Before the Storm

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  The Historic Battle Site Protection Act established more than two dozen restricted areas and claimed ownership of all combat debris everywhere in the name of the Alliance War Museum. But security, not history, was the prime concern. Many observers credited the explosion of a thermal detonator in a wealthy residential zone on Givin and a Rudrig crime ring’s use of an Imperial interrogator droid on a kidnap victim with putting the fear into the Senate.

  But a declaration of ownership by Coruscant only made the traffic in artifacts illegal—it didn’t end it. That took gunship patrols through the restricted areas, the arrest of the notorious Huttese smuggler Uta, and the seizure of weapons and other exotic collectibles from the upper-class customers of a well-known Imperial City art dealer. Even at that, the arrival of Steadfast had twice sent would-be poachers running, and the debris fields it had surveyed so far had all seemed picked over.

  “I have a positive identification on the wreck, Lieutenant,” a junior Intelligence officer called out. “It’s the I-class Star Destroyer Gnisnal, our registry number SD-489. Reported destroyed by internal explosions during the Imperial evacuation of Narth and Ihopek. The report is from Alliance sources.”

  “All right,” said Norda Proi, nodding. “Let’s move in.”

  First aboard the wreck were half a dozen scanning and monitoring droids, which jetted across to it on their own power while the Steadfast held station a safe distance away.

  Working in pairs, so that anything that happened to one would be documented by the other, the droids fanned out according to a search plan tailored to that class of vessel. The priorities were live weapons, known booby traps, and other possible hazards to the living, breathing search teams that were ready to follow.

  The threats were not merely theoretical. The junker Selonia had been badly damaged when a poacher’s bomb disguised as a datapad went off in its hold. A year earlier, the ironically named surveyor Foresight had been destroyed by autofiring laser cannon when search teams tripped an alarm inside an abandoned Imperial cruiser.

  But one rule of thumb had never failed the scavengers—if the droids found bodies aboard, there would be no bombs. Imperial guile did not extend to using the bodies of their own as bait for their enemies, and poachers—out of superstition or respect—always cleared the corridors and compartments of corpses.

  Still, Norda Proi found that it made him uncomfortable to be gladdened by the sight of bodies aboard the Gnisnal.

  “Did you hear about the fellow Republic Security arrested on Derra Four last month?” Proi asked, studying the images being relayed to Steadfast by SM-6. “He had eleven Imperial corpses in cryotanks in a hangar, all of them in full armor or deck uniform. Crazy.”

  “I heard,” said Captain Oolas. “Crazy and sad. Apparently he was keeping them until his son was old enough to be told what happened to his mother during the occupation. Seems he planned to hand his son whatever weapon he wanted and let him take his revenge.”

  “I’m glad I had a normal father,” Proi said, switching the display to the signal from SM-1.

  Captain Oolas sat back and folded his hands on his lap. “I’m glad my homeworld was never occupied by the Empire.”

  At that moment, SM-1 bumped against a floating body, sending it slowly cartwheeling away. But for just a moment, the face of a dead Imperial petty officer—burned by fire or explosion and blistered by decompression—seemed to hover in front of the droid’s optical scanner.

  “You know, Lieutenant,” said Oolas, “even a just war doesn’t look quite so gloriously heroic to those of us who have to pick up afterward.”

  “I won’t disagree,” said Proi. “I’m glad it’s over.”

  The droid team of SM-3 and SM-4 found what was left of the power and propulsion decks of the Gnisnal: a jungle of scorched and twisted durasteel yawning open to space.

  “The explosion was internal, all right,” Norda Proi said after studying the side-by-side images sent back by the droids. “Looks like a failure of the primary transfer coupling for the solar ionization reactor. Which is about as foolproof a piece of equipment as there is aboard a Star Destroyer.”

  “Sabotage?”

  “Or plain bad luck,” said Proi. “Whatever happened, it dropped the hyperspace motivator right down the pipe into the reactor core. The secondary explosion broke her back and carried away just about everything below the twenty-sixth deck. Poor sods wouldn’t have had any warning at all. Concussion alone probably killed most everyone on the upper decks.”

  Proi switched to the signal from SM-5 and SM-6, which were slowly making their way to the bridge.

  “Ensign, what would the normal ship’s complement be for the intact portion of the Gnisnal?”

  “One moment, sir,” said the rating, leaning over his console. “At battle stations, approximately twelve thousand. At normal watch stations, approximately seven thousand, four hundred.”

  “Too many to take home,” said Oolas.

  Norda Proi shook his head. “Chances are half the crew or more was comprised of conscripts, most of them from what are now New Republic worlds,” he said. “I’ll put in a request to have a fleet transport diverted here to take the overflow.”

  The primary operator for SM-1 sat beside data analysis droid DA-1 at a console in Steadfast’s forward hold. Together they monitored in real time the steady stream of images and sensor data from inside Gnisnal. A few steps away sat the operator for SM-2 and his analysis droid, performing the same tasks in parallel.

  The primary task for the droids and their operators was to inventory the ship’s hangars, which had been located forward of the reactor, and its gun batteries, which ordinarily bristled from every face of the wedge-shaped main hull. But enough of the ship was missing that that task was well ahead of schedule. Both droids were already well aft, in the sections below the Star Destroyer’s superstructure.

  Gnisnal’s hull was intact there, and the droids moved through the outer corridors on the port side without difficulty or obstruction. But when they turned down an inner corridor leading to the aft emplacements, alarms began sounding at both consoles.

  “Ambient light detected,” DA-1 announced. But it was obvious to both operators without interpretation—the corridor ahead was brightly lit by its own overhead lights.

  Immediately, the operator paged the Steadfast’s bridge. “Lieutenant Proi, this is Makki on Number One. Sir, the lights are on in Corridor R, Level Ninety. There’s still power aboard.” The operator’s voice was shadowed by concern.

  “Interesting,” said Oolas, glancing at the range marker on the navigation display.

  “Redundant systems,” Proi said, frowning, calling a three-view plan of the ship to his display. “That section is served by the Number Four power cell, backed up by the Number Eight. I guess one of them’s still working. Give the Imps credit, they built those babies to last.”

  “Should I have the helmsman put a little more distance between us and the wreck?” Oolas’s upper tentacles wrapped themselves protectively around his thin neck as he spoke, showing his nervousness.

  “No,” Proi said. He frowned, seemingly lost in thought. “That’s combat lighting, not emergency lighting. You know—as quickly as this ship went bad, there’s a chance they didn’t have time to initiate a purge—Makki, you there?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Any signs of movement? Any vibration or hot spots in the bulkheads?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then I want you to check something for me,” he said. “Send the droid up to Level Ninety-six, Corridor Q.”

  “What’s there?” asked Oolas.

  Norda Proi shook his head. “Wait. I’m superstitious about wishing out loud.”

  With its twin following, SM-1 entered a turbolift shaft and began rising toward Level Ninety-six. Oolas watched anxiously, while Proi watched with silent anticipation. When the first droid had cleared the shaft, they saw an abandoned guardpost by a set of open blast doors. Thousands of jagged, glittery fragme
nts drifted in the air like snow.

  “The viewports on this level must have imploded after the explosion,” said Oolas.

  “No—too thin. Those are fragments from display screens,” Proi said. “Which tells me we’re in the right place. Makki, turn to starboard. Forward, now. Through the blast doors. Look for an access corridor on the right, about twenty meters ahead.”

  The droid’s maneuvering jets stirred the cloud of fragments into frantic motion as it made its way along, finding and turning down the access corridor. Before long, the corridor opened into a large, high-ceilinged room.

  More than forty workstations, their displays all shattered, were arrayed in two half-circles. All faced the two-meter-tall metallic cylinder that stood like an unfinished sculpture on a platform against the far wall. Hanging on the wall to either side of the cylinder were digital display panels as wide as blast doors. An ever-changing array of multicolored messages in Basic and binary filled most of the face of the left panel.

  “By my mother’s jewels—” Proi said in awe.

  “What is it?”

  “Our express ticket back to Coruscant,” said Lieutenant Norda Proi. “An intact Imperial memory core.”

  The Number 4 memory core from the Star Destroyer Gnisnal stood in a Technical Section laboratory coupled to three heavy-duty power droids in a cascade chain. One droid was sufficient to keep the core’s tiers and channels from collapsing; the others were insurance. The contents of the memory core were too valuable to risk.

  Accessing the contents, though, required knowing which of more than a hundred Imperial data sequencing algorithms had been used to write information to the core. And that knowledge was not stored anywhere in the core itself, but in the dual system controllers—which had not survived the destruction of the ship.

  Only fourteen of those algorithms were known in detail to the experts of the Technical Section. In the first day the Gnisnal core was in the laboratory, all fourteen were tried on it, without success. The contents of the core poured out as seemingly impenetrable gibberish.

  Five different teams made up of crack information-science specialists aided by speedy analysis droids immediately set out to find the patterns in the gibberish. Using files captured from other Imperial vessels as a guide, they searched through the digital jigsaw puzzle for pieces that went together. Even a few short strings could be enough to allow the droids to re-create the unknown algorithm, and unlock whatever secrets the memory core held.

  Jarse Motempe’s Team 3 assembled the first fragmentary string, made up of the names and ranks of two of Gnisnal’s command officers. Within a day Team 5 had found an even longer string containing a standard Imperial hypercomm message header.

  The final breakthrough belonged to Motempe again—the complete fifteen-point standing maintenance order for a TIE bomber. Its more than fourteen hundred sequential data bits seemed to map every detail of the new algorithm. Confirmation came quickly: The first file reconstructed was the ship’s duty roster. The second was its daily communications log for the day it was destroyed.

  After that, things moved very quickly. An interface droid was programmed with the new algorithm and linked to the Gnisnal core, and this time tens of thousand of object and data files poured forth instead of gibberish. Each file was copied, tagged, classified, and forwarded to the Analysis Section for distribution.

  One of them, given the ID number AK031995 and a priority code of Most Urgent, ended up in the hands of Ayddar Nylykerka.

  Officially, Ayddar Nylykerka was a cataloger, and his assignment was Asset Tracking. Practically, that meant he made lists, requested lists, collected lists, collated lists, cross-indexed lists. All of the lists concerned the same subject—Imperial warships.

  The Asset Tracking office had been set up in the wake of an intelligence failure that had nearly led to disaster. Grand Admiral Thrawn had been the first to rediscover the more than a hundred hidden Old Republic Dreadnaughts known as the Katana fleet, and had managed to seize the great majority of them before the New Republic caught up. Thrawn’s vastly strengthened fleet then attacked more than twenty New Republic systems. By the time he was defeated, a great price had been paid in lives and material.

  Asset Tracking existed to make sure that there were no more such painful surprises.

  But the office had undergone many changes since it had been established. At first it enjoyed a staff of fifteen—eight researchers, three catalogers, two analysts, and two clerical droids. The size of the staff reflected the importance given the task, and the chief analyst was invariably well connected in the Fleet Office. Reports from the Asset Tracking office regularly received high-level attention.

  Over time, however, the office’s star faded. The easy work was done early, and each report contained less new and useful information. The passage of time raised doubts about the usefulness of Asset Tracking assessments, since it gave potential enemies the chance to build and launch new vessels. Little by little, staff was reassigned to higher-priority tasks, and the positions that remained came to be viewed as career dead ends. Those who could get out, did—except for Ayddar Nylykerka.

  At the time the Gnisnal intelligence reached him, Ayddar Nylykerka was the Asset Tracking office. Starting out as a researcher, he had moved up to cataloger when no one else had seemed to want the job, and had added the analyst’s hat when the office’s last licensed analyst had been reassigned. For more than seven years he had carried the burden alone. He had the smallest cubicle in the Threat Assessment section, no more than a box with a door. To go with the absence of creature comforts, he also had no staff, no status or perks, and no contacts to tell him where file AK031995 had come from.

  Ayddar Nylykerka did not know about the evacuation of Narth and Ipotek, the destruction of the Gnisnal, or the discoveries of the Steadfast. He had never heard of Captain Oolas, Norda Proi, Jarse Motempe, or any of the others whose work had brought the file to him. He was not aware that outside his cubicle walls he was considered laughably humorless and harmlessly obsessive.

  But he knew his job, which had not changed since the office had been established: to inventory and determine the status of every warship known to the New Republic and not under the control of the New Republic.

  And he knew that in the entire history of the Asset Tracking office, it had never before had available to it what he now had before him: a complete Imperial order of battle.

  It was all there: Every warship, by name, class, callsign, and commander, assigned to every fleet and combat command. Every fighter, interceptor, bomber, and assault squadron posted to every SD, SSD, carrier, and Dreadnaught, with squadron strengths detailed. Every stormtrooper company and infantry battalion assigned to every transport, occupation force, outpost, and fort. Every cripple in a drydock and every keel in a shipyard, with projected repair and completion dates. Even the second-tier vessels allocated to training commands were included.

  The datestamp on the file was more than ten years old, but it was still a treasure beyond price. The order of battle encompassed information far beyond that which ordinary snip captains and task force commanders would have at their disposal, information that only a ranking sector commander or the Emperor’s own military aides would possess.

  And that made Ayddar Nylykerka suspicious—suspicious enough to spend the next several hours trying to show that the file was a fraud, a late-discovered Imperial disinformation trick.

  When he could not do so, he called his wives and told them not to expect him that night.

  Then he threw himself into the real task before him: finding something in AK031995 to justify the last seven years of his professional life, something to remind everyone in the Fleet Command that the Asset Tracking office existed for a reason. Having authenticated the order of battle with his highest-confidence intelligence, he put his faith behind it, certain that he would never have such an opportunity again.

  As he studied the data, the unofficial motto of the Intelligence Section lingered in his m
ind: As dangerous as what we don’t know are the things we “know” that aren’t so.

  Ayddar Nylykerka did not leave his desk for three days. When at last he did, it was not to go home. With his datapad tucked tightly under his arm, he ordered an airspeeder from the pool and headed for Victory Lake.

  The Coruscant home of Admiral Ackbar was made up of two squat off-white cylinders. One cylinder, windowless, rose from the grassy shore of Victory Lake. The other, half transparisteel, rose from the tranquil blue water. They were linked by a third cylinder, a long, slender shape that enclosed a second-story skywalk. A graceful single-seat Calamari water skimmer was moored to a pylon in the lake.

  Ayddar’s Fleet ID was enough to get him past the guardpost at the security perimeter, though he was obliged to surrender his datapad for screening, then park the airspeeder and walk up to the house. There he presented himself at the entrance to the lakeshore cylinder.

  “Ayddar Nylykerka, chief analyst of the Asset Tracking office, Intelligence Section, Fleet Command, to see Admiral Ackbar.”

  A few seconds later the curved door flashed open with a hiss to reveal a Fleet valet droid. Folding its arms across its chest, it seemed to take up the whole doorway. “Analyst, Admiral Ackbar doesn’t see anyone below the rank of commodore when he’s home,” the droid said. “He spends enough time out of water as it is. Call his office in the morning and ask for an appointment.”

  Ayddar stared disbelievingly. “You don’t understand. This is important.”

  “Then it’s important enough to disturb your immediate superior first,” the droid said. “Run it up through channels. The admiral will consider it if and when it reaches his desk.”