Kerseage glanced at him, as if suddenly remembering just who his passenger was. "No, no, I was thinking about Lord Binalie's chums," he backtracked hastily. 'The Prackla Trade Council-that sort of crowd."

"You don't think much of them?"

Kerseage shrugged again, uncomfortably this time. "It's nothing to do with me," he muttered. "I got a shuttle; I fly people places. That's all."

"I see," Doriana said, returning his attention to the manufacturing plant now passing directly beneath them. Clearly, Kerseage didn't want to say any more.

But then, he didn't have to. Like everything else he ever did, Doriana had made sure to research Cartao before coming here and hiring this particular man to bring him across the sparsely settled planet to Spaarti Creations. The cargo transport company Kerseage had once owned had been inadvertently run out of business two years earlier by a poorly worded regulation the Prackla Trade Council had issued after the Battle of Geonosis.

Kerseage's appeal was still crawling its way through the system, but by now the issue was essentially moot. His company was gone, and he clearly blamed Lord Binalie for it.

"What about the plant's satellite facilities?" he asked, his eyes flicking around the forested areas north and west of the main facility. 'The buildings where they store raw materials and finished product."

"You mean the three Outlinks?"

"Right," Doriana said. "Where are they?"

"I don't know, exactly," Kerseage said. 'The closest one's supposed to be about three kilometers northeast, just past that big gray-topped worker barracks thing." He pointed.

"Mm," Doriana said, peering into the distance. There was nothing showing in that direction that he could see. Well camouflaged, either by accident or by design. That could be useful. "Where does Lord Binalie live?"

"There." Kerseage pointed to the left as he brought the shuttle around in a wide semicircle. "You see Foulahn City, just south of that kilometer-wide stretch of grassland?"