Sacrifice

"The eyes and ears of the Guard. Welcome to the monitoring center. The ultimate in scrutiny."

"Sir," whispered one of the lieutenants, "keep the noise down, will you?"

Girdun's grin was picked out in blue by the light from a frequency analyzer. "They're all such artists." He steered Ben by his shoulder, taking him to an alcove away from the active consoles. Girdun probably didn't realize how well a Jedi could navigate in darkness, but Ben humored him. "This is where we keep an eye on Senators and other social misfits for their own good."

"Whose calls do you tap?" Ben felt uneasy about it. "I bet it's not even exciting."

"All government staff, our special list of probable and proven scumbags, and politicians," said Girdun. "And given the number of Senators and the volume of hot air they emit, we get automated voice recognition systems to do it, or we'd be here for the next thousand years. If the droid picks up any keywords of interest, it tags the conversation and alerts us. Then we have to sit and actually listen to it."

One of the troopers—Zavirk—was ladling sweetener into a cup of caf.

He sipped it gingerly, looking slightly comical with an audio buffer lead dangling from his ear. "I joined the army to see the galaxy," he whispered, "but all I got was eight-hour watches of listening to weird politicians making appointments to—"

"Ben's fourteen,'" Girdun said.

"Well, if you want him to do monitoring, he's going to hear stuff that'll make his hair curl, sir."

Ben had never considered what tapping comlinks of suspects and people in sensitive posts actually entailed. "I won't faint," he said.