by Timothy Zahn
LaRone nodded acknowledgment. “Brightwater, you’ll swing around toward the main gate,” he ordered. “I want to know what their security looks like, including how many men they’ll have available to draw on when the balloon goes up. Grave, Quiller: you’re on flank. Marcross, you’re on point. You’ll lead Jade to your best choice of entrance and get her inside. I’ll take rear guard. We close up as soon as Marcross gets us in and re-form for quiet incursion. Grave, give Brightwater a hand with his speeder bike.”
Brightwater waddled his speeder bike to the wall, and together he and Grave maneuvered it through the opening. The scout trooper got on and took off with a subdued whine, heading to the left and the cover of the garden foliage. Grave and Quiller went next, branching to right and left, with Marcross behind them. LaRone took a step forward—
“A moment, Commander,” Jade murmured, putting a hand on his arm. “Sensible policy dictates that the second in command knows what the mission is.”
“Yes, ma’am,” LaRone said, feeling his heartbeat starting to pick up.
“Our target is Governor Choard,” she said. “He’s committed high treason, both in conspiring with pirates against Imperial shipping, and in sending the Reprisal to try to kill me on Gepparin. Those crimes have earned him the death penalty.”
“Understood,” LaRone said, a strange sense of unreality sifting into him like fine desert sand. It was one thing to sit out in space or at a pirate nest and talk about judgment and duty and principle. It was quite another to stand outside the palace of an Imperial governor and contemplate his execution in cold blood.
“Then let’s do it,” Jade said. Shifting her lightsaber to her left hand and drawing her blaster with her right, she slipped through the opening.
To defend the Empire and its citizens … Making sure the safety on his E-11 was off, LaRone climbed through behind her.
Chapter Twenty-two
GOVERNOR CHOARD APPARENTLY LIKED HIS gardens rough and primitive. Once they were through the wall and past a narrow brook that ran along the estate’s inner edge, they hit a wide patch of trees, closely spaced bushes, and reedy plants growing out of a ground cover composed mainly of flagstones interspersed with flakes of dead bark.
Oddly enough, for the first few minutes it seemed as if the enemy had completely missed their arrival. Mara saw and heard no one as they slipped through the trees and could sense no suddenly heightened alertness anywhere around them.
The patch of forest ran for about thirty meters, then abruptly gave way to a wide, grassy area, across which they could see a double row of comfortable outdoor chairs set up near the wall of the palace itself.
“That’s the game field,” Marcross said, pointing to the field. “That door behind the seats leads into a kitchen adjunct where refreshments can be set out for the players and spectators.”
“What’s past the adjunct?”
“The main kitchen,” Marcross said. “From there you can go to the first-floor private dining area, the formal dining room, or the main ballroom.”
“Stairs?”
“Closest set is behind the kitchen, off the service corridor,” Marcross said. “There’s a set of turbolifts there, too.”
Mara pursed her lips thoughtfully. It all looked very straightforward, as it was no doubt meant to. But as usual, looks were deceiving. The palace’s stylishly crenellated walls had been combined with careful placement of decorative colored lighting to create deeply shadowed indentations at regular intervals along the walls. Most of those nooks probably sheltered sentries—human, animal, or droid—with their eyes and other senses trained on the wide lawn she and the stormtroopers would have to cross.
But Mara still had a few tricks up her sleeve. A couple of minutes to surreptitiously move a small canister into place upwind, and an oddly persistent mist would begin drifting across the critical lines of sight.
LaRone muttered something under his breath and sidled closer to her. “Brightwater’s in sight of the main entrance,” he reported. “There are nearly fifty civilian landspeeders near there.”
Mara frowned. An emergency meeting of Choard’s fellow conspirators? “Could they be advisers in for a meeting?”
LaRone relayed the question. “The speeders are all too expensive for even high-ranking civil servants,” he said. “More likely Choard’s invited the city’s upper-class citizens to a dinner or party.”
“That could be awkward,” Mara said, peering again at the kitchen’s lighted windows. If Choard was feeding a roomful of guests, the kitchen might not be a good place to break in after all. “Marcross, what’s above the kitchen?”
“Directly above it is a storage area,” Marcross said. “Tables and extra chairs. Flanking the storage room are meeting rooms that open into the reception area outside the main ballroom—”
Suddenly, without warning, a huge dark mass of vines rose silently from the garden floor behind them.
There was a single startled curse as the four stormtroopers spun around, their blasters tracking toward the apparition. “No!” Mara barked.
But the warning came too late. Even as she ignited her lightsaber, four blaster bolts lanced out, striking the creature dead center. With a crackling roar, the whole mass burst into flame.
And with that, the stealthy part of their incursion came to an end. “Inside,” Mara snapped, closing down her lightsaber and bursting out from the bushes onto the exposed grassland.
“What the hell was that?” LaRone demanded as he caught up with her.
“Nouland flare,” Mara ground out. Shadowy figures were starting to emerge from the concealed guard nooks, the firelight flickering off their blaster rifles as they moved to cut off the intruders. “They’re used some places to smoke out intruders.”
LaRone snorted. “Quite literally, I see.”
“Exactly,” Mara agreed tightly. “Nonsentient, not really dangerous, but big and scary and very flammable. Must have been installed sometime after Marcross stopped coming here.”
The closest pair of sentries opened fire, their shots sizzling through the air past Mara’s head. LaRone sent a precise pair of shots in return, and one of the sentries flopped to the ground and lay still. Quiller, on LaRone’s other side, fired a single shot that took out the other of the pair. “What’s the new plan?” he called.
“Same as the old one,” Mara told him, slowing her pace enough to let them catch up. “Give me a wedge.”
The four stormtroopers moved around in front of her, LaRone and Marcross taking dual point, Quiller and Grave a little behind and outboard from them. Mara set herself in the center of the formation, carefully and systematically targeting the scattered pairs of guards converging on them. The air was filling with blaster bolts now as more of their opponents reached optimum firing range, and Mara heard one of the stormtroopers grunt as a shot found a way through his armor. They were halfway to the kitchen door now, the bolts starting to sizzle ever closer.
And then fifty meters away around a corner of the building two pairs of swoops appeared. Driving hard toward the intruders, apparently with little or no regard for the guards between them and their targets, they opened fire with underslung blaster cannons.
“Keep going!” Mara snapped, jamming her blaster back into its holster and igniting her lightsaber.
“Jade—” LaRone began.
“That’s an order,” Mara cut him off. Stepping out of the relative protection of their moving screen, she turned to face the incoming swoops.
To her surprise and chagrin, they ignored her completely. Instead they deliberately curved to stay on an intercept course with the stormtroopers.
Swallowing a curse, Mara snatched out her blaster again. Those cannons would make short work of even stormtrooper armor once they got close enough, and Mara had no intention of letting that happen. Thumbing the blaster’s setting to full auto to open the valve between the gas chamber and conversion enabler, she hurled it in a high arc toward the approaching swoops. Midway through its flight
she stretched out with the Force and caught it in a firm grip, tweaked its trajectory, and guided it to a spot just in front of the lead swoop and directly into the blaster cannon’s line of fire.
The resulting explosion, as such things went, was fairly tame. The cannon’s next shot shattered the blaster’s gas chamber housing, blowing the rest of the weapon apart and igniting a brief fireball as the remnants of the shot then activated the expanding gas.
But if the explosion itself wasn’t particularly impressive, its precise placement more than made up the difference. The force of the blast slammed into the swoop’s nose, causing the vehicle to rear up and back like a crazed animal.
The rider, the bulk of his attention on the stormtroopers, didn’t have a chance. For that first crucial second the swoop thrashed wildly beneath him as he fought to bring it back under control. It slammed sideways against his partner, and now there were two out-of-control swoops flailing across the yard.
The second pair, coming up behind them, swerved hard to get out of the way. They were curving around to bring themselves back on track when Grave and his T-28 nailed them both. Two shots later he had taken out the two flailing ones, as well.
“You coming?” LaRone called back to Mara.
“On my way,” Mara said. She paused first to deflect a pair of blaster bolts, then sprinted after the stormtroopers. They had reached the door, and LaRone was blasting away at a surprisingly stubborn door lock, when she caught up with them.
“Get back,” she ordered, quickly ending the lock’s resistance with a slash of her lightsaber. “You four get inside,” she went on as she pulled the door open. Beyond it, she caught a glimpse of kitchen equipment and frantically retreating kitchen staff but—as yet—no blasters. “Anything from Brightwater?”
“He’s got the gate personnel pinned down, including most of their vehicles,” LaRone told her. “He apologizes for the swoops—no idea where they came from.”
“Just tell him to watch himself,” Mara said, looking back at the converging guards. “Get inside—I’ll take rear guard. Seal the door behind you if you can.”
“What? But—”
“You have your orders, Commander,” Mara said sharply. “If I don’t make it, carry out the mission.”
“Yes, ma’am,” LaRone said, this time with the proper professional tone. “Good luck.” With a final salvo at the approaching guards, he and the other stormtroopers slipped inside and closed the door behind them.
Mara put her back to the door and for a few seconds continued to deflect the incoming blaster bolts. But her opponents were getting closer, the decreasing distance sharpening their aim, and she knew that within seconds even the camouflaging effects of her cloak and combat suit and a Force-driven defense would be unable to handle all of them.
She gave it two more seconds anyway, stretching her margin to the limit to give the stormtroopers more time to seal the door. Then, pushing off the wall for extra momentum, she sprinted outward toward the forest strip and the perimeter wall beyond.
She got two steps before the guards reacted to the move, and managed three more before the blaster bolts were once again tracking toward her. She took two more steps and then jammed her feet into the ground, spinning around as she brought herself to an abrupt halt. Bending her knees, lightsaber at the ready, she stretched to the Force for strength and jumped.
For a second she soared above the fury of the blasterfire as the guards once again tried to react to her unexpected tactic. She was above second-floor height now, nearly to third, the wall rushing up toward her as she hit the top of her arc and started back down again. As she reached the wall she slashed her lightsaber in a wide ring in front of her, cutting a circle through the stone. Tucking her knees to her chest, she slammed feetfirst into the center of the circle.
With a thunderous crash of breaking stone, the section of wall collapsed inward. The impact robbed Mara of her forward momentum, and for a heart-stopping second she teetered on the edge of the hole, fighting for balance. Then her free hand found a grip on the edge, and as the blaster bolts belatedly began to stab at her again, she pulled herself inside to safety.
She had ended up in the storage room Marcross had mentioned, empty except for two carts loaded with round fold-leg tables and three dollies stacked halfway to the low ceiling with ornate, high-backed chairs. A single door was visible at the far end. Closing down her lightsaber, she headed toward it.
She was halfway there when the hint of an odd smell twitched at her nose. Still moving, she started into her sensory enhancement techniques.
There was a sudden, loud splash at her feet. She looked down, rapidly cutting back on the enhancement to find that her last step had landed her in a pool of liquid. So far the pool was only a few millimeters deep, but as the edge flowed past her feet she could see it was getting deeper.
And that single enhanced sniff had left no doubt as to what the liquid was.
One of the two table carts was a couple of meters to her left. Instantly she leapt sideways up onto it, nearly braining herself against the ceiling as she did so. The tables rattled together as she hit them, and she had to grab a pair of the edges to keep from sliding off.
“Imperial agent? Celina, or whatever your real name is?”
Mara looked up, her eyes probing the darkened room. The voice had been muffled, which meant he was outside the door. Considering the liquid rapidly filling the room, she reflected grimly, outside was a very smart place for him to be. “I’m here, Caaldra,” she called back. The edge of the pool had made it nearly to the back wall now, leaving her stranded in the middle of the room. “Better give maintenance a call—you’ve got a serious leak in here.”
“And just in time, too,” Caaldra said. “I was expecting you to come through a window into one of the meeting rooms, not right through the wall like you did. Looks like I’ve ruined a couple of carpets over there for nothing.”
“You’re going to ruin a lot more than that if this stuff goes up,” Mara warned. “What is it about you and fire, anyway? Were you burned as a kid or something?”
“Not at all,” he assured her. “I’ve just learned over the years that fire and water are the two things even professionals usually aren’t prepared for.”
“I’ll have to remember that,” Mara promised.
“I’m sure you will,” Caaldra said. “And if you were thinking about jumping me when I came in with my handy igniter, don’t bother. The edge of the pool’s already seeped out into the reception area, which means I can touch off your private lake of fire without even opening the door.”
Mara grimaced. That had been the direction she’d been thinking, actually. Scratch that now. “Of course, you could have done that anywhere along the line, without nearly so much talk,” she pointed out. “From that I gather you want something.”
“Very perceptive,” Caaldra said approvingly. “I want to make a deal.”
Mara cocked an eyebrow. “I’m listening. Obviously.”
“Basically, I just want out,” Caaldra said. “Completely out. I leave Shelkonwa, you don’t file charges, no one comes after me.”
“And in return I get to leave here uncrisped?”
“That, plus I give you all the records you need to nail Chief Administrator Disra to the wall.”
“So Disra is in this, too?” Mara asked, looking around the room. No windows, no other doors, and the pool of flammable liquid was nearly ankle-deep now.
But there was the hole she’d cut in the outer wall. And there were those three stacks of chairs.
“He’s in it up to his neck,” Caaldra said contemptuously. “Actually, I think he’s been the head mover and shaker on this thing right from square one.”
“Really,” Mara said, stretching out with the Force to the topmost chair on the nearest stack. For a moment it stuck to the one beneath it, but then it came free. She floated it across the room and eased it to the floor about three meters from the end of her table cart in the direction of the hole
. “I’m surprised someone like Governor Choard would let anyone else run his show for him.”
“Choard’s show?” Caaldra snorted. “You must be kidding. That big stupid idiot doesn’t know a thing about any of this.”
Mara smiled tightly. “Nice try, Caaldra, but I know better. It takes a moff or full governor to order Imperial forces around. Not even a chief administrator can do that.”
“Who said he could?” Caaldra countered. “We weren’t going to order either of Shelsha’s garrisons around—we were going for straight-out destruction.”
“Don’t be dense,” Mara admonished as she moved a second chair into position, three meters past the first one. “I’m talking about the Reprisal’s attack on Gepparin.”
“The Reprisal?” Caaldra echoed. “You are on the wrong file heading, aren’t you? That didn’t have anything to do with us—it was Captain Ozzel trying to cover his own sorry tail. Trying to make sure you never lived to tell anyone about his deserters.”
Mara frowned. “His what?”
“His deserters.” Caaldra barked a laugh. “Oh, this is rare. Someone sets you up to get killed, and you don’t even know why?”
“Skip the gloating and enlighten me,” Mara growled.
“To put it in a clig shell, five of the Reprisal’s stormtroopers apparently killed an ISB major, stole one of their special ships, and made a run for it.”
Mara felt her breath freeze in her lungs. Five stormtroopers? “You know anything else about them?” she asked carefully.
“Only that ever since they took off they’ve been wandering around Shelsha sector poking their fingers into our plans,” Caaldra said with a snort. “First they spoiled a hijacking of some heavy blaster rifles we had our eyes on; then they knocked off a patroller chief we were positioning to lead the attack on an attack starfighter plant.”
And with that, the strange comment Brock had made in the BloodScars’ command room suddenly, horribly, made sense. Did you already know about the deserters? Or is that what you were looking for in the Reprisal’s computer?