by Timothy Zahn
“They couldn’t have been,” Rieekan objected. “I was watching the sensor board. Those projectors were definitely drawing power.”
Bel Iblis looked at Drayson. “You know more about Star Destroyers than the rest of us, Admiral. Is it possible?”
Drayson frowned off into the distance, professional pride momentarily eclipsing his personal animosity toward Bel Iblis. “It could be done,” he agreed at last. “You could run a feedback shunt from the tractor beam projector, either to a flash capacitor or a power dissipator somewhere else on the ship. That would let you run a sizable surge of power through the projector without it really doing anything.”
“Is there any way to tell the difference between that and an actual asteroid launch?” Mon Mothma asked.
“From this distance?” Drayson shook his head. “No.”
“It almost doesn’t matter how many are up there,” Rieekan said. “Eventually, their orbits will decay, and letting even one hit ground would be a disaster. Until we’ve cleared them out, we can’t risk lowering the planetary shield.”
“The problem being how we locate them,” Drayson agreed heavily. “And how we know when we’ve gotten them all.”
A movement caught Leia’s eye, and she looked over as a tight-faced Colonel Bremen joined them. “Again, it could be worse,” Bel Iblis pointed out. “The sector fleet can have the out-orbit relay station replaced in a few hours, so at least we’ll still be able to direct the New Republic’s defense from here.”
“It’ll also make it easier to transmit an all-worlds alert,” Bremen spoke up. “Mara Jade’s escaped.”
Mon Mothma inhaled sharply. “How?” she asked.
“With help,” Bremen said grimly. “The guard droid was deactivated. Some kind of jury-rigged restraining bolt. It erased that section of memory, too.”
“How long ago?” Rieekan asked.
“No more than a few hours.” Bremen glanced around the war room. “We’ve had extra security on the command floor since the break was discovered, thinking they might have been planning some sabotage to coincide with the Imperials’ attack.”
“That could still be the plan,” Bel Iblis said. “Have you sealed off the Palace?”
“Like a smuggler’s profit box,” Bremen said. “I doubt they’re still here, though.”
“We’ll need to make certain of that,” Mon Mothma said. “I want you to organize a complete search of the Palace, Colonel.”
Bremen nodded. “Right away.”
Leia braced herself. They weren’t going to be happy about this. “Don’t bother, Colonel,” she said, touching Bremen’s arm to stop him as he turned to leave. “Mara’s not here.”
They all looked at her. “How do you know?” Bel Iblis asked.
“Because she left Coruscant earlier tonight. Along with Han and Luke.”
There was a long silence. “I wondered why Solo didn’t come to the war room with you,” Bel Iblis said. “You want to tell us what’s going on?”
Leia hesitated; but surely none of these people could possibly have anything to do with the Delta Source security leak. “Mara thinks she knows where the Empire’s cloning facility might be. We thought it would be worth sending her and a small team to check it out.”
“We thought?” Drayson snapped. “Who is this we?”
Leia looked him straight in the eye. “My family and closest friends,” she said. “The only people I can be absolutely certain aren’t leaking information to the Empire.”
“That is a gross insult—”
“Enough, Admiral,” Mon Mothma cut him off calmly. Calmly, but there was a hardness around her eyes. “Whatever reprimands may be due here can wait until later. Whether it was prudent or otherwise, the fact remains that they’re on their way, and we need to decide how best to help them. Leia?”
“The most important thing to do is to pretend Mara’s still here,” Leia said, the tightness in her chest easing slightly. “She told me she’d only been to Wayland once, and she couldn’t guess how long it would take her to reconstruct the route. The longer lead they have, the less time the Empire will have to rush reinforcements there.”
“What happens then?” Mon Mothma asked. “Assuming they find it.”
“They’ll try to destroy it.”
There was a moment of silence. “By themselves,” Drayson said.
“Unless you have a spare fleet to lend them, yes,” Leia said.
Mon Mothma shook her head. “You shouldn’t have done it, Leia,” she said. “Not without consulting the Council.”
“If I’d brought it to the Council, Mara might be dead now,” Leia said bluntly. “If news leaked to the Empire that she could find Wayland, the next commando team they sent wouldn’t stop at just trying to discredit her.”
“The Council is above suspicion,” Mon Mothma said, her voice turning chilly.
“Are all the Council members’ aides?” Leia countered. “Or the tactical people and supply officers and library researchers? If I’d suggested an attack on Wayland to the Council, all of those people would eventually have known about it.”
“And more,” Bel Iblis nodded. “She has a point, Mon Mothma.”
“I’m not interested in laying blame, Garm,” Mon Mothma said quietly, “Nor in defending anyone’s little niche of power. I’m concerned about the possibility that all this was indeed a setup, Leia … and that it will cost your husband and brother their lives.”
Leia swallowed hard. “We thought about that, too,” she said. “But we decided it was worth the risk. And there was no one else to do it.”
For a long minute no one said anything. Then Mon Mothma stirred. “You’ll need to talk to everyone who knows Mara Jade is gone, Colonel,” she said to Bremen. “If and when we obtain Wayland’s location, we’ll see what we can do about sending reinforcements to help them.”
“Provided we can be sure it isn’t a trap,” Drayson added, glowering.
“Of course,” Mon Mothma agreed, avoiding Leia’s eyes. “For now, that’s all we can do. Let’s concentrate on Coruscant’s immediate problems: defense, and finding those cloaked asteroids. General Bel Iblis—”
A tentative hand touched Leia’s shoulder, and she turned to find the slicer Ghent standing there. “It’s all over?” he muttered to her.
“The battle is, yes,” she said, glancing at Mon Mothma and the others. They were already knee-deep into a discussion about the asteroids, but eventually one of them was bound to notice Ghent and realize he wasn’t supposed to be here. “Come on,” she told him, steering him back toward the war room exit. “I’ll tell you all about it outside. What did you think of Imperial battle encrypt codes?”
“Oh, they’re okay,” he said. “The guys in there didn’t let me do all that much, really. I didn’t know their machines as well as they did. They had kind of a silly drill going, too.”
Leia smiled. The best and smoothest decrypting routine the New Republic’s experts had come up with, and Ghent considered it a silly drill. “People get into routines on the way they do things,” she said diplomatically. “Maybe I can arrange for you to talk to the person in overall charge and offer some suggestions.”
Ghent waved a vague hand. “Naw. Military types wouldn’t like the way I do things. Even Karrde gets bent out by it sometimes. By the way, you know that pulse transmitter you’ve got going somewhere nearby?”
“The one Delta Source has been using?” Leia nodded. “Counterintelligence has been trying to locate it since it started transmitting. But it’s some sort of cross-frequency split-phase something-or-other, and they haven’t had any luck.”
“Oh.” Ghent seemed to digest that. “Well, that’s a tech problem. I don’t know anything about those.”
“That’s all right,” Leia assured him. “I’m sure you’ll find other ways to help.”
“Yeah,” he said, digging a data card from his pocket. “Anyway … here.”
She frowned as she took the card. “What’s this?”
> “It’s the encrypt code from the pulse transmitter.”
Leia stopped short. “It’s what?”
He stopped too, turning innocent eyes on her. “The encrypt code that cross-frequency whatsis is using. I finally got it sliced.”
She stared at him. “Just like that? You just went ahead and sliced it?”
He shrugged again. “Well, sort of. I’ve been working on it for a month, you know.”
Leia gazed at the data card in her hand, a strange and not entirely pleasant thrill of excitement tingling through her. “Does anyone know you have this?” she asked quietly.
He shook his head. “I thought about giving it to that colonel in there before I left, but he was busy talking to someone.”
Delta Source’s encrypt code … and Delta Source didn’t know they had it. “Don’t tell anyone else,” she said. “And I mean anyone.”
Ghent frowned, but shrugged. “Okay. Whatever you say.”
“Thank you,” Leia murmured, sliding the data card into her robe pocket. It was the key to Delta Source—deep within her, she knew that. All she needed was to find the right way to use it.
And to find it fast.
CHAPTER
15
The fortress of Hijarna had been crumbling slowly away for perhaps a thousand years before the Fifth Alderaanian Expedition had spotted it, keeping its silent, deserted vigil over its silent, deserted world. A vast expanse of incredibly hard black stone, it stood on a high bluff overlooking a plain that still bore the deep scars of massive destruction. To some, the enigmatic fortress was a tragic monument: a last-ditch attempt at defense by a desperate world under siege. To others, it was the brooding and malicious cause of both that siege and the devastation that had followed.
To Karrde, for the moment at least, it was home.
“You sure know how to pick em, Karrde,” Gillespee commented, propping his feet up on the edge of the auxiliary comm desk and looking around. “How did you find this place, anyway?”
“It’s all right there in the old records,” Karrde told him, watching his display as the decrypt program ran its course. A star map appeared, accompanied by a very short text …
Gillespee nodded toward Karrde’s display. “Clyngunn’s report?”
“Yes,” Karrde said, pulling out the data card. “Such as it is.”
“Nothing, right?”
“Pretty much. No indications of clone traffic anywhere on Poderis, Chazwa, or Joiol.”
Gillespee dropped his feet off the table and stood up. “Well, that’s that, then,” he said, stepping over to the fruit rack someone had laid out on a side table and picking himself out a driblis fruit. “Looks like whatever the Empire had going in Orus sector has dried up. If there was anything going there in the first place.”
“Given the lack of a trail, I suspect the latter,” Karrde agreed, choosing one of the cards that had come from his contact on Bespin and sliding it into the display. “Still, it was something we needed to know, one way or the other. Among other things, it frees us up to concentrate on other possibilities.”
“Yeah,” Gillespee said reluctantly as he went back to his seat. “Well … you know, Karrde, this whole thing has been kind of strange. Smugglers, I mean, doing this kind of snoop work. Hasn’t paid very much, either.”
“I’ve already told you we’ll be getting some reimbursement from the New Republic.”
“Except that we don’t have anything to sell them,” Gillespee pointed out. “Never known anyone yet who paid for no delivery.”
Karrde frowned over at him. Gillespee had produced a wicked-looking knife from somewhere and was carefully carving a slice from the driblis fruit. “This isn’t about getting paid,” he reminded the other. “It’s about surviving against the Empire.”
“Maybe for you it is,” Gillespee said, studying the slice of fruit a moment before taking a bite. “You’ve got enough sidelines going that you can afford to lay off business for a while. But, see, the rest of us have payrolls to meet and ships to keep fueled. The money stops coming in, our employees start getting nasty.”
“So you and the others want money?”
He could see Gillespee brace himself. “I want money. The others want out.”
It was not, in retrospect, exactly an unexpected development. The white-hot anger toward the Empire that had been sparked by that attack at the Whistler’s Whirlpool was cooling, and the habits of day-to-day business were beginning to reassert themselves. “The Empire’s still dangerous,” he said.
“Not to us,” Gillespee said bluntly. “There hasn’t been a single blip of Imperial attention directed toward us since the Whirlpool. They didn’t mind us poking around Orus sector; they didn’t even come down on Mazzic for that thing at the Bilbringi shipyards.”
“So they’re ignoring us, despite provocation to do otherwise. Does that make you feel safe?”
Carefully, Gillespee sliced himself off another piece of fruit. “I don’t know,” he conceded. “Half the time I think Brasck’s right, that if we leave the Empire alone, it’ll leave us alone. But I can’t help thinking about that army of clones Thrawn chased me off Ukio with. I start thinking that maybe he’s just too busy with the New Republic to bother with us right now.”
Karrde shook his head. “Thrawn’s never too busy to chase someone down if he wants them,” he said. “If he’s ignoring us, it’s because he knows that’s the best way to quiet any opposition. Next step will probably be to offer us transport contracts and pretend that we’re all good friends again.”
Gillespee looked at him sharply. “You been talking to Par’tah?”
“No. Why?”
“She told me two days ago that she’s been offered a contract to bring a bunch of sublight engines to the Imperial shipyards at Ord Trasi.”
Karrde grimaced. “Has she accepted?”
“Said she was still working out the details. But you know Par’tah—she’s always running right on the edge. Probably can’t afford to say no.”
Karrde turned back to his display, the sour taste of defeat in his mouthy. “I suppose I can’t really blame her,” he said. “What about the others?”
Gillespee shrugged uncomfortably. “Like I said, the money keeps going out. We have to have money coming in, too.”
And just like that, the reluctant coalition he’d tried to put together was falling apart. And the Empire hadn’t had to fire a single shot to do it. “Then I suppose I’ll just have to go it alone,” he said, standing up. “Thank you for your assistance. I’m sure you’ll want to be getting back to business.”
“Now, don’t get all huffy, Karrde,” Gillespee chided him, taking one last bite of fruit and getting to his feet. “You’re right, this clone stuff is serious business. If you want to hire my ships and people for your hunt, we’ll be happy to help you out. We just can’t afford to do it for free anymore, that’s all. Just let us know.” He turned toward the door—
“Just a minute,” Karrde called after him. A rather audacious thought had just occurred to him. “Suppose I find a way to guarantee funding for everyone. You think the others would stay aboard, too?”
Gillespee eyed him suspiciously. “Don’t con me, Karrde. You don’t have that kind of money lying around.”
“No. But the New Republic does. And under the current situation, I don’t think they’d be averse to having a few more fighting ships on the payroll.”
“Uh-uh,” Gillespee shook his head firmly. “Sorry, but privateer is a little out of my line.”
“Even if your duty consists entirely of collecting information?” Karrde asked. “I’m not talking about anything more than what you were just doing in Orus sector.”
“Sounds like a dream assignment,” Gillespee said sardonically. “Except for the tiny little problem of finding someone in the New Republic stupid enough to pay privateer rates for snoop duty.”
Karrde smiled. “Actually, I wasn’t planning to waste their valuable time telling them about it. Have you e
ver met my associate Ghent?”
For a moment Gillespee just stared at him, looking puzzled. Then, abruptly, he got it. “You wouldn’t”
“Why not?” Karrde countered. “On the contrary, we’d be doing them a service. Why clutter their lives with these troublesome accounting details while they’re trying to survive a war?”
“And since they’d have to pay anyway once we found the clone center for them …”
“Exactly,” Karrde nodded. “We can consider this merely a prepayment for work about to be rendered.”
“Just as well they won’t know about it until it’s over,” Gillespee said dryly. “Question is, can Ghent pull it off?”
“Easily,” Karrde assured him. “Particularly since he’s inside the Imperial Palace on Coruscant at the moment. I was planning to head that way soon to pick up Mara anyway; I’ll simply have him slice into some sector fleet’s records and write us in.”
Gillespee exhaled noisily. “It’s got possibilities—I’ll give it that much. Don’t know if it’ll be enough to get the others back on board, though.”
“Then we’ll just have to ask them,” Karrde said, stepping back to his desk. “Invitations for, say, four days from now?”
Gillespee shrugged. “Give it a try. What have you got to lose?”
Karrde sobered. “With Grand Admiral Thrawn,” he reminded the other, “that’s not a question to ever ask lightly.”
The evening breezes moved through the crumbling walls and stone columns of the ruined fortress, occasionally whistling softly as it found its way through a small hole or crevice. Sitting with his back to one of the pillars, Karrde sipped at his cup and watched the last sliver of the sun disappear below the horizon. On the plain below, the long shadows stretching across the scarred ground were beginning to fade as the coming darkness of night began its inexorable move across the landscape.
All in all, rather symbolic of the way this galactic war had finally caught up with Karrde himself.
He took another sip from his cup, marveling once again at this whole absurd situation. Here he was: an intelligent, calculating, appropriately selfish smuggler who’d made a successful career out of keeping his distance from galactic politics. A smuggler, moreover, who’d sworn explicitly to keep his people out of this particular war. And yet, somehow, here he was, squarely in the middle of it.
