by Paul S. Kemp
Vader enmeshed himself in the Force, in his seething, ever-present wrath, and used it to take hold of the freighter and drive the entire ship toward the ground. He grunted with the effort, his respirator increasing his rate of breathing to account for the exertion.
The ship, its damaged engines unable to compensate enough against the downward push of Vader’s power, went nose-down and streaked into the ground. Vader imagined the screams of the pilots as they watched the forest race toward them. The ship disappeared behind the tree line and exploded into a fireball that reached above the forest’s canopy and caused the ground to vibrate. A cloud of black smoke rose into the darkening sky. A second boom sounded behind him, his Master having driven the second ship into the ground the same way. The forest went silent for a moment in the wake of the explosions, with only Vader’s breathing to disrupt the quiet, before the howls and chirps and squeals of Ryloth’s fauna returned. Vader, his Master, and the two Royal Guards stood untouched amid the smoking craters of blasterfire that pockmarked the terrain. The Royal Guards gazed at Vader, at his Master, and Vader imagined the looks of wonder they must have under their helmets. They knew the Emperor had power, though Vader doubted they’d ever seen it so nakedly displayed.
“You,” Vader said to the nearest.
“Sergeant Deez, my lord,” said the guard, and bowed his head.
“Check the wreckage of those ships, Sergeant Deez. If there are any survivors, bring them to me.”
“Yes, Lord Vader,” Deez said. He slung his blaster rifle and sprinted off into the forest.
To the captain, Vader said, “Get on the communications array. Contact our forces.”
His Master put a hand on Vader’s armored shoulder, the power in his touch a palpable weight.
“It seems the traitors found us,” the Emperor said. “It appears you were right, Lord Vader. We’re being hunted.”
“I offer again that I think we should move from this place,” Vader said.
“I agree, my friend.”
The captain of the Royal Guards, attempting to activate the communications array, called, “My lords, I can’t get a signal. It doesn’t make sense. The planetwide network would have to be down for there to be dead air like this.”
Vader strode over to the array, listened to the intermittent bursts of static, and understood the implications right away.
“It’s jammed,” he said. He turned to his Master. “More of them will be coming.”
His Master chuckled. “It appears, then, that the hunt is just beginning.”
Before long, Sergeant Deez returned and reported no survivors. Vader had expected as much. But he also expected he’d get another chance, and soon, to take one of the rebels alive.
—
The dull, repetitive beep of an alarm drove nails into Mors’s temples. She opened her eyes and blinked in the antiseptic lighting of the shuttle’s passenger cabin. Smoke and the acrid ionized stink of short circuits filled the air of the cabin. She lay on her back on the metal deck, staring up at a recessed light that blurred in and out of focus. Her muddled thoughts started to coalesce, to arrange themselves in an order that made sense of her surroundings.
Her ship had been shot at—no, shot down—and it had lost life support and the cabin had been filling with smoke and…
What was that damn alarm? How was she not dead? And where was Breehld?
“Breehld?” she said, and saying the word aloud made her head pound. She recognized it as the aftereffect of partial hypoxia; recognized, too, that her ability to understand what had happened meant that she was coming back from it. She took stock of her body, thought nothing was broken, so she used her arm to lift herself from the deck. Her aged, overweight frame ached, but she managed to sit upright. She blinked away a wave of dizziness.
Twilight leaked in through one of the viewports. She stood, wincing at the pain the effort caused her, moved to the viewport, and looked out on the beige, rocky terrain of Ryloth. Tors large and small rose from the cracked ground, and the ubiquitous wind whipped clouds of dry soil into the air.
Where on the planet was she? She didn’t know the terrain well enough to even guess.
She activated her comlink. “Breehld?”
No response.
Who had shot them down? Breehld had said it was an Imperial escort. But why had it targeted Mors’s shuttle? She started to change her comm frequency to hail Belkor but hesitated.
Belkor had sent her around the planet to help with rescuing someone.
Not someone. VIPs. Darth Vader and the Emperor.
She cursed, a wave of anxiety chasing away some of the bleariness.
What had happened to them? Had they survived the Perilous’s destruction? She had no idea what was going on. The autopilot must have engaged somehow as the shuttle descended, but she didn’t even know how long she’d been unconscious.
Once more she reached to activate her comlink to hail Belkor—a habit. She always called Belkor when she had an issue, any issue. But again she hesitated.
What was making that damn beeping sound?
She looked around, finally traced the sound to a computer terminal stuck on reset. She powered it down and the beeping, mercifully, stopped. She stood there a moment, staring at her reflection in the darkened screen of the computer; she was bleeding from a head wound in her forehead, and her left eye was swollen. She feared she’d dislocated a shoulder, but after testing it realized that she must have just slammed into something during the descent. She’d probably hit something when she’d fallen. She tried again to piece together events.
As soon as her ship had reached the Perilous’s debris field, she’d been attacked. Of all the ships up there, hers had been targeted—and by an Imperial escort, no less. Obviously the escort ship had been hijacked by traitors, but…
Could Belkor have been involved?
She thought it unlikely, but then…was it really?
The Free Ryloth movement had, for years, managed to stay ahead of Belkor. Or had it?
The moment Darth Vader and the Emperor appeared in Ryloth’s system, a visit that was not public knowledge, they were attacked by forces associated with the movement, forces that would have had to have been staged into position, given the sophistication and scale of the attack.
And then Mors herself was diverted to rescue operations—to prevent her from taking command from Belkor planetside?—and was immediately attacked.
She thought back on recent months, even years, recalling the successes of the Free Ryloth movement. Belkor had always had an explanation, something plausible. But now Mors was thinking of the kind of elaborate operation it must have taken to bring down an Imperial Star Destroyer, and the conviction started to come together in her mind. There was only one plausible explanation.
The movement had to have had Imperial help—highly placed Imperial help.
Belkor. Everything circled back to Belkor.
Mors cursed and staggered through the passenger compartment toward the cockpit. She opened the door to find Breehld slumped in his seat, his head hanging at an odd angle, his tongue lolling, his neck obviously broken. He’d probably died after the ship had first taken fire.
The man had served her for years. “Sorry, Breehld,” Mors said.
She accessed the main computer and checked the ship’s logs and status. The autopilot had, indeed, engaged at some point when the ship’s power had come back on. Breehld had been unconscious or dead by then, of course. The ship had set down near Ryloth’s equator. The shuttle had taken some damage from the firefight but was mostly intact, and certainly flyable.
It had been a while since Mors had flown anything herself, but she figured she could manage a shuttle. She unstrapped Breehld, took him under the armpits, and dragged him into the passenger compartment. Even that small effort left her gasping and covered in a sheen of sweat. She’d let herself go, she realized. She’d let everything go. And it had cost her.
Cursing her indolence, she laid Breehld on the
deck with as much dignity as possible and returned to the cockpit. She sat in the pilot’s seat, fired up the engines, and realized all of sudden that she didn’t know where to go. She certainly couldn’t return to the communication center, at least not immediately, not given her suspicions about Belkor.
She checked the navcomp for nearby Imperial bases. She should’ve known which ones were nearby without needing the comp, but she’d been so disengaged from her duties in recent years that she had only a passing familiarity with planetary Imperial resources.
The Equatorial Communications Hub was closest, and Steen Borkas commanded there.
“Good,” Mors muttered. She knew she could trust Steen. They’d served together as lieutenants. The man bled Imperial Gray. If Belkor was plotting, Steen would not be part of it. She activated the ship’s communicator and hailed the hub.
No response, just bursts of static and dead air. Thinking something must have caused the comm system to malfunction, Mors ran a system check. It showed nothing wrong. She frowned. She could think of only a couple of reasons why an operational communications systems offered only dead air, and neither of them was good. Anxiety put a pit in her stomach. For a fleeting, hopefully foolish moment, she wondered if Belkor had arranged a coup and taken over the whole planet after killing Vader and the Emperor.
But that was absurd.
Wasn’t it?
She told herself it was, but she needed to find out what exactly was going on. She engaged the engines and watched the planet’s surface fall away beneath her. She felt a strange sense of being disembodied as the ship gained altitude and realized it was because she hadn’t experienced flight from the cockpit in years. She soon had her bearings, however. The navcomp handled the headings, and she managed to fly with reasonable competence.
About fifty kilometers away from the communications hub, she saw the rising smoke, dark columns of black clouds that climbed from the terrain to diffuse into the darkening sky. She feared the entire base had been destroyed, but as she flew closer she saw that the communications dishes had taken most of the damage. The dead air on the comm suddenly made sense.
“What in the—”
All at once her computer blared an alarm, indicating that the hub’s guns had a target-lock on her ship. Her comm line crackled to life and a voice came over it, the audio dulled and hollow due to the line-of-sight communication.
“Identify yourself, shuttle. And do not approach any closer.”
Mors fumbled with the controls, trying to power down the engines while activating the comm.
“I’m not…I’m…This is Moff Delian Mors.”
A pause, then a familiar voice spoke. “I’ll need a visual, or I’ll shoot you out of the sky,” Steen Borkas said.
“Say again?” Mors said.
“A visual, ma’am. Now. Or I’ll be forced to fire.”
“What?”
“Now, please,” Borkas said tightly.
Mors eyed the communications panel, looking for the button that would open a visual connection. Her unfamiliarity with the controls cost her time, the target-lock alarm screeching at her all the while.
“Hold on,” she said. “Hold on. There, got it.”
A visual came up on her viewscreen and Steen Borkas’s thin, acne-scarred face filled most of it. Frantic activity went on behind Steen, junior officers and technicians moving rapidly among the comp stations. Borkas’s eyes—set a bit too close together—widened when he saw Mors.
“Forgive me, Moff.” He saluted briskly, his thin face reddening. “We…had reason to be skeptical. Where’s your pilot, ma’am?”
“It’s just me,” Mors said. “Brief me when I land. Give me a landing pad.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Mors set the shuttle down, unstrapped, and hurried to the gangplank. Borkas, two lieutenants, and a squad of stormtroopers awaited her outside. Borkas remained the rod-thin, bald, clean-shaven man he’d always been. As Mors debarked, the entourage saluted and Mors returned it as crisply as her wounded shoulder allowed.
“I need a medic for the Moff,” Borkas ordered a lieutenant.
“Later,” Mors said. “First we need to talk.”
The landing pads were elevated ten meters relative to the rest of the base, so she could see the devastation clearly. Fires burned in several places. The air smelled of smoke and burning plastic. Small maintenance ships and fire suppression droids flew around the base, while teams of technicians and maintenance droids rolled or sprinted from here to there. Shouted orders carried through the still air. The remains of the communications dishes—ordinarily among the largest structures on the base—lay toppled, their bases smoking mountains of jagged metal crowned with the ruins of the huge concentric bowls.
“We’re working on getting the network back up,” Borkas said. “Dish Three is the least damaged. We’re all-hands to get it partially operational.”
“Good,” Mors said, unable to stop staring at the destruction. Two score technicians and a dozen maintenance droids worked on what must have been Dish 3. Several maintenance ships hovered above, dropping cables that workmen were preparing to attach to the outer support ring of the dish. “How long?”
“Twelve hours, ma’am. Give or take. We got word of an incoming escort ship carrying Imperial VIPs.”
Mors tensed, turned to face her old friend. “Word from whom?”
Borkas’s brow furrowed. “The communication center. Or so we thought. Couldn’t have been, though. The rebels must have hacked the communications system. Credentials seemed good, but…obviously they were not. As soon as we dropped our shields, that boat opened up. Took less than a minute to do all this.”
“Less than a minute,” Mors echoed stupidly, thinking of Belkor, of treachery.
Borkas drew himself up. “I’m sorry, ma’am. Once this is over, I will obviously offer my resignation.”
Mors shook her head. “Absolutely not.”
“Ma’am…”
“I won’t hear of it, Steen,” Mors said. “This isn’t your fault.”
Mors knew quite well whose fault it was, though she didn’t say it: Hers. Belkor’s. She continued, “I’m going to need every trusted worker I can find to get the situation back under control.”
Borkas inclined his head in gratitude. “What is the situation, ma’am? We’re in an informational vacuum here.”
“Is there somewhere private we can talk?” Mors asked.
“Of course. Follow me.”
“Before that, there’s a body aboard my shuttle,” Mors said. “A good man. See to him.”
Steen ordered a couple of lieutenants to see to Breehld, then the two of them headed off. As they walked, Mors said, “It’s good to see you, Steen.”
“You as well, ma’am,” said Borkas. “Wish the circumstances were better.”
Years earlier, Mors had decided to delegate authority over Imperial operations to Belkor rather than Steen. Belkor had seemed more manageable, less a challenge to Mors’s authority. She had regretted that decision a few times since, but never more than today.
They took a transport to the main building, a three-story, glass-walled hexagonal building situated in the center of the base. Mors rehearsed what she would say as they flew. Once they set down, Borkas led her through lifts and halls that buzzed with activity and finally into a private conference room. Mors lost track of the number of salutes she received. Steen ran a tight ship.
“Bring the Moff and myself some caf and something to eat,” Borkas called out to someone in the hall.
“Pain reliever, too,” Mors said, wincing at the aches in her shoulder, her head.
She sank into one of the cushioned chairs that surrounded the large conference table, suddenly exhausted. She exhaled and tapped her fingers on the table.
“So,” Borkas said, turning and taking a seat as well. “We have an Imperial traitor.”
Mors looked up sharply, eyebrows raised, feeling her face warm. “What? How did—”
A knock
on the door announced the arrival of the meds, the caf, and the food. Borkas poured them each a caf, but Mors couldn’t begin to imagine putting something in her unstable stomach other than the meds, which she swallowed right away.
The moment the junior officer left, Borkas continued: “How do I know that? It’s not that hard to put together, ma’am. The Perilous is ambushed, the communications hub is attacked by an Imperial ship after a questionable order from the communications center. It was from the communications center, wasn’t it, ma’am? Not a hack?”
“It wasn’t a hack,” Mors said.
“All of that took a lot of coordination,” Borkas said. “A lot of looking the other way by Imperial authorities, if not outright collaboration. Is it a coup?”
Mors shook her head and stared into her cup.
“I can’t say for sure,” she said. She could not make eye contact with Borkas. “I’ve been…absent, Steen.”
“Yes,” Borkas said. “Things changed after you lost Murra. When was that, four years ago now?”
Mors nodded. She hadn’t heard anyone else say her wife’s name in a long time. She’d died in a transport accident on Coruscant. A fluke, a system malfunction had flown her and ten other civilians into the side of a building. For months afterward Mors had imagined what Murra must have felt as the transport accelerated. Terror? Resignation? The loss had eroded her, then broken her.
“Things didn’t change,” she said. “I did.”
After Murra had died, she’d found herself purposeless and content in her purposelessness, just drifting. She’d turned hedonistic, grown lazy. Worse, she’d lost her ability or desire to discern a quality commander from a flatterer. So she’d promoted Belkor and those like him, while ignoring people like Steen Borkas. And now she’d lost a Star Destroyer, the Emperor, Lord Vader, and maybe a planet.
“I overlooked you, Steen. I’m sorry.”
Steen’s thin lips formed a still-thinner smile. “I don’t feel unfairly treated, ma’am.”
Mors knew it was a lie, but she took the words in the spirit they were offered. “Can I rely on you now, Steen? Despite everything?”