by Greg Rucka
“You’ll know what you need to know when you need to know it, Captain.” Beck swiveled back around to face Hove. “Burdening you with too much information is an invitation to leak that information to the enemies of the Empire. And you wouldn’t want that.”
Hove stiffened, and Beck managed to keep herself from smiling.
“No, Commander,” he said.
“I require an astromech droid sent to me immediately, and I require you on the bridge. When I give the order, I expect us to move out at once.”
“The ship, as ever, is at your disposal.”
“Yes,” Beck said. “It is. An astromech, now.”
He snapped his heels together, pivoted, and exited the office, the doors sliding emphatically shut in his wake. Beck turned her attention to her computer, which displayed the reports sent up from the surface and the data recovered from the transport. Once she had reviewed the information she used her comm to contact the squad sergeant.
“TX-828,” he answered.
“Sergeant, I’ve just reviewed the transport’s records. Is this everything?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“No, it isn’t. It’s missing the logs from the navicomputer.”
“No, ma’am.”
“The log is empty, Sergeant.”
“Yes, ma’am, that is correct. Best the data retrieval team could determine, there’d been a hard wipe on the system within the last day. They say there are signs that the navicomputer had its cache wiped regularly.”
Her door beeped, and Beck spared a glance toward the surveillance monitor, showing her the view outside her office. An R4 model astromech droid, shiny black and silver, waited outside. She keyed the lock, letting the droid inside.
“And the same goes for the hyperspace logs, I presume?”
“That’s correct, ma’am.”
She killed the connection and pointed at the R4 unit.
“Plug into my local, access all the data that’s just been uploaded from the operation on the surface,” Beck said.
The droid whistled and rolled closer, its top swiveling as its computer interface arm extended from its body to plug into the port at the side of her desk. The unit released a longer stream of binary chirps and whistles, and Beck went back to looking out her window, thinking. Wiping the navicomputer wasn’t unheard of, but hard wiping took time and was done only to prevent exactly what Beck was trying to accomplish: retrieval of the ship’s history. More than that, the library files could be corrupted by such a wipe, and that, in turn, could lead to a disastrous hyperspace jump. Disastrous hyperspace jumps normally ended with the ship’s crew dead and the ship in fragments.
The rebels had worked very, very hard to hide their trail. The Rodian had been willing to kill and die to keep their secrets. All of this and the tattoo of the shrike, visible only to those who would know to look for it. It could only mean one thing.
“Ematt,” Beck said. “You were there. Where did you go?”
As if in answer the R4 unit emitted what, to Beck, sounded like a triumphant string of beeps, drawing her attention back to her desk and the monitor there. Despite its best efforts, the droid had failed to recover any data from the navicomputer or the hyperspace logs; instead, it had taken the data from the ship’s supplies and stores, in particular the fuel store, and cross-referenced that with the EE-730’s flight range.
“That tells me where they’ve been,” Beck told the droid. “Not where they were heading. Not where he’s gone. Link to the bridge computer on my authority. I want a list of all vessels that left the planet between the time we assaulted the transport and the time I ordered the blockade in place.”
The droid whined.
Beck considered. The rebels had been preparing to leave Taanab when she and the stormtroopers had arrived. Ematt must’ve fled the ship the moment the attack started. The stormtroopers on the surface had reported nothing, and she could only guess how many ships Captain Hove had let leave the planet before she’d ordered the blockade in place.
He was off-world by now—she knew it.
The droid chirped and swiveled its head, using the projector to display three stacked images: three ships that had left the planet in the gap before Hove had begun the blockade. One was an automated droid transport, on a fixed run toward the Inner Rim, and Beck dismissed that one right away; it would be beyond foolish for Ematt to flee toward the heart of Imperial control. Of the remaining two, one was an old Sienar MK I bulk transport. The second was a Kuat Yards hauler, a pure cargo ferry, designed to move hundreds of units of freight in their own separate containers.
It would be very easy to hide inside one of those containers until the hauler reached its destination.
“That one,” Beck pointed. “Plot its jump and all destinations along the route.”
The droid had apparently been anticipating this, and immediately the ships vanished, replaced by a star map with the hauler’s projected flight path. Farther out toward the Outer Rim, on a line to Hutt Space.
Beck sat back. She would track the Sienar’s flight path as well, just to be thorough, but she was already certain. She keyed the comm on her desk. “Captain?”
“Yes, Commander?”
“Set course for Cyrkon,” she said. “I want to be there yesterday.”
HAN SOLO SCOWLED and stared out the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon at the swirling blue-and-white hyperspace tunnel, not really seeing it. He could feel the ship around him, the low vibration of the heavily modified Isu-Sim engines growling, hurtling them faster than lightspeed. He thought about the old man, and what he’d been trying to teach the kid on their way from Tatooine to Alderaan—the trip that had started this whole mess, as far as Solo was concerned. The old man had talked of the Force, telling the kid that he needed to stretch out with his senses, garbage like that. Solo didn’t need the Force to feel what the Falcon was doing. It was in his bones.
Chewie rumbled at him, trying for the third time to engage him conversation.
“I’m not talking to you,” Solo said.
The Wookiee chuffed.
“I’m not sulking,” Solo snapped. Even to his own ears, it sounded sullen.
The Wookiee laughed.
“We’ll see how funny you think this is when we’re rotting in some Imperial detention cell. This was never the plan, pal.”
The engines shifted subtly, almost imperceptibly, but both of them felt it, and both of them straightened up in their seats, Chewbacca already reaching overhead to lock in the acceleration compensators as Solo reached forward to throttle back out of hyperspace. There was no need to talk; they’d done this a thousand times. You could tell the quality of a crew by how they handled this maneuver. There were pilots who earned very comfortable livings flying rich passengers here and there solely on the basis of how smoothly they could switch from hyperspace back to realspace, without spilling their passengers’ drinks. Only the very best could manage it seamlessly.
Solo eased the throttle handles back, cutting power on each engine in concert and watching as the end of the hyperspace tunnel suddenly ran toward them, a field of stars and the glow of the atmosphere of Cyrkon coming into focus. At the same time Chewbacca linked into the sublights, and Solo felt the Falcon catch, caught in space, as if trying to determine which way to go, eager to keep running. He nudged her, reversed the throttle on two of the engines, felt the ship yielding, then brought the remaining throttles back up. All at once the tunnel was gone and they were looking at Cyrkon, brown, red, and gold beneath them.
They’d done it flawlessly. The Emperor himself couldn’t have complained. Solo actually grinned, forgetting his bad mood for an instant.
Then the Falcon’s proximity alarm started shrieking, and the bad mood came back as Solo twisted in his seat to silence it.
“What?” he demanded, more of the ship than of his copilot. “What?”
Chewbacca barked, twisting one of the dials on the sensor array, then slapping the aft-view camera to life. Solo stared at
the image on the tiny monitor embedded in the control console and tried to keep his jaw from dropping.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Chewbacca snuffed at him, cocking his head.
“Yes, Chewie, I think they see us.”
There was a crackle from the speakers in the cockpit, the open communications channel springing to life.
“This is the Star Destroyer Vehement.” The voice had all the arrogance and entitlement Solo had come to expect from an Imperial officer. “Unknown YT-1300, identify yourself and state your business on Cyrkon.”
Solo reached for the headset, holding it to one ear as he gestured to Chewie, but he needn’t have bothered—his copilot was already half out of his seat, reaching under one of the consoles to his starboard for the case full of ship aliases they used for the Falcon. Every ship in the galaxy had, built in as part of its core construction, an identity that was broadcast to other ships that came near enough. Called the Identification Friend or Foe—or IFF—transponder, it was a unique ID, theoretically impossible to alter, and never mind that it was positively criminal even to try. That hadn’t stopped the original owners of the Falcon from doing so, and in the intervening years Solo and Chewbacca had built on the already considerable library of aliases for the ship so that now they had, quite literally, hundreds of false names and the documentation to go with them.
“Well, hello there!” Solo said. He discovered that he had affected a definite twang and decided to run with it. “Lovely day, isn’t it, Vehement?”
Chewie had the case open on his lap and was pulling data cubes. He held one up to Solo, looking at him quizzically. Plugged in, it would say the Falcon was a ship called Jin-Den Smoke, running charter for a family named DeWeir. Solo shook his head.
“Unknown YT-1300, we repeat, identify and state your business on Cyrkon or you will be boarded. You have ten seconds to comply.”
“Now that’s no way to greet someone,” Solo said. Chewie held up another two cubes, one that would say they were the Broken Bell carrying hydraulic replacement parts for heavy binary lifters, the other calling them Foul Matter, which was carrying—appropriately enough—sanitation supplies. Solo again shook his head, this time more vigorously, and followed it with a look that said, plainly, they didn’t have time for this. Chewbacca threw up his hands, dropped the cubes, and rummaged around for more. “You talk that way to all the ships that come across your bow?”
“Unknown YT-1300, you have five seconds to comply. Broadcast your transponder identification and state your business on Cyrkon.”
“Now, rein in your eopies,” Solo said. “Got it right here. There something going on down there that—”
“Three seconds. Two seconds—”
Chewbacca held up a final cube and, even before Solo could identify it, slammed it home into its receiver on the console, pounding the transmit button at almost the same instant.
“You all should have it now, Vehement,” Solo said.
There was a pause, nothing but silence over the open channel. Solo and Chewbacca stared at each other. If the identity was rejected—or worse, identified as false—they’d be facing an Imperial Star Destroyer at point-blank range. At best, they might be able to evade long enough to make the jump back to lightspeed, but the mission would have failed before it had truly begun, never mind that there was already a Star Destroyer orbiting Cyrkon; there was a good chance they’d arrived too late anyway.
“We identify you as Lost and Found, Captain Coszel Dridge. State your business and cargo.”
“A-yep, that’s me,” Solo said. “Just heading down to refuel and get a little R and R is all. Understand there’s a cantina out on the south side of Motok, you know, the capital, where they have the cutest little Twi’lek dancers you’ve ever—”
“Your perversions are of no interest to us, Captain Dridge. In future, you are advised to transmit your ship identification immediately upon exiting hyperspace. You are free to go about your business. Vehement out.”
There was a click as the communications channel closed.
Solo and Chewbacca slumped back in their seats, exhaling in unison.
The Falcon shuddered as it cut through the atmosphere, and settled as Solo and Chewbacca guided her through the toxic skies of Cyrkon on approach to the capital. Chewie keyed in coordinates while Solo finalized their landing arrangements with Motok flight control, securing a landing bay in one of the largest facilities on the edge of the city.
There was good and bad about hiding out on Cyrkon, Solo reasoned. The good was that the local government was as corrupt as the Imperial one, and with enough credits one could bribe or buy one’s way to just about anything one needed. While there was, ostensibly, a working economy on the planet, the real business was made on the black market, dealing in goods and weapons and spice and, sometimes, even slaves. If you could make money on it, it was probably being bought or sold in one of Cyrkon’s cities.
The bad was that Cyrkon didn’t have much in the way of said cities. There was Motok, by far the largest and thus the de facto capital, and perhaps a half dozen others scattered across the planet, but that was it. There was a good reason for this: Cyrkon’s cities were all domed, enclosed structures with regulated temperature and atmosphere controls. When the planet had been colonized, long before the fall of the Republic, it had been an ideal, almost idyllic world, situated perfectly in the habitable zone from its single star. Since then, the atmosphere had turned poisonous as industrial and commercial ventures had filled it with toxins. The temperature had skyrocketed, the surface had begun to overheat, and the result was a runaway greenhouse effect that now meant you either lived under a dome or you died, end of story.
Which meant the cities were overcrowded, overpopulated, and underserved. Lots of places to hide, sure, but not a lot of places to run.
The Falcon glided toward the cluster of port structures as directed by flight control, and Solo brought the ship in a slow pass over their designated bay. Each bay was protected by a magnetic shield—a faint, blue-tinged shimmering of energy—and several were occupied. Chewie leaned forward, peering past him, joining him in a survey of the visible ships parked below. In one of the bays, they could see an Imperial troop transport, Sentinel class.
The Wookiee rumbled unhappily.
“Maybe they didn’t land a full complement,” Solo said.
Chewbacca didn’t bother to dignify that with a reply. Instead, he pointed, one hairy finger indicating another ship parked in a bay perhaps half a klick from the Imperial transport. This one wasn’t military, not at all, but rather a 1550-LEX, a luxury yacht with a bright blue stripe painted along the top of its hull, running from bow to stern. Chewie snuffed a question at him.
“Looks like her, yeah.”
Chewie snuffed a second time, lower.
“We’ll see.”
Solo flicked the throttles, brought the Falcon through a one-eighty that reversed their direction, put them into a hover over their designated landing bay, then set the ship down onto its pad as gently as if he were kissing a child on the nose. Chewie began securing systems and Solo set the engines to standby, as opposed to full shutdown. The Wookiee looked at him.
“Like you don’t think we’ll be leaving in a hurry,” Solo said.
The Wookiee considered, then huffed in agreement. He rose, grabbed his bowcaster from where it rested in the empty navigator’s chair behind where he’d been sitting, and looked at Solo again.
“Well, let’s hope you won’t need it.”
They stepped from the cockpit and down the short hall to the circular main compartment. Chewie rumbled, growled, then barked as Solo lowered the ramp and they stepped from the ship and out into the bay.
“I don’t know,” Solo said. “You can pack a lot of stormtroopers into one of those Sentinel shuttles.”
That got another chuff in response.
“Look, it’s a big city, pal. We don’t know if Vehement’s after him. It could just be a coincide
nce, right? And even if they are searching for Ematt, they’re gonna be spread out. So we keep our eyes open, we play it smart, we’ll be fine. In and out, nobody’ll even know we were here.”
They started across the landing bay, toward the main doors that led to the port. The Wookiee rumbled again.
“I’m trying to maintain a spirit of optimism, here, Chewie,” Solo said. He was getting annoyed. “If you’re nervous about this, I’m gonna take this moment to remind you that this was your idea. I wanted nothing to do with it, remember?”
The Wookiee woofed as Solo reached the doors and keyed them open. They slid apart, revealing a long, wide, bustling promenade that stretched as far as the eye could see, with more corridors leading to the other bays extending from either side. The noise was immediate—voices arguing, shouting in a dozen languages, speeders whizzing past, droids yammering in binary, vendors hawking their wares from their stalls. They stepped through, and Solo hit the door controls, locking the Falcon safely behind them.
“Look, relax,” Solo said, turning to face Chewbacca. “We’ve dealt with stormtroopers before. It could be worse.”
The Wookiee rumbled softly.
Solo spun, watching as the crowd parted to reveal an oddly tall and lean figure some fifteen meters away, leading a group of three humanoids. It took another half second before Solo could recognize the leader as a droid, unlike any he’d ever seen. Its face was a mockery of a protocol droid’s—flat, matte gray with an extended collar flaring out around it, like some steel flower. Its chassis was humanoid but seemed only partially completed, ending midtorso and revealing the whirling machinery sunk into its waist. Its legs were long, an imitation of human skeletal structure, like its arms. It carried a heavy blaster pistol in one metal fist and a longer, crueler-looking blaster carbine in the other. The three behind the droid, a Kubaz—his long snout visible even from that distance—a Gran, and a human, were likewise moving their weapons into position.
“Han Solo,” the droid said, and even across the distance its voice was clear, clipped, metallic like the rest of its form. “Jabba says hello.”