by James Luceno
“The Queen of the Red invited Nuso Esva into her city,” Nyama said, sending an acid-edged glare at Parck. “Whatever happens now is on her head, and upon the heads of her people.”
He turned back to Thrawn. “I return to my shuttle, Admiral Thrawn. I expect all Stromma under your command to be assembled at the Admonitor’s hangar bay within the hour.”
“I’ll give the order,” Thrawn said.
Nyama held the admiral’s gaze another two seconds, then stepped away from the table and strode from the room.
The conciliator stood up, his face pained. “Admiral—”
“Go with your superior,” Thrawn said, his face impassive.
The younger Stromma looked helplessly at the others around the table, then nodded and left without another word.
“Well,” Fel said into the silence. “That went well.”
“Hardly unexpected, though,” Parck agreed heavily.
“True.” Fel cocked an eyebrow at Thrawn. “You do know, Admiral, that I wasn’t exaggerating about the size of that gap. You come in at the wrong angle and graze one of those shields, and it’ll blow off that section of wing and give you enough spin to send you spiraling straight into the ground.”
“I have full confidence that you and your pilots will make it work, Commander.” Thrawn turned to Balkin. “As I also have confidence that you and your stormtroopers will do their part.”
“We will, Admiral,” Balkin said quietly.
“So the plan’s still on?” Parck asked.
“It is,” Thrawn confirmed.
Parck felt his lip twitch. “I have spoken to some of the other Stromma who understand Quesoth Soldier Speak,” he said. “They say that even if we’re able to record enough of the Queen’s orders during the battle, it’ll be impossible to pick-and-stitch the words together to create counter-orders of our own.”
“My Stromma trainees say the same thing,” Balkin confirmed. “There’s some kind of pitch rhythm in the subharmonics that a set of randomly stitched words won’t be able to match.”
“We shall see,” Thrawn said. “Are there any other thoughts or concerns?”
Parck looked around the table. No one seemed inclined to say anything more. “Then you’re dismissed,” Thrawn said formally. “Make your final preparations, then get your forces fed and to sleep.”
His eyes glittered. “Tomorrow, at midmorning, we attack.”
It was not in the nature of Imperial stormtroopers to hide themselves from view. Their entire attitude and training, not to mention their gleaming white armor, tended in exactly the opposite direction.
Nevertheless, stormtrooper Lhagva of the Stromma contingent was trying to stay out of everyone’s sight.
For the first hour he succeeded, running a quiet path between the Admonitor’s main trooper kitchen area and the equipment storage facility, choosing a route senior officers seldom traveled unless they had a reason to be there. He kept an ear cocked as he strode silently along, listening for loud voices and stern, determined footsteps.
He was ten minutes into the second hour when his luck ran out. Rounding a stack of safety-webbed crates, he ran smack into Line Lieutenant Dramos Sanjin, perched casually on the saddle of a Mobquet reconnaissance swoop.
“Stormtrooper Lhagva,” Sanjin said with an air of clearly artificial casualness. “You seem to have missed the order that all Stromma aboard the Admonitor were to report to the Number Three hangar deck for disembarkation.”
“My apologies, Lieutenant,” Lhagva said, striving for the right mix of surprise and chagrin. “I’ve been having trouble with my hearing lately.”
“Really,” Sanjin said. “You didn’t seem to have any trouble with Commander Balkin’s order to report to the practice range earlier this afternoon.”
Lhagva grimaced. Sanjin had him, and there really was no point in carrying on the charade any longer. “I heard a rumor that all the Stromma were being taken off in advance of the attack,” he said. “I wanted to stay.”
“You feel entitled to ignore orders you don’t feel like obeying?”
“You need me, Lieutenant,” Lhagva said, painfully aware that he was walking on extremely thin stone here. “Puriv and I are the only ones in the assault force who understand Quesoth Soldier Speak. We’re the only ones who can give you any advance warning of what the Queen of the Red is ordering her forces to do.”
“Yet Puriv left the Admonitor as ordered,” Sanjin said. “Are you saying he doesn’t have the same loyalty to the unit that you do?”
“Puriv has a family, and a strong family honor that he must uphold,” Lhagva said. “Disobeying his orders would shame them all.”
“Whereas you’re an orphan who has no one to shame?”
“I’m an orphan who will dishonor no one but myself,” Lhagva corrected. “I’m willing to accept that shame.”
“Stromma discipline can be harsh,” Sanjin warned. “Imperial discipline can be even worse.”
“I understand,” Lhagva said. “Discipline or discharge me as you must, Lieutenant. But I beg you, don’t do either until after tomorrow.”
Sanjin studied Lhagva’s face. “You feel that strongly about this battle?”
“The Quesoth are Stromma allies,” Lhagva said. “More than that, I spent two years in the Stromma diplomatic enclave at the edge of the Black City. I like these people, and I don’t want to see them destroyed.”
“And you think that likely?”
“If Nuso Esva isn’t stopped, it’s the only possible outcome,” Lhagva said. “If he succeeds in holding the Red City, it’ll be only a matter of time before he also takes the White City, then the Black City, and then the entire planet.”
“And you want to see him stopped.”
“Yes, sir, I do.”
“Even at the risk of your own life and honor?”
“I’m an Imperial stormtrooper, Lieutenant,” Lhagva said. “I live or die at the pleasure of my superiors and my commander.”
“And if it pleases those same superiors for you to sit this one out?”
Lhagva swallowed hard, wishing he could read Sanjin’s face. But human expressions were always so hard for him to penetrate. “Then I will resign my commission and accompany my former unit to the surface as a civilian,” he said. “Stowing away aboard the transport if need be.”
For a dozen heartbeats Sanjin just gazed at him. “This hearing problem of yours,” he said at last. “Comes and goes, does it?”
It took Lhagva a moment to figure out what Sanjin was talking about. And there was a strange look the human’s eye … “Yes, sir, it does,” he said. “As I said earlier—”
“Sounds serious,” Sanjin cut in. “You’d better report to the medical bay. I’ll let the Stromma liaison officer know that you’ll be remaining aboard until the diagnostic droids have come up with a reading and a course of treatment.” He cocked his head. “I’m sure you’ll be ordered to remain in the bay until the assault transports have all launched at midmorning tomorrow.”
“Hopefully, my hearing will be functional when that order is given.” Lhagva bowed his head. “Thank you, Lieutenant.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” Sanjin warned. “Better yet, don’t thank me at all. If we’re both still alive this time tomorrow Captain Parck will probably flay both of us alive. That is, if Commander Balkin doesn’t get to us first.” He gestured. “Get to the medical bay, and then get some rest. One way or the other, tomorrow is likely to end badly.”
It was midmorning, and Trevik was once again holding the nectar bowl at the Queen’s side when one of the Storm-hairs came unexpectedly into the Dwelling of Guests with an urgent report.
The forces of Grand Admiral Thrawn had left the star caravan and were moving toward the edges of the Red City.
“Excellent,” Nuso Esva said with an almost eager satisfaction in his voice. “All is prepared?”
“All is prepared,” the other Storm-hair confirmed.
Nuso Esva turned to the Queen. “Your
forces are also arrayed as I ordered, O Queen?”
Trevik’s eyes flicked sideways to the Queen’s litter. The Queen’s Soldiers, as Nuso Esva had ordered? Had ordered?
Such blatant effrontery should have earned Nuso Esva words of sharp rebuke, possibly even death at the hands of the Soldiers standing their usual guard outside the Dwelling. But to Trevik’s even greater surprise, the Queen made neither response. “They are so arrayed,” she said instead. “You are certain your weapons can stop the invading forces?”
“They will do more than simply stop them, O Queen,” Nuso Esva said with grim satisfaction. “Today is the beginning of your final dominion over this world.”
Again, Trevik looked sideways at the Queen. But this time, his surreptitious glance was accompanied by a surge of unpleasantness that curled through him like a plume of black smoke. What did Nuso Esva mean by dominion? In two years the Queen of the White would arise, the air would change, and the Queen of the Red would die. The Circlings would go into hibernation in the lower citadel of the palace, where they would arise and breed a new Queen when their part of the cycle came again. Once the citadel had been sealed, the Midlis, Soldiers, and Workers would start the long journey to the White City; there, those who survived the ordeal would join in with the Queen of the White’s offspring. Eighteen years later, the Queen of the Black would arise, and the cycle would begin anew.
But the Queen of the Red—the current Queen of the Red—would still be long dead. What could Nuso Esva possibly mean by speaking to her of dominion over Quethold?
Trevik had no idea. He also had no doubt that, whatever the meaning, he wasn’t going to like it.
The eight transports put down at the edge of the Red City, landing in a widely spaced semicircle in the fields just outside the outermost ring of Worker homes. The arrangement of the semicircle was typically Thrawn, Fel saw as he and his three squadrons of TIE fighters flew cover over the landing site. Setting Sun Avenue, the road that led due east into the city, was the designated entry point, and Fel had known commanders who would have automatically centered the force on that vector so as to provide maximum flanking cover to the main thrust.
But Thrawn did things with a bit more subtlety. This semicircle was centered instead on a creek that flowed west-southwest across the city, crossing the line of transports about half a kilometer south of Setting Sun Avenue. The gently sloping banks of the creek offered another wide entry point, one that a clever and unconventional commander might choose to exploit. It was certainly a tactic Thrawn might use, and one Nuso Esva would surely anticipate.
Sure enough, Fel could see movement now in the inner parts of the city, the Midli and Circling areas protected by Nuso Esva’s umbrella shields. Some of the Quesoth Soldiers who had been deployed there were leaving the center city and moving down the hill along the creek-bed toward the handful of natural strongpoints on the banks.
Fel smiled tightly. Nuso Esva didn’t know that most of the transports arrayed against him, including the one positioned along the streambed, were just for show.
“Commander Fel?” Thrawn’s voice came through Fel’s helmet comlink.
“No resistance so far, Admiral,” Fel reported. “I have Soldiers redeploying to the stream, but so far everyone’s staying well back inside the shield zone.”
“Any of the laser cannons in evidence?”
Fel took a moment to glance at his fighter’s compact tactical board, wishing briefly that he was in his usual TIE interceptor with its better instrument array. But of course, the newer, sleeker interceptor wouldn’t have worked nearly so well with this particular mission. “Nothing visible,” he said. “Shall I make a pass across the larger holes in the shield array and see if I can draw some fire?”
“Not yet, Commander,” Thrawn said with that mixture of respect, patience, and amusement that Fel had noted the Grand Admiral always seemed to use with him. “Are we intercepting any of the Queen’s orders yet?”
“Negative on that, too, sir,” Fel said. “We’re probably still too far out to pick up anything from the loudspeakers.”
“Stay on it,” Thrawn instructed him. “I want to know the minute you start hearing Soldier Speak. Armor Commander?”
“Armor Commander,” said a flat nonhuman voice coming into the circuit.
“Are the juggernauts ready?”
“They are.”
“Deploy juggernauts.”
Fel turned his fighter into a tight curve back toward the transport that lay across Setting Sun Avenue. The access door slid up into the curved top of the vehicle and a juggernaut rolled into view, twenty-two meters’ worth of weapons and heavy armor, moving a little awkwardly on its ten wheels as it maneuvered itself onto the road. It had stabilized itself and started toward the city when the second tank appeared, following in the track marks of the first. It, too, made it onto the road just as the one behind it emerged into view.
Fel nodded to himself and turned into another curve back toward the city. If the first three juggernauts had made it out all right, he had no doubt that the remaining six would do likewise.
Meanwhile, his TIEs had another job to do. “Gray Squadron, form up around me,” Fel called into his comlink. “Blanket sweep over the city. Let’s see what sort of holes we can find to shoot through.”
The fourth of the nine juggernaut tanks had emerged in the distance when Lhagva’s squad rolled out of their transport on the first of the attack force’s three A-rack carriers.
The A-rack was a simple device, one that Lhagva was told had been adopted from one of Thrawn’s other liberated worlds. It looked very much like an A-frame, fold-up clothing roller of the type he’d seen being pushed or pulled along busy walkways back in his own home city’s garment district. The A-rack, though, was much sturdier than those, with oversized wheels, a top-mounted E-Web/M heavy repeating blaster, a center-mounted engine, and enough room on each side for five stormtroopers to stand facing outward. With the pair of cramped seats in the center section for the driver and gunner, the carrier could transport a full stormtrooper squad quickly and efficiently across medium-rough terrain.
The downside, which Lhagva always thought about when he rode one of the things, was that it also left the squad bunched close together and thus vulnerable to ambush.
But so far the enemy here hadn’t made any such moves. The houses the three A-racks rolled past were showing no signs of life, not even the occasional furtive peek by a curious face at any of the windows. The Workers were apparently all out of the city as usual for this time of the morning, laboring in the fields, forests, and mines stretching out beyond the urban area.
As for the Soldiers, most of those Lhagva could see from his angle were gathered in clumps along the juggernauts’ line of travel a few hundred meters to the north. Their backs were to the incoming A-racks, with no indication that they were even aware that three squads of stormtroopers were coming toward them from the south. It was as if Thrawn had completely blindsided Nuso Esva and the Queen of the Red.
Lhagva didn’t believe it for a minute.
“Tighten it up, troopers,” Sanjin called from the A-rack’s gunner’s seat. “Things are about to get hot.”
Lhagva shot a quick look upward. They’d reached the outer circle of Midli houses, and the sky above them had gone dark and shimmery as they passed beneath the edge of the city’s new patchwork of umbrella shields. From this point on, Commander Fel’s TIEs would be unable to provide the stormtroopers with any cover fire.
Readjusting his grip on his BlasTech E-11 blaster rifle, Lhagva returned his attention to the houses and open areas on his side of the A-rack. Whatever Nuso Esva was planning, he knew, the battle was about to begin.
“Excellent,” Nuso Esva said, his lips curled back, his faceted yellow eyes intent on the line of eight large monitors the other Storm-hairs had set up in the Dwelling of Guests gathering area. “Thrawn is nothing if not always precisely on schedule.” He gestured to one of the monitors. “Observe, O Queen. He
re come his soldiers.”
The Queen leaned closer toward the image. Surreptitiously, Trevik did the same. The white-armored soldiers were heading northward through the southwestern part of the city, riding on three bouncy and fragile-looking metal frameworks. On one of the other monitors, larger, more substantial vehicles were rumbling into the city along Setting Sun Avenue.
And just like the soldiers, the large vehicles were moving in a straight line. Trevik didn’t know much about tactics, but even to him that seemed foolish.
It apparently seemed that way to the Queen, as well. “I will order my Soldiers to attack,” she said, picking up the special farspeak that rested beside her armrest, its wires snaking across the room to the connector in the wall. “They will make short work of them.”
“Not yet,” Nuso Esva said, holding out a hand. “Not yet.”
Trevik flinched. The outstretched hand was a signal of command, a gesture Trevik had used many times when overseeing Workers and one that he’d received in turn from senior Midlis and occasional Circlings.
No one ever used such a gesture toward the Queen of the Red. Ever. The very thought of such a blatant insult was both fantastic and outrageous.
Yet once again, the Queen gave no indication of such outrage. “Then when?” she simply asked.
“Be patient, O Queen,” Nuso Esva said. To Trevik’s relief, he lowered the discourteous hand again to his side. “The enemy fighter craft are about to make their first attempt to enter through my trap. When they do, my soldiers will open fire with the blaster cannons I set up in concealment—”
“The guns my Workers set up in concealment,” the Queen corrected him.
Nuso Esva’s eyes might have glittered with new fire. Trevik wasn’t certain. “The cannons your Workers set up,” he amended coolly. “Once they open fire, destroying or scattering the fighter craft, the cannons that I”—he inclined his head—“the cannons that your Workers set up along Setting Sun Avenue will destroy the first and last juggernauts in line. Then you will order your Soldiers to destroy the stormtroopers. All is as I predicted.”