VADER STOOD OMINOUSLY motionless in the illuminated cargo hold of the YT freighter, breathing deeply and looking as if he was ready to draw his lightsaber and cut everything around him to shreds. Tarkin, too, thought it unlikely they were going to discover anything of interest among the haphazardly stacked shipping crates, but he was willing to have a look nonetheless.
The foul-smelling and disheveled old ship sat in the glare of spotlights in one of the Star Destroyer’s ancillary hangars, like some stultified and wary insect. Circular in design, with an outrigger cockpit sandwiched between a pair of rectangular mandibles, the Reticent had seen better days a century earlier, and was now barely spaceworthy. The cargo ramp beneath the cockpit had been lowered, and glow rods set up inside and out to flood the hold with light. Vader and Tarkin’s cursory search had revealed consignments of tools, medical supplies, bolts of fabric, trays of gaudy costume jewelry, tankfuls of alcoholic beverages, and droid parts. Recording devices and scanners in hand, Lieutenant Crest and two other stormtroopers—all three without helmets or armored plastrons—were following Vader and Tarkin as they nosed around.
The Reticent was the only ship to have been sequestered following the catastrophe at the edge of Obroa-skai space. The rest that had fallen victim to the faulty interdiction field had been checked out and allowed to go on their way, which for most of them meant directly to the system’s namesake planet for repairs, after collisions with escape pods and debris from the wrecked Mon Cal star cruiser. That ship and the Detainer had also been towed to Obroa-skai, with the death toll from the crash estimated at eleven hundred beings. The state-of-the-art Immobilizer whose fail-safes had malfunctioned had been returned to Corellian Engineering for reassessment. Legitimate holovids of the events had flooded the HoloNet, most of them cammed by passengers aboard the luxury liner, and by media teams who had received word from unidentified sources of an Imperial operation taking place at the periphery of the star system. As for Carrion Spike, she had yet to turn up in any system. By the time the task force’s fastest frigate had reached Thustra, Tarkin’s rogue ship had already jumped to unknown space.
Crest was reading from a datapad.
“The ship’s identification signature doesn’t appear to have been altered. It hasn’t even changed names in decades. The crew acquired it three years back from a dealer on Lantillies. The itinerary we sliced from the navicomputer corroborates the captain’s story. They jumped from Taris to Thustra to pick up replacement parts for a fleet of Sephi flyers that were sold in bulk at the end of the war to an Obroa-skai emergency medevac center.”
“How was the pickup and delivery arranged?” Tarkin asked.
“Through a broker on Lantillies—maybe the same dealer in pre-owned ships. He gets a line on what’s needed when and where and dispatches crews to make the transfers.”
“The Reticent’s crew are freelance operators?”
Crest nodded. “They describe themselves as itinerant merchants.”
“Where were they bound after Obroa-skai?” Vader wanted to know.
“Taanab,” Crest said, “to buy foodstuffs. Parties at Thustra, Obroa-skai, and Taanab have substantiated all this.”
“And the communications board?” Tarkin asked.
Crest turned to him. “It isn’t set up to record incoming or outgoing transmissions, but the log checks out, at least in terms of supporting the captain’s claims about who contacted them and where the freighter was at the time.”
Vader scanned the hold, as if in search of something unspecified. “How long did they spend at Thustra?”
“Three hours, Lord Vader.”
Vader glanced at Tarkin. “What, I wonder, was their rush?”
Tarkin considered it. “Apparently the goods—the flyer replacement parts—were already crated and waiting for them. The medcenter on Obroa-skai had requested that they expedite the delivery.” He fell briefly silent. “The Reticent’s hyperdrive is vastly inferior to that of the Carrion Spike. No better than a Class Five, I would imagine. That means that even though they arrived in the Obroa-skai system at almost precisely the moment we were expecting the Carrion Spike, the Reticent had to have gone to hyperspace much sooner than the Carrion Spike would have. The timing could owe to nothing more than coincidence, but one question to ask is just what the dissidents were doing in the Thustra system for so many hours.”
Vader had swung abruptly to Tarkin on the word coincidence, and now the Dark Lord was in motion, pushing crates aside as he stormed about—without actually touching any of them.
“This ship rendezvoused with the Carrion Spike. I’m certain of it.”
Tarkin threw Crest a questioning look.
“If so, Lord Vader,” the stormtrooper said, “there’s no evidence of the ships linking up. No evidence in the comm board showing intership communication, and no evidence in the docking ring’s air lock memory showing that the Reticent was umbilicaled to another ship.”
Vader took a moment to reply, and when he did it was to pose a question to Tarkin. “Why would the dissidents elect to send us a ship, in any case?”
Tarkin smiled faintly, aware that the question was rhetorical. “To throw us off the scent, if I recall your phrase correctly. To give us plenty to deal with while they’re busy making plans to strike elsewhere.”
Vader turned and proceeded to the cargo hold ramp. “Let us see what the captain of this scrap heap has to say for himself.”
“You are not an itinerant merchant, Captain,” Vader said, gesticulating with his right hand. “You are in league with a group of dissidents intent on destroying military installations as a means of undermining the sovereignty of the Empire.”
A Koorivar with a long cranial horn, the Reticent’s naked and shackled captain was suspended a meter overhead, captive of a containment field produced by a device whose prototype had been manufactured on Geonosis long before the war. As far as Tarkin knew, the Executrix was the only capital ship in the Imperial fleet to have such an appliance, which created and maintained the field by means of disklike generators bolted to the deck and to the ceiling directly above. The detention center’s version of prisoner interdiction, the field required that the detainee wear magnetic cuffs that not only anchored him in place but also monitored life signs: Too powerful a field could stop a being’s heart or cause irreversible brain damage. As well—and as if the field itself weren’t enough—the cuffs could be used as torture devices, capable of unleashing powerful electrical charges. Vader, however, had no need to utilize the cuffs. His dark powers had the captain writhing in pain.
“Lord Vader,” Tarkin said, “we should at least give him an opportunity to respond.”
Reluctantly, Vader lowered his hand, and the Koorivar’s ridged facial features relaxed in cautious relief. “I’m a merchant and nothing more,” he managed to say. “Torture me as you must, but it won’t change the fact that we came to Obroa-skai on business.”
“The business of conspiracy,” Vader said. “The business of sabotage.”
The Koorivar shook his head weakly. “The business of buying and selling. That is what we do, and only what we do.” He paused. “Not all of us were Separatists.”
Tarkin smiled to himself. It was true: Not all Koorivar population centers and worlds had thrown in with Dooku. Nor had all Sy Myrthians, a pair of which made up the rest of the crew.
But why would the captain say that?
“Why do you make a point of stating that fact, Captain?” he asked.
The Koorivar’s bleary eyes found him. “The Empire demands retribution for the war, and so it lumps the innocent with the guilty and holds all of us responsible.”
“Responsible for what, Captain? Do you believe that the Separatists were wrong to secede from the Republic?”
“I move about to keep from having to decide who is right and who is wrong.”
“A being without a homeworld,” Tarkin said. “As your species was once without a planet.”
“I’m telling you the truth.”
“You’re lying,” Vader countered. “Admit that you swore allegiance to the Separatist Alliance, and that you and your current allies are the ones seeking retribution.”
The Koorivar squeezed his eyes closed, anticipating pain Vader opted not to deliver.
“Tell me about the broker who provides you with leads,” Tarkin said.
“Knotts. A human who works out of Lantillies. Contact him. He’ll verify everything I’ve been telling you.”
“He helped you procure the Reticent?”
“He loaned us the credits, yes.”
“And you’ve been in his employ for three years.”
“Not in his employ. We’re freelance. He provides jobs to several crews, and we accept jobs from several brokers.”
“How did you originally find your way to a human broker on Lantillies?”
“An advert of some sort. I don’t recall precisely.”
“This time he instructed you to travel from Taris to Thustra?”
“Yes.”
“A rush job,” Tarkin surmised.
“The medcenter relies on its Sephi flyers for medical evacuations.”
“So, in and out,” Tarkin said. “No interaction with anyone other than the provider.”
“No interaction. Exactly as you say.”
“And no ship-to-ship interaction.”
“There was no need. The supplies were groundside on Thustra.”
Tarkin circled the Koorivar. “In your recent travels, have you seen holovids of attacks launched against Imperial facilities?”
“We try to ignore the media.”
“Clueless, as well as homeless,” Tarkin said, “is that it?”
The captain sneered at him. “Guilty as charged.”
Tarkin traded glances with Vader. “An interesting turn of phrase, Captain,” Tarkin said.
Vader loosed a sound that approximated a growl. “We’re not in some Coruscant courtroom, Governor. Questions of this sort are useless.”
“You’d prefer to break him with pain.”
“If need be. Unless, of course, you object.”
Vader’s menacing tone rolled off Tarkin. “I suspect that our captain will go insane long before he breaks. But I also agree that we’re wasting our time. The longer we spend here, the greater the chance that the Carrion Spike will elude us entirely.” He watched the Koorivar peripherally as he said it.
Vader looked directly at the captain. “Yes, this one is stronger than he looks, and he is not innocent. I want more time with him. For all we know the dissidents abandoned your ship at Thustra and transferred to the YT freighter. He may be one of them.”
“Then someone else must have the Carrion Spike, as there was no sign of her there.” Tarkin glanced at the captain a final time and forced an exhalation. “I’ll leave you to your work, Lord Vader.”
The Koorivar’s anguished screams accompanied him down the long corridor that led to the detention center’s turbolifts.
Teller found Anora in the corvette’s darkened cockpit, swiveling absently in one of the chairs, her bare feet crossed atop the instrument console. Salikk and the others were resting, as was the Carrion Spike, a slave to sundry deep-space gravities.
“We’re almost done,” he said, sinking into an adjacent chair.
Her face fell. “There has to be a more comforting way of saying that.”
He frowned at her. “You’re the writer.”
“Yes, but you’re talking, not writing.”
His frown only deepened. “You know what I mean. One more jump and on to the serious business.”
Her eyes searched his face. “And then?”
All he could do was shrug. “With luck, live to fight another day.”
She closed her eyes and shook her head. “With luck…There you go again, qualifying every answer.”
He didn’t know how else to put it; how not to qualify his remarks. In thinking about it, he recalled having made almost the same comment when the Reticent had jumped for Obroa-skai. With any luck, Tarkin and Vader will dismiss the ship’s arrival as coincidental, and the crew will simply be questioned and released. But that wasn’t what happened. The Imperials had seen through the ruse, the ship had been impounded, and the crew had been arrested. Word was that neither Tarkin nor Vader had been able to glean much information from them, but Teller doubted that Tarkin would leave it at that. Tarkin wouldn’t rest until he rooted out connections, and once he did…Well, by then it would be too late.
With any luck.
The update on the situation at Obroa-skai had also included a piece of good news. The corvette’s crew had been given a target to attack, which had saved him the trouble of having to choose one from among increasingly bad options. The objective was another Imperial facility rather than some more significant objective, but Teller could live with that. No one aboard the Carrion Spike nursed any delusions about winning a war against the Empire single-handedly. They were merely contributing to what Teller hoped would one day grow into a cause. That, and avenging themselves for what each of them had had to bear; payback for atrocities the Empire had committed, which had inspired them to come together as a group.
“Nice of you to give Cala the privilege of destroying the homing beacon,” Anora said.
“He earned it.”
Anora put her feet on the cool deck, yawned, and stretched her thin, dark arms over her head. “When do we go?”
Teller glanced at the console’s chron display. “We’ve still got a couple of hours.”
“Do you trust your contact entirely?”
Teller rocked his head. “I’d say, up to a point. He’s convinced that he has as much to gain as we do.”
Anora grinned faintly. “I was expecting you to add, or lose.”
“It was implied.”
“Any compassion for our stand-ins at Obroa-skai?”
Teller exhaled in disappointment. “Not you, too.”
“I’m only asking.”
“They knew the risks,” Teller said, straight-faced.
Anora took a long moment to respond. “I know I sound like Hask, but maybe I’m just not cut out for this, Teller.” She eyed him askance. “It was never an ambition of mine to be a revolutionary.”
He snorted. “I don’t buy it. You were fighting the good fight in your own way long before I met you. With words, anyway.”
She smiled without showing her teeth. “Not quite the same as firing laser cannons at other beings or letting strangers take the fall for you.”
He studied her. “You know, I’m actually surprised to hear you talk like this. You practically jumped at the chance to get involved.”
She nodded. “I won’t deny it. But since we’re being honest with each other, I may have been thinking of it more as a career move.”
“Fame and fortune.”
“I guess. And like our stand-ins, I knew the risk. But I underestimated COMPNOR and the Emperor.”
“His reach.”
“Not just his reach.” Her face grew serious. “His power. His barbarity.”
“You’re not the only one who underestimated him.”
Anora glanced toward the command center hatch and lowered her voice. “I still feel bad about dragging Hask into this.”
Teller shrugged. “We could always drop her off somewhere.”
Anora’s eyes searched his face. “Really?”
“Sure, if that’s what she wants.”
“Should I ask her?”
“Go ahead. I’ll give you odds she says no.”
Anora laughed shortly. “I think you’re right.” She fell silent, then said: “Are we going to win, Teller?”
He reached out to clap her gently on the shoulder. “We’re winning so far, aren’t we?”
The subsurface Sith shrine wasn’t the sole area in the Palace where the dark side of the Force was strong. Rooms and corridors throughout the lower levels still bore traces of the resentful fury Darth Vader had unleashed in the final days of the Clone Wars. In one such room a human and a Koorivar knelt in separate pools of ruthless light trained on them from hidden sources in the vaulted ceiling. To Darth Sidious, however, they were not so much living beings as whirlpools in the befuddled waters he had been negotiating since the cache of communications gear found on Murkhana had been brought to his attention; obstacles he needed to maneuver past in order to reach an untroubled stretch of current.
Sidious occupied a simple chair well removed from the twin pools of light, the droid 11-4D off to one side and, slightly behind him, Vizier Mas Amedda close at hand as well. Opposite him across the barren room, a pair of Royal Guards flanked the carved stone doorway.
The Koorivar—Bracchia—was an Imperial intelligence asset assigned to Murkhana; the human—Stellan—the Koorivar’s Security Bureau case officer stationed on Coruscant. Sidious already knew all he needed to about their separate backgrounds and records of service. He sought nothing more than to observe them through the Force, and to evaluate their responses to a few simple questions.
“Koorivar,” he said from the chair, “you served the Republic during the war, and more recently you provided some assistance to Lord Vader and Governor Tarkin on Murkhana.”
Light reflected off the Koorivar’s spiral horn as he lifted his head a bit. “I helped them rid Murkhana of arms smugglers, my lord.”
“So it seems. But tell us what you told them at the time about your initial survey of the HoloNet jamming devices.”
“My lord, I stated that I did not chance upon the devices on my own, nor was I cognizant of any rumors indicating that such a cache existed in Murkhana City. I was merely executing a directive I received from Coruscant.”
Viewing him through the Force, Sidious saw the eddying waters began to relax and surrender themselves to the current.
“Case officer,” he said to Stellan, “by ‘Coruscant’ he means you, does he not?”
“Yes, my lord. The investigation was carried out at my request.” A thickset human man of indeterminate age, he had brown wavy hair and large ears set low on a blockish head.
“Then tell us how you came to learn of this cache.”
The man lifted his nondescript face to the light, squinting and blinking in puzzlement. “My lord, forgive me. I assumed you were aware that the information was provided to ISB by Military Intelligence.”
Sidious’s pulse quickened. Instead of smoothing out, the hydraulic tightened on itself and began to spin more rapidly, as if summoning Sidious to follow the swirling funnel beneath the surface to whatever irregularity below had given rise to it.
It may as well have been the dark side that rasped: “Explain this.”
Humbling himself, the case officer lowered his head. “My lord, Military Intelligence was in the process of conducting an inventory of caches of armaments, vehicles, and supplies that had been left abandoned during the war on a host of contested worlds, from Raxus all the way to Utapau. In the case of the HoloNet jamming devices, MI wasn’t certain if the cache had been on Murkhana for several years, or if it was of more recent origin, and worthy therefore of further investigation. Given that an investigation of that sort fell outside its purview, MI relayed the matter to Imperial Security.”
“To you,” Sidious said.
“Yes, my lord, I received a crude holovid that showed the devices.”
“A holovid? Cammed by someone in Military Intelligence?”
“That was my assumption, my lord. I didn’t see the need to pursue the matter, nor did the deputy director. We simply instructed…Bracchia to conduct a survey.”
Sidious thought back to the initial briefing that had taken place in the audience chamber. Defending ISB’s apprehensions that the jammers could be used to spread anti-Imperial propaganda, Deputy Director Ison had wondered aloud why Naval Intelligence was suddenly so troubled by the cache when on first learning of it they had expressed no such concerns. None of the admirals—not Rancit, Screed, nor any of the others—had replied to Ison’s question.
Without taking his eyes from the case officer, Sidious said in a low voice, “Droid, locate this holovid sent by Military Intelligence to ISB.”
OneOne-FourDee extended its interface arm into an access port behind Sidious’s chair. After a long silence, the droid said: “Your Majesty, I find no record of the holovid.”
“As I suspected,” Sidious said. “But you will find it in ISB’s archives.”
Another moment passed before 11-4D said, “Yes, Your Majesty. The holovid is archived.”
And when projected, Sidious thought, it would show corruption of a telltale sort. Because the holovid was counterfeit; faked by someone with access to Imperial codes and to devices capable of subverting the HoloNet.
Deep beneath the surface he had found the irregularities responsible for the turbulence above. And it was apparent now that they were closer at hand than even he had realized.