Hera swung the ship out of traffic and onto a wide approach vector to the moon. Kanan looked back into the windowless rear of the cockpit. Light reflecting from Cynda intensified, casting his and Hera’s shadows darkly upon their passengers. Skelly sat, unusually mute and reserved, on the acceleration couch to the left, his head bowed. Zaluna was on the little chair behind Kanan’s, facing in the opposite direction. Initially excited by the takeoff, she’d refrained from looking out the forward viewport as they closed in on the disaster site.
“All those people,” she said in a low voice. “I watched them every day.” In an odd way, Kanan thought, the woman had been going with them to work on the moon for years.
Kanan looked forward as Hera expertly brought Expedient into a roll. He saw the length and shape of the debris field now. “No, that doesn’t look suspicious at all,” she said. “It’s like a funnel.”
“Yeah. Channeling outward.” He blinked. “None of it’s falling back down!”
“It won’t,” Skelly said morosely. “A normal blast would emanate outward spherically. You’d have a lot of fragments raining down again. This was the result of a shaped charge—a bunch of simultaneous blasts placed to direct most of the debris up and out at escape velocity.”
Kanan stared at the unnatural-looking formation. “How do you know?”
“It was my idea.” Skelly groaned. “It was on the holodisk.”
Kanan grew sick as he studied the sensors. “Outgassing at the main landing bay. The complex has been ruptured.” He unsnapped his restraint and headed for the rear of the compartment. “I’ve got to get down there.”
Hera punched several buttons. “I can needle us in beneath the cloud. Where do you want to go?”
Skelly unhooked himself and came forward. Studying the scene, he pointed. “The auxiliary bay!”
Half in the space suit he’d retrieved, Kanan came forward to look. “Yeah, I think you’re right.”
Skelly directed Hera toward a small dark indentation clear of the blast zone. The auxiliary bay had been the shipping-and-receiving area for a smaller network of caverns, long since abandoned for the richer veins of the main expanse. An airlock separated the sections, installed due to fears that the old complex might vent to space.
Now that the opposite had happened, Kanan thought, it could provide the only way in.
Hera directed the ship into a deep crater. The surface beneath was coated with ashen residue from the blast, but the rectangular opening cut into the southern wall was intact.
“Magnetic field’s still holding,” she said. “But it’s dark.”
“Lights are on a different power grid,” Kanan said, putting on his boots. “Can you handle it?”
“Of course.” Effortlessly, Hera guided Expedient toward the maw.
As the ship entered the blackness, Hera activated the exterior flood-lamps. At once, the occupants of Expedient were bathed again in light—their own, mirroring off and coruscating through the thousand stalagmites on the cavern’s ceiling.
“We saved a lot on lighting this way,” Skelly said.
Zaluna leaned around Kanan’s chair for a look as Expedient touched down. She gasped at the beauty—and then retreated into her seat as Cynda rumbled. The moon hadn’t quaked before to Kanan’s memory, but he didn’t care. He was already donning the helmet of the environment suit. The air in the bay was fine, but what lay ahead might not be. “I’m patching my suit comm into Moonglow’s audio channel. Hold station here.”
“I’m going,” Hera said, rising. “You’ve got two suits.”
Stuffing a bag full of oxygen masks, Kanan shook his head. “I need you here. Someone’s got to fly these guys out of this place.”
She was already suiting up. “Is this a rescue or a suicide mission? Now get the ramp open, because I’m going!”
Kanan felt like an insect making its way into a pile of brambles—in the dark. That was what had become of the region beyond the reinforced airlock. Passageways that had been horizontal and shafts that had been vertical had both gone diagonal as gravity sought to fill in the gap left by the explosion.
The thorilide-rich crystals that were the Empire’s goal were, in fact, the only reason there was room to move at all: Even damaged by the blast, their tensile strength was amazing, giving the place a continued semblance of structure. Kanan didn’t have time to think on the irony. He kept going downward, inward, ever farther into the darkness, lit only by his and Hera’s helmet lights.
Hera had somehow kept up with him, even as he’d scrambled over and under and around barriers. She was unspooling a microfilament cable they’d found in the landing bay; there was no expectation of getting back to the ship otherwise.
Kanan couldn’t rely on positioning technology to guide him down here in the underworld. All he had was the distress signal in his helmet, still being weakly broadcast from somewhere in the chaos. Every so often, they had seen a sign of past occupation: a cart, smashed and sideways, or the arm or leg of a droid. But there had been no indication of life.
He found a dark triangular opening up ahead. Shining his light into it, he saw what amounted to a floor several meters down. He pulled the loop of cable he’d been carrying from around his arm and lashed it to a seemingly solid crystal support. “Wait here,” he said into his helmet mike.
“No.”
There was no time to stop and argue. He slipped over the side and dangled, trying to find the surface somewhere beneath him. Letting go, he hit the ground—and slid downward into the darkness.
“Kanan!” Hera called.
“I’m all right,” he said, shining his light around where he’d come to rest. “We’re getting close.”
She rappelled down the cable and slid down behind him. “Close? How can you tell? It’s hard to see anything!”
“I can tell,” Kanan said. He pointed his light to illuminate a battered head, sticking out from the ceiling.
“Oh,” she said.
“Yeah.” It was Yelkin. His body was crushed, embedded in the new strata of the moon.
Kanan could tell the sight chilled Hera. It didn’t do him much good, either. But as the opening started to go more horizontal, they saw more corpses, dropped like sticks this way and that amid the broken crystal columns. It was like tunneling into a graveyard. Kanan recognized a uniform next—and then a hovercart, like the one he used daily. He was in the right place.
“Kanan!” Hera called.
Crawling over a mound of debris, he found her kneeling beside a half-buried equipment console. “That’s your distress beacon,” she said, looking around. “But I don’t see—”
“Okadiah!”
Kanan leapt over jutting obstacles in the dark, hurrying to a spot up ahead. It was an elevator car, diagonal but still held in shape by the frame of its onetime shaft.
Okadiah was under it. Kanan shone his light on the old man’s face. Okadiah’s skin was blue; his eyes and lips were covered with frost. The volume of air in the underground network was vast relative to the new vents to space, and further collapses had closed those portals off. But pressure had dropped considerably, and the air that remained was frigid. Kanan whipped his pouch open and removed an oxygen mask. Carefully wrapping it around the miner’s head, he was relieved to hear the old man cough.
“Kanan—”
“Don’t move,” Kanan said.
“That … a joke? Not funny.”
Kanan pulled the thermo-wrap from his bag and covered Okadiah’s chest and shoulders. Then he looked to the old man’s legs. They had been crushed beneath the elevator car, but not fully pinned. “Hang on!”
Kanan turned and looked for something to use for leverage. Hera was right there, gripping a tough-looking stalactite. Kanan took it from her and inserted it beneath the side of the car. “You pull him out,” he said to Hera—and heaved. The mass, already lopsided, gave way in the opposite direction, tilting backward enough for Hera to slide the old man free.
Kanan collapsed, panting
, on the ground next to Okadiah.
Okadiah struggled to say something. “S-s-stormtroopers …”
“What?”
“Stormtroopers. Came in … ordered us out of Zone Sixty-Six. Had their own charges …”
Kanan exhaled. “I knew it.” Feeling strength returning to his muscles, he got to his knees. “We’re going to get you out of here.”
“Too … late,” Okadiah said.
Kanan looked back at Hera. She was looking away, off into the darkness, respectfully.
“C-c-come here,” Okadiah mumbled. “Where … I can see you.”
Kanan cradled the old man’s battered frame in his arms. “What is it, Okadiah?”
“Not … you,” Okadiah said, before coughing. “The … pretty one.”
Hera stepped to the other side of Kanan and knelt. “I’m here.”
“Ah,” he said, smiling as if laying eyes on her were medicine enough. “You … listen. This boy … is good to have around.” Okadiah coughed again, this time much more violently. “You ought to … stick by him. Think … he needs …”
Okadiah stopped talking and closed his eyes. The inside of the transparent oxygen mask, once fogged, went clear.
No. Kanan reached for the man’s chest, certain he needed to do something, but unsure of what. He knew conventional first aid, but Okadiah’s injuries seemed past that. He felt useless, as useless as he had when Master Billaba had died—and the turmoil of that moment mixed with this one, clouding his concentration. He struggled to focus—
—only to feel the gentle touch of Hera’s hand on his arm. She shook her head. “He’s gone, Kanan.”
“I tried.”
“You did,” she said, her touch turning into a firm grip. “We need to leave now.”
Kanan looked back at her and shook his head. “No. Not without him.”
“It’s a triumph,” Count Vidian declared. “A triumph, pure and simple!”
He strode onto the bridge, holding a datapad high. He didn’t need it, but not everyone had his eyes. “It’s the report from my lead researcher,” he said, approaching Captain Sloane. “Ninety-seven percent of thorilide molecules in the effluent remained intact. Only a small portion broke down!”
“I don’t recognize the name,” Sloane said, pointing to the lead researcher. “Lemuel Tharsa. He’s aboard?”
“Part of my team. He boarded with me.” Vidian glared impatiently, bothered to have had his good news interrupted. “You’ll find him checked in on your ship’s manifest. What difference does it make? The important thing is what he says.”
Sloane read from the report. “ ‘The moon Cynda may be effectively pulverized using deep-bore charges, yielding an amount of ready thorilide equating to what could be mined in two thousand years, using conventional methods—’ ” She looked up in disbelief. “Two thousand years?”
“Imagine the Emperor’s response!”
“We’ll have increased efficiency, all right.”
Vidian looked past her to the sky outside Ultimatum. “What’s the status of the mining cargo fleets?”
“We’ve ordered every empty vessel to hold position, awaiting your next command,” she said, handing off the datapad to an aide. “Two hundred seventy ships, counting thorilide carriers and explosives haulers.”
“We’ll need them all,” Vidian said. “And all the ones on Gorse. We’ll be bringing back thousands of metric tons of baradium-357 from Calcoraan Depot. We can retrofit the thorilide carriers for use there.”
Sloane stepped over to examine a monitor. “There also appears to be at least one intact explosives freighter remaining on Cynda.”
“Hardy.”
“Or foolhardy. Our sensors showed it going to the moon, even after the explosion. Someone was determined to deliver his payload.” Sloane studied the screen in more detail, before looking up with concern. “We count thirty-six vessels destroyed in Cynda’s main hangar, both personnel carriers and cargo ships. All attendant personnel presumably lost.”
“Acceptable,” Vidian said. “If we’d alerted the miners to our plans, you’d have seen true unrest. There’d be dozens like that bomber.”
“One was plenty,” Sloane said, straightening. “But won’t people on Gorse wonder what happened?”
Vidian began walking back to the elevator, accompanied by Sloane. “I’ve prepared an alert for broadcast,” he said, “calling the event a comet strike. That explanation alone accounts both for why the workers were caught unawares—and for Cynda’s ultimate fate.”
“Efficient.”
“We won’t need miners anyway, when our plan works.”
The captain’s dark eyebrows shot up. “Our plan?”
“This could be big for you, Sloane,” Vidian said, standing in the lift doorway. “I’ll send up final instructions shortly.”
“We’re ready, my lord.”
Vidian nodded, stepped back, and watched as the door closed in front of him. He could no longer smile, but he felt it. It was a triumph.
But not pure and simple. He hadn’t told Sloane everything. Certainly, destroying the moon would help him meet the Emperor’s goal now—but later was another story. That little inconvenient distinction had been revealed to him in the past hour, and he had shared it with no one.
He’d expected such an eventuality, however, and he had a means of dealing with it. It would get him past this crisis—and then he would lay a trap that Baron Danthe could never escape. Vidian knew something Danthe didn’t, a secret that would solve all his problems.
In one stroke he would keep the Emperor’s favor—and eliminate his main rival once and for all. Efficient, as always.
Together with Hera, Kanan had managed to move Okadiah’s body back up the long and twisted route to the still-pressurized auxiliary bay. There, after removing their environment suits, they’d found Skelly and Zaluna outside the ship. Skelly was lying on his back, looking up at the lights, as Zaluna wandered as if in a daze, marveling at the kaleidoscopic effects.
“I watched the place on the cams for years,” she’d said. “But I never imagined anything could be so beautiful.”
Kanan had considered taking Okadiah’s body back to Gorse for burial. But on reflection, Cynda seemed a much more fitting resting place for his friend. He and Hera had found a side grotto, where they laid the body down and covered it with rocks.
With the damage to the complex, Kanan couldn’t imagine anyone mining the moon again, not in the normal way. That meant the Empire had gone all in on the moon-shattering scheme.
“You’re blinking,” Skelly said, looking up at Kanan.
Kanan noticed the flashing light on the device on his belt. “Call coming in.” It was strange to see, now, of all times. “It’s my Moonglow pager.”
He activated it, and Vidian’s voice echoed through the massive chamber. “Attention, all traffic associated with the Mining Guild. All empty mining cargo ships on Gorse or in orbit are instructed to follow Ultimatum to the Calcoraan system. All off-shift pilots on Gorse are ordered to report and fly whatever vessels are available.”
Skelly sat up. He gawked, trying to calculate. “That’s got to be a thousand ships!”
The transmission continued—only now, it was Sloane speaking. “This alert is for Gorse Space Traffic Control. No other traffic of any kind is allowed to depart Gorse until further notice. The space lanes must be kept clear until our return. We’re leaving a TIE patrol to enforce the restriction.” The message ended.
“No one can leave Gorse?” Zaluna asked, fretful.
“And if we go back, we’re stuck,” Skelly said. “So much for warning people.”
“What is this about?” Kanan asked. “What’s Calcoraan?”
Kneeling near the exit to the landing bay, Hera looked through the magnetic shield and out to space. “It’s Vidian’s base of operations. A nerve center, a supply hub for the Empire in this sector.”
Skelly snapped his fingers. “Three fifty-seven!”
Kanan
blinked. “What, baradium-357?”
“It’s in my research,” the bomber said. “I ran the numbers on the worst case, what it would take to blow the moon apart. Plain old baradium bisulfate can’t do it, not even a thousand ships full. But the isotope could. That’s the evil stuff, weapons-grade.”
You’re the expert, Kanan thought. “And they’ve got it there.”
“They invented it there,” Hera said, walking over to join them.
Zaluna spoke in a worried voice. “So what do we do?”
No one said anything.
Kanan finally shrugged and gestured to Expedient. “We could do what they want us to do.”
Hera turned to face him. “Yeah?”
“That’s an explosives hauler. I’m a pilot for one of the mining firms. You just heard my orders. We can’t go anywhere else, more than likely—not without a fight.” He put his hands before him, palms upward. “So we go.”
“We follow Vidian?” Skelly’s eyes narrowed. “What would we do?”
Kanan glowered at him. “We’re not blowing the place up, I’ll tell you that!”
“But maybe,” Hera said, “maybe we won’t have to.”
Kanan looked at the ship, considering the possibilities.
“We can’t decide to go without everyone’s consent,” Hera said. “That’s the Empire’s way.”
Kanan looked back at her in disbelief. “What, you want a vote? We can’t exactly sit around in a circle debating all year.”
Hera walked into the middle of the group, addressing each of the three as she turned. “Listen, I think we all understand the stakes—at least, I hope we do. You know the Empire needs to be stopped here, and you’ve also got individual reasons to care. But for us to have any chance of working together, we’ve got to be united. We’ve all got to see the same big picture.”
Zaluna watched her. “Tell us.”
“I’ve been around to see it. All across the galaxy. This is an Empire motivated by greed—that delivers injustice. That rules through fear—and that prospers through deceit.” Hera started counting on her fingers. “Greed, injustice, fear, deceit. You can see them here, can’t you?”
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