ON THE REFINERY FLOOR, Gord Grallik wailed.

The security chief had rushed into the room, still looking for Hera. She was heading down the stairs herself when he stopped between the frothing acid pools and looked down. Hera had already seen from above that the four-armed figure in the acid was unmistakably Besalisk.

“Lal!” Gord scrambled around, looking for one of the acid-proof prods. By the time Hera reached the floor, he had given up. He turned to the pool, ready to dive into the acid bath and save his wife.

“Don’t!” Hera called out. Skidding to a stop so as not to knock them both in, she grabbed at the security chief’s left arms. “It’s too late!”

Gord struggled. “I’ve got to!”

Hera clung to him desperately. She didn’t even know if he was aware of her as he struggled to step toward the pool. He greatly outweighed her—and yet she was using every bit of her strength to keep him from jumping. “You…can’t…do this!”

At last, Gord stopped. She didn’t know if he’d finally registered her presence, realizing she would fall in, too—or if he’d simply seen again what was left of Lal. So little. “No,” he said in a low voice. He fell to his knees. “No.”

The Twi’lek hung on to his arms. “I’m sorry,” she said. She was trying to pull him back from the edge, without much success.

Gord looked at her—and anger blazed in his eyes. “Did you do this?”

“No! I swear I didn’t. It was Vidian!” Hera fell away from him but did not run. “Check the security monitors. You’ll see!”

Besalisk hands grabbed her. With Hera in tow and murder in his eyes, Gord moved quickly with her to the security control station at the far wall. “I’ll see,” he said.

—

Vidian stood outside the refinery and looked up at the moon. He’d killed another tour guide, yes, but there really wasn’t any sense in continuing with this tour, or any other. Moonglow was the best-case operator on Gorse. Even if the Empire seized direct control of the factories—a tool in his kit that he found to be of mixed effectiveness—there was no way to make the Emperor’s new quotas.

And the first deliveries were due in a week.

Vidian turned and punched the wall. His hand smashed into the permacrete, leaving an indentation. Baron Danthe was at fault for this—a supposed underling, turning him into just another worker scrambling to meet an ultimatum from above. He already knew there was no way to find enough ready thorilide in his territory, or anyone else’s. Not without tearing the moon completely apart…

Vidian stopped. He played back what his eyes and ears had recorded from earlier, the rantings of the madman Skelly.

“You’ve got to stop the blasting on Cynda. You could tear the whole moon apart by mistake!”

Remembering, he reached into his pocket. The holodisk was there, the one he had planned to destroy.

Vidian strode purposefully toward a nearby office building. Yes, looking at it would almost certainly be a waste of time for a man that did not waste time. The fact he considered it at all was a true measure of the desperate situation he faced.

—

Sloane wasn’t the first Imperial captain Kanan had met. But she was certainly the best-looking—even if she did insist on pulling that wonderful black hair back beneath the little hat. One of her aides was shining a light into his face, entirely unnecessary under the light from the moon.

“They say you got into the security zone because you were ferrying miners to work,” the woman said. “If you’re a bus driver, why were you trying to enter the factory?”

“Heading to pick up my pay.” Hands manacled behind his back, Kanan flashed a smile at her. “If you want, once I get it I can show you the town.”

Sloane’s brown eyes narrowed. “Wait a second. I know you! You’re that pilot from the explosives hauler. The mouth.”

“You’ve got a name for me,” Kanan said, grinning. “That’s great. I knew you couldn’t just fly off. You came all the way down here to see me?”

Sloane stepped forward, reached around to grab his ponytail, and yanked. “Let’s not be giving me jobs to do, pilot,” she said, forcing him to the ground. “This little act of yours might work with some. Me, I might press you into service and set you to maintaining trash compactors. Or shove you into one!”

“Okay, okay.” Kanan shrugged against the stormtrooper’s hold. “But if you know I’m a pilot, you know I work here.”

“With no pass for the grounds?”

“Lal Grallik knows me. Ask her.”

“Making friends?” Kanan heard a now-familiar voice from behind Sloane. The captain spun without releasing him, wrenching his neck in the process. Hera stepped forward from the factory, dangling his pass in her hands. “You left your ID in the plant, buddy.”

The Imperials shone their light on Hera. Sloane studied her before looking back to him. Kanan nodded, to the extent he could with the captain holding on to his hair. “Told you.”

Sloane released Kanan with a shove, knocking him backward and down into the mud. She turned on Hera. “And where’s your badge?”

Hera grinned. “Well, I’ve got to have it. How could I be in here, otherwise?”

Sloane looked to the sky and growled with frustration. “I’ve had enough of you people. I think we’ll take you all in for—”

“Sloane!”

The captain checked her comlink. “Count Vidian,” she said. “We’re still running down Skelly—and any accomplices.”

“Forget them,” Vidian replied.

“My lord?”

“The inspection. Everything. Forget it all. I’ve seen enough here. I have a new strategy that will serve the Emperor. We need to return to Ultimatum right away. Gather your team and meet me at the shuttle.”

Sloane acknowledged the order and deactivated her comlink. She gestured to a stormtrooper to remove Kanan’s handcuffs. Another returned his blaster and holster. “Your lucky day,” Sloane said.

“It sure is,” Kanan said, nodding to Hera. “I’ve got the two of you here.”

Hera rushed forward and grabbed his arm. “Thank you, Captain. We’ll be going.” She began pushing Kanan toward the open gate, under Sloane’s icy glare. “Sorry to have disturbed you.”

“Yeah, good luck with your inspection,” Kanan said, before Hera forcibly shoved him out the employee gate.

Hera hustled Kanan around the corner and back to the hoverbus. She seemed perturbed. “You really don’t know when to quit, do you?”

Kanan shrugged. “Hey, it worked, didn’t it?” He wiped the mud off his trousers. “Being hostile or closemouthed just sets them off. The way to get rid of Imperials is to be so happy to see them that they’re thrilled when you’re gone. Some Imperials, anyway.”

Hera put up her hands. “We don’t have time for this. Something horrible happened in there, and—” She paused and looked down, choking up a little. He realized he hadn’t seen her looking anything but fully in control before. Now she looked spent.

“Hey,” he said, touching her wrist. “You’re not kidding. Something bad?”

“Vidian killed the administrator.”

“What, Lal?” Kanan was shocked. “He killed her? Why?”

“Because he could,” she said, looking up and staring into his eyes. “Her husband saw it and ran off searching for Vidian. And it sounds from that comlink call like Vidian’s up to something else!”

“Right about over there,” Kanan said, pointing to the Imperial shuttle. Across the muddy boulevard from it, Moonglow’s main gate opened. Vidian appeared there, talking with the vessel’s flight crew. Sloane and her stormtroopers joined him.

“We’ve got to follow them,” Hera said.

“I can’t follow a shuttle in a hoverbus!”

“It’s a Mark Six Smoothride,” she said. “It’ll fly!”

“About a zillion years ago,” Kanan said. He looked back to see Vidian marching purposefully along the planking toward the shuttle. Sloane lingered at the gate with the others, evidently giving orders related to her departure.

And then, his eye tracing the path back to the Lambda, he saw something wedged beneath the plank nearest the ship. It looked like a small pouch, several meters away from what appeared to a sewer grating.

An open sewer grating.

Kanan didn’t need the Force to tell him to grab Hera. “Get down!”

The night lit up in Shaketown. The Imperial shuttle exploded, sending blazing debris in all directions. In the street, the shock wave caught Vidian, hurling him bodily into the factory’s outer fence even as a fireball blazed overhead.

Kanan caught only a glimpse of the cyborg’s fate as, Hera’s shoulders in his gloved hands, he dived with her behind the Smoothride. Metallic debris rocketed in all directions, some of it slamming thunderously into the hoverbus. Speeder bikes parked earlier by the reinforcements went spinning wildly; Kanan saw one impale itself in the fencing behind him.

The din subsided. Once certain Hera was all right, Kanan drew his blaster and looked cautiously around the vehicle. Up the way, Vidian was on his knees but alive, his reinforced frame evidently giving him some protection. But the street before the factory was a blazing crater—and the block of buildings behind it, including poor Drakka’s Diner, was now afire. Kanan’s instinct was to run toward it, to see if the Besalisk cook was all right.

But something else caught his eye first. A dark figure, scrambling out from the sewer grating he’d seen. The spot was amid the flames but untouched at the moment—and the figure was limping quickly along with a large pack on his back. Skelly!

Finding a functioning Imperial speeder bike, Skelly took one look back. Then he mounted it and was gone.