by James Luceno
The three Senators were well-known members of the Delegation of Two Thousand, a loyalist coterie opposed to the strong measures Chancellor Palpatine had enacted since the start of the war.
“Jedi Master J'oopi Shé is also present.”
“Technical division?”
“That's the one.”
Isard walked while he spoke. “Interesting that they should be holding a private meeting while several of their cohorts are up here.”
“Which ones?”
“Danu, Malé-Dee, Eekway … the usual bunch. Do you have audio of the meeting?”
“No. Countermeasures were taken. But we were able to snake a snoop-cam through the landing bay's intake vents, so we have acceptable video.”
“The carry case …”
“Too soon to know what it contains. Our people are working on cleaning up the surveillance feeds.”
“Do we have anything on the couriers?”
“Nothing yet. The freighter carries a Ralltiir registry, and is owned by a company called the Republic Group.”
“That could be telling.”
“I thought so, too. The pilots transmitted a valid authorization code to Senate Airlane Control.”
Isard paused at the edge of the stark atrium, where the Chancellor and the others were awaiting a turbolift. The area was filling fast with Senators who had emerged from the shelters and wanted to offer their congratulations to Palpatine. Isard found the lack of security appalling. Fierce fighting had occurred in the vicinity of the annex while Palpatine had been held prisoner, and it was possible that the Separatists had infiltrated flesh-and-blood or droid assassins. Yet here Palpatine was, acting as if he'd only been out for a stroll, a pair of Republic guards his only protection. But that was typical of him, despite the strain it placed on the Intelligence Bureau. Typical of him, too, to admit only loyalist senators to the docking berth, in full knowledge of their growing impatience with the sweeping changes he had made, the liberties he had revoked. Palpatine had at least agreed with Isard's suggestion that the media be held at bay for a while longer.
Isard thought about the clandestine meeting. The Senators were harmless, but he didn't like the idea of a Jedi being present. Members of the Order had been doing more than their usual share of snooping about of late. Eavesdropping on Senate sessions, investigating old tunnels that ran beneath The Works and the sub-basements of 500 Republica … It had to stop.
“Send a squad of shock troopers to disrupt the meeting,” he said, “with orders to hold the Senators for questioning.”
“What about Master Shé?”
“Supply a credible pretext for the intrusion. Senate security concerns, a bomb threat, whatever you need. Shé will keep out of it.”
“And the couriers?”
“Charge them with possession of a stolen security code, impersonating emergency personnel, and violating restricted airspace.” Isard paused, then said: “I'll see to their interrogation myself.”
“It should hold,” Jadak said into the mouthpiece of his headset from beneath the YT's port mandible. “But we might want to pick up a replacement on Kuat before heading to Toprawa.”
Reeze was crouched inside an access bay at the tip of the mandible, evaluating the braking thruster from the inside. His response came through the earphones. “You don't have to twist my arm.”
Jadak gave the damaged jet another look. Wiping lubricant from his hands, he walked around the bow of the ship and nearly collided with Master Shé as he was hurrying down the boarding ramp. The installation apparently completed, the Jedi had the tool case in one hand, an activated comlink in the other.
“Shock troopers have been dispatched to arrest the Senators,” he said, without slowing down. “I will lead them to safety. Raise the ship and be quick about it.” He stopped a few meters from the ramp, then turned. “Good luck, Captain.”
Halfway up the ramp, Jadak waved a casual salute. “Thanks for the heads-up.” He brought the headset microphone to his mouth and commed Reeze. “Company's coming. Haul yourself out of there.”
Reeze was climbing from a hatch in the main hold when Jadak entered.
“Clones?”
“Shock troopers.”
Reeze scowled. “We're not being paid enough.”
“Noted.”
“Especially now that they're taking the ship.”
“We knew this could happen.”
“That doesn't soften the blow.”
“How 'bout we have this conversation later.” Jadak extended a hand and yanked Reeze up onto the deck plates. “Do a readiness check and get her warmed up. I'm going see about delaying them.” Moving to the engineering station, he pulled a small blaster from a compartment below the console.
Reeze planted his hands on his hips and laughed. “I'm sorry, Tobb, but that's the funniest sight I've seen in a long while. That toy against a couple of DC-fifteen blaster rifles?”
Jadak frowned at him. “I'm not planning on a standoff. I just want to slow them down.”
“I guess you can try.” Reeze laughed again as he made for the cockpit.
Jadak raced down the ramp and hurried to the landing bay's rear door. Taking aim, he sent a bolt directly into the door controls, stepping back while sparks and tendrils of smoke erupted from the switch and the smell of fried circuitry stung his nostrils. Broader and taller, the cargo door was a vertical hatch in the bay's west wall. Rearming the blaster, Jadak fired two bolts into the control, one of which sizzled past his right ear in sibilant ricochet. He was hastening back to the ship when gauntleted fists began to pound on the exterior of the frozen hatch. Amplified—though muffled by the durasteel door—the voice of a shock-trooper rang out.
“Senate Security! Raise the hatch and move to the center of the bay with your hands above your head. Make no attempt to flee.”
A smile of satisfaction was just taking shape on Jadak's face when he heard noise from above. A blade of white-hot light was tracing an arc through the ceiling. Taking the boarding ramp in long strides, he skidded into the connector, ducked into the cockpit, and threw himself into the pilot's chair.
“You tell them to go away?” Reeze asked, eyes on the status displays.
“I toasted the door locks, all right. But they're rappelling through the kriffing ceiling!”
Reeze glanced at him. “They want us that badly?”
“We're not waiting around to find out.”
Jadak was strapping in when sounds of impact issued from the Envoy's roof. Above the modulating whistle of the warming engines came the throaty rasp of a cutting torch.
In a rush Jadak enabled the repulsorlifts. The YT was a few meters off the floor when blaster rifle bolts began to sear into the hull.
“Bork them!” Reeze said.
Jadak grabbed the yoke and whipped the Envoy through a rapid about-face, trusting that centrifugal force would hurl the clone soldiers from the hull. A trooper in red-emblazoned armor flew past the cockpit viewport, arms and legs flailing.
Reeze winced. “That's not going to earn us any points with them.”
Without a thought for approaching traffic, Jadak took the ship hurtling out of the landing bay.
“I HAVE THEM,” ISARD SAID INTO THE MIKE SECURED TO THE SHORT collar of his uniform. Standing at the rim of the speeder bus berth, he traversed the macrobinoculars to keep the fleeing YT centered in the visual field. Far below him, the freighter dived into the broad cleft opposite the Senate Annex.
“Captain Archer's ARC squadron will take up the pursuit,” the assistant director said through the comlink.
“What about Fang Zar and the others?”
“Gone by the time the shock troopers entered the bay. Someone had to have tipped them off.”
Isard lowered the macrobinoculars and hurried down the red carpet toward the atrium. “We'll see to them in due time. Right now that freighter is our priority.”
“Disable or destroy?”
“Archer's call. Have a forensics team standing
by to retrieve the bodies and pick through the wreckage if it comes to that.”
* * *
Blaster bolts nipping at her stern, the YT dropped from the high ground, nearly colliding with a speeder bus that was making a stately approach to one of the upper-tier berths. Whizzing from around the east curve of the annex dome flew a pair of speeders with front-mounted repeating weapons. Jadak pushed the yoke forward, plunging the Envoy into one of the canyons that radiated from the Senate circle. Cutting through traffic lanes, he tilted the freighter up on her side, then completed a rollover and clawed for the sky. The speeders were soon a memory, but the Envoy hadn't ascended to the penthouse levels of 500 Republica when the threat-assessment board began to chime.
“V-wings and ARC-one-seventies,” Reeze said. “Count five … six, seven. Closing from our four and nine.”
Jadak nudged the throttle and pulled the yoke into his lap, fomenting chaos in several midlevel airlanes as the YT executed a vertical climb of several hundred meters, ahead of her own sonic boom, the threat board hollering all the while.
“More ARCs.”
Jadak glanced at the instrument panel's main screen. Heat-shedding S-foils parting into attack position, the pursuit ships were flying full-out, laser weapons and proton missile launchers coming alive.
“Has the blockade been lifted?”
“Just,” Reeze said, twisting the comm's selector dial and listening through the headset. “Ships are dispersing from the holding patterns. Most of the incoming traffic has been routed to Sectors Thirteen through Twenty.”
Jadak changed vectors, slewing widely to the east and calling more power from the engines. The displays told him that the clone pilots had second-guessed him. The closest of the Advanced Recon fighters sent a flurry of warning bolts across the Envoy's bow.
“Well, they mean business.”
“Told you you were too rough on them back in the bay.”
“Angle the front deflectors and keep an eye out.”
Up ahead flew the vanguard vessels of a kilometers-wide swath of ships eager to reach their destinations at long last. Escorted by police vehicles and V-wing fighters, the ships were evenly placed and descending in measured speed. Jadak took the Envoy directly into their midst. Moving against the traffic flow and weaving his way through the pack, Jadak came close enough to some of the ships to see the startled expressions on the faces of the humans, humanoids, and aliens behind the canopies. And clearly the pilots didn't have as much trust in Jadak's ability as Jadak had in himself. Like a school of fish discombobulated by the sudden appearance of a predator, ships were suddenly diverting from their courses, doing what they could to avoid accidents but in many cases slamming against nearby vessels and initiating chain reactions of collisions. Trying in vain to match speeds with the Envoy, the ARC-170s kept to the perimeter, holding fire for fear of hitting innocent ships. But the pack was thinning before the Envoy had even reached the upper limits of the atmosphere, and the ARCs were climbing at high boost.
“Reallocate power to the rear shields,” Jadak said as the Envoy parted company with Coruscant's gravitational field.
Local space was littered with debris—the smoking husks of Republic and Separatist warships, blackened pieces of annihilated fighter craft, shards of fragmented orbital mirrors. There was no sign of the Trade Federation and Commerce Guild ships that had survived the battle, but the cruisers of the Home and Open Circle fleets were still defensively deployed in the event the Separatists decided to have another go at Coruscant.
Reeze muttered to himself while he listened to the battle net. “Ships of the line have been alerted. We're designated an enemy target.”
Jadak shoved the throttle home. But instead of trying to distance them from the giant, arrow-headed KDY ships, he brought the YT as close to the tightly arrayed Republic cruisers as he dared, running the hulls, darting from one clear space to the next, using the ships for cover in an effort to get far enough from Coruscant to make the jump to lightspeed. But the ARC-170 pilots hadn't given up the chase and were no longer worried about innocent parties. The deflector shields of the big ships were more than capable of warding off stray laser cannon bolts.
The Envoy was rocked by the first volley.
Jadak twisted the ship up on her starboard side, as if showing her belly to the pursuit ships. “We've gotta protect that port thruster—”
A deafening sound erased the rest of it, and a tangle of blue energy gamboled over the instrument panel. The cockpit lights and telltales blinked, then flickered back to life. Jadak slammed his hand against the ceiling to motivate the few systems that refused to come back online.
“Light turbo from the Integrity. They're coming about to tractor us in.”
“You've got the yoke.”
Jadak swiveled his chair to face the Rubicon navicomputer and entered a request for jump data.
“We can lose the V-wings,” Reeze said, “but those ARCs have Class One-point-five hyperdrives. They'll follow us to Hell and back.”
“Then Toprawa's out. We've got to throw them off the scent.”
“Where, then?”
Jadak looked over his shoulder at Reeze. “Nar Shaddaa's our best option.”
A follow-up bolt from the Integrity dazzled the Envoy.
“Any port in a storm.”
Jadak waited for the Rubicon's go-to and reached for the hyper-drive lever. The stars had not yet become streaks when another powerful boom rattled the YT to her bones. The freighter didn't so much jump into hyperspace as get kicked into it.
They spent most of the hyperspace journey crawling through the ship's innards assessing the damage and effecting what repairs they could. The energy weapons that had caught them aft at the moment of the jump had dazzled the sublight engine. After conferring, they decided that they could nurse the ship into orbit around Nar Shaddaa by relying on the attitude and braking thrusters.
They returned to the cockpit for the remainder of the journey through the netherworld of hyperspace, neither of them speaking. Reeze broke the long silence.
“What do you think the Jedi installed?”
Jadak swiveled his chair, gazing around at the instruments. “No idea.”
“You didn't think to ask?”
“Why would I?”
Reeze didn't respond immediately. “You know, we could just keep going. Repair the ship at Nar Shaddaa and light out for the Outer Rim.”
“We could. But we're not going to.”
Reeze snorted. “Mission always has to come first. Even when it involves surrendering the ship.”
“The Senators are playing their part, we're playing ours. With any luck, it's all going to come out right in the end.”
“But this thing's about over anyway, isn't it? With Count Dooku dead. You heard what they said. They might not even need us anymore.”
Jadak mulled it over. “I'll tell you what, Reeze. If it does end by the time we reach Toprawa, I'll think hard about doing what you say.”
Reeze sat up straight in the chair. “So you are mad at them—for giving the ship away, I mean.”
Jadak finally looked at him. “Let's leave it at disappointment.”
Reeze grinned. “Disappointment's good.”
“You're ready to celebrate, huh?”
“Why not? It's been a lot of years, Tobb.”
“It has. But don't go getting your hopes up.”
“How could I with you around?”
Jadak smiled without showing his teeth. “So, Nar Shaddaa. Your old stomping ground.”
“Ha! You mean the ground where I frequently got stomped.”
The Rubicon navicomputer toned, and Jadak swung the chair around.
“Reversion coming up.”
They fell into an uneasy silence while the ship emerged into real-space, stars and starfields taking shape after a moment of wake rotation, the Envoy shuddering and groaning, running on pure momentum now.
“That wasn't too bad,” Jadak started to say—when the sh
ip suddenly died.
Reeze began to toggle switches in the blackness. “No power of any sort. No lights, communications. No response from the emergency systems.”
Jadak watched Nar Shaddaa grow larger in the viewport. “That blast must have rattled the power core.”
“Any way to bleed velocity manually?”
“There might be if we had time. As it stands, we're going to go wherever Nar Shaddaa dictates we go.”
Back to toggling switches, Reeze cursed. “Any chance of inserting into orbit?”
“Hard to say.” Jadak unstrapped from the seat and stood, leaning toward the viewport. “At this speed and vector … we could end up slingshot back into space. I'm more worried about traffic coming up the well.”
“You should be,” Reeze said. He had a pair of macrobinoculars pressed to his eyes. “I've got a visual on a ship.” He fell silent, then said: “Oh, brother …”
Jadak peered at the enlarging ship. “What is it?”
Reeze lowered the binoculars. “Corellian bulk freighter—one of the big Action jobs. Large enough for a payload of Hutts with room enough for a herd of banthas.”
Jadak grabbed the binoculars and raised them to his eyes. A rounded rectangle with a gargantuan V-shaped undercarriage, the freighter was driven by a trio of cylindrical engines. “She's climbing right into our path. Accruing speed for a jump. Their instruments will warn them.”
“Warn them?” Reeze looked at Jadak in disbelief. “This is Nar Shaddaa. Who bigger, who better. We're like a mote in her eye. She won't yield.”
Jadak watched the huge ship rise from the planet's envelope.
“Your call, Tobb,” Reeze said after a long moment of silence.
Jadak gave the power toggles a final flick and blew out his breath. “Okay. We're outta here.”
They hurried aft to one of the escape pods, which fired from the freighter's ventral surface, well below the hyperdrive and sublight engines. Reeze climbed in first and popped the cover that sealed the manual release switch. Jadak squeezed through the circular hatch and sealed it behind him. Reeze had just pulled the override lever when the Envoy gave a sudden start and the inside of the pod was bathed in red light.
