by James Luceno
“Nothing can get in without clearance.”
The pilot nodded. “Or out. More than one Rebel agent has been caught trying to race back out while ships are coming in. It’s a gamble, but not one that pays off very often.”
The copilot pushed a glowing button on the console. “We’re through the first shield.”
“Our next opening comes two degrees north, four east.”
“Course set, sir.”
“Not much longer until we’re down, Agent Loor. Only thing that could go wrong now is a cloud discharging and trying to hit the upper shield through our opening.”
“Does that happen?”
“Sometimes.”
“Often?”
The pilot shrugged. “The power for the upper shield comes through openings in the lower shield. This tends to ionize a lot of atoms, making lightning travel that much faster along those routes. However, doesn’t look like our hole served as an energy conduit very recently, so we should be safe.”
Turbulence hit the shuttle as it pierced the layer of clouds. Kirtan tightened some of the belts restraining him, then clutched the back of the copilot’s chair with white knuckles. He wanted to blame his growing feeling of nausea on the way the shuttle bounced down through the atmosphere, but he knew that was not its only cause. The world beneath these clouds is the last thing I will see before I die.
The shuttle broke through the vapor shell around the planet and the pilot smiled at him. “Welcome to Imperial Center, Agent Loor.”
Despite his fear, Kirtan Loor looked out at the dark world below and felt overwhelmed by the panorama. Instantly recognizable, the Imperial Palace stood tall, like a volcano that had thrust itself up through the heart of the metropolis that dominated a whole continent of Coruscant. Towers festooned it, as if spires on a crown, and thousands of lights sparkled like jewels set in an incandescent mosaic on its stone hide. Beneath it, dwarfed into insignificance, lay Senate Hill. Its tiny buildings—raised as monuments to the justice and glory of the Old Republic—seemed frozen with fright that the Palace would grow out and consume them.
Spreading out from that central point, brilliant neon lights in all manner of colors pulsed as if nerves carrying information to and from the palace itself. Kirtan followed one river of light as it shifted from red and green to gold and blue, from the heart of the world out to the horizon. As the ship swooped lower, he saw depths to the lightstreams, where buildings had accreted, sinking the streets into twisted, broken canyons. He knew the light could not reach all the way down, and his imagination had no difficulty in populating those black gashes with nightmare creatures and lethal danger.
But the lethal danger I face dwells above all this. Kirtan sat back as the shuttle banked and the nose came up a bit. The pilot leveled the Objurium off while the copilot flicked a switch above his head. A red square appeared on the shuttle’s viewport and surrounded the top of one of the palace’s towers. Lights blinked around an opening far too small to admit the shuttle, even with its wings folded up.
“We can’t be going there. Where will we land?”
“It looks small, Agent Loor, because we’re still three kilometers away from it.”
Kirtan’s mouth hung open as his brain fought to put everything he was seeing in perspective. The streets below, which he had taken to be narrow tracks, had to be the size of major boulevards. And the towers, they were not slender, needlelike minarets, but massive buildings designed to house hundreds or thousands of people on each level. And the structures on the surface, they armored the planet with layer after layer of ferrocrete.
Kirtan shuddered as he realized how deep the warrens had to run on the planet, yet he doubted anyone had set foot on the soil beneath Imperial City for centuries.
It all struck him as impossible that a world could house that many people, but this was Coruscant. It was the heart of an Empire that boasted millions of known worlds. If each one required only a thousand people to deal with it and its problems, Coruscant would have to be home to billions of people. And to see to their needs, billions more would have to be in residence, working, building, cleaning.
Suddenly he went from wondering how Coruscant could house so many people to wondering if even billions of individuals were enough to oversee the Empire. Or what’s left of it.
The Objurium swept in closer to the tower. The opening appeared to be a black hole waiting to suck him down and rend him atom from atom. Though logic argued against expending the money it cost to bring him to Coruscant just to kill him, he knew that Death hovered close and would be seeking him out. He had failed and the price the Empire demanded for failure was dear indeed.
Kirtan ran a finger around his collar to loosen it. Arguing against his death, aside from the wasted expense of his travel, was a thought that proved utterly ludicrous to him. The only way he would stay alive was if he had something the person who had summoned him here found valuable. But he was just one person. The only thing he imagined he possessed that was not duplicated by ten or a hundred or a thousand other people on Coruscant was his life. I have nothing else that is unique.
The opening loomed close enough for Kirtan to see figures moving around in its shadows. The pilot punched a button on the command console. The shuttle’s wings rose and locked up while the landing gear descended. The shuttle drifted forward, easing into the hangar, then slowly settled to the deck. It landed with only a slight bump, but Kirtan’s nerves magnified it until it felt as heavy as the blow of a vibroblade on his neck.
Steeling himself for the worst, Kirtan slapped the buckle against his breastbone and slid free of the restraining harness. “Thank you, Lieutenant, for your efforts on my behalf.”
The pilot watched him for a moment, then nodded. “Good luck, sir.”
Kirtan pulled on a pair of black leather gloves and flexed his right hand. “Smooth flight back to the Aggressor.”
The Intelligence agent stood slowly, letting his legs get used to the planet’s gravity, then walked back from the cockpit and down the egress ramp. At the base of the ramp four Imperial Guards, resplendent in their scarlet uniforms, stood at attention. When he stepped into their midst, they turned as one and marched him toward the doorway at the far end of the hangar.
The few people Kirtan saw in the hangar did not look at him directly. Even when he turned his head, seeking to catch one of them from the corner of his eye, they paid him no heed. Have they seen so many people come this way and not return that it is no longer remarkable to them? Or do they think undue attention paid to me would find them being drawn along in my wake?
Being as tall as he was, he could almost see over the red dome of the guards’ helmets. As nearly as he could determine, the four guards were identical in height and other physical dimensions, but their cloaks shrouded them sufficiently well that details that might have differentiated them one from another were lost. Because of that they appeared to be identical to all the holograms he had seen of Imperial Guards, with one minor exception.
Their cloaks had been hemmed with a black ribbon. In the dim light it had not been easy to pick out and its presence almost made it appear as if the guards walked a few centimeters above the floor. The officially mandated year of mourning had ended over a year previously—except, of course, on worlds where notification of the Emperor’s death had arrived late or, worse yet, inspired open rebellion. Here on Coruscant that was not a problem, so Kirtan took the ribbon as a sign of the guards’ continued devotion to their slain master.
They passed through the doorway and into a small corridor that seemed to extend on forever. Kirtan thought he noticed a slight arch to the floor and a tremble in the structure that suggested to him they had entered one of the bridges between the tower and the Palace proper. The close passageway had no windows and any decorations on the walls had been covered with meter after meter of black satin.
Through the far end and along another corridor, the guards brought him to a doorway where two of their number stood. His escorts stopp
ed when the other two guards turned and pulled open the doors before him. He stepped through them into a large room, the far wall of which was constructed entirely out of glass. A tall, slender woman stood in silhouette before it, though the backlight from the planet’s surface outlined her in red.
“You are Kirtan Loor.” It came not as a question, but a statement full of import.
“Reporting as ordered.” He had tried to keep his voice as even and vital as hers had been, but he failed. A nervous squeak punctuated his sentence. “I can explain my report.”
“Agent Loor, if I had wanted your report explained, I would have had your superiors go to great pains to extract that explanation from you.” She turned slowly toward him. “Do you have any idea who I am?”
Kirtan’s mouth had gone dry. “No, ma’am.”
“I am Ysanne Isard. I am Imperial Intelligence.” She opened her arms. “I rule here now and I am determined to destroy this Rebellion. I believe you can aid me in this task.”
Kirtan swallowed hard. “Me?”
“You.” Her hands returned to her sides. “I hope my belief is not unfounded. If it is, I will have gone to great expense to bring you here for nothing. Accounts will have to be balanced and I don’t believe there is any way you can pay what you owe.”
11
Wedge Antilles smiled when Admiral Ackbar nodded. “I think you’ll see, sir, that the squadron is coming along quite well.”
The Mon Calamari looked up from the datapad on his desk. “Your performance figures and exercise scores are commendable. Your people are better than some operational line units.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Their level of discipline is not that of line units however, Admiral.”
Wedge looked over at General Salm. The irritation in his voice matched the sour expression on the small man’s face. Having come up through the ranks of Y-wing pilots, Salm had not been pleased when the Rogues staged a training attack on a full wing of Y-wing bombers. Though he had approved the exercise and had flown lead in one of the squadrons, he clearly had not expected things to go so badly for his trainees. The Rogues had lost four of their own fighters, but had destroyed all but six of the Y-wings. Salm was one of the survivors, which Wedge felt was a good thing and would have asked his pilots to leave Salm alone if he had thought of it beforehand. Despite that, the nearly eight-to-one kill ratio had been better than even Wedge had imagined possible and had made Salm furious.
“I appreciate the General’s assessment of my squadron, but these are elite pilots. I think making allowances for their high spirits promotes high morale.” Wedge lifted his chin. “My people have a lot to live up to …”
“Right now,” Salm sniffed, “they’re living down to the squadron name.”
“Begging your pardon, General, I think you’re judging Rogue Squadron too harshly.” And it’s because we made your Guardian, Warden, and Champion squadrons look as if they were Lame, Sick, and Dying! The fighter pilot looked at Ackbar. “Sir, there have been no incidents, aside from the exercise in which General Salm was a willing participant, in which Rogue Squadron has done anything untoward.”
The Mon Cal military leader set the datapad down. “I think General Salm has legitimate concerns about modified computer code being downloaded into his Y-wings’ computers. I understand it painted your squadron crest on their primary monitor after they were shot down by your people.”
Salm’s eyes blazed and Wedge fought to keep a smile off his face. Gavin Darklighter had created the crest and with Zraii’s help had linked a digitized image of it into the start-up and communications packages in the squadron. The crest, which featured a twelve-pointed red star with the Alliance crest in blue at the center, had an X-wing at each point of the star. Though the image was not sanctioned by the Alliance, astrotechs had started painting it on the squadron’s X-wings and Emtrey had requisitioned unit patches that featured the design.
Wedge had been unable to determine if it was Corran, Nawara, Shiel, Rhysati, or some combination thereof who had talked the Verpine chief tech into adding the image to the Target-Aggressor Attack Resolution Software package, but he did know that Horn’s R2 unit had done some of the code-slicing. When the TAARS package informed the downed Y-wing pilots of their status in the exercise, as Ackbar noted, the Rogue crest showed up to annoy the bomber jocks.
“I undertook an investigation into that situation, sir, and have restricted the unit’s recreation time until I find out who did what in this whole thing.”
Salm scoffed at that explanation. “You have arranged for your squadron to use the recreation facilities exclusively. They get more time in the gymnasium now than they ever did before, and the squadron briefing room has more recreational equipment than the Officers’ Lounge here. Lujayne Forge spends more time as a social secretary for your brood than she does training.”
“General, I’m building a squadron that will be given difficult missions, which means I need them to trust each other. If that means they have to be cliquish, then so be it.”
Ackbar rose from his chair and walked over to where a blue globe of water hung suspended in a repulsorlift cage. The apparatus negated gravity, allowing the water to form a perfect globe. Within it a school of small fish with neon blue and gold stripes flashed this way and that. The Mon Cal studied it for a moment, then inclined his head toward Salm.
“It does not strike me, General, that your earlier complaints about the TAARS tampering involved how Rogue Squadron spends its recreational time.”
“No, sir, but all of this is indicative of the difficulties the Rogues are creating. I have three squadrons of bombers training here as well as two other fighter squadrons. The morale of my troops suffers as the Rogues get rewarded for ignoring operational rules.”
Ackbar gave Salm a wall-eyed stare. “Your specific complaint about TAARS?”
Salm’s brown eyes smoldered. “Rogue Squadron’s ability to alter Top Secret and proprietary software packages has serious security ramifications, especially with Tycho Celchu serving as the Executive Officer of that unit.”
Wedge’s jaw dropped. “Admiral, Tycho had nothing to do with the incident, in the first place, and second, Tycho has done nothing to show himself to be a risk.”
Ackbar clasped his hands together at his back. “I agree to both of your points, but you would acknowledge that General Salm’s concerns are valid?”
The Rogue Squadron’s leader hesitated, never voicing the hot denial he had prepared as he heard the question. While he did not doubt Tycho’s loyalty, he could see that taking chances was not wise. “Yes, sir.”
“Good, because I am going to make an extraordinary request of you.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m making Rogue Squadron operational within the week.”
“What?” Wedge felt as if he’d been snared by a Stokhli stun-net. “It’s only been a month since the roster was finalized, sir. Advanced training takes six months normally—four if it’s rushed. We’re not ready.”
Ackbar returned to his desk and tapped the datapad. “That is not what your numbers suggest.”
“Admiral, you know there is more than just numbers to a unit. My people are good pilots, but they’re still green. I need more time.”
Salm folded his arms. “Rogue Squadron has gone into battle before with less training.”
“Yes, and I lost a lot of good men and women because of it.” He opened his arms and appealed to Ackbar. “Admiral, I’ve not even run any hyperjump exercises with these pilots.”
“Ah, but I thought all the pilots were pre-screened for being astronav capable.”
“They are, but …” Wedge was going to protest that Gavin Darklighter needed more work with astronavigation, but Lujayne had been tutoring him and reported Gavin was a natural. Just like his cousin. Dammit, I don’t like this. “I would still prefer having time to take them through more drills.”
“We would all like that luxury, Commander, but we don’t have it.”
Salm frowned. “I’m taking my Y-wings—the wing you so neatly chewed up—operational in two weeks.”
Wedge fell silent. My people are far closer to battle-ready than Salm’s. As always, the needs of the Rebellion outweigh the needs of its people—but this we knew going in. “Admiral, can I at least run some astronav exercises to get my people working together when they come out of hyperspace?”
“By all means, Commander. In fact, I have the perfect assignment for you to use in that regard.” Ackbar touched his datapad screen in two or three locations and the lights in his office dimmed. As they did so, a swirling disk of stars appeared suspended between ceiling and floor. It tipped up on edge and a green circle slowly zoomed in on Commenor, locating it just outside the dense Galactic Core. “I will be moving Rogue Squadron from here to Talasea in the Morobe system.”
Even before another green circle could appear and pinpoint the new system, Wedge’s eyes narrowed. “That’s Coreward of here.”
Ackbar nodded. “There has been much debate in the Provisional Council about how we should proceed in the war against the Empire. Much of what we have discussed has been paralleled in the conversations held by the vast majority of citizens, Rebel and Imperial alike.”
“We’re going after Coruscant? Imperial Center?”
Ackbar’s chin fringe twitched. “We are given little choice, really, if we wish to overthrow the last remnants of the Empire—that goal being an exercise that may well take generations to complete, mind you. Many of the Moffs are adopting a wait-and-see attitude about the New Republic. Others, like Zsinj, have proclaimed themselves warlords and are doing what they can to consolidate their holdings with those of weaker neighbors. Any of these warlords could decide to turn his forces toward Coruscant and, by taking it, proclaim himself heir to Palpatine’s throne.”