“HEY, LADY! I’m talkin’ to you!”

The big bruiser was talking to Zaluna, for no one else was on the street. But she’d chosen to keep going—until he kept after her. Just steps behind her, he yelled again. “I said, I’m talking to you!”

“No, you aren’t,” she said, continuing to walk through the mud. “If you were talking to me, you’d use my real name.”

Picking up his pace, the drunk laughed. “How’m I supposed to know who you are?”

“Precisely!” Zaluna spun and looked keenly at him from beneath her light hood. “Then you have no reason to talk to me, Ketticus Brayl. Go home to your wife and children.”

Face lit by moonlight, the behemoth blanched. “Wait. How do you know who I am?”

“That’s not important,” she said, right hand disappearing in the long, loose sleeve of her poncho—the lightest garment she owned that would conceal her features. “What’s important is that you will leave me alone.”

Brayl guffawed. “And if I don’t?”

“Then you’ll have a talk with this.” Her right hand reappeared from within the sleeve, holding a slim blaster. “Are we through?”

The drunk goggled at the weapon’s sudden appearance. Then he turned away, staggering off into the steamy night. Resuming her journey, Zaluna put the blaster back in its hiding place, glad no one knew it hadn’t been fired in the thirty-three years since her mother had left it to her.

It wasn’t true that she knew everyone on Gorse and Cynda by sight, of course—but nearly a third of a century of surveillance had put a lot of troublemakers on her watchlists. And many of them seemed to wind up down here, in The Pits. Some miners acted as if the neighborhood, settled to be close to the old quarries, was a decent place to live now that the strip mining had long since ended. Perhaps for them, it was. But in her experience, roustabouts were trouble waiting to happen. She’d monitored too many bar fights in The Pits, watched dozens of people being shaken down on the streets for money or sport. Whatever the firms paid the miners, it wasn’t enough to keep some of them from hassling good folks for cash.

Then again, if they were paid more, they’d just drink more—and that seemed to make them all the worse.

The encounter was just one more headache in a day filled with them. After Hetto’s arrest, the remaining surveillance staffers at Transcept had worked their overtime in silence, everyone afraid to say anything. Every operator’s background was potentially under review, if the Imperial lieutenant was to be believed. Zaluna had hoped that finding the suspect Skelly again would make up for the Mynocks’ not having flagged him for capture earlier—but her hopes fell when she learned that Skelly had escaped from Moonglow’s offices before the stormtroopers could arrive.

At least no one suspected the Mynocks of signaling him. The factory supervisor had spent an hour defending her security team from the stormtroopers’ insults. Still, Zaluna expected difficult days ahead for everyone at the Transcept office.

And even if nothing happened, a job she’d enjoyed working at would never be fun again.

It was a strange thing. So many people on Gorse lived in fear—especially Sullustans and others of smaller stature. Yet working with the Mynocks, she’d felt somewhat immune. There was safety in isolation, security in having information. Yes, her kind of work did have the potential to create problems for others. But she’d suppressed any consideration of that on the grounds that so many of the people she eavesdropped on were bad characters, likely to hassle a poor workingwoman on a darkened street.

But.

Increasingly, there had been fewer and fewer roughnecks being targeted for snooping, and more and more people like—well, like Hetto. And now Hetto himself, who faced an unknown fate. It hadn’t made sense to anyone on the work floor. Sure, Hetto had complained about working conditions and pay, but who didn’t? Yes, he’d thought what the Empire had done to the once magnificent caverns of Cynda was an abomination, but that was both old news and a common feeling on Gorse.

But the data cube was another thing—and Zaluna now knew it was the reason he’d been targeted. When the shift ended, she’d fled home to see what it was Hetto had given her. He hadn’t given her permission to read what was on the data cube, but it wouldn’t be her first time to pry—and she had no intention of passing something along to this “Hera” person without checking it out first.

She’d used a reader she’d first owned as a teenager, safely detached from the HoloNet—and studied the contents of the data cube in her closet for good measure. The contents were encrypted using a commercial program, but Zaluna had worked several years in electronic data collection and soon found her way past the protections.

She was amazed at what she discovered. Somehow, Hetto had managed to download the files Transcept kept on everyone it had ever watched on Gorse and its moon, from way back in the Republic era to the present.

She thought for a moment this “Hera” might be from a rival surveillance firm. Corporate espionage—spying on the spies for profit. Hetto, always broke, could have been hoping for a payoff. She didn’t want any part of a transaction like that. But thinking on it, she realized Transcept sold data to its competitors all the time, and sometimes on a massive scale. This act didn’t seem necessary.

Looking more closely at it, Zaluna realized that the bounty of personal information on the data cube wasn’t the important part. Its existence served as a guide to the state of the art in surveillance means. Every image, every voice recording, every bioscan, every electronic communication tied to names in the files was tagged with information describing how it had been obtained. With it, a reader knew the location of every surveillance point on Transcept’s local grid.

Who would need something like that?

Maybe it was another Skelly, some crank or mad bomber looking to know the Empire’s capabilities, in order to create more mischief. She wouldn’t want to be a part of that.

But Hetto wasn’t that kind of person. And that suggested someone else who might want it: someone who cared about what the Empire was doing to the people of Gorse.

Someone who cared as much as Zaluna did.

If there was a chance “Hera” was of that sort, it was worth a conversation, no matter what the danger to Zaluna. One conversation, no more; she had no desire to end up like him. But Hetto deserved that much.

It had to be done in secret, though—and that was why her destination bewildered her. “The Asteroid Belt?” She hadn’t set foot in a cantina in thirty years, but she’d seen enough video to wonder why anyone would ever consider one a place for a surreptitious meeting. So many eyes! So many ears! Not to mention the sensory organs of natures she’d never imagined, belonging to all the other species that frequented cantinas.

Running on adrenaline, she’d unpacked all her devices from the training programs she’d been through years earlier, when she’d learned best practices for placing hidden cams and mikes, and for locating existing ones for repair based on their subspace emissions. Detecting them before they detected her: That would be her edge, she thought.

She saw the sign up ahead. There was no sense waiting outside any longer. “Hetto, you poor reckless soul, this is for you.” She drew the cloak tightly around her and stepped toward the building.