“Sir! I wasn't told that this infestation was capable of resistance—”
“The scout fighter was under your direction. You did not free him to pursue or evade when the vermin fighter appeared. That is your offense.”
“We were preparing to fire—”
“You are relieved. And there will be a price in blood, I promise. Get out of here. Report to the stockade.”
The primate turned to the tactics master.
“Launch your fighters. I want the skies of Polneye cleared of vermin.”
The fight for Polneye did not last long.
One of the three TIE interceptors that followed Mallar into the air was piloted by a first-form student who had never been aloft. That he got the ship off the ground under control was a credit to the simplicity of Imperial cockpit design. But the first-former's target melted into the clouds while he was still calling for help unlocking the laser cannon. Not long after, a squadron of Yevethan fighters, tracking his comm signal, fell on him from the clouds. His flight ended in a fiery flat spin and an explosion on the plains east of Twelve North.
The interceptor launched from Eleven South was piloted by the engineering instructor. Like Mallar, he climbed through the cloud layer to the edge of space and found the cruiser Liberty orbiting above. Unlike Mallar, he did not escape after his discovery. An antifighter turbolaser battery on the cruiser tracked the interceptor and blew it into a thousand pieces, which returned to the surface as a rain of metal.
A veteran combat pilot was at the controls of the interceptor from Nine North, but he barely escaped the destruction of the city, and one of the fighter's engines was damaged by shrapnel. It faltered as he was swept into a dogfight with three Yevethan fighters, and he and his ship vanished in a brilliant ball of flame.
The fourth interceptor was destroyed on the ground by strafing TIE fighters as a frantic volunteer crew tried to ready it for launch.
The fifth was lost in the first moments of the attack, as Eleven North came under Liberty's savage cannonade.
Plat Mallar's success against the TIE/rc was the only victory of the day, and no one was more aware than he how meaningless it was. Because he was afraid to die, he fled to the far side of the planet, hiding in the clouds under the ionization shield the Empire had created for Polneye. Because he was afraid to face the guilt of not dying, he lingered there, circling.
Before long, though, both of those fears paled against the fear that no one would ever know what had happened to his parents and lovers and friends.
After reviewing the images captured by his combat recorder, he realized that he had to have more, and turned back.
Approaching the cities of Polneye, Mallar brought the interceptor up above the clouds just long enough to record the three marauding warships, now orbiting together.
If his little fighter appeared on their defense screens at all, it was as a momentary blip among the static caused by the inversion.
Then he dipped below the clouds, and found the sky free of fighters.
His holocam scanned across the ruins of seven cities, captured seven thin plumes of smoke spaced across the plains. But only seven, for Ten South was still standing, and a giant transport was ground-docked beside it.
The sight brought the first hope to Mallar's heart since Nine South had disappeared under blaster fire.
There was a chance for more than mere justice—there was a chance he could bring help in time to matter.
Ducking back between the veils, he pushed both the interceptor and his ability to control it to the limit, racing for the receding horizon.
Half an hour later, on the far side of Polneye, a tiny single-seat fighter with a determined young student at the controls flung itself up from the clouds and out toward the stars.
Aboard the flagship Pride of Yevetha, Viceroy Nil Spaar personally supervised the extermination of the Kubaz colony—a particularly repulsive variety of vermin, he thought, with faces so hideously mutated that he actively took pleasure in their destruction.
Then, as Pride continued on to seize the Imperial factory farm at Pirol-5, the viceroy retired to his quarters to receive the attentions of his darna and the reports from the other elements of the fleet.
The news was uniformly good. There had been an unfortunate accident at Polneye that had left a pilot dead and the weapons master a suicide, but that was of no consequence. Everywhere the ships of the Yevetha appeared, the vermin were swept off the faces of the worlds they had soiled.
Calmly, ruthless, efficiently, the Black Fleet drew a curtain of death across the Cluster. One after another the vermin settlements fell beneath it—the Kubaz, the Brigia, the Polneye, the Morath, the Corasgh, the H'kig. The targets included colonies and species whose names and histories were unknown to those who plotted their eradication.
Full sterilizations were carried out on the two worlds to be reclaimed for the Yevetha. The colonists meant for those planets were already outbound from The Twelve in the new thrustships, which were faster than light itself. Others would soon follow.
It was the realization of a great destiny. At the end of one long day of glory, the All again belonged to the Yevetha alone.
When the last report was in hand, Nil Spaar called his broodmates to join him and his darna in celebration.
Afterward, the viceroy slept long, deep, and well.
Leia Organa Solo waited hopefully, eagerly, behind the gate for the Fleet shuttle to land at Eastport 18. The moment the shuttle's engines were cut, she brushed past the gate supervisor's earnest cautions and ran out onto the landing pad. When the hatch hissed open and the boarding stairs unfolded, she was already waiting at the bottom.
Han was the first to appear on the top step, wearing his lopsided grin and carrying his flight bag over one shoulder. Taking the stairs in three long strides, he tossed the flight bag down and gathered Leia up in a hug so deep and warm that it almost began to drive away the icy chill that had invaded her spirit since the collapse of the Yevethan negotiations and her humiliation by Peramis and Nil Spaar. She hid her tears against his chest.
“It's gonna be all right,” Han murmured into her hair. “You should hear about some of the bad days I've had.”
Leia laughed despite herself and hugged him fiercely. “Let's go home.”
“Can't think of one good reason not to,” Han said, bending to pluck his flight bag from the ground. “Don't make too much of it, hon, but I kinda missed you.”
Twenty-three hours out from Polneye, Plat Mallar turned on the cockpit recorder of the TIE interceptor.
His face was pale and slick with perspiration. His voice was weak, and his eyes wandered as he tried to force his blurred vision to clear.
Designed without hyperdrive, the interceptor had never been intended for the kind of journey Mallar had attempted—across realspace from one star to another.
He had fled Polneye, eluded the Yevetha, and left Koornacht Cluster behind, but he could not escape the cold equations of time, energy, and distance.
Mallar had run the fighter wide open for as long as the solar panels and the capacitors had allowed, accelerating the little ship to a straightline speed well above that any pilot could use in combat. He had even persuaded the autopilot, designed for simple in-system navigation problems, to accept Galantos as a destination.
But the engines had been cold for hours now, and only emptiness surrounded his hurtling craft. The nose of the fighter was pointed directly at Galantos, but it would not reach that system for—he calculated—nearly three years. And Mallar did not expect to live another three hours.
The ship's small oxygen reserve was gone. His re-breather could no longer cleanse the breaths he drew well enough to end the agonizing headaches. The recirculators were keeping the air dry, but he was slowly suffocating on his own waste gases.
Memory had deceived him. The images from his childhood, of Polneye as a bustling port, as the hub of the region's spacelanes, were too strong to be shaken by facts. Those images offe
red what had proved a false promise—that he would find another ship to offer help or transport.
Dirtbound his whole life, he found it was beyond him to imagine how empty space was, or to believe how deserted that region had become. In twenty-three hours, not a single vessel of any size had been detected by the interceptor's targeting system. He knew he was going to die, and he was going to die alone.
He cleared his throat, an uglier sound than his rasping breaths. “My name is Plat Mallar,” he said. “I was born in the city of Three North, on the planet Polneye. My mother was Fall Topas. She was a plant biologist, and quite beautiful. My father was Plat Hovath, a droid mechanic. I was their only son. We lived in Ten South, on blue level, near the algae pool.
“Yesterday was the fortieth day of Molar. Yesterday warships attacked Polneye without any warning—without any cause. Unidentified ships. Imperial designs. They destroyed most of Polneye—killed my parents—killed most of us. I think the survivors are hostages now—there was a transport—” He paused, heart pounding, to try to catch his breath. His voice had become frail and wheezy.
When he could continue, Mallar said, “The combat recorders of my ship contain evidence of this attack-of the destruction of my home. They murdered my people, thousands and thousands and thousands. Please help us. Please—if any are still alive—try to save them. Whoever sees this—you must find these monsters and punish them. It's wrong. It's terribly wrong. I beg—I beg for justice for the dead. For my parents. For my friends. For me.”
Mallar sagged back into his seat, exhausted by the effort of speaking.
But the recorder kept running—he could not manage to raise an arm to stop it. It kept on, faithfully capturing Mallar's image, for as long as he moved or made a sound at turns.
But it stopped when at last he slipped into unconsciousness.
He was still unconscious, barely clinging to life, when the crew of the Fifth Fleet prowler SP8 stumbled on his hurtling ship.
Chapter 15
The first early-morning rays from Coruscant's sun were throwing long shadows down the east-west streets of Imperial City when Admiral Ackbar reached the family entrance to the presidential residence.
“Good morning,” said the security droid. “This entrance is closed. The family is not receiving visitors at this time. Please come back another time, or call the scheduling center for further information.”
Ackbar cocked his head and blinked in surprise. “I am Admiral Ackbar.”
“Good morning, Admiral Ackbar. This entrance is closed. Please move back to the sidewalk.”
“It's all right,” Ackbar said. “I have a key.” He squeezed his eyes shut while he concentrated. “Aleph—lamed—zayin—shin. Yes, I think that's it.”
“Good morning, Admiral Ackbar,” the droid said. “You may enter.”
The grounds were quiet, except for the tiny cowlpups grazing on the lawns. When Ackbar passed too close to one, it growled at him with a ferociousness all out of proportion to its size.
“Go back to your breakfast,” Ackbar said, amused. “I'm not here for you.”
None of the early rays reached the well-shaded main house, and there were no lights on inside, except in the kitchen, where a butler droid was completing its nightly maintenance. There was no sound from the direction of the children's rooms, which was a relief—he was not ready to deal with their eager energy. Ackbar supposed that, with Han's return, the whole family had been up late.
Sleep in as long as you like, children, he thought with a melancholy tenderness. Sleep in while you can.
Ackbar followed memory and the floorboard glow strips through the darkened halls to Leia and Han's bedroom. Out of consideration for the children, the door was closed but not secured. He hoped his friends were not busy mating.
“Open,” Ackbar told the housecomm. “Lights.”
When the bedroom was suddenly flooded with light, Han reflexively spun over on his back and sat bolt upright. Squinting, he sighed away the rush of adrenaline when he recognized Ackbar. “You,” Han said gruffly. “It's a lucky thing for you I don't sleep with a blaster anymore.”
“Not luck,” the Calamari said. “You told me, after the time you and Jaina scared each other half to death.”
Han's sudden movements had shaken the bed enough to bring Leia up from her deeper sleep. Now she rose on her elbows.
“Admiral Ackbar,” she said, a quizzical expression on her face. “When I invited you to come talk me out of resigning, I thought you might at least wait until I was awake.”
“Good morning, Princess.”
“Don't try to disarm me with politeness,” Leia said. “What are you doing here at this hour?”
“Getting you out of bed,” Ackbar said. “I'll wait outside while you get dressed.”
“Oh, you will? Then what?”
“Then there's somewhere we have to go. I have a speeder waiting.”
“Slow down a second. I'm not on call,” said Leia. “Not for state business. Especially not at this hour—what time is it, anyway?” She glanced sideways at the bedroom chrono. “Oh, heaven—I'm sorry I looked.”
“I understand how you feel,” said Ackbar. “I would rather have stayed in the water myself. Still, there's somewhere we have to go.”
“Why don't you tell me a little more and let me make that decision?”
“I'm afraid I can't do that,” said Ackbar, holding out her robe. “Your head isn't clear yet. You'll have to trust me—if you do trust me.”
Leia frowned as she studied him. Finally she sat up and took the robe from his hand.
“Thank you, Princess.” His gaze moved to Han.
“General Solo, I think you should come, too.”
“What is this, divide and conquer?”
“Please. This involves you as well.”
“Let me find my pants,” Han said resignedly.
“Leia, tell me again why we gave the fishhead a key to the front door—” Leia peered through the viewpane of the Fleet infirmary's Intensive Care Unit Number 5 at the pale-faced young man who had just been transferred from a medical cocoon to the bacta tank. A Fleet doctor and two MD-7 medical droids hovered over the biomonitors.
“Who is he?”
“He is Grannan by stock, Polneye by allegiance,” Ackbar said. “His name is Plat Mallar. He's suffering from severe metabolic disruption due to breathing his own wastes. He may not live. I thought you should see him now, just in case.”
“Why?” asked Leia. “I'm sorry for him, of course, but...” She left the sentence unfinished.
“Polneye? I never heard of it,” Han said. “What happened to him?”
“According to the prowler that found him, he was trying to make an interstellar run in a TIE interceptor—”
“Why would anyone do a fool thing like that?” Han asked dismissively. “It's suicide.”
“Or self-sacrifice,” said Ackbar. “Sometimes they are hard to tell apart.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It appears that Plat Mallar was trying to get a message out of Koornacht Cluster—apparently the only way he could.”
Leia's eyes flashed. “What message?”
“I will show you,” Ackbar said. “But let us stay here awhile longer. I do not know why it is, but the Fleet casualty officer tells me that patients with family and friends to wish them health are strengthened by it. And I am afraid this young pilot needs every edge right now.”
In the privacy of Admiral Ackbar's offices at Fleet Headquarters, in grim silence, Han and Leia watched the holo-recordings taken from Plat Mallar's TIE interceptor.
It was unsettling to see the familiar, forbidding shapes of warships once again at the business of dealing out destruction, and profoundly dismaying to see the cities of Polneye reduced to smoking scorch marks on the planer's barren plains. But Mallar's deathly ill face gave the greatest power to his words.
“—Please help us. Please—if any are still alive—try to save them. Whoever sees
this—you must find these monsters and punish them. It's wrong. It's terribly wrong. I beg—I beg for justice for the dead. For my parents. For my friends. For me.”
When it was over, Leia pushed back from the table without a word, turning her back on Han and the admiral. Hugging herself, she stood before the galactic holomap that covered nearly one whole wall of Ackbar's office, staring up into it with haunted eyes.
“Did you orchestrate all this to humiliate me, Ackbar?” she said finally, still facing the map.
“No, Leia,” Ackbar protested, surprised. “I do not understand.”
“That makes two of us,” Han said, standing.
“What are you talking about, hon? This doesn't have anything to do with you.”
She whirled around to face them. “Doesn't it? Look at him—he's just sitting there waiting for me to draw the same conclusion he has. If you wanted to convince me to resign, Admiral, you couldn't have picked any better way.”
“I'm missing something here,” Han said, looking to Ackbar for help.
“Princess, you are wrong,” said Ackbar. “You could not be more wrong. You are the Chief of State of the New Republic. I would not have anyone else sit in that chair. We need your strength and dedication—and more now than we did yesterday, to answer this challenge.”
Ackbar's praise deflected off Leia's defensiveness, leaving her untouched. “Whose ships were those?” she asked, pointing at the monitor.
“You know as well as I.”
“Imperial design. Imperial fighters. What does that prove?”
“Plat Mallar got close enough to the first ship to interrogate it with his targeting system. It answered as the Imperial Star Destroyer Valorous.”
“Are you arguing with me?”
“Valorous was one of the Black Sword ships on Nylykerka's list.”
“I know that,” she said. “And if it was at Polneye under Yevethan command, then you're looking at the biggest fool in the whole Republic. But we don't know that, do we?”
“Does it matter?”
“Isn't that why you brought me in here? Your subtle way of telling me I was wrong?”
Star Wars - Black Fleet Crisis 1 - Before the Storm Page 28