He cleared his throat, but found he had nothing to say.

Skywalker pushed himself to his feet. His face was drawn, and far more deeply lined than Geptun had expected from a lad of twenty-four. He looked like he hadn’t been sleeping for some few days now. His movements were slightly unsteady, and the shadows under his eyes were shading toward purple—but they were nothing compared to the shadows within his eyes. “That’s what I know about you. What do you know about me?”

Geptun blinked. “General?”

“Come on, Inspector.” Skywalker sounded even more tired than he looked. “Everybody knows stuff about me. What do you know?”

“Oh, well, you know, the usual—Tatooine, Yavin, Endor, Bakura, Death Star One and Two—” Geptun realized he was babbling and shut up.

Skywalker nodded. “The usual. The stories. The press releases. The problem is that those stories and press releases aren’t really about me at all. They’re about the guy everybody wants me to be, understand?”

Geptun eyed him warily; he sensed that he’d been maneuvered onto dangerous ground. “I’m afraid,” he said slowly, “that I don’t understand.”

Skywalker nodded with a slow, tired sigh. “That’s because you don’t know that less than a month ago, I murdered about fifty thousand innocent beings.”

Geptun goggled at him, then blinked and cleared his throat again as he figured out what the young Jedi was talking about. “You mean Mindor?”

Skywalker’s eyes drifted shut; he winced as though he were looking at something painful on the inside of his eyelids. “Yeah. Mindor. I say about fifty thousand because I don’t know the real number. Nobody does. The records were destroyed along with the system.”

“From what I’ve heard, your victory at the Battle of Mindor would hardly constitute murder—”

“From what you’ve heard. More stories.”

“Well, I had heard—I, ah …” Geptun coughed delicately. “What is it, exactly, that you want me to do?”

“You’re an investigator. I want you to investigate.”

“Investigate what?”

“Mindor.” Skywalker’s face twisted. “Me.”

He looked like something hurt. Or like everything hurt.

“Well, I, ah … erm.” Geptun could think of several dozen ways to earn a tidy sum from such a project. “If you don’t mind, may I inquire as to how my name came up for this?”

Skywalker looked away. “You were recommended by an old friend.”

“Was I? And how did your old friend come to—”

“Not my old friend,” Skywalker said. “Yours. His name was Nick.”

“Nick?” Geptun frowned. “I don’t know any—”

“He said to give you this.” Skywalker held out a hook-shaped, curved, metallic-looking object. “Careful. It’s sharp.”

Geptun accepted the object gingerly … and as soon as it touched his palm, his mind was flooded with images of a dark-skinned man with tight-cropped hair, a cocky grin, and startling blue eyes. “Nick Rostu?” he breathed. “I haven’t thought of Nick Rostu in … years. Decades. I thought he was dead.”

Skywalker shrugged. “He probably is.”

“I don’t understand.” But he did understand, at least a little. The object in his hand was from his—and Nick Rostu’s—homeworld.

It was a brassvine thorn.

“So he was right about that, anyway.” Skywalker nodded at the thorn. “He said you can read objects. That you can touch them and sense things about their owners.”

Geptun shrugged. Why trouble to deny it? “It’s a minor talent—but useful in an intelligence analyst.”

“Or an investigator.”

Geptun’s nod was noncommittal. “What else did Rostu tell you about me?”

“He said you’re vicious, venal, and corrupt. That you don’t have a shred of decency, and about as much human feeling as a glacier lizard.”

Geptun nodded abstractedly. “That does sound like Rostu …”

“He also said that you’ve got plenty of guts, that you’re the smartest guy he ever met, and that once you get started on something, you never, ever quit. You don’t like Jedi, and you don’t much care who rules the galaxy as long as you can make a decent living. All of which makes you exactly the man for this job.”

“And what job, if you don’t mind saying, is this?”

“I want you to build a case. Talk to people. Everyone who survived Mindor. Get the facts, and make sense of them, and make a case.”

“What sort of case?”

“War crimes,” Skywalker said grimly. “Crimes against civilization, dereliction of duty, desertion. That kind of thing. Anything you can find out.”

Geptun angled his head. “About whom? Who is the war criminal you wish to indict?”

“I thought that was obvious.” The shadows in Skywalker’s eyes swelled as though they might swallow his whole life. “It’s me.”

Geptun said, “I’ll do it.”