by Paul S. Kemp
“As ever, ma’am.”
Mors nodded and laid things out. “Belkor Dray is the traitor. I’m almost certain.”
Borkas tensed as he sipped his caf. The contempt in his eyes was more eloquent and cutting than any insult he might have hurled at Belkor.
“And,” Mors went on, but she hesitated a moment before her dry mouth could utter the words. “Darth Vader and the Emperor were aboard the Perilous.”
Borkas stared at her, looking dumbfounded. His hand started to tremble, sending caf over the cup’s rim. He set it down on the table. “Were they…aboard when it exploded?”
Mors shook her head. “I don’t know. My shuttle was diverted to assist in the rescue of VIPs. Could’ve been referring to them, but the diversion presumably came from Belkor and could have simply been a way to have me killed by the rebels while involved in rescue operations. We were attacked the moment we came within range.”
“They had your ship ident,” Borkas said.
“Yes,” Mors agreed. “Which means that if Vader and the Emperor got off the Perilous, they had their ident, too.”
Borkas looked up sharply. “Wait. That’s it.”
“What’s it?”
“The intercept.”
“I’m not following,” Mors said.
Borkas spoke rapidly. “During the attack on the hub, we intercepted a communication to the shuttle on an open channel. Took us a while to decrypt it, and we still only got a partial. But it mentioned Vader. I assumed it was code or nonsense or…”
Mors was half out of her seat. “Mentioned him how?”
Borkas rose and started pacing, his eyes on the floor. “Coordinates, ma’am. If Vader and the Emperor escaped in a ship and it went down, then the rebels know where they landed. Or crashed.”
Mors was standing now, too. “But so do we! What do you have here, Borkas? In terms of combat-capable crew? Vehicles? I saw the stormtroopers. Anyone else? I need to get to those coordinates.”
Borkas was nodding, warming to Mors’s still-unspoken idea. “We have maintenance vehicles and transports, nothing armed. As for personnel, I’ve got mostly techs and a handful of untested officers. All in, I’ve got the twenty stormtroopers and maybe ten more bodies familiar enough with a blaster to serve. Eleven, counting me.”
“That’ll have to do,” Mors said, placing her fingertips on the tabletop. “But you’re not coming, Steen.”
“Ma’am—”
“Major, you’re going to get the communications net back up, and when you do, you’re going to reach out to officers we can trust. Only the ones we know are incapable of treachery. And you’re going to have them round up every stormtrooper on Ryloth and bring them all to me. We can’t count on anyone else. Whatever is going on here—a coup, an assassination attempt, both—hinges on killing me, the Emperor, and Vader. I’m going to make sure none of that happens. And then I’m going to put an end to Belkor and the Free Ryloth movement. They think today is their finest hour. I intend to make it their last.”
Steen shook his head, his face flushed. “Ma’am, I’ve got someone I can leave in charge here. I’d rather accompany you. I don’t have to tell him anything. He can supervise the repairs as well as me.”
Mors looked Steen in the face, saw the desire there to do something, anything, and understood it quite well. “Very well, Steen. You’re with me. One of your transports and my shuttle can carry the troops. Let’s get everyone armed as quickly as possible and then move out.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Borkas said, and saluted.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Isval considered skipping the planned rendezvous with Cham and heading directly to the coordinates she’d received from Nordon, but with communications down, Cham wouldn’t know how to find her. He didn’t have those coordinates yet.
Faylin must have picked up on her tension. “You all right?” she asked.
“Fine,” Isval said, shifting in her seat. “Just twitchy to get after Vader.”
“We’ll be at the rendezvous point shortly,” Faylin said, checking the coordinates.
Below and before them, one of Ryloth’s lush equatorial forests darkened the landscape. Most of the planet was dry and devoid of thick vegetation, but wind patterns and other meteorological phenomena that Isval didn’t understand drew moisture to the equatorial region, giving Ryloth a belt of verdure. She rarely saw it up close, and now she couldn’t stop staring down at the carpet of the forest’s canopy. The last of the day’s sunlight shaded it all in red.
“Keep an active scan,” she said to Faylin. “Cham’s never late.”
Right on time, the scanner pinged a contact. Isval checked the details and saw it was Cham’s transport. They’d need to be closer before she could hail him. Kallon’s jamming signal was doing its work well. She found she was leaning forward in her seat, trying to spy Cham’s ship. Movement in the distance caught her eye: the ship. At visual distance, their transmitters would cut through Kallon’s jamming.
“Cham, do you copy?”
“Isval,” he returned, and she heard the relief in his voice. “Put down in that clearing there. You see it?”
“Let’s not waste the time, Cham. Nordon contacted me when we were attacking the communications hub. He had eyes on a downed Imperial shuttle. I have the coordinates.”
She transmitted them to Cham’s ship.
“Good,” Cham said. “But I still want you to set down. I’ve got thirty of our people aboard—Goll and his troops. I want half of them on your ship.”
Goll and his fighters were one of the strike teams the movement used when they needed to hit something and hit it hard. Pok’s team had been the same way, until Pok had run into Vader.
“Good thought,” she told him. No reason to put all their assets on one ship. To Faylin, she said, “You want to put us down?”
Faylin smiled and shook her head. “I’ve flown enough for today.”
Isval set the escort boat down in a wide clearing, and Cham landed his converted transport. Isval opened the passenger compartment door on the escort and debarked. The passenger bay door on Cham’s ship opened, and Goll and half his troops jogged out toward Isval’s ship, all of them heavily laden with blasters and grenades. The men and women nodded at Isval as they passed—all but Goll, who stopped before her. He stood taller than any other Twi’lek she had ever met. Muscles bulged under his deep-green skin.
“It’s good to see you, Isval. That was good work today.”
“Good to see you, too, Goll. And the day’s not done yet. Get your people aboard. We’re leaving in five minutes.”
“Got it,” he said, and moved past her. “Seated and strapped in, ladies and gentlemen,” he said to his team. “We’re going right back up.”
“Goll,” Isval called, and the big Twi’lek turned. “Crost, Drim, and Eshgo are aboard. They…need to come off.”
Goll’s features fell and he nodded. He looked around the clearing. “This is good soil. We’ll handle it, Isval.”
While Goll pulled a few of his troops onto burial duty, Cham emerged from his ship, still wearing his headset, and the sight of him stalled her. He saw her and stopped, too, just for a moment, then covered the distance between them rapidly. For a moment Isval thought he might try to embrace her, and she didn’t know how she felt about the warm rush the thought elicited.
But he merely took her by the shoulders and looked into her eyes, both of them saying nothing yet—with their quiet—saying much. As ever, they walked up to the line but neither crossed. They couldn’t do what they had to do for the movement if their relationship were anything more than it was.
Just another casualty of the conflict, Isval supposed.
“It’s good to see you,” he said, and his skin darkened.
She felt her skin darken in response. “And you, Cham.”
“For a while I wasn’t sure I would,” he said. “And the thought didn’t please me.”
“I’m hard to get rid of,” she said awkwardly.
> He smiled, but she saw the openness of his expression disappear as he closed down his emotions. She took the cue and did the same, leaving everything unspoken.
“A Star Destroyer and an Imperial base in the span of hours?” he commented. “That has to be some kind of record. And damn good work.”
His praise always pleased her. “We’re not done yet, though. Now we get Vader and the Emperor.”
“Now we get them,” Cham agreed. “Engines are still hot. Let’s get moving.” He looked past her at Goll and his troops, rapidly digging graves. Pain animated his eyes. “Peaceful sleep, my friends.”
When they’d interred their fallen, they boarded their respective ships and lifted off, flying low over the trees. Cham’s transport ran ahead, with Isval’s escort boat behind and slightly to starboard. They ran dark, no lights.
“Run every scan this boat has,” Isval said to Faylin. “And keep your eyes sharp.”
“Too dark to see anything,” Faylin answered.
“Eyes sharp anyway,” Isval snapped.
“Foliage is thick,” Cham said over the comlink. “It’s interfering with scans.”
“A lot of life down there,” Faylin said, checking on the infrared.
Clearings broke up the dense vegetation as they closed on the coordinates.
“Got something. Metal, large,” Faylin said, and looked over at Isval. “Wreckage.”
“You getting that, Cham?” Isval asked.
“I got it. These aren’t the coordinates we were given, but they’re not too far out of the way. And there’s no sign of Nordon.”
“No,” Isval said, and both of them knew what Cham meant. Nordon had run into Vader.
“We should check it out,” Cham said.
“Agreed,” she said. “Forest is too thick to tell anything from the air. We’ll have to set down and go in on foot. I’ll find somewhere to set down.”
Faylin located a clearing on the scan, and Isval set the boat down. She kept the engines hot. She hailed Cham as he set down his transport near the escort boat.
“We should send the ships ahead to Nordon’s coordinates,” she suggested. “Just in case.”
“Was thinking the same thing,” he answered. “They can stagger the ships so we have a relay. Keep communication open between us.”
“Right,” Isval said.
Faylin would fly halfway to the coordinates Nordon had given them and hover there. Kallon would fly Cham’s transport to the coordinates. He’d be close enough to have communications with Faylin, and she’d be close enough to have communications back to Cham and Isval.
“You get any sign of Nordon, you let us know right away,” Isval told Faylin. “And don’t worry about flying. The sim squared you away. You’ll be fine.”
“Right and right,” Faylin answered weakly.
Isval debarked with Goll and the members of his team who had joined him on her ship, met Cham in the clearing, and headed out in the direction of the wreckage, four kilometers into the forest. The wind had picked up and now howled through the trees, causing a continuous rustle. The humid air smelled of loam and conifers. Howls, screeches, and growls rose above the sound of the wind to punctuate the darkness. Cham and Isval led, and Goll dispatched his crew into their usual scouting pattern to the left, right, and rear. The ships lifted off and darted away into the night.
“Heard all kinds of stories about the equatorial forests,” Cham said to her.
“Me, too,” she said.
“Lylek hordes, huge carnivorous primates, killer plants, you name it. But Vader’s the worst thing we’re going to find out here,” he said.
She nodded.
Before long Faylin’s voice came over the comlink. “I’m on station.”
“Continuing on to Nordon’s coordinates,” Kallon said. “I’ll be out of reach of all but Faylin in moments.”
“Let us know what you see,” Cham said.
Cham, Isval, and Goll and his team picked their way through the cages of exposed tree roots and the towering columns of tree trunks. The amount of movement in the canopy far above them caused a steady rain of sticks, leaves, and other debris.
Isval felt exposed, watched. The forest quieted as they closed on the wrecked ship. Goll pulled his men back in close. The group fell silent as they neared the site.
“You and two more with Isval and me,” Cham said to Goll, who selected two of his team and ordered the rest to remain behind for support.
Cham and Isval quietly advanced the final two hundred meters to the crash site, weapons drawn. They could smell the stink of burned plastic as they approached, and they could see that a dozen or so trees had been sheared in half by a falling ship, the treetops crashing to the forest floor. Cham and Isval halted at the edge of the tree line.
The wreckage of a ship lay strewn about the clearing and nearby forest, mixed with tons of soil and trees displaced by the impact. Much of it still smoked, and the central fuselage was mostly intact.
Isval cursed. The ship wasn’t Imperial. It was what she and Cham had feared: one of the movement’s modified freighters. From the dispersal of the ship’s wreckage, survivors seemed unlikely. She checked for markings, saw a partial number on part of the fuselage. It was enough.
“Nordon’s ship,” she said. “Cham?”
Cham was staring at the wreckage, a stricken look on his face. She took him by the arm.
“Cham, what’s wrong with you?”
He turned to face her, his lekku twitching once, twice, and the mask came up. “Nothing. I’m fine. That’s Nordon’s ship.”
“How’d it get brought down?” she asked, but knew the answer as soon as she asked the question.
“Vader,” Cham said.
Isval nodded. Somehow Vader had done it. He’d single-handedly captured Pok’s ship and killed everyone aboard, run through a storm of her blasterfire, somehow choked her unconscious from the cockpit of another ship, and now brought down an armed freighter.
“Can we do this?” she asked, her voice soft, the words escaping her before she could rein them in.
If Cham had heard her, he gave no sign. “We get their bodies,” he said. “Goll.”
“Understood,” the huge Twi’lek said, gesturing to two of his men to search the wreckage.
Faylin’s voice came over the comlink. “Kallon is at the coordinates. Scans show a downed ship, damaged but intact. It’s an Imperial shuttle.”
“Do not investigate,” Cham ordered. “Get back here, both of you.”
“Copy that,” Faylin said.
Goll’s team hadn’t gone ten paces out of the tree line before a form crept out from behind the smoking fuselage, the arm of a Twi’lek in its jaws. The creature would have stood taller than a human or a Twi’lek, but its posture was hunched. Its insectoid-looking legs moved in a rapid, herky-jerky fashion, and its thin arms ended in curved claws as large as meat hooks. A humped, spiked carapace bulged on its back, and its misshapen head was mostly tooth-filled mouth and overlarge eyes.
The men froze. Isval and Cham cursed as one, lifting their weapons to take aim.
“Gutkurr,” Cham whispered, and Isval nodded.
“Ease back,” she said to Goll’s two men, and they started to slowly walk backward.
On Ryloth, only lyleks were more dangerous than the predatory gutkurrs. Isval had seen blaster shots bounce off a gutkurr’s hide more than once.
“Slow,” Cham said to the men. “Slow and quiet.”
Another gutkurr darted out of the wreckage, took the other end of the arm in its jaws, and tried to pull the prize away from its fellow, both of them hissing and growling. A third, fourth, and fifth emerged from the wreckage, and more growls and hisses from within suggested the presence of more gutkurrs, many more.
“We are leaving,” Cham said softly. “Quietly now.”
Isval hated leaving Nordon’s body to the gutkurrs, but there was nothing for it. She wished him a peaceful sleep.
The wind picked up, blowing at thei
r back, showering them in needles and leaves and twigs. Isval cursed again, knowing what it meant.
As one, the gutkurrs whirled around to face in their direction, rising up on their legs, fanged mouths open as if tasting the wind.
“If they have our scent,” Cham said, “we use suppressing fire and retreat to the clearing. A retreat, not a rout.”
The gutkurrs lowered themselves back into a crouch, and several of them uttered a sound like a harsh bark. One of them turned a circle in excitement. Four more bounded out of the wreckage, including the largest of the pack, a female. She thumped into the smaller gutkurrs near her, asserting dominance, and growled loudly. The pack encircled her, hissing excitedly. She reared up to her full height, mouth open.
“She’s got us,” Isval whispered.
“Maybe not,” Cham said, but the words lacked conviction.
Goll’s team reached the tree line.
The pack leader fell back into a hunched crouch, roared, and bounded toward them. The entire pack fell in behind her, their claws throwing up divots of dirt.
Cham and Isval fired their blasters, and Goll’s team followed their lead. Red lines slammed into the leading gutkurrs, sending them tumbling to the ground. Their fellows leapt over them or thudded into them, but those that were shot rolled back onto their feet and continued to run.
“Back to the clearing!” Cham ordered. “Run, but don’t get separated!”
They turned and sprinted back through the forest, turning every few moments to fire into the pack. The gutkurrs hissed and roared, crashing through the deadwood and underbrush in their eagerness to feed. In moments Isval, Cham, and the rest reached the support team they’d left behind them. Goll shouted at them.
“Gutkurrs! Suppressing fire and an organized retreat back to the clearing!”
A grenade explosion to the right splintered a tree and sent pieces of a gutkurr flying into the air.
Isval called Faylin over the comlink. “Faylin, we need you back at the clearing right now, and set down with the doors open!”
“What? What’s happening down there? Are you under attack?”
“Yes,” Isval said. “Hurry!”