by Paul S. Kemp
He tried to think of how he could manage events, how he could extricate himself from the hole in which he’d buried himself.
He could run. He’d thought about it before. He could do it, just get offplanet and find some hovel farther out on the Rim and…
He knew he couldn’t. If Vader and the Emperor were dead and he was found to have fled, the Imperial Security Bureau would hound him to the universe’s end and the ISB always found those they hunted. And if Vader and the Emperor weren’t dead and he was found to have fled, Vader himself would hound him.
He had to see it through. He had no other choice.
He stood, took a deep breath, straightened his uniform, and turned back toward the main comm room. Eyes that had been on him found their duty stations. The lieutenant colonel, standing just outside the room, stood to attention when Belkor’s eyes fell on him. Belkor walked through the door and said to him, “Ensure the repair ships have a fighter escort. Do it right now. I’ll be…back. I need to check something.”
“Yes, sir,” the lieutenant colonel said, and almost sprinted to a nearby comm officer.
Belkor swallowed as he walked through comm central, out into the corridor and onto a lift, and finally into an officers-only restroom. He stood there, his back against the door. No one else was in the room, so he locked himself in. He consciously unclenched his jaw, his fists, his guts.
Vader and the Emperor. Vader and the Emperor.
His encrypted comm buzzed—Cham. He snatched it from his pocket, squeezing it so hard it slipped from his hand and fell to the floor. He picked it up, cursing, opened a channel, and held it to his ear.
“You bastard,” he said. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
“Calm down, Belkor.”
“Calm down! You tried to kill—” He caught himself and reduced his tone to a whisper. “You tried to kill the Emperor and Vader.”
“I’m going to kill the Emperor and Vader,” Cham said. “And you’re going to help me.”
Belkor could not bring himself to agree. Cham must have read into his silence.
“You will, Belkor. You must. The attack already happened. You’re implicated. There will be nowhere for you to run—”
Belkor cut the connection, his heart racing, sweating under his uniform, his mind filled anew with the static of stress. He paced back and forth in the restroom, back and forth, as the encrypted comm buzzed in his pocket.
“Blast, blast, blast, blast.”
He answered the comm.
“Say nothing, Colonel,” Cham snapped, pronouncing Belkor’s rank as he would an insult. “And just listen. I told you I’d expose you if you didn’t help, and I will. I will. But you’re in this now. Did you order the rescue ships? Speak!”
“Yes,” Belkor answered tightly.
“Good. Now listen to me. Vader and the Emperor and Taa die today. It’s about to happen. You don’t need to do anything more except supervise the repair and rescue just as you would otherwise. See, nothing suspicious? See? Do you hear me, Belkor?”
Belkor had to pull the answer up from the depths of his gut. “Yes. Mors is coming down to Ryloth.”
Cham was quiet for a moment. “That changes nothing. Do as we just discussed. And keep this comm at hand in case I need anything else. Everything turns on the next hour.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Cham pocketed the encrypted comm and stepped back into the command center. No one even turned to see him enter. All eyes were still on the screens, where the Perilous burned but still flew, moving at full speed through the system, racing toward Ryloth.
In truth Cham hadn’t expected to bring the Perilous down with the vulture droids, though he’d started hoping for it before Vader had gotten in the way.
He bit down, activated the private comm, and addressed Isval, though he spoke loud enough for the others in the command center to hear him.
“Phase two is a go,” he said, and the eyes in the room did turn to him then. “The alert’s going out in moments. You’re up, Isval. The Perilous is burning but flying, heading straight for Ryloth.”
“Copy that,” she responded.
“Good luck,” he said to her.
Kallon, Xira, and Gobi all looked at him, brows furrowed in a question. D4 gave an interrogatory beep. Kallon voiced their shared thoughts: “There’s a phase two?”
“There is,” Cham said. He’d kept it need-to-know only.
“Yes!” Gobi said.
Cham stared at him until his glee wilted.
“What?” Gobi asked. “Did I say something wrong?”
“This isn’t a game,” Cham said, thinking of the danger Isval was about to put herself in. “You understand that? People are dying.”
“Only their people,” Gobi said weakly.
“So far,” Cham said. “Let’s hope it stays that way. But either way, it’s no game.”
“Right,” Gobi said, his skin darkening with embarrassment. “Right.”
Cham stared at the viewscreens. Matters were out of his hands, and the most dangerous part of the plan was just getting under way.
—
Isval shared a look with Eshgo, a nod, and they waited for the alert to come. They didn’t have to wait long before it came over the comm: All ships to aid an Imperial vessel in distress.
“Repair Eighty-Three, copy that,” she said.
On the landing pad all around her, Twi’lek repair teams hurried out of side caves and ran for their ships. Other vessels, already crewed, lurched into the air on their antigravs.
The onboard computer blinked as pertinent details, clearances, and assignments started emerging from central. She waited for theirs to come through, and when it did, Eshgo got them off the pad. In her secure wrist comlink Isval said to the two backup teams, “We are up. Status?”
“Up and out,” came the first response.
“Off the pad and waiting for clearance,” came the second.
“Comm silence between us from now on.”
“Copy that,” came the responses. “And good luck.”
She cut the connection and said over her shoulder, “Copy that.”
Drim, Faylin, and Crost all echoed her sentiment.
Eshgo piloted them out of the mouth of the landing bay and into Ryloth’s winds. As soon as he hit open air, he accelerated to full in-atmo speed. Ryloth’s dry, rocky terrain fell away below them. In moments the dying light of a planetside day gave way to the dark of outer space.
“We’re clear of the outer atmosphere,” Eshgo said, checking the instruments. “Accelerating to full. ETA in under an hour.”
A fleet of repair ships, some Imperial, but most Rylothian, dotted space, heading in the direction of the wounded Star Destroyer. As they sped past Ryloth’s moons, Isval’s eyes lingered on the small rocky one where she knew Cham and many of the members of the movement were hiding in one of their longstanding underground bases. V-wings from the Imperial bases on the largest moon—the Moff’s moon—fell in as escorts.
She bit down and activated the private comm with Cham. “Flying by you now. We’ll soon clear the moons’ orbits. I’m going to lose you after that.”
“Get in and get out, Isval. As fast as you can. Speed is your ally.”
She nodded. “Any Imperial chatter about Vader and the Emperor?”
“Frequencies are buzzing with the revelation that they were aboard, but no certain word on whether they’re still alive. The Perilous is heading fast toward Ryloth. It’s already past the asteroid belt.”
“And Taa?”
Cham guffawed. “No one cares about Taa except us. But he’s incidental at this point.”
The communicator crackled in Isval’s ear. She was losing the connection. Cham said something, but she couldn’t make it out.
“Say again?”
“Think through your exits, Isval. You copy?”
She smiled. She should’ve known. “Got it, Cham.”
The entire repair fleet streaked through the system.
“Got it,” Eshgo said, pointing at a viewscreen, which showed a ship at the edge of the scanner’s range. “That’s her.”
Isval watched as the Perilous took shape as a dot, then a larger blob, and finally a wedge. She leaned forward in her seat as they got closer and the ship got bigger. Faylin, Drim, and Crost edged up from their seats in the rear cargo area to look over her and Eshgo in the pilots’ seats.
Drim whistled. Faylin swore. Crost exhaled, his breath turned bad from stress.
“You all right?” Isval asked him.
His lekku perked up. “Me? Yeah, fine.”
“She’s hurtin’, all right,” Eshgo said, meaning the ship.
“She is,” Isval said. The sight of the heavily damaged Perilous buoyed her.
“Look at those fires,” Drim observed, “Vultures did a job.”
“Now we have to do ours,” Isval said, to nods all around.
The Perilous’s forward landing bay was damaged, the edges made jagged and charred, ruining the ordinarily sleek wedge of the ship’s lines, giving it a look like a huge mouth opened to swallow the stars. The Star Destroyer leaked flames from dozens of different onboard fires—large ones—and that was only what Isval could see from her angle and distance. She imagined that Kallon’s repurposed, explosive buzz droids had done a lot of additional damage deep inside the ship. Or at least she hoped so.
It pleased her to think of how many Imperials must have already died.
“More coming,” she said to herself.
“How’s that?” Eshgo said.
“Nothing,” she said. “Talking to myself.”
“You turning into Kallon?” Eshgo joked. “Muttering to yourself, now?”
She smiled.
Damage from vulture droids blackened the superstructure all along its length. An explosion had turned the forward sensor array into a jagged metal stub, rotating futilely on its mounts. The ship moved at velocity, sliding quickly through space despite the damage. A haphazard mix of fire suppression ships of all shapes and sizes, both Imperial and Twi’lek, already swarmed the huge ship, spraying suppression foam as directed. The smaller ships matched vectors with the Star Destroyer as they went, keeping pace.
“She’s heading fast for Ryloth,” Faylin said.
“I’m thinkin’ she feels vulnerable,” Eshgo said. Smiles answered his wry comment, but no laughter.
Isval had never been so close to a Star Destroyer, and as they neared it and it filled the cockpit’s glass, its size took her aback. She didn’t let it awe her, though. If the movement wanted to hit the Empire hard, they’d have to hit it at this scale. And they needed to kill enough Imperials for it to hurt. More important, they needed to kill Vader and the Emperor. Her gaze went to the bridge, where she imagined they were, if they were still alive.
“Stay sharp, people,” she said to her team, and they all nodded, though they, too, stared at the size of the Star Destroyer with eyes wide.
Orders and chatter carried over the comm channel, the Star Destroyer crew relaying orders to the incoming repair ships. Isval simply waited for the hail. It came within moments.
“This is Repair Eighty-Three from Ryloth,” she responded.
“Port Forty-Five-A” came the call, along with instructions to the navcomp.
She ran a quick check, saw that Port 45A was far to stern, which was a long way from their target. She hailed them.
“Uh, this is Repair Eighty-Three. Sir, I have a crew of specialists aboard. We’re supposed to assist in engine repair.”
“Repair Eighty-Three, there’s nothing here to indicate that.”
“It’s chaotic planetside, sir, as you can imagine. The call came and we launched. Orders and manifests are not exactly a priority at the moment. Keeping the Perilous flying is. My team can help best if we assist in the engine compartment.”
“Understood Repair Eighty-Three. Uh…Port Two-Sixty-Six-R then.”
Isval checked the location of 266R, saw that it was near the engine compartment and not too far from the hyperdrive chamber.
“Two-Sixty-Six-R,” she said. “Thank you, bridge.”
“Here we go,” said Eshgo.
She felt the change come over her team. The nervous excitement, the quiet, shoulder-bunching tension. She felt it, too, so she gave them something to do.
“Double-check the gear, weapons, and explosives. Everyone armed, but nothing visible. Deep breaths, people.”
The team set to it without objection as Eshgo steered their ship to Bay 266R. Isval scanned the comp to see the docking assignments for ships bearing the two decoy teams. She committed their ports to memory.
Meanwhile the onboard comp matched velocity with the Star Destroyer while Eshgo spun them and backed up to the docking port for Bay 266R. The repair ship’s port mated with the port on the Perilous and locked down. Green lights showed a clean seal.
“Work faces,” she said to her team.
Nods around, bobbing lekku from the Twi’leks, serious expressions all around.
“Here we go,” she said.
She took the steering column on the antigrav pallet, a large metal sled dotted with compartments—which were ordinarily stocked with tools and parts—and opened the bay to reveal the Perilous.
The sound hit her first: the blare of alarms, a constant stream of chatter over the ship’s comm, the hustle and bustle of the crowded corridor. The smell hit her, too, the stink of burning plastic, charred flesh, and the acrid smell of electrical fires.
All along the wide hallway, comp terminals hung loose from their wall mounts, the wires dangling free and puking sparks. Uniformed Imperials hustled through the corridors, individually or in groups, all of them looking dazed, speaking urgently into their wrist comlinks. A few injured men and woman lay slouched against the wall, blood staining their uniforms and the otherwise clean white floors. Wheeled mouse droids darted through the chaos. A faint haze of smoke hung near the ceiling, stinging Isval’s eyes. The venting hadn’t been able to clear it all yet.
“You!” an officer shouted at her.
Her heart rate spiked, but she didn’t let it reach her expression, which remained calm. The officer, a human man with red hair and freckles, held a datapad in one hand. He said something into a wrist comlink as she steered the antigrav pallet toward them. Her team followed.
A group of stormtroopers came out of a side hallway and rushed toward them. She froze for half a moment then reached for a weapon, but before she could draw her blaster, the stormtroopers rushed past them and on down the hall. She blinked and tried to recover herself, feigned patting herself for a tool.
“IDs,” the officer said.
She stepped out from around the pallet and extended her datapad, which held their forged credentials. She hoped he wouldn’t study them too closely. “Repair Eighty-Three. Engine repair. We—”
“Good, good.” He glanced at her ’pad only in passing, then input some data into his own. He frowned at something and waved toward a junior officer standing across the corridor.
“Lieutenant Grolt, guide this repair team—”
“Sir, we know where we’re going,” Isval said.
The officer continued on as if she hadn’t even spoken. “Guide this repair team to the engine access stations.”
The whiptree-thin Lieutenant Grolt reminded Isval of the officer she’d beaten almost to death back in the Octagon. The expression on his ashen face showed that his world had been shaken by the attack on the Perilous. He, and everyone else aboard, had felt invulnerable on the Star Destroyer. She was glad they felt vulnerable now, felt some of the fear she and all Twi’leks lived with every day.
“Of course, sir.” Grolt saluted. “Follow me,” he said to Isval and her team, and moved briskly through the chaos. Isval stared at the back of his head as they walked, considering ways to kill him if she had need.
The antigrav pallet helped part the way through the tumult of the busy corridor. All over the ship it was the same—heavy damage,
fire, alarms, casualties, smoke, and everyone hurrying somewhere and paying little attention to anyone else.
As they moved along, Isval consulted the rough diagram of the Star Destroyer she kept in her head. They were nearing the target. They’d need to divert. She gave Eshgo a knowing look, and he gave a barely noticeable nod.
“You know, we know our way from here, Lieutenant,” she said to Grolt. “I’m sure you have other things you’d rather be doing.”
He didn’t even turn to look at her.
“I have my assignment, Twi’lek,” he said, and she realized that killing him had moved from possibility to certainty.
“Of course,” she said, and shared a nod with Eshgo.
They came to a lift and piled in. She maneuvered the antigrav pallet so that it filled the lift, and Grolt pressed Level 29 on the lift’s control pad.
When another Imperial tried to squeeze in, Eshgo put his body in the way.
“Sorry, sorry,” he said, as if he were just trying to get out of the way.
Isval bumped them both with the antigrav pallet. “Apologies,” she said. “I think we’re filled, sir. This pallet…”
She gave a helpless shrug.
“Sorry,” Grolt said to the officer.
“I’ll wait,” said the man, stepping back. He saluted Grolt, who returned the gesture.
The moment the doors closed, Isval drew the blaster she kept in the holster in the small of her back and fired into the back of Grolt’s head. He collapsed without a sound. The shot from the small blaster left his head intact, and the entry wound, cauterized by the blaster bolt, didn’t even bleed.
Eshgo and Drim didn’t need instructions. They threw open one of the pallet’s larger compartments and started to stuff Grolt’s body inside.
“Hurry,” Isval said.
Isval watched the digital readout show their progress along the levels. Twenty-two, twenty-three.
“Come on!”