The next time Isamer sent minions to prepare a hideout, he’d make sure he sent people with some sense of comfort. Yes, the caves were all but impregnable to anyone who didn’t have in-depth surveys on hand. (Which Isamer did, and he’d wiped many droid memories to ensure no one outside the Directorate could say the same.) But it was cold down there, dark and cramped, and the fool humans who’d chosen that spot hadn’t considered that the top of the cave came too low for the comfort of a Lasat. Isamer was tired of being hunched over, tired of the weary hostages huddled in one corner, tired of waiting for this operation to end.

Already the governments of E’ronoh and Eiram had taken the first inevitable steps: offering ransom for their stolen royalty, ineptly investigating the kidnapping and following the false trails Isamer had left for them, making clumsy public appeals for calm that had only panicked their citizens more—and asking for the help of the Jedi.

As the Hutts had explained, the greater activity between the Republic and that area of space made it inevitable that some planet or other would turn to the Jedi in a crisis. By creating a crisis at the right time and place, Isamer and the Directorate could ensure that the Jedi rescue mission would fail horribly. Both rescuers and hostages would, by the end, be very messily dead. The Jedi Order would mourn its lost Knights, these planets and all their neighbors would realize neither the Republic nor the Jedi could help them.

Then nothing would stand in the way of the enslavers’ bounties. Planets would instead turn on other planets, on their own subcultures or nondominant sentient species, offering up people to enslave in the hopes it would keep them from being enslaved themselves. Fear would triumph. And Isamer would profit.

One of the guards barged into the inner chamber, salt dusting his cloak; in the corner, both Thandeka and Cassel flinched. “Lord Isamer,” the guard said, “in the ship we found the dead body of the Jedi.”

Too easy. Isamer narrowed his golden eyes. “How many Jedi did you find?”

“Just…just the one, Lord Isamer, a Filithar, no one else was with—”

“Fool!” Isamer growled. “They would not have sent only one Jedi on this mission.”

The lieutenant pleaded, “But we saw no tracks, no signs that anyone escaped.”

“You did not see them because the Jedi are cleverer than you. They know how to conceal themselves. Others must have survived and escaped. Find them and eliminate them, now!”

The guard scurried out. Isamer, in a fouler temper than before, coiled in his chair and stroked his claws over the hilt of his blaster. He hoped they’d get to the end of this soon, because he was in the mood to slaughter someone. Anyone. A glorious battle with a Jedi would be preferable, but merely executing the hostages would do.