The Bacta War

by Michael A. Stackpole

  “I copy, Nine. This is Pulsar Skate to Empress’s Diadem. You’ve been cleared for continuation of the journey.”

  “I copy, Skate. Feed us the coordinates and we can get this thing moving.”

  “Coordinates for exit vector, jump duration, and speed on their way.”

  Corran watched the data stream flow across the bottom of his monitor and wondered what Melina Carniss was making of it. He imagined she’d be disappointed because the first jump was just a short hop to a dead system. From there they’d get another exit vector that would put them on a straight line for the Yag’Dhul system, but the speed and duration data would suggest they were going to another system well beyond Yag’Dhul. She’ll be anticipating calling in a strike on Folor in the Commenor system.

  Corran smiled as he thought about the surprise the convoy would be in for during their journey. The speed that was being set for them would allow them to slip past the Yag’Dhul system in hyperspace, but Booster had thought of a way to end their journey prematurely. The gravity well projector he’d gotten from Karrde and had grafted onto the station would create enough of a gravity shadow to pull the convoy out of hyperspace. The premature end of the flight would deliver the goods where they were most needed and would be a trick clearly meant to conceal the location of the base from outsiders.

  Which ought to be enough to make Carniss think secrecy is still important to us. Corran dearly wished he knew the full extent of Wedge’s plan to deal with Isard’s forces, but he respected the security provided by the compartmentalization of such information. I doubt I’ll know everything that goes on unless or until this is all over and I get debriefed.

  Corran brought his X-wing around on the appointed exit vector and chopped his throttle back to 51 percent of thrust. In hyperspace, the X-wings were twice as fast as the freighters, save Carniss’s Diadem and Mirax’s Skate. By dropping his thrust to just over half, the X-wing would arrive in-system just before the freighters and could head off any ambushes.

  The other X-wings pulled up off his S-foils. “Nine to Skate. Escort is ready to head out.”

  “Lead on, Nine, and be careful.”

  “As ever, Skate. Wouldn’t want your father to be disappointed in me.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Melina Carniss managed to keep a smile on her face and a light lilt in her voice despite being anxious to leave the Yag’Dhul station. “No, Mirax, no need to apologize. I’ve enjoyed your company over the last two days. I would have felt quite out of sorts and lonely had you not taken me under your wing.”

  Mirax smiled. “I’m glad you feel that way. I am sometimes accused of being somewhat smothering.”

  Somewhat? Lady, you could smother a Givin, and they don’t need to breathe. “Again your company was appreciated. And let your father know I’m sure Karrde won’t have a problem with my having been kept here awaiting payment. He’s very understanding that way.”

  Mirax stepped back away from the turbolift opening. “See you on the next trip.”

  “I’m sure. Good-bye.” Melina remained smiling even after the door closed. Be just like her father to have security holocams set up here in the turbolift. I have to maintain the charade until I’m back aboard Diadem.

  Carniss had hoped to be away from the Yag’Dhul station as quickly as possible, but the delay in payment meant her ship was the last of the convoy to leave. Despite being a huge station, Yag’Dhul’s docking bays were mostly in use, requiring a piecemeal unloading of the convoy. That delay meant the shipments couldn’t be verified, hence the reason payment was late. Mirax’s insistence that she leave Diadem and enjoy the station’s facilities meant she had no chance to send a message out to Thyferra to report the location of Rogue base.

  While it certainly was Mirax’s fault that she’d not been able to make her report sooner, the fact was that she didn’t really want to make it until her ship was outbound anyway. Her navicomputer had worked out the time it would take for Iceheart’s taskforce to arrive at Yag’Dhul from Thyferra. Had she sent out the coordinates when she arrived, she would have been trapped on the station and killed along with all the others. While Iceheart appreciates my information, I don’t doubt I’m seen as expendable.

  Carniss exited the turbolift and cut between two battered freighters on her way to her ship. The motley collection of freighters and fighters reminded her of the force Karrde had said had been used to take Coruscant from Isard. Except this force is lacking Star Destroyers and Mon Calamari cruisers. Most of the ships looked as if they had been cobbled together from scrap salvaged from Endor or Alderaan. Isard’s Virulence could defeat this fleet all by itself.

  She walked up the ramp on her modified Corellian YT-1210 light freighter, the Empress’s Diadem, and closed it behind her. The disk-shaped ship had a pair of blaster cannons in a turret mounted above and below a boxy concussion missile launch tube assembly that fired into the ship’s aft arc. What I can’t outrun I can discourage from chasing me.

  “Peet,” she shouted at her pilot, “get us off this station and bound for Corellia. We have business on Selonia. Once you compute the route and have the times, let me know. I’ll be in my quarters.”

  “As ordered, Captain Carniss.”

  Melina headed back to her quarters and sealed the hatch behind her. Because space was at a premium on the freighter, her cabin was small, yet not without luxuries. Included among them was a small refresher station which meant she did not have to use the facilities shared by the rest of the crew. Since she was the only woman on board, the concession had a practical side to it, as well as serving to remind the crew of her superior status.

  She opened the central drawer on her datapad desk and pulled it all the way out. On the back panel she slid aside a finger-length wafer of duraplast, revealing a small cavity. From it she pulled out a slender, silver capsule approximately the size of her smallest finger. She put it on the desk, then returned the duraplast wafer and the drawer to their proper places.

  From her personal gear she got two small batteries and a transparisteel flask with a chrome bottom and capped with a chrome tumbler. She worked two screws loose on the bottom of the bottle and pulled the base off. Into the hollows in the base she snapped the batteries and the capsule. She fastened the flask’s base back on the transparisteel bottle, then tossed the whole assembly into the refresher station’s bowl and evacuated it.

  The flush of disinfectant washed the flask down into a holding tank. As the Diadem came about on its exit vector, the pilot hit a switch that dumped the holding tank’s contents out into space. The fluid immediately froze into a mass of blue ice that slowly began to drift in toward the system’s sun. It would be months before the debris finally evaporated in the solar engine.

  The sudden drop in temperature around the flask immediately started the capsule issuing orders. A tiny port opened in the tip of the flask’s cap and a spark from the batteries ignited enough of the Savareen brandy to burn the flask free of the ice and jet it away. At the same time, a panel on the bottom of the flask opened up to expose electromagnetic sensors that started feeding system data to the capsule.

  The capsule itself was really the heart of a probe droid. Stripped of the armor and devices necessary to let it enter an atmosphere and operate in a hostile environment, the droid took up a minimum of space and could easily function on batteries for a dozen hours. Its mission was simple: pinpoint the location of the system in which it was dropped, locate a hidden HoloNet transmission station, and pulse out a tight-beam message conveying that information to the station. The automated station would, in turn, deliver that information through the HoloNet to Fliry Vorru within seconds of its reception.

  With the sensors, it mapped the sky and compared the configuration of stars with what would be available at various systems in the galaxy. While a complete catalog of systems would have required far more storage than the probe droid possessed, Vorru and his people had ruthlessly eliminated systems that lacked habitable worlds, had settlemen
ts that were insufficiently developed to help maintain the Rogues and their ships, or that otherwise appeared to be inappropriate.

  Within an hour of beginning its mission, the probe droid found a match in its star catalog. It knew it was in the Yag’Dhul system. It oriented itself so it could pulse its message out to a clandestine HoloNet transmission site, but found an obstacle in its way. It did pick up comm frequencies emanating from the obstacle and also saw how many stars it blotted out of the sky, but had no way to identify it as a space station. It did catalog the item’s presence, then it jetted up to a point where it could locate the relay station.

  Once it found its target, the droid pulsed its message out. It continued to do so for the next three standard hours before a meteorite shattered the transparisteel flask and reduced the droid to so much junk orbiting Yag’Dhul.

  Wedge looked out over the assembly of pilots in the station’s amphitheater. They all looked eager, which was good, but that surprised him. When he began the briefing he expected their hungry expressions to melt into disappointment. “So, there it is: within the next twenty-four to thirty-six hours we anticipate the arrival of Isard’s Lusankya and Virulence here at Yag’Dhul. We’ve already begun an evacuation of the station, with our ships taking up a position on the edge of this system. Their position provides a clean exit vector to Thyferra, which is where you will be going along with them. Is that understood?”

  Nawara Ven raised a hand. “Forgive me, Commander, but do you think having all of us fighters scramble and then run away will fool the Thyferran commanders?”

  Bror Jace turned in his seat to look at Nawara. “If they were Thyferran commanders it wouldn’t, but these are Imps. They’re used to imagining that Rebels run at the sight of them.”

  Wedge smiled at Jace’s answer. “Just as you’ve been simming a lot of antiship attacks, we’ve been simming the likely reactions on the Thyferran command level. We’re pretty certain they’ll believe our retreat, especially when we jump to lightspeed on a vector bound for Thyferra. Captain Drysso will assume, in our desperation to save the station we’re going to strike at Thyferra. Because our snubfighters are twice as fast as the Lusankya, we’ll have twelve hours there to batter Thyferra unopposed. He knows he can’t beat us back there, so he’ll finish our station off, then come after us.”

  Corran frowned. “What if his people pick up on the fact that we rendezvous with our freighters before we head out?”

  “Still no cause of alarm for him. The Lusankya still out-guns our entire fleet. More ships just provide his gunners with more practice.” Wedge shrugged. “I know there are dozens of unanswered questions you have right now because I’ve been fairly vague about our overall plan and have just concentrated on your roles in what is going to happen. Your squadron leaders have more specific orders on which they will brief you at the appropriate time. Right now I just wanted to let you know that action is imminent, so you should take care to put your affairs in order and prepare any holograms you want sent in case of death.”

  Gavin smiled. “But you’re not going to leave those things on the station here, are you?”

  Wedge laughed. “No, we’ll have them sent to Coruscant. Make no mistake about it, people, this won’t be easy. A lot of us won’t be coming back. There will be a terrible price to pay to liberate Thyferra, but an even greater one if we don’t liberate it. We’ll be taking a lot of risks, but we have no choice because this will be our best chance to destroy Isard. If we fail now, it could very well be that no one else will ever dare to oppose her.”

  Asyr let a little growl rumble from her throat. “So failure is not an option, eh, Wedge?”

  “Not for us, Asyr, not by a long shot.”

  Fliry Vorru looked at the data scrolling up through the air above his holopad. Beyond the glowing green numbers he watched Erisi Dlarit study the information. “Rather ingenious of them, wasn’t it, my dear, to choose the Yag’Dhul station as their base. You might have guessed.”

  Erisi nodded once, curtly. “I did guess and did some checking of my own. The station was ordered and reported destroyed. Pash Cracken signed the report indicating the station had been destroyed, so perhaps I should have been suspicious.”

  Vorru waved her remark away. “Don’t berate yourself, Erisi.”

  “No, Madam Director will do that for me, won’t she?”

  Vorru smiled. “Ah, you know her so well. She does seem to visit injustice upon you with fair frequency. I think that is a situation that should change.”

  Erisi arched an eyebrow over an ice blue eye. “What did you have in mind?”

  “See if your reasoning parallels my own. It strikes me that after the Lusankya is sent off to destroy the Yag’Dhul station, someone in the New Republic is going to have to take notice of how much firepower she possesses. While Zsinj has been more of a direct threat—and is why the New Republic fleet is out there hunting him down and, with any luck at all, destroying him—Ysanne Isard has succeeded in raising her profile rather considerably. The New Republic will be forced to deal with her sooner or later, and I’m inclined to think they will opt for sooner.”

  The Thyferran pilot nodded slowly. “I follow you so far.”

  “It strikes me that my position here is no longer going to be profitable. I have managed, in my position, to set aside a certain amount of credits that would be sufficient, say, to purchase a planet. I would require a loyal staff and even a wing of pilots to keep my rivals at bay.”

  “I see. And would you be requiring my services as a pilot or my company?”

  Vorru bowed his head in a salute. “Your services as a pilot would be most valuable to me. Your company, on the other hand, would be invaluable to me. I leave the choice of role to you, to be modified as you wish.”

  “Very well, I shall start as the commander of your pilots.” Erisi clasped her hands at the small of her back. “How do you see this defection being accomplished?”

  “After the Lusankya and the Virulence return from destroying the Yag’Dhul station, we will head out on the Virulence on an inspection tour of facilities. There will be an accident, we will disappear. It can be arranged.”

  “Then arrange it.” Erisi looked around and toward the viewports displaying the planet’s lush greenery. “Iceheart will find a way to destroy this world I love. I have no desire to be here when that happens.”

  “Nor do I, Erisi dear, nor do I.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Corran reached across the table at Flarestar and took Mirax’s hand in his. “Thanks.”

  She gave his hand a squeeze. “Buying dinner was no big deal.”

  “That’s not what I’m thanking you for.” Corran glanced down at the table, then back up at her. “Seeing you sitting there I remember the first time I saw you, back on Talasea.”

  Mirax smiled. “Yeah, the lighting is dim enough in here to resemble that world.”

  He chuckled. “I was remembering how beautiful you looked then and how beautiful you are now.”

  “And I remember you cut a rather dashing figure in your flightsuit, then I had to go and spoil it by bringing our fathers’ rivalry into things.”

  “But we got over that fast. Then I was remembering our last conversation on Coruscant before we headed out to conquer a world.” His smile shrank somewhat. “And then I ruined what we were heading for by getting captured by Isard.”

  “Yet another crime for which she should pay.”

  “Agreed.” Corran sat back as a serving droid started clearing platters from their table. “A huge chunk of what gnawed at me while I was on the Lusankya, was knowing you thought I was dead. I didn’t want to presume that my disappearance would have hurt you that much, but I knew how I’d have felt were our situations reversed.”

  Mirax nodded solemnly. “And now, in less than a day, we’ll be tossed again into a fight where we both might die”

  Corran shot her a wry grin. “You wouldn’t be trying to turn this into a ‘sleep with me tonight because tomorr
ow we may die’ thing, would you?”

  “Me?” Mirax demurely pressed a hand against her breastbone. “Perish the thought. I’d never think of taking advantage of you like that—despite having bought you a lavish meal.”

  “Oh, no?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” Corran sniffed. “Am I not good enough for you?”

  “You are that, but, as I recall, you’re also already sleeping in my bed.”

  “Good point. It does sort of make this kind of seduction rather moot.”

  “True, but the flirtation is fun.”

  “I agree there, too.” Corran smiled and tightened his grip on her hand ever so slightly, doing his best to make sure he didn’t feed the pressure building in his chest into his hand. “And I can’t think of anyone I would rather flirt with and be seduced by than you. In fact, I think we should make it permanent.”

  Mirax’s brown eyes grew wide. “Lieutenant Corran Horn, are you asking me to marry you?”

  “Look, I know this might seem abrupt. I mean, I know we’ve been living together since my return from the grave, but with all our missions and trips and everything, I’d guess we’ve not had more than three weeks in the last four months where we’ve actually been able to spend time alone with each other. Despite how hectic and chaotic things have been, what I do know is that I want more time to spend with you. I know that I’m never going to find someone for whom I feel more than I feel for you.”

  “That’s true, because if you did, I’d see to it that you stopped feeling altogether.” Mirax squeezed his fingers. “Are you sure about this? Don’t you want to talk to Iella about it?”

  “She’d tell me I’ve been an idiot for not asking you to marry me sooner. She and Diric were as close as any two people I’ve ever seen; and despite the pain she’s been through, I don’t think she’d have surrendered one moment of their happiness together to make her feel better. For as long as I’ve known her she’s had a habit of predicting how many weeks my relationships would last, and she was always on target. With us, no prediction.”