A New Dawn

by John Jackson Miller

  Kanan saw Hera stand erect, keeping her eyes on Vidian. “You want to know why we’re here? Put him down!”

  “Certainly.” Vidian lowered Kanan—but just as the tips of the younger man’s toes touched the ground, the count delivered a mighty open-handed slap with his left hand. Kanan felt his jaw nearly go sideways.

  And still, Vidian continued to hold him by the throat. Kanan struggled to speak, but only unintelligible sounds came out.

  Vidian loosened his hold a little. “What’s that? You want mercy?”

  Kanan coughed once and glared at him. “I said, ‘That was a cheap shot.’ ”

  “Glad you approve.” Vidian looked back to Hera, whose eyes darted between him and the door. “You needn’t worry. These walls are soundproofed, and I haven’t called for help. I rarely get to entertain—I don’t want anyone to interfere.”

  Hera looked at Vidian—and then moved, vaulting athletically over the console. She fired her blaster just past Vidian’s head, purposefully missing him, as she hit the floor. She was there just a moment before bounding forward, charging toward the cyborg. Vidian, startled by the frontal attack, reached out with both arms to grasp for her, releasing Kanan in the process. Hera instantly changed her target, diving low and tackling Kanan around the midsection while Vidian’s arms crossed, catching nothing. The force of her jump propelled her and Kanan to the floor, two meters behind the count.

  Vidian spun, amused rather than alarmed as the two stood. “Well done.”

  Kanan, breathing again, pushed Hera away from him just as Vidian charged toward them. The count was a shirtless brawler in a cage, now: the sort of opponent he’d dealt with in many a cantina. Kanan met the advancing cyborg with a roundhouse kick to his lower back. It felt like kicking a sack of titanium hammers—and Kanan felt dumber than one for the attempt when Vidian snatched his leg and shoved. Kanan tumbled backward, smashing through a lab table.

  Hera opened up on Vidian again, clearly convinced no one outside would respond to the blasterfire. Vidian shrugged it off and charged her. She leapt high, vaulting over his back as he dived. But this time, his legs kept their balance, and he pivoted in time to catch her by a head-tendril. Vidian yanked, hurling her violently across the room.

  “Hera!” Kanan yelled, rising from the debris. Vidian had thrown Hera hard enough to smash her against the far wall—and yet she hadn’t landed at all. Blue light from a ceiling-mounted stasis beam captured her in midair.

  The count looked up at her in high spirits. “Marvelous! Perfect aim. Don’t move, now.”

  Of course, she couldn’t—but before Kanan could wonder what Vidian was doing with a paralyzing suspension beam in his living quarters, the cyborg was moving toward him again. “Now, where were we? I used to spar in physical therapy.”

  “Oh, yeah? I used to put people there.” Kanan stepped gamely toward him.

  Vidian lunged with his right. Kanan stepped aside just as quickly, feeling the stroke go past. Balling his gloved fist, he pounded Vidian’s left ear. The rest of the man might be sheathed with something tough, but Kanan bet that Vidian needed his ears for balance like anyone else. He was right—at least for an instant, the cyborg recoiled. It gave Kanan enough time to grab Vidian violently by what passed for his ear. Whipping the count’s head around, Kanan bowled forward, smashing Vidian face-first into a cabinet with a colossal clang.

  Like a spring-loaded weapon, Vidian snapped back around. His face was expressionless, but his mechanical voice betrayed excitement. “Now we’re to it!”

  Kanan and Vidian punched at each other for long seconds. Kanan used all his speed to prevent Vidian from landing a solid blow—and all his own technique to keep from breaking his hand on the count’s metallic hide. He’d battled enough tough-skinned opponents to know to avoid head-butts or anything else more threatening to him than to Vidian. But that didn’t leave him a lot of options, except for trying to knock Vidian off balance.

  He tried—and the room paid for it, as the two overturned cabinets and more stands in their melee. But the cyborg was just too fast.

  “We’re done,” Vidian said, his right arm lancing out. Catching Kanan’s wrist in his viselike grip, Vidian delivered a left jab to his temple. Kanan didn’t see anything for a few moments after that. But he felt motion, as Vidian grabbed his tunic and shoved him.

  When the lights in his mind stopped blinking, Kanan realized Vidian had him against the main operating table. The count snapped Kanan’s right hand into one metal restraint. When Kanan struggled, the cyborg smacked him again. A moment later both Kanan’s hands and feet were bound to the surface.

  Vidian straightened and stretched, as one refreshed. “That was invigorating.” He looked around. “Any other guests? Are we done? No grieving Besalisks to the rescue?”

  Seeing no other new arrivals, Vidian turned around. “Fine then,” he said, facing Hera and Kanan. “It’s time we got to know one another.”

  Kanan swallowed and looked at Hera, who, still suspended, managed to shake her head. Skelly, down in the basement level, was in no shape to do anything, and Zaluna would never come up into the middle of a fight. Nor would they want her to.

  Vidian rummaged in a wardrobe. “You flew for Moonglow, gunslinger. I killed your boss. Is that what this is?” Vidian took out a gold-colored shirt and put it on. “Friendships are costly. They make you do things outside your best interests.”

  Kanan said nothing.

  “I’m sure you’d tell my interrogator droid more,” Vidian said as he walked through the mess his room had become. “And I may have another use for you.”

  Struggling against the stasis beam, Hera glared. “What do you mean?”

  “I might let my droids practice on you.” He turned to face Kanan and scratched his chin—a move that seemed more an affectation than anything motivated by an actual itch. “Can you imagine what it is to live without senses, without any means of interacting with your environment?”

  “After a few drinks.”

  “The mind is a dynamo in the dark, an engine endlessly running, powering nothing. It thrashes in the night, seeking daylight, inventing its own.” He walked around the table, looking for the surgical stand. Finding a bent tray, Vidian knelt beside it and began meticulously replacing the scattered surgical instruments on it. He held up a scalpel before his eyes. “Controlling nothing. Consider that! The youngling and the aged experience it—the struggle with ineffectuality. Controlling nothing is the true death.”

  He rose, holding the tray. “But I have come back from the dead. And through me, the Empire will control everything.” He set the tray back on the stand. “You’ve heard my slogan, perhaps: Keep moving, destroy barriers, see everything?”

  “You were talking on the holo in a spaceport once,” Kanan said. “Nobody was watching.”

  “I’m not offended. A trite bit of management advice. But for one amputated from everything, it is more. It’s a prescription for being.” Vidian walked back to Kanan, scalpel in hand. “I was without contact for two years. Let us see what happens if you go without for ten. Who knows? You might even become interesting.”

  “Wait!” Hera said, still dangling.

  Vidian looked over with impatience. “Yes?”

  “I thought you were going to interrogate us first.”

  Kanan rolled his eyes. “Oh, yeah, torture me before you torture me. Wouldn’t want to forget that!” What was she thinking?

  Vidian set the scalpel aside. “She’s quite right.” He went silent for a moment. “I’ve just sent for my assistant. Be patient.”

  Another slot in the floor opened. A black, bug-eyed globe levitated upward through it. Kanan, struggling to get loose, recognized it as an Imperial interrogator droid. Their reputation was well known—and the large syringe it wielded identified it unmistakably.

  “Hold still,” Vidian said. “It’ll be over in a second.”

  Kanan’s mind raced as the thing approached. Master Billaba would have advised him to use
the Force. Cast the thing against the wall! Unlock your bonds! Hypnotize Vidian into taking a long walk out of a short airlock! He’d tried never to use the Force openly in the past, yet this was serious. Kanan started to focus—

  —but before he could do anything, the interrogator droid rotated just a few degrees and extended its needle right toward the injection port on Vidian’s exposed neck.

  “What?” Vidian swatted at the hovering droid, sending it tumbling into a far wall. He fell to his hands and knees.

  A large door opened within the floor. Vidian’s throne rose into the room. Skelly sat on it, with Zaluna standing beside it, holding the remote control for the droid.

  “I don’t think that’s truth serum,” Hera said.

  “It sure isn’t.” Skelly patted the small mountain of vials in his lap. “I know my pharmaceuticals.” He grinned through broken teeth at Vidian. “Nighty-night, sweetheart.”

  Lying diagonally on a separate table from Vidian, Skelly enjoyed a bacta rub from one of the count’s medical droids. “I don’t know about you guys,” he said, “but I think we delete him. Enough’s enough.”

  Kanan rubbed his throat. “Show of hands on that one?”

  Skelly forced his right hand up with his left.

  Hera shook her head. “I want to do the right thing here,” she said. “I’m not against killing if it’s necessary. But something strange is going on. I want to know that killing him won’t cause something worse!”

  “Worse than him blowing up the moon and leaving Gorse a graveyard?” Skelly asked.

  Hera shook her head. “No, I mean—bad, but different. If we assassinate Vidian here and now, and we’re caught, the Empire’s going to think it’s got a rebellion on Gorse!”

  “A rebellion? There?” Kanan chuckled. “It’s not exactly a hotbed of political thought.”

  “It’ll get hot when the purges start,” Hera said. She pointed to Zaluna, working at a console at her side. “Zal knows better than anyone—they’ve been taking names. It won’t be random, like rocks dropped out of the sky. It’ll be targeted.” Hera blinked. “Or maybe it will be random, whole neighborhoods firebombed from orbit just to make an example!”

  Zaluna goggled. “Has … has that happened before?”

  Hera looked away. “You don’t see everything,” she said softly.

  Silence fell across the room. Vidian had been as good as his word on a couple of things, at least: As far as they knew, no one outside had heard anything from within his chamber, and no one had seen the fight. Zaluna had already swept for cams. Kanan had wondered why Vidian wanted protection from the eyes of his own people. But at least his room didn’t suffer from lack of restraining devices. They’d move him into the stasis field if he started to stir—but according to the medical droid, Skelly’s cocktail would keep him out for a couple of hours.

  Which it looked like they would need. “There’s no getting into this system,” Zaluna said in frustration.

  Hera shook her head. “Still the last passkey?”

  “It’s a code, entered by hand,” the woman said. “He couldn’t do it by voice. If there was a cam or something around here, maybe it would have seen. There’d be something I could look at. But there isn’t.”

  The room fell silent again.

  Kanan stared. “Wait a second. Maybe there is.” He stepped over to Vidian and turned the man’s head. There, in his left ear, he saw a small dataport. A moment’s revulsion struck and passed. “All right,” he said. “Who wants to download Vidian’s brain?”

  Zaluna sat at the portable terminal next to Vidian’s bed and looked back along the clear thin wire. It stretched to a dataport hidden in the count’s ear. “This is the strangest thing I’ve ever done. And after the last couple of days, that’s saying something.”

  Kanan laughed and moved a piece of fallen equipment that was obstructing the holoprojector. “We’re clear,” he said. “Show us what he’s got.”

  “I’ve deactivated his eyes and ears so they’re not recording, and I’ve also deleted his entire encounter with us,” Zaluna said. “That’s pretty easy. But I can only show you what he’s seen in the last day—that must be this subsystem’s limit.” She pushed a button. “There.”

  The lights in the room dimmed. Across the floor from Vidian’s throne, life-sized holographic images appeared, cast by the overhead emitter. The holograms were simply stereoscopic, comprising images from Vidian’s left and right eyes—but they had unusual crispness and depth.

  Hera shook her head in amazement. “We’re seeing through Vidian’s eyes!”

  “Yeah,” Kanan said. “Makes you want to throw up.”

  Zaluna forwarded and reversed the visions through elapsed time, stopping only for a fraction of a second before setting them moving again. The images came and went so quickly that Kanan was often unsure what he was looking at, but the Sullustan seemed to know. “You can watch that fast?” he asked.

  “Every day for thirty years,” Zaluna said, manipulating the controls. She seemed more comfortable than he’d ever seen her. “Most people’s lives aren’t very interesting. You learn to skip around pretty quickly.”

  She reached a stretch seemingly recorded recently, here in the sanctum. A data terminal came into view—the one across the room. “There,” Hera said.

  Zaluna was way ahead of her. “He’s entering his data key,” she said, framing the sequence backward. “Right … here.”

  Hera quickly read the code and dashed to the terminal on the far side of the room. A few seconds later, she called back happily, “We’re in!”

  Skelly, nicely medicated, hobbled over. “What have you got?”

  “The list of subspace data messages to Coruscant,” Hera said, reading. She frowned. “He’s already sent the Cynda test results to the Emperor.”

  Skelly found a chair and pulled it up beside her. “Find the original. We’ll create a revised version, saying the tests failed. We’ll say there was a measurement error.”

  “I don’t know if we can send anything. It looks like accessing the Emperor’s direct channel requires a different passkey. He must have entered it earlier and logged out.”

  “It must have been a while earlier,” Zaluna said, still searching through the images from his eyes. “There’s no other code being entered.”

  “We can’t get lucky twice,” Hera said. “But maybe there’s another way.” Her fingers moved quickly on the controls. “Here’s the file with the lunar test results. Let’s have a look.”

  Skelly looked on as Hera began reading. After a few moments, she paused, staring at the screen in bewilderment. “This is confusing.”

  “I’m sure it’s technical,” Kanan said. “That’s why we brought Skelly, to lie in their language.”

  “That’s not why it’s confusing,” Hera said, exiting the document to look at another. “I can’t do it.”

  “You can’t make the change?”

  “No, there’s no need,” she replied, both surprised and confused. “The original results already say that the test blast caused most of the thorilide to disintegrate. The version Vidian sent the Emperor was a lie.”

  “What?” Kanan had begun to think a year wouldn’t be enough for them to make sense of the count’s world.

  Hera read aloud from it. The original report said there was thorilide in the space debris kicked up by the blast that had killed Okadiah, but that much of it had been destroyed outright. An exponentially progressive decay process had been triggered in the rest; within a year of the moon’s destruction, all unharvested thorilide would cease to be. And yet Vidian had told the Emperor there was a two-thousand-year supply. Hera was flabbergasted. “Why would he want to destroy Cynda when it’ll ruin the thing he’s there to get?”

  Kanan had the same question. “Who gets to destroy something the Emperor wants?”

  Zaluna looked at Hera. “You don’t think …”

  “That he’s a revolutionary, like me?” Hera stifled a laugh. “I doubt it. Thi
s seems like a good way to wind up dead.”

  “Or with a desk job on Kessel,” Kanan said.

  Skelly rubbed one of his bruises. “Well, we know he’s a sadistic crazoid. Maybe that’s enough, in his world.”

  Hera shook her head. “He’s not suicidal. There’s got to be a reason he wants to do it, and a reason he’s not worried.”

  The room fell silent, except for the quiet clicking of Zaluna’s hologram controller as she continued to follow Vidian throughout his day.

  Kanan found Vidian’s chair and collapsed on it. He cast his tired gaze onto the flood of images. It was the ultimate spy tool, he’d thought—but all it had gotten them so far was the passcode. He looked down to the floor.

  And then back up, where an image caught his eye. “Frame that back,” he said.

  Zaluna complied. “Now, there’s a well-dressed man,” she said. It was a young blond human, wearing regal business attire: a richly decorated suit of clothes, with gold buttons and a half cape slung over his right shoulder. But the image seemed different from the other pictures they’d seen. “The resolution of this image is different from everything else. Strange.”

  Hera saw the figure. “That’s Baron Danthe, the droid magnate.” Hera seemed to know everything, as usual, but now she seemed confused. “He’s in Imperial government, too—he’s Vidian’s attaché, back on Coruscant. I found him in my research. He was here?”

  “He wasn’t here,” Kanan said, snapping his fingers. “He looks different because he’s a hologram.”

  “A hologram in a hologram? Shouldn’t he be blue and fuzzy?”

  Zaluna shook her head as she adjusted the controls. “Not if Vidian has messages piped straight to his eyes. And it’s a message, all right. It looks like Vidian saved the audio from the conversation.”

  The images began to move, and they heard Vidian’s disembodied voice. “Baron Danthe, how can I do my work if you won’t leave me alone?”