Grallik led him to the far wall, and a narrow door. Beyond it was another large room with colossal pipes in the ceiling and the long pools cut into the floor. Long and narrow, like harvesting troughs in a farm for sea life. The droids were here, too, some shoving cartloads of crystals into the roiling green liquid, others trolling the pools with long implements.
“We’re very proud of this, my lord. This is a prize project of mine—the only automated xenoboric acid bath on Gorse. The crystals from Cynda start here, and the droids do the rest.”
Vidian looked down into a pool. Deep and long, a roiling cauldron with an endless appetite for matter. “And how many days do you lose from droids falling in during groundquakes? Organics would keep their balance better.”
“Yes, sir. But the fumes and splashing would be dangerous—and of course, if someone went in, that would be much worse than a droid.”
“Worse, how? The baths cannot be used for purification until the offending matter is consumed. Droids take much longer to digest.”
Lal was struck speechless by that one. Vidian didn’t care. He had a call coming in. He switched his ears to comlink mode.
“Commander Chamas aboard Ultimatum, my lord. Message from Coruscant.”
“Patch it through.”
Lero Danthe appeared before his electronic eyes. “My compliments to Count Vidian.”
What was left of Vidian’s vocal cords stirred in a growl, a vocalization that for him had no electronic counterpart. The young man appeared life-sized, superimposed over Vidian’s surroundings: There was no holoprojector here, but it worked basically the same way. “What is it?” he finally said.
The blond baron smiled. “I’ve just emerged from another series of meetings with top authorities, working at the highest levels on projects of the greatest …”
Vidian stopped listening. He was too busy moving his head around, digitally dumping the chattering baron in one pool of acid after another.
“… and to make it all possible, the Emperor will require an immediate doubling of thorilide deliveries. Effective immediately.”
Vidian gawked. “What? Doubling?”
“Correct.”
“A doubling of the original quotas.”
“No,” Danthe said, explaining as if he were talking to a child. “Your quota was increased by half yesterday, remember? So—”
“So it’s really a tripling.” Vidian felt his ire bubbling over, angrier than any acid bath in the room. “And you didn’t argue against this? This target is impossible. The failure will be yours, too.”
The baron shrugged. “I’m attached to your administration, my lord, but I serve the Emperor in all things.” He paused, before continuing gingerly. “I did suggest a number of things I could do to help—but of course those would require putting some of your territories in my hands.”
“I’ll just bet you did,” Vidian snarled. “This isn’t finished, Danthe!”
“So what should I tell the Emperor?”
“That I’ll succeed! Vidian out!”
Vidian seethed. This was deception on a grand scale. Vidian had never played games of court well; it was his biggest weakness. The other aristocrats knew it, and one had finally pounced. He was undermined, completely and totally, in a way that he hadn’t experienced since years earlier, when he was a different person—
Lal stood near one of the acid baths and looked back in puzzlement. “Are you all right, my lord? You—er, haven’t moved for a while.”
Vidian wore no emotion, as always. The words came from his neck. “I need triple the output from this factory, immediately.”
Lal laughed out loud. Immediately embarrassed, she covered her wide mouth with two of her hands. “I’m sorry. You can’t be serious?”
Vidian turned and began stalking toward her. “I am always serious.”
She stepped back, nervously. “We can’t do that. We were struggling to meet the original Imperial targets.”
“Which you never met, either.” Vidian stepped up to her. Lal shook, eyeing him fearfully. “Can you meet these targets?”
“N-n-no.”
“Then what good are you?” Vidian’s arms lanced out, shoving Lal with his open palms. She tumbled backward into one of the boiling troughs.
She screamed, the acid bubbling all around her. “Help! P-p-please!”
Vidian turned and found one of the tending poles, constructed of material designed to withstand the chemical abuse. But instead of fishing her out, he jabbed at her, pushing Lal farther in.
“I am helping,” Vidian said, electronic eyes shining. “I need this vat returned to operation. Now hurry up and dissolve.”
Hera heard the scream.
She had been staying a step ahead of the Besalisk security chief by entering the refinery and running among the rafters. There were plenty of pipes and catwalks providing routes for one as nimble as she. She’d been hoping to double back, to finish looking for what she’d entered for—when she’d heard the cry. Horrible, unlike anything she’d ever known.
She couldn’t help but run toward it.
When she arrived, it was too late. The body was visible from her high vantage point—barely—in the depths of the turbulent pool, but there was no way to get down there without falling in herself. Count Vidian stood at the edge with a tending pole. It had to be him; no one else looked like that. He watched the pool for a moment before dropping the pole, turning, and heading off.
Hera saw a place where she could safely leap down, up ahead. She started working her way toward it.
But Gord Grallik arrived first—and broke her heart.
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 abo
ve. 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.
Hera caught her breath as she reached the third-story rooftop. The buildings across the boulevard from Moonglow’s headquarters weren’t tall, but they all had ladders or some other kind of fire escapes. Everyone knew to expect groundquakes on Gorse. This was another story.
From a concealed spot, she looked down into the street with amazement. The Imperial vessel was still burning below, destroyed by someone they’d hurt. It was something Hera had expected to see one day, something she’d always believed was coming. Just not this soon, and not this way. She wasn’t sure what had driven Skelly to do it, but he certainly had been the one responsible, based on what Kanan had seen.
Hera hadn’t wanted to linger at ground level aft
er the blast. The street looked like a war zone, and the assassination attempt was sure to send the Imperials over the edge. But she’d helped with the search-and-rescue for as long as she dared, and had to scout the best way out of the security-cordoned neighborhood. Only Kanan had any kind of permission to be on the ground anyway, and he’d hung around down there, trying to free people. She thought well of him that he’d do that. It went very much against the freewheeler mold he seemed to want to fit into.
In truth, she was still reeling from the moment in the factory when Gord Grallik had viewed the recording of Vidian killing his wife. A typical tough security guy, yet he had watched the murder as if his world were crumbling around him. It still wrenched at her heart to remember it.
But that wasn’t the worst part, she now realized as she looked down at the street. Vidian, singed but apparently intact, was being hustled from the scene by his escort when Gord appeared at the gate. The Besalisk rushed forward amid the flaming embers only to be stopped by the stormtroopers. She couldn’t hear him from this distance, but he was appealing to them, begging them. To arrest Vidian, she supposed. A Moonglow aide handed Gord a datapad: Hera assumed it was the images from the security cam. The frantic Besalisk showed it to one trooper after another, but they would not let him pass.
Hera didn’t want to watch—there was nothing at all she could do. Not here, not now. But she made herself. Gord tried to follow Vidian anyway, only to be grabbed by the troopers. It took four of them to restrain the heavy-shouldered security chief: one for each arm.
Then they beat him. This was justice in the Empire.
When the stormtroopers parted, Hera saw Gord crawling back toward Moonglow’s gate. She blinked away a tear of anger. Yes, she needed to see these things, to remind her what she was fighting for.
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