Free Tales from the New Republic by Peter Schweighofer

unless absolutely necessary, if only because it drew too much attention their direction. All too often, in contrast, fanatics reveled in both the violence and the notoriety.
    Bad enough if some loose-laser Rebel shot him through the back for no reason.
    Worse if a Rebel shot Isard instead, and her dead body was the last thing Hal wound up seeing as her choke-collar squeezed the life out of him.
    “Fine,” Isard said, interrupting Hal’s increasingly unpleasant line of thought as she straightened back up from her interrogator’s lean. “If she spun him a story that he fell for that easily, it almost certainly had something to do with a relative or friend. I want their names. All of them. Now.”
    The Devaronian gulped. “I—of course. Let me get his profile chart.”
    Sidling down the bar, he escaped into the manager’s office. “Waste of time,” Hal murmured, turning around to lean his shoulder blades against the bar as he glanced over the handful of patrons. A mixture of simple workers and less simple fringe types, he decided, fairly typical of places like this. “Even if we find him, and even if he got a good look at Moranda, she’s had more than enough time to change her appearance by now.”
    “The fact she and Arkos thought the manager important enough to chase out of town implies they’re reasonably concerned about it,” Isard pointed out.
    “Possibly,” Hal said. “Except that I don’t think it’s Arkos who’s running around with her.”
    “Why not?” Isard argued. “He was right there at the scene. Probably even saw Trabler shoot her.”
    “Which is exactly why it wasn’t him,” Hal said. “I know Arkos, and he’s emphatically not the type to get mixed up with a shooting. At least not without some serious pushing from someone else.”
    Isard grunted. “Fine; so she’s picked up someone else. The point is that in setting up this wild skipper hunt they had to come at least part of the way out of the sideboards. If we can chase down the manager and backtrack the story they spun for him, we might be able to get another vector on them.”
    “I see,” Hal murmured, throwing a sideways look at Isard’s profile. It was a reasonable approach, all right, classic in its straightforwardness.
    Unfortunately, it also required a data-sifting team that would stretch halfway to Coruscant to pull it off. If she really had that much manpower here to draw on…
    “Don’t worry, we’re not going to do it all ourselves,” Isard continued, not bothering to look at him. Apparently, she was no slouch at reading people’s expressions, either. “There’s an Intelligence quiet-drop tucked away in one of the better parts of town where I can tap into Darkknell Security’s computers. A few properly placed orders, and the locals will have the manager’s complete list of acquaintances tracked down by nightfall.”
    “Um,” Hal said, thinking back to his own earlier interactions with Darkknell officialdom. “You’d better hope they don’t tumble to what you’re doing,” he warned her mildly. “Colonel Nyroska, for one, struck me as something of a stickler for proper protocol. Forged orders don’t exactly come under that heading.”
    “Colonel Nyroska will do what he’s told,” Isard said coldly, dismissing Nyroska with the flick of an eyelash. “That goes for the rest of this rabble, too.”
    And for me, too, I suppose ? Hal added silently, feeling with fresh awareness and fresh resentment the soft pressure of the choke-collar against his throat. A rhetorical question—of course it went for him, too. He was just one more of her tools, after all, like Darkknell Security and Trabler and probably dozens of others whose broken lives lay scattered about in the dust of her wake. Maybe even hundreds, if the whispered stories about Armand Isard and his ambitious daughter were to be believed.
    He eyed her profile again. Yes, he was a tool. But then, so was a lightsaber; and many was the overconfident