“Be careful. She’s a woman with a mission,” Kanan said as the metal beast settled harshly in the mud. The doors opened, and his passengers filed past him. Kanan remained.
“You’re not flying bombs today?” Okadiah said.
“No,” Kanan said, nodding toward the back. “I’d like to show someone the sights.”
Okadiah patted his shoulder. “The only job that matters. Good luck.”
Kanan smiled, slowly, as the man stepped out. Okadiah hadn’t seen the duffel on the floor near the driver’s seat—Kanan’s belongings, packed while the old man wasn’t looking. He’d miss Okadiah, and that was probably good-bye. But the next chapter, he could feel, had already begun.
Even if it was starting strangely. “You really want to do this?” he asked Hera. She was at the window behind the driver’s seat, looking all around.
“Yes,” Hera said. “I really do.”
She slipped off her cloak to reveal an all-black outfit. Good for sneaking around in a sunless place, Kanan thought—and better to look at. She checked her holster to see that her blaster pistol was secure. “I really think you ought to hang this and do something else with your time,” he said.
Hera replied with a firm look. “I’m sure you have suggestions.” She put out her hand.
“Fine.” Kanan reluctantly handed her his Moonglow ID badge. “Wave it in front of the sensor at the inner door. I’ll be parked out in the street, pretending to have engine trouble.” It wouldn’t be require much of a lie, he knew. “When you get back, I’ll get my pay from Lal and take you to the spaceport—and we’ll go to any planet you want.”
“We will, will we?” Hera rolled her eyes.
“That’s right.”
“I have my own ship.” She stepped out of the bus.
Huh. That was interesting news, he thought as she disappeared through the door.
Kanan guided the hoverbus back out the gate and parked it within sight of the shuttle. Stepping out, he saw that stormtroopers and local security types were still stationed all around. It was time to start the pantomime.
And there was one small blessing: Skelly hadn’t made an appearance after all. Nobody’s that foolish!
“That’s Kanan, all right.” Skelly surveyed the new arrivals from his perch hidden among the chimneys atop Drakka’s Diner. Only one eyepiece of his secondhand macrobinoculars displayed anything, but that was enough to show him what he needed to see.
He’d realized that he couldn’t simply reveal himself. The mining company people wouldn’t want him to speak to Vidian, and he didn’t trust stormtroopers to deliver him after the episode on the moon. He needed to reach the man when he was alone—and that meant getting into the factory. Thorilide refineries were complicated places: a lot of huge equipment often crammed into tight spaces, offering lots of hiding places.
And Moonglow had something else: an ancient connection to Shaketown’s long-abandoned sewer system. Gorse wasn’t a particularly rainy place, but the underground water table rose and fell dramatically with the tides. Cynda’s movements squeezed the planet like a sponge, causing puddles to spring randomly from the soil. But quake damage had rendered the sewers useless, and only people interested in such places, like Skelly, knew the sewer system existed.
And how to get into it. Prying the macrobinoculars from his hand, he stuffed them into his enormous backpack. Donning it, he found the ladder leading down into the diner’s back alley. There, in the middle of a low pool of brackish water, sat the rounded cover he was looking for.
Struggling under the burden of his pack, Skelly fished for handholds around the circumference of the metal disk. He curled his fingers beneath and strained for a long minute. It wouldn’t budge. He tried to stand up—only to realize his malfunctioning right hand was locked in position, with his fingers underneath the cover.
Great, Skelly thought. What else can go wrong?
Then he found out.
“Who’s back here?” Drakka, the enormous Besalisk chef, appeared behind him, armed—as if he needed to be—with a huge iron skillet. He grabbed at Skelly with his three free hands, trying to turn him around. Skelly felt pain in his arm as his hand, still attached to the sewer cover, didn’t budge.
“Whoa, there!” Skelly said. He was trespassing, he knew—but the Besalisk ought to recognize him. “It’s me, Drakka! Skelly! You know me!”
“You say that like it’s a good thing!” The Besalisk continued pulling. “You’re breaking into my place!”
“Whoa, no!” Skelly winced with pain. “I’m going over to Moonglow to see the Imperials!”
Drakka stopped tugging. He frowned. “I’m closed today because of those idiots.” Skelly watched him nervously, for a moment, as the behemoth decided what to do.
Then he reached past Skelly and ripped the sewer cover off the hole, freeing the human’s hand in the process. “Besalisks have a saying,” he said. “When your neighbors trouble you, send your rodents to their nest.” Before Skelly could feel relief, Drakka yanked him from the ground and threw him down the hole.
“Thanks, pal!” Skelly called up from the drenched bottom. He was lucky to have good friends who wanted to lend a hand.
Having power to wield on the ground might not be so good after all, Sloane thought. Not if authority meant going on mindless tours of local factories. Hailing from the industrial world Ganthel, she had seen quite enough of shipyards and loading docks. She had gone to the Academy to escape a life working at such places.
But Lal Grallik had insisted on extolling the virtues of every little thing at her company. She was leading them now into the new section, built under her watch; when Gorse ran out of thorilide deposits and mining of the moon started, a new intake center had been required. Next she’ll be showing us the janitorial closets, Sloane thought.
The one surprising thing was that Count Vidian had said little during the tour. Strange, since he was here to issue directives, and if anyone could stop the Besalisk woman in her time-wasting palaver, he could.
A beeping comlink from the rear of the entourage stopped her instead. “Lal!” her security chief husband called out. “There’s a report of someone sneaking around the plant. Personnel department.”
“That Skelly person?” Vidian asked.
“They didn’t see who it was,” Gord Grallik said. He pocketed the comlink and turned around. “I’ll check it out.”
Sloane gestured to her stormtrooper escort. “Go see.”
“No, no,” the guard said, heading off. “This is my turf.”
“It’s all our turf,” Sloane said. She pointed after the Besalisk. “Follow him!”
Skelly watched from his hiding place behind a moving conveyer belt. He had been lucky. An old storm drain opened up right next to one of the newer buildings; he’d had to leave his pack at the bottom to climb up, but he’d been able to dash quickly into the building.
Since then, he’d crept around the high-ceilinged facility, waiting for his chance to get to Vidian. Something had happened to cause Gord to leave, and the Imperial captain had sent her stormtroopers along. Skelly continued to creep closer. He could finally hear their conversations, even over the din of the active belts.
“—and you may find this of particular interest, Captain Sloane.” It was Lal, speaking from the foot of the ten-meter-tall mass of titanium at the far end of the room. “This is our heavy-duty bulk-loader vehicle, the newest in use on Gorse. You’ll find the cab interior similar to what’s in some of your own armored walkers: It’s the same manufacturer. If you’ll step inside, I can show you,”
Skelly saw the women climbing up the metal staircase and into the passenger compartment of the big vehicle. Creeping ahead, he saw Vidian unaccompanied at the bottom, pacing down the long aisle between the conveyer belts out of the women’s sight. Skelly’s heart pounded. Whether Vidian was alone a moment or a minute, this was his chance!
“You can come out now.” The loud voice was the one Skelly had heard on a dozen manageme
nt recordings. “I can hear you very well, even in a place like this.” Count Vidian turned to face him. “The saboteur, I presume.”
“That’s not what I am,” Skelly said, rising from his knees. He dusted himself off. “I’m a whistleblower, Count Vidian. I’m like you—I think the old ways of doing things have to change. I see what people are doing wrong!”
“I see someone doing something wrong.”
Skelly was glad Vidian was talking. He’d heard about the man’s cybernetic capabilities: Talking to Skelly meant he wasn’t calling for help on his internal comlink.
“If you know me,” the count continued, “you know I take problems into my own hands to solve.”
“Then you want this,” Skelly said, pulling the holodisk from his vest. “My research. You’ve got to stop the blasting on Cynda. You could tear the whole moon apart by mistake!”
“Madness.” Vidian kept walking purposefully toward him. “And if it were possible, and the Empire chose to do it, we would certainly not ask your permission.”
Skelly’s eyes locked on Vidian’s macabre visage, and he stumbled backward. “I’m trying to help you!”
“Help by dying.” With a mighty swat, Vidian smacked the disk away. It clattered to the floor beneath a conveyor belt. The second swing found Skelly’s face.
It had not been a good couple of days for snooping around, Hera thought. There was no getting near Vidian during his tour of the landing field, so she’d started in the personnel department, looking to see if Lemuel Tharsa—the person of Imperial interest, according to Zaluna’s files—was anyone important. He’d never been an employee, but the man had been to Moonglow: Visitor badges had been supplied to him on several occasions more than twenty years earlier. Before she could learn more, someone had found her. That was the problem with infiltrating a working factory on a day when the Empire came to inspect. No one had called in sick.
Normally, she liked a challenge. But with the Moonglow security team going one direction and the stormtroopers going another, she’d been forced early into the skulker’s last resort: the ventilation shafts. Fortunately, the new building’s system was less vile than what she’d found in other factories.
Peering down through another grate, she saw the Besalisk security chief again—Gord, Kanan had called him, the administrator’s husband. Gord was telling his aides they had to redeem themselves for losing Skelly the day before. Hera felt a momentary pang of guilt for getting the guy in trouble with his wife and the Empire. But it passed as Gord looked up and pointed, evidently noticing the indentation in the vent housing. That’s when the blasterfire started.
Enough of this, she thought, scrambling through another tube. It was time to find Vidian.
Sloane emerged from the cab of the bulk-loader to see Vidian a few dozen meters away down on the factory floor, mercilessly pummeling Skelly. She activated the comlink attached to her wrist and pulled her blaster. “Troopers, to me!”
Vidian lifted the intruder and hurled him through the air. Limbs flailed as Skelly hurtled end over end. His flight ended violently against a control console for one of the conveyor belts.
“This is under control,” Vidian said, walking casually toward the spot.
Sloane ran down the stairs anyway. She could see that Vidian’s opponent was bleeding and clutching his chest. Skelly stood, facing the approaching cyborg in a daze, before desperately scrambling up the side of the control station. Leaping, he reached for the overhang above and tried to pull himself up.
“Stop!” Sloane raised her weapon.
With a burst of energy that startled her, Skelly pulled himself up and onto the moving conveyor belt. Sloane fired—but the belt carried him around a turn, and her blaster bolt only singed his shin.
Sloane looked back to see Lal, horrified and keeping her distance, up on the metal staircase. “Stop all the belts!” the captain yelled. Lal bustled down the steps to the controls.
“Too late,” Vidian said, watching. The conveyor belt led back outside, to the loading area. Seeing Sloane’s troopers arriving through a side hallway, Vidian pointed. “After him!”
Sloane stepped up to Vidian. “That was him? Skelly?”
Vidian nodded—and started walking back up the aisle.
“He won’t get off the grounds. I’ll alert everyone,” she said.
“I’ve just done so,” Vidian said, his gaze cast low. He was looking for something, she realized, at the foot of one of the conveyor belts. “But you should go supervise. Someone in authority should be out there.”
The whole episode puzzled Sloane. “What was Skelly trying to accomplish? What did he want?”
Vidian knelt. He picked up a small object from the floor. “He wanted to give me this,” he said. It was a holodisk, Sloane saw. “It’s of no consequence. When you find him, tell him I destroyed it. He should die knowing the futility of defying the Empire.”
Kanan removed a bolt from the Smoothride’s engine for the fourteenth time. Then he proceeded to put it right back.
He didn’t stick his neck out for many—hardly any, really!—but there was something about Hera that had kept him from leaving. He was still working out what it was. She was beautiful, of course—but she knew how to play it cool, something he liked a lot. She also seemed reasonably competent—she’d caught on to his ruse back at the cantina right away. All good traits, suited for whatever it was she was playing at. Kanan still didn’t quite know what that was, but that was all right. He could play along, as he had many times before when something or someone caught his interest for a while. He had nothing else to do.
Outside, a siren blared. Looking out from beneath the engine bonnet of the hoverbus, Kanan saw several stormtroopers on speeder bikes racing into the security zone and rushing toward the factory gates. Some were headed toward Moonglow’s airfield, where Expedient sat parked amid a few other vehicles; others were headed for the main facility.
So much for competence, he thought. Looked like Hera was in trouble.
He slammed the engine lid shut and started to turn toward the factory. He didn’t have his badge, but he knew a place around the corner where he could scale the fence ringing the aerodrome.
Reaching the spot, Kanan leapt and swung himself over the railing. Hitting the soft ground, he rolled—
—and was met by stormtrooper blasters pointed in his direction.
Harsh lights flooded the corner of the airfield, nearly blinding him. He could just make out a brown-skinned woman in an Imperial captain’s uniform stepping toward him.
“And where,” she asked sharply, “do you think you’re going?”
Skelly had closed the sewer grating over his head just in time. He heard the boots of stormtroopers running past, above, even as he struggled to make his way down the iron rungs of the ladder.
Reaching the bottom, he collapsed in the ankle-deep brackish water, battered and broken. His head was bleeding, and his cheekbones felt as if they were moving beneath his skin. He fumbled with his left hand to count his teeth—and felt anguish when he realized how many were gone. He struggled to roll over, certain his ribs had been cracked.
Skelly coughed, bewildered. Vidian was supposed to be different. The rule breaker. The paradigm destroyer. He had reached the heights of both the public and private sectors by ignoring the bureaucracies and their conventions, by listening to everyone and everything, and deciding based on facts.
Yet he had turned out to be just another sadist, as deaf and blind as he had been before the prosthetics.
Seeing his pack nearby, Skelly fought through the pain and dragged his body close to it. There was a medpac in there—and more. Much more.
If words couldn’t save the moon, it was time for something else!
Besalisks looked miserable in a way that few species could, Vidian thought. With enormous wide mouths and droopy skin sacs hanging beneath, when they frowned, you could read the expression from orbit.
Count Vidian wasn’t interested in Lal Grallik’s emb
arrassment over Skelly breaking in, any more than he was interested in her apologies. The encounter with the saboteur had deterred him from his intended schedule. She had taken him without delay to the refinery building: the oldest part of Moonglow, she’d said, dating back to when the firm was part of Introsphere.
She eagerly showed him her updates—and he ignored her obvious disappointment as he just as quickly undid them, stripping away one safety practice after another. Toxic exposure was a small price to pay to meet the Emperor’s quota.
Vidian hated being dependent on surface refineries for thorilide: His comet-chaser harvesters required few workers and were closer to the source. But cometary deposits were already microscopic, while the shards coming from Cynda had to be reduced to a refinable size without damaging the material within. Worse, thorilide-bearing comets were exceedingly rare, and the Empire’s insatiable demand for materials had nearly swept the galaxy clean of them. It had idled many of the giant harvester vessels Vidian operated—and had given the slackers in this system job security. It would take forever to replicate Gorse’s refining infrastructure on Cynda: He would be reliant on fools like Lal Grallik forever.
Thorilide was Vidian’s franchise within the Empire—it, and several other strategic materials. Meeting the need for it had brought him power and position. Now he was failing at meeting his Emperor’s demands. And Vidian’s rivals knew it.
He’d been preoccupied since Baron Danthe’s second message, the night before on Ultimatum. Danthe wasn’t calling to tell him the Emperor was re-raising production quotas, at least, but what he’d said was almost as bad. Another comet-chaser fleet was returning to Calcoraan Depot, having exhausted what was once a rich supply of thorilide-bearing comets.
And worse, Vidian had learned next from his aides that Danthe had been whispering to the Emperor, casting aspersions on Vidian’s whole production scheme. The count knew what Danthe wanted: to turn Gorse into another market for his family’s manufacturing droids. Vidian had no quarrel with droids, which could in many cases be much more efficient than organics. But he wasn’t about to let Danthe colonize an industry that belonged to him. Vidian had taken out his temper on his stateroom, then—but he’d longed to have Danthe’s windpipe in his robotic hands.
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