THE BLACK FLEET CRISIS #3 - TYRANTS_TEST

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  people. There are so many stories about you, Han Solo--more than are

  told of any Yevetha, even the viceroy. I wonder why you permit it."

  He paused a moment, then continued. "This is also how we knew that

  Lieutenant Barth was not

  important. There were no stories of his life and heroics.

  I was not surprised when you let him die."

  Han's hot flash of anger overwhelmed any good intentions he had not to

  be drawn into Tal Fraan's game. "You son of a bitch--you think you

  understand us, but you haven't the first clue," he snapped. "What you

  did to Barth makes him important to us--just like what you did to those

  colonists all over the Cluster made them important to us. We're not

  like you--we remember our dead. That's why our fleet isn't going

  away."

  Other than a twitch of his forebrow ridges, Tal Fraan showed no outward

  reaction whatever to Han's outburst. "I have an interesting question

  for you, Han Solo--do you think that your mate would be willing to fire

  through your body to kill my master?"

  "Is that what this is about? Is that why I'm being moved?" Han looked

  out at the swiftly darkening sky enveloping the shuttle, at the rich

  array of bright stars piercing the curtain. "When you can answer that

  question yourself, Proctor, then you really will understand us as well

  as you think you do."

  "So coy," said Tal Fraan. "Is the answer that distasteful to you?"

  "All I'm gonna say is this," Han said, relaxing against the back of the

  bench and turning a quietly murderous gaze on the Yevetha. "When your

  last morning arrives--and it'll come sooner than you think--I hope the

  fates give you a moment to realize that everything that's happened, you

  brought on yourself."

  "You are kind to show such concern for me," Tal Fraan said, nodding and

  smiling generously. "We will have to talk again. You have been most

  helpful."

  As Han gritted his teeth Tal Fraan peered past him out the viewport at

  the massive Star Destroyer Pride of Yevetha, which had just come into

  view.

  "Such a splendid vessel. The sight of it still inspires my blood," he

  said with open pride. "You should count yourself honored that the

  viceroy has allowed you to make it your new home."

  From the moment Han knew where he was bound, he had been picturing

  himself alone in one of the tiny isolation cells of a standard Imperial

  detention block. A Super-class Star Destroyer had six such detention

  blocks for crew discipline alone, and ten additional high-security

  blocks for enemy prisoners.

  But to Han's surprise, his four-guard escort led him to a different

  part of the ship, and a different sort of prison. Three of the ship's

  cargo areas had been designed for the secure transport of large numbers

  of slaves, refugees, or prisoners of war. Located adjacent to the

  large landing bays used by the SSD's bulk shuttles, each of the holding

  areas was equipped with minimal facilities--water taps, ventilation,

  and food dispensers--considered adequate for up to a thousand people.

  The holding area to which Han was taken, number two, was not even

  remotely that crowded. At a glance, Han guessed that there were no

  more than a hundred prisoners huddled along the walls or sprawled on

  the hard deck.

  Most took little or no notice of his arrival, but a small group,

  perhaps twenty strong, formed a large, ragged circle around him as he

  made his way toward a water tap. More than half a dozen species were

  represented in the circle, and they looked upon him with a mixture of

  dull-eyed curiosity and suspicion.

  "What world are you from?" asked a young woman in a brown

  fire-scorched caftan. She was either human or Andalese--her tousled

  hair might have concealed the latter's horn points, and the caftan was

  shapeless enough to hide the symbiosis grafts.

  "Coruscant," said Han. "And you?"

  "I was at the Morath pholikite mine number four, on Elcorth."

  The others began to crowd closer around him as they recited their own

  answers.

  "Taratan, of the Kubaz, nested at Morning Bell--" "I am Brakka

  Bar.akas, dothmir of New Brigia--"

  "Bek nar walae Ithak e Gotoma--" "Fogg Alait, assigned to Polneye--"

  "I am called Noloth by my brothers of the L'at H'kig--" "My home was

  Kojash. I am known as Jara ba Nylra--" "My stars," said Han, turning

  slowly, hands raised as though to fend them off. "Are there survivors

  here from all the colony worlds?"

  "All our homes were attacked by the silver spheres," said the woman who

  had spoken first. "Are we the only survivors?"

  "How much longer will we be here?" asked Noloth.

  "Do you think we can go home soon?" asked a slender alien who had not

  spoken before.

  Han swept his gaze across their faces. "I don't know," he said

  uncomfortably. "I'm just like you are--I don't know what's going on

  out there."

  The days immediately following the presentation to the Senate of a

  petition of recall against President Leia Organa Solo were full of the

  kind of moments that made Hiram Drayson despair of leaving the

  government in the hands of civilians.

  Moving quickly in the wake of the Ruling Council's vote, both Fleet

  Intelligence and New Republic Intelligence had intervened to prevent

  the news of Han's capture by the Yevetha from being released with the

  petition. Stripped of its supporting argument by the blue and silver

  SECURE seals, the petition ought--by all rights--to have foundered on

  arrival.

  But a Ruling Council had never passed such a judgment against a Senate

  President before, and novelty alone gave the petition an undeserved

  gravity. And the threat of prosecution for security violations could

  do nothing to rein in the rumors and leaks that blossomed to fill the

  information vacuum.

  Within twelve hours, Drayson's information filters had picked up an

  uncensored copy of Beruss's original complaint, an anonymous interview

  with one of Tampion's escort pilots, and even a holo that purported to

  show Jedi "commandos" in training for an imminent rescue mission. When

  Coruscant Prime led its morning packet with a feature titled "Where Is

  Han Solo?" and the New Republic Newsgrid answered with "Princess

  Leia's Personal War," Drayson knew that the battle had been lost.

  "You may as well release everything you have concerning Han," Drayson

  told Ackbar. "At this point, the official silence, the denials, look

  like admissions that there is something to hide. Leia should be

  getting a flood of sympathy over Han's situation--but with Borsk

  Fey'lya leaking everything he can get his hands on, and Doman Beruss

  appointing himself the champion of the public's right to 'full

  disclosure,' her stock is dropping almost by the hour."

  "I have urged her to that course," said Ackbar.

  "But she is protecting the children--they still do not know what has

  happened to their father."

  "That can't last much longer."

  "She is determined not to burden them with the truth," said Ackbar,

  shaking his head. "L
eia has told them that Han is on a secret mission

  for her, that they are not to believe anything they hear anywhere

  else.

  And Winter is keeping them away from anyone and anything that might

  contradict Leia's version."

  "Children aren't stupid," said Drayson. "Particularly not those

  children. I expect that they already know quite a bit more than she

  realizes."

  "It would not surprise me," said Ackbar. "But until events force her

  hand, Leia is determined to protect the children from the knowledge

  that their father is a prisoner of war. And I have personally promised

  to support that fiction."

  Disgruntled, Drayson retired to his private office with the

  ever-growing catalog of message packets, grid dispatches, comlink

  captures, and electronic graffiti assembled for him by the Maxwell

  filters that were riding

  the planet's busy communication channels. Later that afternoon,

  reports began to come in from his contacts in the palace complex and

  Fleet headquarters.

  By that time, Drayson had already made a decision about what was needed

  to change the tone and tenor of the public and political

  consciousness.

  His hastily jotted notes to himself read: Must erase the perception of

  selfish act--replace with the reality of selfless one. This crisis

  must have another face.

  Drayson spent the next hour browsing through the personnel records of

  the casualties of the engagement at Doornik 319. He marked four of

  them for further consideration husband-and-wife pilots from the battle

  cruiser Liberty, a female crew chief who died fighting the hangar fire

  aboard Venture, and the Hassarian captain of the ill-fated Trenchant.

  Each story had a powerful emotional hook; But their effectiveness in

  deflecting the focus from Leia and Han would be undercut by the fact

  that, coming so late in the crisis, all four deaths could be as easily

  blamed on Leia's actions as on Nil Spaar's. The tragedy was obvious;

  that the Yevetha were to blame was less so.

  So Drayson set the casualty records aside and retrieved his data

  folders concerning the eight destroyed colonies in Koornacht Cluster,

  including the stasis probes' documentation of the devastation.

  Assessing the cold realities of emotional kinship, Drayson knew that

  the most ready identification would be with the humanoid Brigians, the

  hard-working Morath miners on Elcorth, and the largely human

  inhabitants of Polneye.

  Which, in the end, brought Drayson to the same place his first

  instincts had said he must go, hours be-fore--to the young Grannan

  survivor from Polneye, Plat Mailar. It would have been better if

  Mallar were human, and of Polneye's historical associations were with

  the Alliance rather than the Empire, but those problems could be dealt

  with if addressed head on.

  The only question remaining was which provider was to receive the

  benefit of Drayson's gift-wrapped leadline scoop. Over the years, he

  had cultivated mutu ally helpful relationships with understanding

  producers in news organizations of all sizes, but rarely had the

  material been this hot or the stakes this high. He needed someone who

  not only would set the proper tone for the copycats hustling to catch

  up, but who also had the courage to risk a shutdown order, even the

  seizure of the studio facilities, to break a big story first, In the

  end, it came down to an old friend or a young idealist, and Drayson

  settled on the latter.

  "Open message to The Life Monitor, blind and secure," he said.

  "Personal to Cindel Towani. This is your shopping service. I want to

  alert you to a special offer, limited availability, your signature

  required .... " The initial release of the sixty-second issue of The

  Life Monitor reached fewer than a hundred thousand subscribers, and

  Belezaboth Ourn, extraordinary counsel of the Paqwepori, was not among

  them.

  But the lead producer of Capitol Scavenger was, and within an hour a

  licensed crosslink to Towani's feature had appeared in the rolling CS

  queue. That brought Plat Mallar's story to the attention of nearly

  half a million more viewers, including the senior night producer for

  Sunrise and the Senate correspondent for Roll Call.

  From there, it was picked up by Coruscant Global and New Republic

  Primeraboth of which gave as small a nod to Cindel Towani as possible,

  but ran the audio-video portion of her story uncut. By dawn, Mallar's

  achingly poignant plea on behalf of the inhabitants of Polneye had

  reached more than forty million ears on Coruscant and ridden the

  hypercomm trails to eighty thousand other New Republic worlds.

  By midday, it had even reached a destitute and dispirited Ourn.

  Both the flight crew of the wrecked Mother's Valkyrie and his consular

  staff had long since abandoned him. One by one, they had faced up to

  the failure and futility of their mission and disappeared, buying

  cheap

  passage to Paqwepori on their families' credit or with the proceeds

  from selling mission supplies and equipment in the no-name market

  halls. Cathacatin, the licensed breeder-keeper, had been the last to

  go, slaughtering the few remaining toko birds before he departed rather

  than see them suffer from neglect.

  Ourn's continued presence in the diplomatic hostel was strictly a

  courtesy, for he no longer had either the status or the resources to

  command a room, much less an entire cottage. First, Mother's Valkyrie

  was sold for salvage in a lien auction. Then half of the mission's

  line-of-account was attached by the port authorities as partial payment

  of the balance of the herthing fees. In the final humiliation, Ourn's

  appointment was revoked by Ilar Paqwe himself, and the diplomatic

  account closed.

  "You would save your parents from further embarrassment by not

  returning to the Paqwe dominion," Ourn was advised in the termination

  notice.

  Since that time, Ourn had clung ever more tightly to the frail reed of

  hope represented by the Yevethan blind-relay transmitter and the

  promise from Nil Spaar.

  If only the viceroy could appease his peers on N'zoth and deliver the

  thrustship as he had agreed he would--not only could Ourn repair his

  savaged reputation at home, but he would have a hundred generals and

  five hundred senators begging him for a chance to study the Yevethan

  vessel Ourn clung to that hope against all reason, mining the grids and

  the gossip in the hostel's courtyards for even the smallest tidbits of

  information, making himself believe that his next dispatch would be the

  one by which he would earn the Yevetha's confidence, and his reward.

  But when he saw the stories on Plat Mallar's narrow escape from Polneye

  and Captain Llotta's death at Morning Bell, that hope finally

  evaporated. There was no escaping the truth--the pretty silver spheres

  were also deadly warships, and Nil Spaar would never receive permission

  to deliver one to Belezaboth Ourn.

  "If only the peace had held a little longer," he said resignedly in the

  p
rivacy of his room. "If only the Prin cess had not been so

  stubborn.

  She has cost me everything."

  He picked up the hypercomm black box and turned it over in his hands.

  "So perhaps I shall ask her for my payment. Perhaps this toy is worth

  more than the words that have passed through it."

  There were a hundred things Leia should have been doing, a thousand

  better uses for her energy than lining a garden path with brilliant

  white sasalea blossoms, one fragrant ball--the size of Anakin's

  fist--to a planting. It was work a droid could do, work the

  residence's groundskeeper would have gladly seen to in the mornng.

  But none of those other things she might have been doing that evening

  had half the appeal of burying her hands in the cool, moist soil,

  crumbling it between her fingers, cradling each sasalea plant gently

  into its new home. On a day where nothing she had tackled had yielded

  to her efforts, it was intensely gratifying to take on a task where

  every element was under her control--spade and earth, stalk and

  blossom. Her vision, her time, her labor, her triumph, her

  satisfaction.

  It was a small triumph, a minor transformation of a tiny landscape, but

  it was balm for her whole beingm reassurance that she was, at the end

  of the day, master of her own world. If you don't believe that what

  you do matters, it's awfully hard to get up in the morning.

  "Princess--" Leia looked up from her work in surprise at the voice.