The Rise of the Empire: Star Wars: Featuring the novels Star Wars: Tarkin, Star Wars: A New Dawn, and 3 all-new short stories

by John Jackson Miller

  “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. This 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?”

  “I’m only the messenger. The Emperor wants immediate assurance you can make this year’s thorilide quota,” the young man said.

  “My plans will yield all the Emperor requires—providing you don’t talk him into raising the totals again.”

  “Count, I’m hurt. I would never—”

  “Spare me. I’m about to send His Imperial Majesty the report.”

  “Wonderful. If you would copy me on that—”

  “I will not. This is my domain, not yours.” A pause. “If you want the responsibility so much, Baron Danthe, fine. After I successfully meet the Emperor’s targets this year I’ll ask that he transfer management of Gorse to your office.”

  “That’s generous, my lord. I don’t know what to—”

  “Say nothing. Just stay out of my affairs!” The image of the baron disappeared.

  “Boy, they don’t like each other at all,” Kanan said. “Did you catch the smirk on that baron guy’s face? I wouldn’t trust him to hold the door open for me.”

  “It makes sense,” Hera said. “The Emperor’s leaning on Vidian to make a quota, so Vidian’s got to crack Cynda like an egg. He gets a year’s worth of thorilide, so he makes his quota. And by the time it runs out prematurely, Danthe will be left holding the bag!”

  “Evil,” Kanan said, regarding the motionless Vidian. “I knew he had it in him.”

  “Wait a minute,” Skelly said. “The Emperor wouldn’t take Vidian’s word on this report. Vidian’s a management guy, not a scientist. What’s the name on that report?”

  Hera looked at the screen again. “I can’t believe I missed this. Lemuel Tharsa!”

  Kanan blinked. “That name again. Who was he?”

  Hera whipped out a datapad from her pocket. “I found that earlier. According to the HoloNet, for fifteen years Lemuel Tharsa has served as chief analyst with Minerax Consulting, producing studies on raw materials for private and, more recently, Imperial government use.”

  Zaluna perked up. “That’s the man someone on the Star Destroyer asked us about. There wasn’t much on the data cube about him—just the standard bioscan at customs.”

  Hera looked at her. “Check Moonglow’s refinery, twenty or so years ago. I found he’d been issued entry credentials.”

  “Ah,” Zaluna said. She opened her bag and produced Hetto’s data cube. Switching off the link to Vidian’s visual memory, she connected the cube to the terminal she was working at. “Moonglow was Introsphere then. We were definitely monitoring the building.”

  Skelly rolled his eyes. “Why am I not surprised?”

  “A lot of this old material hasn’t been mined—we probably didn’t know where to start, when the inquiry came in.” Zaluna’s nimble fingers flew across the console. “I’m running a visual search on the name, limited to security badges.”

  “What can’t you do?” Kanan rubbed his forehead. Hiding his Force talents even from himself made a lot more sense, now.

  “Got him,” Zaluna said. “Here he is.” The holoprojector activated again, and a human male appeared. Kanan stood and approached the life-sized image.

  The biometric data Zaluna had found in the customs files said the man was just shy of thirty at the time of the visit, but he looked far older: like a harried middle manager, prematurely balding, with a few tufts of rust-colored hair hanging on. His suit was dingy, his shoes scuffed. He could have been anyone.

  And yet Kanan thought there was something oddly familiar about Lemuel Tharsa. His posture, his gestures as he ranted to an executive who clearly couldn’t have cared less what he was saying. “What is he saying?” Kanan asked.

  “Looks like we only caught a snippet.” Zaluna pressed a button.

  “…don’t have to tell you people again what the guild’s safety rules are. It’s the same everywhere in the trade. You’ve been doing it wrong. Forget the old way!”

  Skelly laughed. “There’s old Vidian’s motto, before Vidian said it.”

  Kanan and Hera looked at each other, at the prone count, and then back at the image. The voice was different, for sure, but the intonation was similar. Hera rose and approached Zaluna. “You said there were biometrics on Tharsa?”

  “Right here.” Zaluna punched them up on the console. “We do a little work with them at Transcept. The main spaceport requires them of all arriving visitors.” Kanan bristled, glad he’d arrived on a tramp freighter that avoided that routine.

  “I can’t believe I’m going to ask this.” Hera glanced over at Vidian. “Is Vidian’s biodata in that medical console?”

  “It should be.” Catching Hera’s drift, Zaluna ran a comparison. The results appeared on her screen. “Genetic markers are identical with Tharsa’s sample on entry. No way to compare eyes, voice, or prints—but somewhere in there, that’s the same guy.”

  “Whoa,” Skelly said, looking between Vidian and the image of Tharsa. He scratched his head. “No, no. That’s wrong. I saw the biography piece on the HoloNet. Vidian was a defense contractor, nearly died of Shilmer’s syndrome. He wasn’t some safety inspector.” He chuckled. “How ironic would that be?”

  “Very,” Hera said, studying the results. “But that’s him.”

  Skelly was stunned. “Then Vidian’s war bio was a hoax? He was supposed to have been a whistleblower, helping the troops!”

  Hera gave Skelly a sympathetic look. “Come on, are you really surprised?”

  Skelly threw up his hands. “It’s more fun when I think of the conspiracies.”

  “So Tharsa got sick and became Vidian.” Kanan crossed his arms. “Was that on Gorse, too? Are there medcenter records?”

  “The Republic had privacy laws, then,” Zaluna said. “It was the one place we didn’t have access. The only records would be on the site.”

  “Or not.” Hera’s brow furrowed. “Vidian had a medcenter demolished on his visit. But I don’t know why he’d care about covering his tracks now—or why someone on the Ultimatum would be asking about Tharsa.”

  Kanan looked at her, puzzled. “That’s not the only thing I don’t get. Why wouldn’t he keep his original name?”

  Hera thought for a moment—and brightened. “Because he wanted to keep Tharsa alive. He’s still on the Imperial rolls as an adviser, remember?” She rushed back to the terminal on the far side of the room. She pointed at the screen. “And look what he’s been responsible for!”

  Kanan stepped behind her and read. It was a long list of things, some dated recently. “I…don’t get it. What are these?”

  Hera ran her finger down the entries on the screen. “Technical reports from Minerax Consulting. Tharsa’s name is on many of them as the preparer.” Her eyes scanned the titles. “There ar
e dozens of worlds, dozens of projects. Some are things Vidian worked on for the Empire—and some are before, from back in the Republic days.”

  “He’s his own independent auditor?” Skelly hooted. “There’s an efficient way to bilk your customers. Do your own fraudulent research!” He leered at Vidian’s motionless body. “I’m impressed. You’re the master. Really.”

  Kanan nodded. Things were falling into place. If some Imperial was asking around about Tharsa, maybe Vidian had covered his tracks on Gorse to keep anyone from making the connection. Tharsa’s name would still be good with the Emperor, providing he didn’t suspect anything; Vidian’s plan to destroy the moon would sail through.

  Hera squinted. “There’s another file here tagged with Tharsa’s name—older, but accessed today. But I can’t get it open.”

  “No problem,” Kanan said, turning. “Zal?”

  “Reporting,” Zaluna said, skipping over the cable attached to Vidian’s head.

  Hera stood up and stepped over to Kanan. He smiled at her. “This is something, right?”

  “It’s something,” she said, looking around at the outer doors. “I’m just not sure what.”

  “We send the correct version to the Emperor, that’s what,” Kanan said.

  “Not on that system,” Hera said. “And I don’t exactly think the Emperor checks his own messages—particularly not ones from random dissidents.”

  She turned her eyes to the ceiling. She had that look again, the one that said she was five moves ahead of him in whatever game it was she was playing. He liked the look, even if it made him a little uncomfortable. He looked back. “Any luck, Zal?”

  “I can’t decrypt it,” Zaluna said. “I’m not a slicer. Kidnap one of those next time.”

  Kanan looked over at Vidian. Time was running out. They could dose the count again—but someone would be around for him eventually.

  Kanan looked at Hera. “You really think there’s something important in that file?”

  She nodded. “It’s the only one protected like that. And,” she added, cautiously, “I’ve got a feeling.”