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his name—and three stormtroopers waited on the pad. They saluted, rather sloppily in the case of the officer, as Belkor descended the ramp. Belkor returned the gesture with crispness.
    “The Moff was unable to greet you personally,” the junior officer said.
    Because she is in a spice haze
, Belkor thought but didn’t say.
Or engaged with her Twi’lek slaves
.
    “I’ll walk you to her.”
    Because she is too lazy to walk this far herself
, Belkor thought, but he said only, “Very good, Lieutenant.”
    A trio of V-wings on patrol cruised low overhead, the telltale in-atmosphere buzz of their engines temporarily quieting the cacophony of the native animals.
    The moon’s humidity had exacted a toll of sweat by the time Belkorand his escort reached the climate-controlled confines of Mors’s luxurious command center—more akin to a noble’s villa on Naboo than an Imperial installation. Belkor’s sweat-stained uniform fouled his mood, and he barely returned the salutes of the stormtrooper sentries on guard outside the villa’s main doors.
    Vast windows looked out on the rolling viridian waves of the jungle. Rounded edges, burnished wood tables, and overstuffed chairs, divans, and lounges seemed to be everywhere, the whole of it giving the impression of softness, which fit Mors’s personality precisely. The stone “sculptures” so favored by Twi’leks—chunks of rock naturally carved by Ryloth’s winds, as Belkor understood it—stood here and there on tables. Twi’lek servants moved like pale-green ghosts through the rooms. Mors chose only Twi’leks with pale-green skin for her household servants—the Moff refused to call them slaves, though none could leave.
    “Their skin goes well with the surrounding trees,” she had once said to Belkor.
    The stormtroopers in the escort peeled off and took station at their interior watch posts while the junior officer led Belkor toward the villa’s open-air central courtyard, where Mors seemed to spend all her time while Belkor did all the work planetside.
    The courtyard was covered in a retractable clear dome to allow in ambient light. At the moment, the dome was fully retracted and hundreds of the brightly colored, hand-sized native insects common to the top of the jungle’s trees flitted about in the air.
    A walking path meandered through colorful flowers, bushes, and dwarf versions of the native trees. Belkor found Mors, looking as overstuffed and soft as the villa’s furnishings, seated on a bench near a fountain in the center of the courtyard, leaning into a conversation with a Hutt. The Hutt’s three-meter-long sluglike body, covered in wrinkled, leathery skin, convulsed in something that might have been laughter. It took Belkor a great deal of effort to keep the disgust from his face. He filed the presence of the Hutt away in the cabinet of his mind, intending to look into travel records later. Implicating Mors in a conspiracy with the Hutts, who were engaged in any numberof criminal enterprises, would give him another tool to discredit the Moff.
    Mors held up a finger to forestall Belkor’s advance while she concluded her business with the Hutt. Watching the exchange, Belkor was struck by the similarities between the two. Both woman and alien looked like overfilled sausages, only Mors was wrapped in a wrinkled uniform rather than leathery skin. Her watery eyes and vaguely slack expression showed that she was in a spice haze. The Hutt’s watery eyes and slack expression showed that he was, in fact, a typical specimen of his kind.
    “Who is that?” Belkor asked his escort softly.
    “Nashi the Hutt, an envoy from Jabba.”
    Neither of the names meant anything to Belkor, but he filed them away, too. “What does the Empire have to do with the Hutts?” he asked.
    To that, the officer said nothing. Belkor did not press. Meanwhile, Hutt and human shared a belly laugh—the Hutt’s tone unexpectedly high-pitched—and Mors gestured for Belkor and his officer