by Paul S. Kemp
Faylin assisted, twisting Grolt’s arms into impossible angles, tearing gristle, then pushing hard on Grolt’s head, stuffing him all the way in.
Twenty-nine.
Eshgo closed up the compartment and the lift doors opened, revealing a pair of uniformed officers. Looks of surprise filled their faces. One of them wrinkled his nose, perhaps catching a whiff of blasterfire.
“Burning wires,” Isval said.
“What level is this?” Eshgo said, looking at the pad. “This doesn’t seem right. We should be one down. Coming?” he said to the waiting officers.
They eyed the full lift. “We’ll wait,” the taller of the two said.
Isval held off on a hard smile until the lift doors closed.
All of them exhaled as one but otherwise said nothing as the lift descended and opened on the level they’d passed moments before. Carrying the body of a dead Imperial officer, they moved through the bustling corridors toward the hyperdrive chamber.
As they approached that area of the ship, the corridors narrowed and became somewhat less filled with activity. Most of the bustle was in the main halls. Side passages were almost deserted.
“Could’ve saved a lot of time by putting a vulture and its payload right here,” Faylin said.
“Too deep in the ship and too hardened,” Isval said.
“And we’d have been bored with nothing to do back on Ryloth,” Drim said.
Mindful of Cham’s admonition, Isval took care to note the layout, in case their escape got hairy. She’d have been unconcerned about exit were she alone, but her team expected her to get them out, and so she would.
They came around a corner to see a group of four stormtroopers who stood at attention before a large, reinforced hatch that provided access to the hyperdrive chamber.
The stormtroopers tensed and put hands to blaster grips as Isval and her team approached.
“Easy,” Isval said under her breath, though she felt lines of sweat drip down her sides from her armpits. She did her best to look harmless.
One of the troopers stepped forward and held up a gloved hand. “Stop there. This area is restricted.” The amplifier in his helmet made his voice sound robotic.
Isval slowed but didn’t stop. “We’re with Repair Eighty-Three. Engine repair.”
“Engine access stations are that way,” the trooper said, pointing back the way they’d come.
“I know,” Isval said, still coming toward him. “But the hyperdrive is damaged, too. We’re authorized to repair it. See?”
She held out her datapad, but the stormtrooper would have none of it. “I don’t care what that says, Twi’lek. Passage through this door isn’t allowed without the presence of an authorized officer. Leave. Now.” He stared at her, and she saw her reflected face in the black lenses of his helmet.
She felt her own team tense, but she decided to take a moment to regroup. “All right,” she said. “We’ll go get an officer then and come back.”
She started to turn the antigrav pallet when a sound came from within the large compartment: a voice.
Someone was calling over Lieutenant Grolt’s comm.
“Lieutenant Grolt,” said the muffled voice. “You’re needed in Weapons Bay Nineteen. Grolt, respond.”
Isval felt her skin darken.
The stormtroopers looked at the pallet, then back at Isval, and grabbed for their blasters.
—
Vader’s growing anger kept him company as the lift rose toward the bridge. The doors slid open to the sights and sounds of a ship in crisis. The ashen-faced crew went about their business professionally, the air filled with the hum of comm chatter and the occasional shouted order. Damage reports came in from all over the Star Destroyer and were relayed to appropriate duty stations in urgent voices, their recitations filling the air with tales of death and fire. Luitt moved among the stations, taking reports, issuing orders, trying to retake control of the situation. A member of the crew ran past Vader and hurried onto the lift.
The Emperor remained where he had been, standing on the central raised tier of the bridge. Orn Free Taa stood near him, staring down into the crew pits and tilting his head to see the various viewscreens there.
Eyes turned to Vader as he walked toward the central tier. Without breaking stride, he used the Force to take hold of Orn Free Taa. He lifted the obese Twi’lek from the floor and hung him in the air before the Emperor. Taa, wide-eyed, his many chins trembling, pawed at his throat and gasped for air. Vader took care not to kill him…yet.
“Lord Vader returns,” the Emperor said. “You seem displeased, old friend.”
Vader released his hold on Taa, and the Twi’lek fell hard to the deck. Vader stepped to the Emperor’s side, looming over the prone Taa. He pointed a finger at the Twi’lek.
“There’s a traitor on your staff, Senator. And that traitor is responsible for what has transpired here.”
The words seemed to so shock Taa that he could muster no reply. He massaged his throat and scurried back a bit from Vader.
“What is this now?” Luitt asked, taking the corrugated stairs two at a time from a lower deck. “This alien scum is a traitor?”
Grunting, breathing heavily, Taa struggled to his feet. His eyes went from Luitt, to Vader, to the Emperor, pleading.
“Not him, no,” the Emperor said. “But one or more members of his staff.”
“My Emperor,” Taa said, his voice rough from Vader’s Force choke, “Lord Vader, I had no idea. If I had…” He sniffed, stood up straight. “I vow to find the traitors behind this foul attack and—”
“Oh, I believe you,” the Emperor said dismissively. “But that hardly mitigates your fault, Senator. You had a traitor on your staff and were ignorant of it.”
The Emperor signaled the Royal Guards, and they stepped to the senator’s side.
Taa’s chins quivered. He looked as though he might weep. His squinty eyes flicked from the guards to Vader to the Emperor. “My Emperor, if only you could…”
To Luitt, the Emperor said, “Restrict all of the senator’s staff to their quarters and deny them access to communications equipment or computer terminals. Present this as ordinary practice in situations of this kind. Lord Vader will interrogate them when we reach Ryloth.”
Vader looked forward to the opportunity.
The Emperor turned back to Taa. “Senator, I trust I can count on your assistance in all things Ryloth for the foreseeable future? With the spice and slave trade, and the Free Ryloth movement? Harsher measures may be required to quell the difficulties on your planet. I think if my orders came out of your mouth, the people would accept them more readily. Do you agree?”
“Of…of course, my Emperor,” Taa said.
“In the meantime, I trust you’ll remain here with Lord Vader and me? It’s fascinating to watch broken things get pieced back together.”
Taa didn’t bother to respond.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The stormtroopers drew their blasters at the same time as Isval’s teammates. Isval did not bother to reach for her weapon, instead driving the antigrav pallet full-speed into the stormtroopers, slamming them into the walls and fouling their blaster shots, which went high and wide. Eshgo shot one of the troopers in the head, Drim shot another in the chest, and Faylin and Crost shot the other two in the face.
“We have minutes,” she said to them, then broke comm silence to call over to the decoy teams elsewhere on the station. Cham had insisted on the decoys in case matters went badly and they needed distraction, and Cham, as usual, had been right.
Think through your exits, she reminded herself, though at the moment she cared less about an exit than bringing down the Perilous.
“You are go,” she said to the decoy teams. “All teams. You are go. But we aren’t hot yet. Repeat, we aren’t yet hot.”
Affirmative replies came. The two other teams who’d snuck into the Star Destroyer aboard the repair ships would set an explosive or three, even start a firefight if n
ecessary.
Isval drew her twin blasters, Drim pulled a heavy blaster rifle from a compartment on the pallet, and Eshgo and the rest of the team readied weapons. Drim overrode the security protocol on the hyperdrive hatch, it slid open, and they rushed in after the pallet, leaving the dead stormtroopers behind them in the hallway.
—
“Captain,” called the bridge communications officer, and something in his tone drew Vader’s attention. “Sir, we’re getting reports of a firefight on Deck Seventeen, and some explosions in Bay Twelve forward.”
“A firefight?” Luitt asked. “How can we have a firefight?”
The comm officer put his hand to his earpiece, nodding, then said, “Sir, it’s one of the repair crews. Twi’leks. The explosions, too, appear to be intentionally set. I have reports of multiple additional casualties. Security teams are en route.”
Vader saw it then. The attack by the droid fighters, as bad as it had been, had been a ruse, or only half the plan. The Free Ryloth movement was more resourceful than either he or the Emperor had imagined.
“Tell your security teams to kill every Ryloth repair team on board,” he said, the words silencing the bridge crew. He turned and strode for the lift.
Luitt called after him. “Lord Vader, there are almost a hundred teams aboard! My Emperor?”
“One hundred teams seems a manageable number,” the Emperor said, his eyes not on the captain but on Vader.
“Give the order, Captain,” Vader said. “Kill them all.”
“Yes, Lord Vader.”
The lift doors closed before Vader’s face. He headed for Deck 17.
—
The huge, upright vertical slab of the Star Destroyer’s hyperdrive sat at the bottom of a circular depression in the middle of the cavernous chamber that housed it. A corrugated metal walkway encircled the drive’s bay. Computer stations and other hardware Isval didn’t recognize or understand covered the walls. For a moment the layout reminded her of the Octagon in Lessu. The association summoned a grim smile. She’d leave dead Imperials here just as she had there.
Engineers and officers stood at intervals around the walkway, checking or monitoring comps and conduits. Apparently the thick hatch had prevented them from hearing the shots in the hallway beyond. The nearest one, a tech officer, turned to face them, lowering the datapad he held.
“You can’t be in here unaccomp—” he began, but stopped, wide-eyed, when he registered the blasters she held. Isval shot him through the datapad and in the chest, and man and device fell to the floor. Beside her, Drim opened up with the blaster rifle, while Eshgo and Faylin and Crost, too, opened fire on the crew, sending them shouting and scrambling.
“Secure the hatch!” she said to Eshgo, and picked another target, fired, then a second, fired, and left both of them dead on the floor with smoking holes in their uniforms.
The Imperials scrambled, ducked, and tried to flee toward the hatch opposite. One, a short, stocky man in an engineer’s uniform, ran for an alarm, but Drim shot him in the back. He slammed face-first into the bulkhead and fell to the floor, leaving a smear of blood on the wall.
None of the Imperials were armed—tech officers and engineers usually weren’t—so she and her team put them all down quickly.
“Find a uniform,” she said to Drim while she and the rest of the team moved the pallet to the base of a stairway. “No, two uniforms. Piecemeal them if you have to. No blaster holes.”
“What? Why?”
“Just do it.”
Eshgo, struggling with the locking mechanism on the hatch they’d entered through, finally just shot the control panel with his blaster. It exploded in sparks and smoke.
“Hatch is as secure as I can make it,” he said.
It’d have to do. “Watch that other door, Drim,” Isval said, pointing at it with her chin. “Don’t blow the controls, though. We want a way out.”
“Got it,” Drim said, and darted around the walkway, bounding over the bodies, to the only other hatch that allowed ingress or egress into the chamber. Isval knew it led into a maintenance bay, which then led out, through a series of winding hallways, into one of the main corridors of the ship.
Faylin and Crost had already stripped one of the officers of his shirt and jacket, another of his trousers and hat.
She carefully lowered the antigrav pallet down the stairs that led down from the walkway until she stood before the huge slab of the hyperdrive. Eshgo assisted. It towered over her, more than twice her height. Proximity to it made her skin tingle, raised the hairs on her arms. Whorls and swirls scored the gray metal of the slab. She knew they helped channel the energy of the drive somehow, but to her they just looked like some indecipherable, mystical script. Arm-thick cables, large power relays, and other electronic equipment—most of it obscure to her—plugged into the slab at various places along its sides and disappeared into conduits that ran under the floor.
She opened the lower compartment in the pallet to reveal the dozen explosive charges they’d brought aboard. They looked like small missiles, each equipped with powerful magnetic pads and timers.
“Help me,” she said to Eshgo, and they started lifting the explosives out.
The weapons somehow seemed heavier than when she’d loaded them back on Ryloth. She supposed the adrenaline dump of the last half hour had left her weakened.
A new alarm sounded over the ship’s comm system, different in tone and cadence from the one they’d heard when they’d first boarded. She and Eshgo shared a look. Lines of concern furrowed his heavy brow.
“They know we’re here,” she said. “Let’s hurry it up, laggards!” she shouted to Faylin and Crost.
“Yeah, yeah,” Faylin said.
Isval opened the top of the pallet, pulled Grolt’s already stiffening body out, and dropped him to the floor. She took out his comlink and smashed it under her heel.
“I’ve got one more job for you, Lieutenant Grolt,” she said.
“What are you doing?” Eshgo asked.
“We’re going to need the space,” she said. “Let’s get the charges set.”
—
Vader stepped from the lift and used the Force to augment his speed, sprinting through the smoky, crowded corridors. He saw a Twi’lek repair crew ahead, four men and a woman. They navigated an antigrav tool-and-parts pallet through the corridor, and nothing about them looked suspicious. He didn’t care. He ignited his lightsaber, and when he did, the Imperials in the corridor parted before him, wide-eyed, confused.
The Twi’leks had only a moment to register his approach before he cut them down in rapid succession. He left five corpses and a hall full of gawking troops behind him as he pelted onward.
Details about the location of the firefight carried over his comlink, and he headed directly for it. He heard the sound of blasterfire before he saw it. In the corridor ahead, a squad of stormtroopers crouched against the bulkhead, trading fire around the corner with unseen enemies. The corporal commanding the squad saw him approaching and turned to face him.
“Lord Vader, there are five sabot—”
Vader brushed past him and around the corner, enmeshed in the Force, lightsaber humming.
A Twi’lek male with green skin and a blaster rifle, making himself small against the bulkhead, opened fire at Vader. The red line of Vader’s lightsaber flashed, deflecting the shots back at the Twi’lek, putting a dark hole in his chest and another in his face.
As Vader stalked down the corridor, a second Twi’lek darted out from around the corner, a blaster pistol spewing red bolts. Vader deflected them, extended his free hand, and used the Force to take hold of the Twi’lek’s blaster. When he jerked the pistol from the alien’s hand and into his own, the Twi’lek reached for a second blaster holstered on his thigh. Without breaking stride, Vader hurled his lightsaber, and the spinning blade cut the Twi’lek in two. Vader crushed the blaster he’d taken in his fist, dropped it to the floor, and, with his other hand, used the Force to recall his
blade to his hand.
Boots thumped on the deck as the stormtroopers rushed around the corner and past him, blaster rifles firing. By the time Vader rounded the corner, three more Twi’leks lay dead.
“Lord Vader,” said the voice of the bridge communications officer over his comlink. “We have reports of dead stormtroopers outside the hyperdrive chamber. The hatch is sealed from the inside.”
Vader understood it then. The Twi’leks he’d just killed were decoys.
“I’m on my way there,” he said. He stepped over the corpse of one of the Twi’leks and strode toward the aft section of the Perilous.
—
Eshgo and Isval put the charges in place, most around the hyperdrive slab but a few at the base of nearby system components, all of them exactly where Kallon had said to put them. They’d drilled on it dozens of times. The charges, when they blew, would destroy the hyperdrive. That explosion would start a series of secondary detonations that would end with the Perilous’s engines blowing the Star Destroyer out of space.
Isval saw that Eshgo’s hands were shaking as he fiddled with the timers.
“I got it,” she said. Her hands were steady, as they always were when she was killing Imperials.
He backed off and she set the timers on the charges, one after another. They’d blow in sequence, milliseconds apart. Kallon had told them the timing had to be precise or the chain reaction would not start.
“That’s it,” she said, wiping sweat from her brow.
She shared a look with her team, and all of them nodded. They might or might not get clear, but there was no stopping the destruction now. Once they armed the explosives and the timers started their countdown, nothing could save the Perilous. It would be a flying tomb.
They’d try to get clear, of course, but given that the entire ship was on alert, the odds were long.
Faylin, the only human on Isval’s team, had already stripped and was putting on a piecemeal Imperial uniform. It was an ill fit and mismatched, but there were no blaster holes in it and it would withstand a superficial look.
“You look good, Corporal,” Isval said to Faylin, whose pale face was even whiter than normal. “You good?”
