by Paul S. Kemp
The droid’s social programming kicked in, and it tried to make small talk designed to put a passenger at ease. “Are you from Alderaan, mistress?”
“No,” Aryn said.
“Ah, then may I recommend that you try—”
“I have no need for conversation,” she said. “Please drive in silence.”
“Yes, mistress.”
Once the taxi took position at commercial altitude and fell into a lane, the droid accelerated the taxi to a few hundred kilometers per hour. They’d make the spaceport in half an hour. She considered powering on the in-car vidscreen but decided against it. Instead, she looked out the window at other traffic, at the dark Alderaanian terrain.
“Spaceport ahead, mistress,” said the droid.
Below and ahead, the Eeseen spaceport—one of many on Alderaan—came into view. Aryn could not have missed it. Its lights glowed like a galaxy.
One of the larger structures on the planet, the spaceport was really a series of interconnected structures that straddled fifty square kilometers. The main hub of the port was a series of tiered, concentric arms that twisted around a core of mostly transparisteel, which locals called “the bubble.” It was very much a self-contained city, with its own hotels, restaurants, medical facilities, and security forces.
From above, Aryn knew, the spaceport looked similar to a spiral-armed galaxy. It could dock several hundred ships at a time, from large superfreighters on the lower-level cargo platforms to single-being craft on the upper platforms. A tower for planetary control stuck out of the top of the bubble like a fat antenna.
Due to the late hour, most of the upper docking platforms were dark, but the lower levels were bright and busy with activity. As Aryn watched, a large cargo freighter descended toward one of the lower platforms, while two others began their slow ascent out of dock and into the atmosphere. Shipping firms often did much of their work at night, when in-atmosphere traffic was reduced.
Watching it all, Aryn was once more struck with the oddity of the fact that life for everyone else in the galaxy went on as it had, while the Republic itself was in grave danger. She wanted desperately to scream at all of them: What do you think is going to happen next!
But instead she kept it inside, an emotional pressure that she thought must soon pop an artery.
Dozens of speeders, swoops, and loader droids flew, buzzed, crawled, and rolled along the port’s many docks and in the air around the landing platforms. Automated cranes lifted the huge shipping containers carried in the bays of freighters.
Even from half a kilometer out, Aryn could see the lines of people and droids riding the autowalks and lifts within the spaceport’s central bubble. The whole structure looked like an insect hive. A portion of the bubble near the top housed a luxury hotel. Each room featured a balcony that looked out on Alderaan’s natural beauty. Seeing them, Aryn thought of her exchange with Syo.
“A Jedi must sacrifice,” she said.
She was about to do exactly that.
“I’m sorry, mistress,” said the droid. “Did you say something?”
“No.”
“What entrance, mistress?”
“I need to get to level one, sublevel D.”
“Very good, mistress.”
The aircar descended from the traffic lane to stop at one of the entrances on level one of the spaceport. The droid offered his hand, which featured an integrated card scanner, and Aryn ran her credcard. The Order would be able to track her from its use, but she had no other way to pay. She stepped out of the aircar and hurried through the automated doors of the port.
Once inside, she moved rapidly, barely seeing the other sentients on the walkways and lifts. Conversation occurred around her, but, lost in her thoughts, she heard it only as a distant buzz. Music blared from a darkened cantina. A young couple—a human man and a Cerean woman—walked arm-and-arm out of a restaurant, heads close together, laughing at some shared secret. Droids whirred past Aryn, carting cargo and luggage.
“Pardon me,” they said as they whizzed past.
Vidscreens hung in strategic places throughout the facility. She eyed one, saw a view of Coruscant, which then cut to the High Council compound on Alderaan. She avoided looking at any other vids as she went.
She kept her eyes focused on nothing, hoping that the late hour would spare her any contact with other members of the Jedi delegation who might be stationed at the spaceport. She feared the sound of their voices would pop the bubble of her emotional control.
Hurrying along the corridors, lifts, and walks, she reached the level where she’d landed her Raven and let herself relax. She raised her wrist comlink to her mouth, thinking to hail T6, but a voice from behind called to her and shattered her calm.
“Aryn? Aryn Leneer?”
Her heart lurched as she turned to see Vollen Sor, a fellow Jedi Knight, emerging from a nearby lift and hurrying to catch up with her. Vollen’s Padawan, a Rodian named Keevo, trailed behind him, a satellite in orbit around the planet of his Master. Both wore their traditional robes. They wore their lightsabers openly, outside their robes, as they would in a combat environment.
She tensed. Perhaps Master Dar’nala had noticed her absence and deduced her intent. Perhaps Vollen and Keevo had come to stop her.
She let her hand hover near the hilt of her lightsaber.
BY THE TIME the transport set down near the Temple, Malgus had followed enough communication chatter to understand what had occurred. And what he had learned only incensed him further.
He bounded onto the transport and stood in the small, rear cargo bay.
“Leave the bay open as you fly,” he ordered the pilot over the transport’s intercom.
“My lord?”
“Go to a hundred meters up and circle. I want to see the surface.”
“Yes, Darth Malgus.”
As the transport lifted him away from the ruins of the Jedi Temple, wind whipped around the bay and pawed at his cloak. He stood at the edge of the ramp and used the Force to anchor himself in place. From there, he surveyed Coruscant, the planet that should have been destroyed.
Most of the urbanscape was lit, so night did not hide the destruction. A haze of smoke hung like a funeral shroud over the still smoldering ruins. The air carried the faint, sickly sweet tang of burned bodies and melted plastoid. He tried to guess the number of the dead: in the tens of thousands, certainly. A hundred thousand? He could not know. He did know that it should have been billions.
Shafts of steel stuck like bones out of piles of shattered duracrete. Here and there droid-assisted excavation teams sifted through the rubble, seeking survivors or bodies. Frightened faces turned up to watch the transport pass.
“You should be dead,” Malgus said to them. “Not merely frightened.”
Quadrant after quadrant of Coruscant had been reduced to rubble.
But not enough of it.
Most buildings still stood and most of the planet’s people still lived. The Republic had been wounded, but not killed.
And there was nothing more dangerous than a wounded animal.
Malgus had difficulty containing the anger he felt. His fist reflexively clenched and unclenched.
He had been misled. Worse, he had been betrayed. A score of his warriors had died for no reason other than to strengthen the Empire’s negotiating posture.
Sirens screamed in the distance, barely audible over the wind. Far off, unarmed Republic medical ships whirred through the sky. Speeders and swoops dotted the air here and there, the traffic light and haphazard.
Malgus had learned that Darth Angral had dissolved the Senate and declared martial law. But with the planet pacified, Angral had allowed rescuers to save whom they could. Malgus imagined that Angral would soon allow free civilian movement. Life would start again on Coruscant. Malgus did not understand Angral’s thinking.
No. He did not understand the Emperor’s thinking, for it must have been the Emperor who had decided to spare Coruscant.
&n
bsp; Nothing was as it should be. Malgus had intended, had expected, to turn Coruscant into a cinder. He knew the Force intended him to topple the Republic and the corrupt Jedi who led it. His vision had shown him as much.
Instead, the Emperor had given the Republic a slight burn and begun to negotiate.
To negotiate.
A squad of ten Imperial fighters sped past, their wings reflecting the red glow of a nearby medical ship’s sirens. Smoke plumes from several ongoing fires snaked into the sky.
Malgus might have hoped that the Emperor planned to force the Republic to surrender Coruscant to the Empire, but he knew better. The fleet had temporarily secured the planet, but they did not have the forces to hold it for long. The planet was too big, the population too numerous, for the Imperial fleet to occupy it indefinitely. Even a formal surrender would not end the resistance of Coruscant’s population, and an insurgency among a population so large would devour Imperial resources.
No, they had to destroy it or return it. And it looked as if the Emperor had decided on the latter, using the threat of the former as leverage in negotiations.
The pilot’s voice sounded over the intercom. “Shall I continue the flyover, my lord?”
“No. Take me to the Senate Building. Notify Darth Angral of our imminent arrival.”
He had seen all he needed to see. Now he needed to hear an explanation.
“Peace,” he said, the word a curse.
ZEERID FINALLY NOTICED the ping from Vulta’s planetary control. He watched it blink, half dazed, having no idea how long they had been signaling him. He shook his head to clear up his thinking, called up the fake freighter registry Oren had told him to use, ran it through Fatman’s comp, and used it to auto-respond to the ping. In moments he received approval to land and docking instructions.
“Welcome to Vulta, Red Dwarf,” said the controller. “Set down on Yinta Lake landing pad one-eleven B.”
Zeerid tried to let the heat of atmospheric entry burn away thoughts of Oren, of The Exchange, of engspice. He tried instead to focus only on the one hundred thousand credits that should be awaiting him, and what he could do with them.
By the time the ship cleared the stratosphere and entered Vulta’s sky traffic, he had once more begun to distance himself from work and the persona that it necessitated.
But stripping away the vice-runner was getting harder to do all the time. The hole was getting too deep, the costume too sticky. He would be ashamed if his daughter ever learned how he earned a living.
He gave Fatman to the autopilot and went to the small room below the cockpit that he’d converted to his quarters.
His time in the army had taught him the value of organization, and his room reflected it. His rack was neatly made, though no one ever saw it but him. His clothes hung neatly from a wall locker beside the viewport. He kept extra blasters of various makes stowed about the room, and a lockbox held enough extra charger packs to keep him firing for a standard year. The top of his small metal work desk was clear, with nothing atop it but a portcomp and a stack of fraudulent invoices. Integrated into the floor beside it was a hidden safe. He exposed it, input the combination, and opened it. Inside was a bearer payment card with the mere handful of spare credits he’d been able to stash, and, more important, a small holo of his daughter.
Seeing the holo summoned a smile.
He picked it up. He always noticed the same three things about the image: Arra’s long curly hair, her smile, as bright as a nova despite her handicap, and the wheelchair in which she sat.
He could have chosen a holo that didn’t include the chair, but he hadn’t. It pained him to see her in it and it would continue to pain him until he got her out of it.
And that was the point.
The holo reminded him of his purpose. He looked at the holo before he went to sleep in his quarters and he looked at it when he awakened.
He hated the wheelchair. It was the sin he needed to expiate.
Val and Arra had been coming to see him on planetside leave. He’d still been in the army then. Val had been suffering dizzy spells but she had insisted on coming anyway and he, desperate to see his wife and daughter, had done nothing to discourage her. She’d had an episode while driving and careered into another aircar.
The accident had killed Val and left Arra near death. Her legs had been crushed from the impact, and the doctors had been forced to remove them.
He’d mustered out of the army to grieve for Val and take care of Arra, not thinking much beyond just getting through one day and then the next. He’d had no pension, no property, and soon learned that even with his piloting skills he could not find legit work that paid anywhere near what he needed and was going to need. Not only had Arra’s immediate post-crash care resulted in enormous medical bills, but ongoing rehab cost just as much.
Desperate, despondent, he’d taken a leap, jumping into the atmosphere and hoping he hit deep water. He called on some old acquaintances he’d known before his tour in the army, and they’d put him in contact with The Exchange. When he’d heard their offer, he’d hopped on the treadmill, thinking he could make it work.
His debts had only grown since. He’d gone into debt to an Exchange-owned holding company for Fatman, and he pretended to have a gambling problem against which he sometimes took additional loans. In truth, the credits from the loans went to Arra’s ongoing care.
But he was treading water there, too. He could barely make interest payments and while he tried to keep his head above water, Arra remained in a prehistoric, unpowered wheelchair. Zeerid did not make enough to purchase her even a basic hoverchair, much less the prosthetic legs she deserved.
He’d once heard tell of technology in the Empire that could actually regrow limbs, but he refused to think much about it. If it existed somewhere, the cost would put it well beyond his means.
He just wanted to get her a hoverchair, or legs if he could hit a big job. She deserved at least that and he planned to see to it.
The engspice run to Coruscant was the start, the turning point. The front-end money alone could get her a hoverchair, and with his slate wiped clean afterward, he could actually start making real credits without all of it going to paying down debt.
Credits for prosthetics. Credits for regrown legs, maybe.
He’d see her run again, play grav-ball.
He returned the holo to the safe and stripped out of his “work” clothes, sloughing away Z-man the spicerunner to reveal Zeerid the father, and dropped them into a hamper. After he landed, he’d activate the small maintenance droid he kept aboard; it would clean and sweep the ship and launder his clothing.
He threw on a pair of trousers, an undershirt, and his ablative armor vest, then took a collared shirt from its hanger and sniffed it. Smelled reasonably clean.
He swapped out his hip holsters with their GH-44s for a single sling holster he’d wear under his jacket and fill with an E-11, then secured two E-9 blasters, one in an ankle holster, one in the small of his back.
Arra had never seen him holding a blaster since he had mustered out, and, fates willing, she never would. But Zeerid never went anywhere unarmed.
Before leaving his quarters, he sat at the portcomp, logged in, and checked the balance in the dummy account he used with The Exchange.
And there it was—one hundred thousand credits, newly deposited.
“Thank you, Oren.”
He transferred the credits to an untraceable bearer card. It was more than he’d ever held in his hand before.
VRATH SAT on one of the many metal benches found in Yinta Lake’s spaceport on Vulta. Droids sped past. Sentients went by in groups of two and three and four. Someone’s voice blared over a loudspeaker.
Like every spaceport on every planet in the galaxy, the place was abuzz with activity: droids, holovids, vehicles, conversations. Vrath tuned it all out.
A large vidscreen hanging from the ceiling showed the latest news on the right side, and the latest ship arrivals and depa
rtures on the left. He watched only the arrivals. The board tracked every ship to which planetary control gave docking instructions, the scroll moving as rapidly as the activity in the port. Vrath was waiting for one name in particular.
An exercise of will, the firing of certain neurons, caused his artificial eyes to go to three-times magnification. The words on the screen grew clearer.
The Hutts’ mole in The Exchange had given Vrath a ship’s name, which meant he had a pilot, which meant he could find the engspice and keep it from ever getting to Coruscant.
The Hutts wanted the addicts on Coruscant freed of their reliance on their competitor’s engspice so they could be hooked on Hutt engspice, a new market for the Hutts, as Vrath understood matters.
In truth he found it surprising that The Exchange had been able to find a pilot crazy enough to make a run to Coruscant, a world on Imperial lockdown. The Exchange must have had a flier with uncommon skill.
Or uncommon stupidity.
The overhead vidscreen showed the same news footage that every vidscreen and holovid in the galaxy must have been showing: another story on the peace negotiations on Alderaan. A Togruta female—Vrath knew she was a Jedi Master but could not recall her name—was giving an interview. She looked stern, unbowed as she spoke. Vrath could not make out her words. The sound of engines and people made it impossible to hear. He could have activated the auditory implant in his right ear to pick up the vid’s sound, even through the noise, but he really did not care what the Jedi had to say. He did not care how the war between the Republic and Empire went, so long as he could thread the needle between them and make his credits.
He hoped to retire soon, maybe to Alderaan. If he could take out the engspice, the Hutts would compensate him well. Who knew? Maybe this would be his last job, after which he’d get drunk, fat, and old, in that order.
He alternated his attention between the news and the arrivals board until he saw the name he was waiting for—Red Dwarf.
He slung the satchel that held his equipment over his shoulder, stood, and walked to the Red Dwarf’s landing pad. Lingering among the bustle, he watched unobtrusively as the beat-up freighter set down on the landing pad. He noted the modified engine housings. He suspected Fatman was fast.
