Habuur slid back in her seat, all ice, and then glanced at Ben.
“What’s the kid here for?”
“Training.”
“You start your thugs young on Coruscant.”
Shevu laid Habuur’s comlink and datapad on the table in front of her. Ben watched, feeling how stressed she was. There was something unfocused about her, as if her hostility and anxiety were directed at something that wasn’t in the room.
“You like spacecraft for some reason?”
Habuur shrugged. “Beats walking.”
“You got a lot of images of them on your datapad.” Shevu switched on the ‘pad and showed them to her. “Who did you have under surveillance?”
Habuur just stared back at him. Ben craned his neck to get a look at the images on the ‘pad, but it was all just a blur from this angle.
Shevu went on, still with that tone of bored patience. “Just cut the poodoo and tell me why you’re here. If it’s just some lowlife you’ve been sent to vape, I’m too busy to worry about that.”
“Don’t I get a lawyer?”
“Under the emergency powers I’ve been granted, no. You get zip.”
“You’ll be banging my head on the table pretty soon, then.”
“Want me to call your friend?”
“I don’t have any.”
“The one who keeps contacting you.”
“Who?”
“Mirta Gev,” said Shevu.
Habuur’s face was completely unmoved, but Ben felt the little flare of strong emotion-fear, dismay, yearning-well up and surround her like an energy field. Shevu reacted to it, too. Ben wondered how non-Force-users could sense things that well hidden.
“She was recovering some jewelry for me.” And that sounded like the truth. The whole timbre of her voice and the feel of the Force around her changed. “My mother’s necklace.”
“Looks like she got it.”
Habuur said nothing and remained apparently relaxed in the durasteel seat even though the muscles in her jaw had started to twitch. Shevu got up and beckoned Ben to follow him outside.
The captain closed the doors. “Go and get Girdun for me. I want to check out this Mirta Gev again. If she’s on her way here, I’d like to welcome her to the capital personally, especially if she’s armed like madam in there.”
“Are you happy leaving her with Girdun?”
Shevu frowned slightly. “That’s a very grown-up question.”
“He feels pretty nasty.”
“That’s a Force judgment, is it?”
“Yes.”
“It’s spot-on. He’s a former New Republic Intelligence officer. He’s used to different rules than the ones we had to follow as police.” Jacen had cobbled together a very mixed bag of men and women for 967 Commando; Ben found some of them frightening, and he could see the differences in cultures, as Shevu called it, among those from the Intelligence Service, the police, and the military. “But he wouldn’t dare cross me on this.”
“Okay.” Shevu was very much in command, even if the two men had the same rank. “Right away.”
Shevu went back into the interrogation room, and Ben went in search of Captain Girdun, trying to walk briskly and not break into a run. He found the man in the barracks’ gymnasium. The 967, being newly formed, didn’t have a proper headquarters yet and had taken over a Fleet Reserve training center.
Girdun, who never looked at ease in his black uniform, stood talking to a couple of sergeants. Somehow it took Ben a few seconds to see the ranks of people behind him, sitting cross-legged on the floor with their hands on top of their heads, fingers meshed. Some of them looked like the kind of people Ben would avoid at all costs, and some looked pretty ordinary. Most were male.
“Latest haul,” said the sergeant. “Nice tip-off, kid.”
Ben still scanned the gymnasium-silent except for the heavy sense of people breathing nervously-in the way of someone who felt he ought to recognize one of the prisoners.
He did.
His gaze jerked to a halt on a blond boy a few years older than he was. Barit Saiy sat in the ranks of Corellians arrested during the night, staring at Ben with an expression of utter loathing.
“Yeah, great tip,” said Gurdin, distracted. “What did you want me for?”
Ben knew at that moment that he would never be a child again. He wished more than anything that he could.
Chapter Fourteen
Ke barjurir gar’ade, jagyc’ade kot’la a dalyc’ade kotla’shya.
Train your sons to be strong but your daughters to be stronger.
-Mandalorian saying
ZERRIA’S BAR, DRALL, CORELLIAN SYSTEM.
“Mand’alor!” said a voice Fett didn’t recognize. “Gal’gala?”