by Star Wars
She shifted her attention back to the six unknown beings in the middle of the compartment. Two of them had their backs to her, their blasters pointed at the prisoners, while the third held his loosely in his hand, the muzzle pointed at the deck a meter in front of him. His facial skin above the high collar of his tunic was a wrinkled mess of dark red and dirty white, with a lipless slit of a mouth tucked away amid the folds. But the black eyes staring out at Faro were bright and clear and oddly tense. He gestured, and the being to his left spoke—
“ ‘Are you the guarantor of our safety?’ ” Thrawn translated.
“Yes,” Faro said. “I’m Commodore Karyn Faro, commander of the Imperial Star Destroyer Chimaera. Surrender your weapons, and I will promise you your lives and safety.”
Thrawn translated her statement. Faro tensed…
With a sigh that seemed to collapse his whole body, the armed being bowed his head to his chest. He let his blaster drop to the deck—
“Kill him,” Thrawn snapped.
Faro felt her eyes widen. What the hell?
Before she could speak the two stormtroopers flanking her opened fire, raking the being’s torso with blaster bolts. The creature jerked violently backward.
And as he collapsed, a small cylinder Faro hadn’t noticed flew out of his other hand.
He was still falling when the other beings leapt into motion, the nearest grabbing for the bouncing cylinder, the others opening fire on the prisoners. Each of them got a single shot off before they, too, were sent sprawling by stormtrooper blasterfire. The being diving for the cylinder stretched out his hand—
“Kill them all,” Thrawn ordered, raising his voice to be audible above the noise.
Five seconds later, it was over.
Faro swallowed hard, shaking with reaction and adrenaline. What in hell’s name had just happened?
“Major, are there any injuries?” Thrawn asked.
“Two of the prisoners were hit, sir,” Carvia reported as four of the stormtroopers hurried over to the corner. “We’re checking on them now.”
“Also check them for booby traps.”
“Absolutely,” Carvia said grimly. “All our people are unhurt.”
“And Commodore Faro?”
“Safe, sir,” Carvia said, his voice going grim. “Is that cylinder what I think it is?”
“I believe so,” Thrawn said. “Take care when handling it. The explosives it was set to trigger are most likely still within range and active.”
A cold chill ran up Faro’s back. Basically the very same thought that had led her to coming aboard the enemy ship in the first place.
Only instead of the hidden warship wanting to lure in and destroy a high-value target from combat distance, here it had been intended to be up close and very, very personal.
“They must have been desperate to keep the Grysks’ goodwill to agree to sacrifice themselves this way,” Thrawn continued, his voice calm again. “Commodore, are you all right?”
“Yes, sir,” Faro managed. Enemies of the Empire took shots at her all the time, but usually she had shields and turbolasers and officers and crew and an entire ship protecting her. Here on the ground, the experience was considerably different.
“Good,” Thrawn said. “My apologies for allowing you to walk into danger that way. But while I suspected there would be a final attempt, the remaining Grysk clients had to be offered a chance to turn back from that path.”
“Understood, sir,” Faro said. “And I completely agree.”
“Good,” Thrawn said again. “A medical team is on the way to treat the injured. A detailed sensor scan indicates there are no other beings aboard either ship, so I believe the need for your presence there has ended. Once the stormtroopers have finished clearing out any further traps and brought the survivors to the Chimaera, an analysis group will go aboard and search for data the Grysks may have been careless enough to leave us.”
“They may also be worried about information carried by surviving prisoners,” Faro pointed out. “Because whoever they sent their last message to doesn’t know their suicide team didn’t have second thoughts.”
“A fact and concern I hope to use against them,” Thrawn agreed. “I do not know if the Grysks did indeed send a message before we destroyed the warship, but the triad was certainly active at the time.”
“With any luck, the last image they sent was that of their own destruction.”
“That would certainly provoke a reaction,” Thrawn said. “I had thought that the Grysk response would be to the observation post. Now I believe this will be the location of our final confrontation with them. Major Carvia, escort Commodore Faro back to your shuttle and return her to the Chimaera.”
“Yes, sir,” Carvia said.
“And I trust, Commodore,” Thrawn added, “that this has been a learning experience for you.”
“Yes, sir,” Faro said grimly.
And it had.
The Chimaera had faced the Grysks in combat before, and while they were formidable opponents, they weren’t any worse than other enemies the Empire had fought and defeated.
Now, for the first time, she truly understood why Thrawn was so deeply concerned about this particular threat. An enemy who could enslave the hearts and minds of their captive species so thoroughly that they were willing to die on the Grysks’ behalf—even when their masters were gone, even when those masters would never know whether those slaves had fulfilled their final orders—posed a terrible threat to the galaxy. With an enemy like that pulling the strings, one could never be certain if an ally was still an ally, or a subservient species still subservient. The Grysks could wear a thousand faces, and could wield a thousand weapons.
They might not be able to destroy the Empire from without. But they might well be able to subvert and destroy it from within.
“Good,” Thrawn said. “We will speak further once we have examined the prisoners. Perhaps they will have useful information to give us.”
* * *
—
“I don’t know what I can tell you,” the man who called himself Bleary said. His voice was tired and anxious and nervous, Faro noted, the voice of a man who’s been pulled out of one laser cooker only to be dropped into another. Rescued from the Grysks, he and his companions were now facing charges of piracy and theft of Imperial property. “They would sit us down for hours, asking us everything about the Empire, threatening our lives, our families, our clan totems—whatever the hell those are—and on and on.”
“Did they utilize body scanners or other measurement devices?” Thrawn asked.
“I don’t think so,” Bleary said. “I suppose there might have been something in the chairs, but I don’t think so. Anyway, they didn’t need anything. Those things—well, you saw them. Screechy voices, long fingers, crazy eyes. They’d have two or three of those things standing behind us the whole time, those fingers wrapped around our heads and the back of our necks. Creepiest thing I ever saw. They’d ask questions, and the screechers would just stand there hanging on to us. Then, after it was all over, they’d all sit down together and talk about the whole thing.”
“How do you know they were talking about the interrogations?” Faro asked.
Bleary gave her a nervously scornful look. “What, you think they were talking about the weather? What else could they have been talking about?”
“Perhaps the stolen cargo that was in your transfer station,” Thrawn suggested.
Bleary flinched back in his chair. “Yeah. I…” He trailed off.
“Tell us about it,” Thrawn said. “Who gave you your orders?”
“I don’t know,” Bleary said. “Maliss and Sorath—they were the bosses—they’re the ones who hired us for the job.”
“How?” Thrawn asked.
“What do you mean how?” Bleary asked. “We we
re a…well, we weren’t pirates, exactly. More like backstage assistants. Anyway, we’d worked with a couple of pirate groups, and I guess Sorath remembered us. I mean, we might even have worked with him directly—Dashades all look alike to me. Anyway, he called us in and hired us to run the way station, collect cargoes from the freighters that would be coming, then switch the stuff and the crews to new freighters and dump the original ones. We had a schedule for moving the station to different places, and the freighters kept coming in, and everyone was happy.”
“Maliss and Sorath both knew the organizer?”
“I don’t know,” Bleary said. “Maliss was always the one who gave us the tweaks or revised schedules. Sorath might have known, too, but you’re never going to get anything out of him.”
“We shall see,” Thrawn said calmly. “Tell us of the coming of the Grysks.”
Bleary’s face scrunched up. “I don’t know how they found us,” he said, his voice shaking slightly. “Maybe they followed one of the freighters. Maybe it was just luck. But we were shifting cargo around to get ready for the incoming ship and suddenly they were there. Big ship, lots of firepower.”
“They fired on you?”
“Oh, yeah,” Bleary said bitterly. “Though they didn’t really need to. We didn’t even know the ship was there until it blew open one of the outer hatches.” He shivered. “And then they came aboard.”
“The Grysks?” Thrawn asked.
“Yeah, if that’s what they’re called,” Bleary said, hunching his shoulders. “Not the screechers, the ones who were running the ship. The ones with blasters.” He waved a hand. “Maliss and Sorath charged straight in—you know Dashades—but they weren’t ready for a real fight. Maliss got killed in the first wave. Sorath took over and tried to push back.”
He swallowed hard. “We weren’t fighters. None of us except Sorath. He let them whittle us down to twelve before he finally surrendered. I don’t know—I guess he figured they just wanted the cargo and maybe we could do a deal with them.”
“Apparently not,” Faro said.
Bleary snorted. “They didn’t seem to care about the cargo. Matter of fact, I don’t think they even looked at it. They were more interested in us. Who we were, what we liked, what we were afraid of. The stuff I already told you.”
Faro nodded, giving a little shiver of her own. Searching for the handles and levers they could use to turn a given group of humans to their side.
“How many cargoes have you transferred?” Thrawn asked.
Bleary looked down at the table. “Eighteen,” he muttered. He looked back up. “But handling stolen merchandise isn’t as bad as stealing it. Right?”
“That will be for the prosecutors to decide,” Thrawn said. “Thank you. You will now be taken to another compartment for questioning in more detail, both about your crimes and about your time in captivity.” He motioned, and the navy troopers flanking the door stepped forward.
“All right,” Bleary said, standing up, holding his arms awkwardly with the binders around them. “But look. I mean…they were getting to some of us. They really were. Creepy as hell. Westerli and Yimmer especially—you could see that they were starting to think that we should be working for the Grysks instead of Sorath. Or maybe they’d been so scared or dug into that they were thinking that. I don’t know. All I know is that you need to keep real close watch on them.”
“We are,” Thrawn said. “We are keeping close watch on all of you.”
Bleary seemed to sink into himself. “Yeah. I…So what happens to me after you’re done asking questions?”
“That will depend on how cooperative you are,” Thrawn said quietly. “And perhaps how much the Grysks got to you, as well.” He gestured, and the troopers took the prisoner’s arms and walked him out of the conference room.
“So that’s it,” Faro said when the hatch was once again closed behind them. “Looks like there won’t be anything tying this back to Governor Haveland.”
“I’m not surprised,” Thrawn said. “Still, we haven’t yet talked with Sorath. He may have information he’s willing to give us.”
“Maybe in exchange for some blosphi extract?”
“Very good,” Thrawn said, giving her a small smile. “I wondered if you would pick up on the thought that that particular delicacy had been added to the stolen cargoes specifically for him. No, I doubt we shall gain much more from them. But I’m certain Colonel Yularen’s interrogators will welcome the challenge.”
“Yes, sir,” Faro said, eyeing him closely. The piracy and the disruption of Krennic’s supply chain were the reason the Chimaera was out here, and solving the crime was what would make or break Thrawn’s TIE Defender program. But she could see that that wasn’t where his thoughts were right now. “What are we going to do about the Grysks?” she asked. “You’ve closed down their observation and probe operation and demolished their forward base. What’s next?”
“What’s next is the main command center, the force that was coordinating this effort,” Thrawn said, his eyes narrowing. “It will be somewhere within a few hours’ travel, supporting this operation and possibly others as well.”
“Well, I think we’ve delivered a pretty strong message,” Faro said.
“We have indeed,” Thrawn said. “And now that the conjoined ships have been cleared of traps, I shall go across and see what I may glean from what they left behind.”
“So that we can deliver an even stronger message?”
“No, Commodore,” Thrawn said. “Not a message. Not even a warning.
“I intend to deliver complete and total destruction.”
Ronan hadn’t paid much attention to the Tiquwe spaceport as they were coming in from space. But the place had already turned out to be bigger than he’d expected, and even as he squeezed through Dayja’s secret door he was glumly anticipating the long walk still ahead of them.
Fortunately, Dayja was already on top of the situation. Ronan finished his passage through the wall to discover the ISB agent had gone off somewhere on his own. By the time Vanto and the death troopers made it through behind him, Dayja was back with a commandeered speeder truck.
Commandeered, or stolen. From what Ronan knew of the ISB, it could be either.
But at this point he didn’t care. All that mattered was locating the freighter Vanto had identified and finding out whether or not Thrawn’s theory was right.
Preferably before the stormtroopers from the Star Destroyer looming overhead caught up with them. Being forced to present his credentials out in the open in a place like this would be begging for some pirate or smuggler to take a shot at him.
Just as bad, he decided as he grimly hung on to the truck’s safety bars, would be if Dayja’s lunatic driving got them stopped by some low-level spaceport workers. If Sisay had been right about many of them being in the pay of criminal organizations, their reaction to having a high-ranking Stardust official in their midst might be even worse than a pirate’s potshot.
Fortunately, Dayja seemed to know what he was doing. His crazily winding path through the spaceport’s commercial section somehow managed to avoid inspectors, officials, port guards, watch droids, and everything else that might impede their progress. They reached the outer edge of the official Imperial section—whose wall and defenses, Ronan noted, were far more elaborate and forbidding than those of the commercial section—without incident. Abandoning the speeder truck, Dayja led them to a temporary work shelter that had been erected over a scorched freighter hulk clearly far beyond any chance of repair. Inside the wreck, he opened up the hatch to the lower cargo hold, opened the camouflaged hatch in the hold’s deck, led them through a dank underground passage and up and out again into an abandoned dispatch office. Another commandeered vehicle, and they were off on yet another twisted ride.
And then—suddenly and somehow paradoxically before Ronan expected—the
y were there.
“There’s your freighter,” Dayja said, gesturing to the slightly dilapidated vessel crouched on its landing skids, the name Brylan Ross in faded letters on the underside. “You’ve got half an hour before the loaders and stock checkers get back.”
“We’ve got what?” Ronan demanded. “What are you talking about?”
“I rescheduled all the people who are supposed to be crawling over this ship so you’d have a little privacy,” Dayja said, his eyes narrowing a little. “You’re welcome. I suggest you stow the attitude and get on with it before they all wander back.”
Ronan glared at him. That kind of unwanted initiative wasn’t exactly praised under Director Krennic’s administration, especially when such thoughtless actions could jeopardize more important operations. In this case, moving everyone away from the Brylan Ross could draw attention to both the freighter and its data backtrail, which could open up access to the whole Stardust supply line.
But Dayja hadn’t known that, and probably wouldn’t have cared if he had. And at this point, it was too late to fix it. Ronan would just have to hope the port workers didn’t have a sense of curiosity.
“So what’s first?” Dayja asked.
“We know some of the cargoes were switched out of other ships,” Vanto said. “I suggest you and Assistant Director Ronan start there. I’ll take a look at the hull, see if I can find any signs of tampering.”
“What kind of tampering?” Dayja asked.
“Tampering designed to draw in grallocs,” Vanto said.
Dayja looked at Ronan. “He’s kidding, right?”
“Unfortunately, he’s not,” Ronan growled. “Fine. I trust you can get us inside?”
Dayja gave a little snort. “What, a piece-of-junk freighter like this?”
“It happens to be under the auspices of the Stardust project,” Ronan said stiffly. “As such—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Dayja interrupted, turning and heading for the forward hatch. “Come on.”
One of the conditions Director Krennic had insisted on when he first agreed to ship Death Star material through Esaga sector was that Governor Haveland provide the best security available, not just for the ports but also for the freighters themselves. Ronan had already seen the kind of back doors Tiquwe contained; now he discovered that Stardust’s freighter security was equally sloppy. It took Dayja barely ten seconds to slice the hatch lock, and another ten to disable the supposedly undetectable and unbreachable backup alarm system.