Almania had envied Pydyr for generations.
But no more.
Pydyr was his.
The quiet was eerie. All he could hear was the sound of booted feet brushing against sandstone. The troopers were investigating each building, making certain no one remained.
He had half-expected the stench of bodies decaying in Pydyr’s harsh sun, but Hartzig, the officer in charge, had been thorough. Pydyr’s aristocracy was dead, its bodies disposed of within hours. But the moon’s wealth remained.
And he needed it. His timing couldn’t have been better. He tried to smile, but his skin slid beneath the mask. The lips still adhered, though.
He whirled on a booted foot and walked into one of the buildings the troopers had already investigated.
Pydyrian architecture was bold, with heavy brown columns and large, square rooms. Each surface was covered with decoration, some hand-painted by famous artists long dead, and others studded with tiny seafah jewels. In addition to the wealth accumulated over centuries, Pydyr had its own source. Seafah jewels were formed in the ocean in the shells of microscopic creatures. Kueller had ordered the seafah jewelers spared; it took a trained eye to locate most of the jewels on the seabed. A trained Pydyrian eye. The aristocratic Pydyrians had tried for generations to create droids that could locate the jewels, but no matter how good the droid, it couldn’t tell the jewel from centuries of hardened fish dung.
He walked to a column and ran a gloved finger over the ridged jewels embedded in the baked surface. The jewels were bright spots of swirled color, some blue and green, some black and red, some white and orange, some a startling, lusterless yellow. Each jewel, no wider than the seam on his fingertip, had formed over the centuries from tiny seafah bodies discarded on the ocean floor.
The column alone held two years of materials cost for him at the rate he had been spending it. He would probably increase his spending now. He had some large ships that needed rebuilding quickly. Unlike the Pydyrians, he was not one to hoard his wealth. He would have plenty more within a few months.
“It feels as if someone just left.” Femon’s soft voice boomed in this empty place. She had apparently finished her tasks on Almania and decided to join him.
“Someone did.” Kueller did not turn. His mask was slipping more than he liked. The mouth no longer moved with his. “They haven’t been dead very long, Femon.”
“It seems so strange. I was in the eating wing, and there were still dishes on the tables.”
“But the food was gone,” Kueller said. Cleaned up by the droids, as was anything organic and likely to decompose.
“Of course.” She walked up behind him. He could feel her warmth against his back. He did not move, even though he wanted to. She was getting too presumptuous of her own power. He would have to remind her who controlled whom, and soon. “I don’t understand why the Emperor didn’t do this. He was so destructive.”
Kueller remembered the delicious feeling of all those screams, all those lives, all that fear filling him. “He hadn’t found a clean way yet. Maybe he didn’t look for one. Sometimes I think Palpatine was less interested in power than in destruction itself.”
“But you’re interested in power.”
She seemed to be making a statement, but he thought he heard a question beneath it.
“You have an opinion?” he asked in a way that made it sound as if she had no right to one.
“It would seem to me,” she said slowly, “that if we are going to conquer, we should do so now. Everything is in place.”
“Only on Coruscant,” he said.
“But that’s where it’s needed.”
He brought his hand down. Her questions were interrupting his fine mood. “It’s needed on all the designated planets. The secret to control is thoroughness.”
“So we do Coruscant first. Everything else will be in place in a few days.”
“Timing is everything,” Kueller said. “I will wait.”
“If you get rid of the leaders—”
“Others will rise in their place.” He resisted the urge to turn, to glower at her through the mask. The mask wasn’t working, and he didn’t want her to see his face. Sweat dripped off his chin onto his linen shirt.
“Is that why you’re trying to get rid of Skywalker?”
He hesitated, unsure how much he wanted to reveal himself to her. Then he said, “Skywalker’s sister leads the Republic.”
“How do you know she survived the attack on the Senate Hall?”
“She survived,” he said softly.
“So go after her.”
“I am.” He clenched his fists, careful not to let his temper show on such a fine, successful day. “I most assuredly am.”
The ship hung in space. Lando Calrissian peered out the cockpit on the Lady Luck. He was alone on this trip, having dropped Mara Jade off at the Minos Cluster to run some errand for Talon Karrde. Lando didn’t like their continued association, but he had no real right to complain—and he wasn’t sure he wanted that right.
Still, the last few weeks with Mara in the floating cities of Calamari had been delightful. He hadn’t seen her in a long while. He had enjoyed her company, and only a few times had longed for solitude.
He had the solitude now, but he no longer wanted it. At the moment, he’d give anything to have someone to consult about the ship spinning slowly in front of him.
It looked familiar. At first he had thought it was the Millennium Falcon. Then he realized that the Arakyd concussion-missile tubes weren’t just missing. They hadn’t been there at all. Something had been built to fill the area and that something was long gone. He had only seen one other stock light freighter that so closely resembled the Falcon, and that had been the Spicy Lady. Although the Spicy Lady had a modified A-wing where the missile tubes had been.
An A-wing that could fly on its own. A separate ship, for escapes and escapades.
Lando hailed the Spicy Lady, his heart pounding. “Spicy Lady, this is Lady Luck. Are you in distress? Over?”
No response. The ship looked abandoned. Only he had never known Jarril to leave the Spicy Lady for long. Jarril had invested his personal fortune in her, and used her to make more money. He never let her drift. Even when he was in the A-wing, he made certain she looked powered-up so that no one would board without major preparation.
“Spicy Lady, this is Lady Luck. Over.”
Lando swore under his breath. This was supposed to be a simple trip. He didn’t like flying solo. He had a new astromech droid that Mara had bought with profits from their most recent shared venture, but even with the modifications, the droid wasn’t a lot of help in a situation like this.
He scanned the Spicy Lady for life signs. None. She was dark. Life support wasn’t even functioning.
He sighed. He couldn’t board her. He didn’t want to leave the Lady Luck without good cause. Instead he checked to see if the Spicy Lady had slave circuitry. He doubted it. Most smuggling vessels avoided slave circuits, which allowed remote control of the ship from other ships. But business had changed since Lando entered it. A few suppliers were requiring slave circuits. And Jarril was still hip-deep in the business. He might be dealing with some of those suppliers.
The Lady Luck’s computer beeped at Lando. The Spicy Lady not only had slave circuits, she had fully rigged slave circuits.
“First break I’ve had all day,” Lando said.
He linked the Spicy Lady’s internal holocams to the Lady Luck’s and surveyed the interior of the ship.
It looked like an Imerria Windstorm had gone through the public sections. Supplies floated in the zero-gravity environment. Blaster scars seared the couches in the rec area. The oxygen masks were broken, the emergency equipment destroyed.
Lando panned through the public areas. He knew that Jarril wouldn’t allow holocams in the storage compartments. Lando’s mouth was dry. The discomfort he had felt when he first saw the ship was growing.
Except for the blaster scars in th
e rec room, he saw no signs of battle. No real destruction, only the kind made when someone—or several someones—searched a ship. Still, the tension in Lando’s shoulders was growing.
Finally he brought the Spicy Lady’s cockpit up on his screen. And then he let out the breath he had been holding.
Jarril floated, his body bumping against the controls, the viewport, the ceiling, the floor. Judging from the hole in his chest, he had been hit with a weapon at very close range.
Lando closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. An old friend shouldn’t die like that. Especially not in the rear-end of nowhere with no one to guard his back.
Then Lando frowned. Jarril usually had a Sullustan with him. Seluss. Had Seluss taken the A-wing? For help? That made no sense. He would have been back.
Unless he was followed.
But Lando had seen no other vessels in this corner of space. Very few ships went back and forth here. There was nothing to smuggle. Lando himself wouldn’t have been here if Mara hadn’t had to meet Karrde. The Republic had little interest in the primitive planets nearby and the Empire had abandoned hope of uniting such diverse peoples.
The Empire had long ago abandoned hope of anything.
Something nagged at the back of Lando’s mind. He had seen something in that debris. Something that didn’t belong.
He opened his eyes as he panned away from the cockpit, searching, searching, scanning the debris at close range until he found what he was looking for.
In the galley, banging off one wall and ricocheting into another like a puck in null hockey, a stormtrooper helmet floated.
A helmet so clean it reflected the emergency glow panels.
Stormtroopers. This far out. Perhaps Lando had been wrong about the Empire.
With a flurry of movements, he rigged up the rest of the slave circuitry. He’d tow the Spicy Lady to his mining operation on Kessel and then inspect the interior himself. Maybe he could see what Jarril had been into.
Lando had a hunch he wouldn’t like what he was about to find.
Eight
The surviving senators filled the Emperor’s Audience Room in the Imperial Palace. The senior senators, the ones who clearly supported the Republic, were mingling with one another, and talking about substantive issues. Leia stood beside the buffet table that lined one wall. She wasn’t interested in her colleagues. She was watching the junior senators, many of them former Imperials, argue. Her hands still hurt from the burns she had sustained in the blast, but otherwise she felt fine.
Except for her hearing.
She wished it hadn’t returned.
The arguments rose around her, so loud that one voice would quickly cover another.
“… decide who’s in charge now that …”
“… never would have allowed such chaos …”
“… glad we’re here. The New Republic can’t afford such lax …”
She didn’t need to hear more than a few snatches of conversation to know what was happening. Here, at least among the junior senators, the blame for the destruction of the Senate Hall was going to fall on her government. She shouldn’t have listened to Han. She should have been up and around the day of the explosion. Two days away had allowed this situation to get out of hand.
Leia took a vagnerian canape and ate it quickly, hoping its sweetness would give her energy she still lacked. The doctors said she needed time to recover, that she had nearly died, but she had made it through serious wounds before. This time, she suspected, part of the problem was her attitude.
She wiped her hands on her pants—she wore a loose, flowing pair that resembled a skirt, with a blouse over them, deciding to be dressy but comfortable at this meeting—and stepped into the crowd of junior senators.
Their conversation ceased. She smiled at them, as if she had heard nothing, and clapped her hands for attention.
“I want to thank you all for coming on such short notice,” she said. “We are currently preparing the ballroom as a temporary home for the Senate, but it won’t be completed until tomorrow. In the meantime, I thought we would hold this informal meeting. I wanted to get you all up-to-date on the investigation.”
“What investigation?” asked R’yet Coome, the junior senator from Exodeen. His voice, filtered through his six sets of teeth, sounded so much like that of his colleague, M’yet Luure, that Leia started. It was even a question that M’yet would have asked.
She glanced at R’yet as he preened his six arms against his side. If she hadn’t known M’yet was dead, she would have thought she was speaking to him.
“We’ve had an investigation running simultaneously with the rescue effort,” she said. “The rescue effort took top priority for a day. We had to make certain—” Her voice broke.
“We had to make certain that no one else was trapped in the rubble,” said ChoFï, one of the senators who had been with her since the beginning of the New Republic. He stood just behind her, his seven-foot length protecting instead of dwarfing her.
She nodded, grateful for his support. She hadn’t seen him when she came in. He must have been eavesdropping, as she had been.
“You should have taken the precautions up front,” R’yet said. “I don’t know how I’ll tell the people of Exodeen that one of their most beloved figures is dead.”
“We have the best security of any place in the Republic,” Leia said. “Obviously, it wasn’t good enough.”
“Obviously,” R’yet said.
Meido, vibroblade-thin, his crimson face covered with tiny white lines, put a two-fingered hand on R’yet’s first arm. Leia was astonished that Meido knew Exodeenian etiquette. A touch on the first arm was a signal to stop speaking. A touch on the second would have been a challenge to fight.
“The Chief of State has had a difficult week,” Meido said.
“As have we all,” some senator in the back said.
Meido ignored him. “We must give her the benefit of any doubt. Of course, we had to see if anyone remained in the ruins of the Hall. Now the investigation can begin in earnest.”
His support made Leia suspicious. Meido hadn’t been supportive since his election.
“Thank you, Senator,” she said. She took a deep breath. “The damage to the Hall was extensive. The bomb, if we might call it that, was detonated inside the Hall. There was no exterior damage at all. We are currently investigating all personnel who were in the Hall at the time of the explosion as well as people who had access to it in the days before.”
“Does that include senators?” asked Senator Wwebyls, a tiny humanoid from Yn.
“It includes everyone,” Leia said.
“Even the dead?” R’yet asked, his lower hands perched on his secondary hips.
“Even the dead,” Leia said softly. “We can’t overlook anyone or anything here.”
“So you’re being investigated as well,” Senator Meido asked.
Leia started. Of course she wasn’t being investigated. She knew she wasn’t involved.
“She said everyone.” ChoFï spoke without judgment as he reminded them to listen, and as he got Leia off the hook.
Kerrithrarr, the senior Wookiee senator, growled from the back of the room.
“My Wookiee colleague has a good point,” ChoFï said. “The best way to survive this crisis is to work together.”
“We can’t work together when we’re being investigated,” said another junior senator.
“We’re all being investigated,” said Nyxy, a senator from Rudrig.
“We have to work together,” said Senator Gno. He had been a senator in the Old Republic, and then a member of the Rebel ring in the Imperial Senate. He was one of the few Old Republic members who hadn’t retired. “Have you ever thought that whoever set off that bomb did so for precisely this reason? If we fight among ourselves, we no longer focus on outside threats. We cannot tear this government apart from within.”
That thought hadn’t occurred to Leia either. She had bee
n concentrating on finding the perpetrators, and on discovering if they were the source of the Force-vision she had shared with Luke. She hadn’t forgotten that feeling of impending doom, not just for the Senate, but for the government itself.
She couldn’t tell this body, though, about the new weapon. Not without a greater proof than her feeling, and Luke’s.
“It seems to me that this government is already being torn apart,” R’yet said. “We need leadership. Good leadership would have prevented this attack.”
“We don’t know that,” ChoFï said. “We won’t know anything like that until we discover what caused the destruction.”
“The teams are working on that now,” Leia said. “We have some experts digging through material removed from the building, as well as searchers still in the Hall. We’ll know more by later today.”
“Will we know then whether the attack was aimed at the Senate or aimed at you?” R’yet asked.
He had the right to ask that. Leia knew he did. But that didn’t stop the flare of anger within her. She had had enough. He was acting as if he had attained a moral high road through M’yet Luure’s loss.
“Senator Coome,” she said, rising to her full height. “If the attack was aimed at you, at me, or at any of our colleagues, then it was aimed at all of us. We are a body, a group, whether you like it or not. The attack occurred in the seat of government, and affected all of us equally—”
“Not equally,” R’yet said. “Some of us are dead.”
“Equally,” Leia said, “at least for the survivors. Now you can work with us and help the New Republic.”
“Or?” He had stepped forward despite Meido’s restraining hand. “Are you threatening me, Leia Organa Solo?”
“That wouldn’t be good for unity, now, would it?” Leia asked.
“It certainly wouldn’t,” Meido said smoothly. “Perhaps it would ease my colleague’s mind if we had a separate investigation going, as well as the official investigation. With two teams, we might get better results.”
Star Wars: The New Rebellion Page 6