A New Dawn

by John Jackson Miller

  “I’ll tell you what’s going on,” Kanan said, peering up the dark opening. “Your dumb droid’s messed up the whole works!”

  Sloane waved her hand dismissively. “Someone send for a repair crew.”

  “Yeah, you do that,” he replied, pleased as he backed out that she could not see through the faceplate of his hazmat suit. He turned away from the group and marched back to Expedient.

  “Wait,” the captain called. “Where do you think you’re going?” But Kanan was already heading up the ramp.

  When he returned, he saw Sloane waiting with an armed stormtrooper. “Coming through,” he said, pushing Expedient’s spare hovercart down the ramp. Smaller than the one he’d ridden to survival on Cynda, it bounced on the air as he pushed it toward Sloane’s feet. “I’ve got a deadline, lady. Move it.”

  Sloane stepped back, seemingly surprised by his presumption. “What are you doing now?”

  “You’re paying us to move this stuff,” Kanan said. “If your depot can’t bring the junk to me, I’m going to it.” He looked back at Hera. “Come on, Layda. Bring your cousins.”

  Hera saluted and gathered the others. They followed Kanan and his hovercart toward the service hallway, even as other loaders on the floor got the same idea and went for carts of their own.

  Sloane shrugged in irritation and stepped back. She looked at the stormtrooper beside her. “This is not what I went to the Academy for.”

  Skelly leaned back against a pillar, wheezing. “Next time … we take the tram.”

  “Yeah, that wouldn’t be suspicious,” Kanan said, pushing the cart up another seemingly endless hallway. They hadn’t encountered anyone but service droids like the one he’d accosted, but the distance was the real test. They’d gone from one node to another, working their way toward the hub.

  He looked down at the hovercart in annoyance. I thought I gave this up when I quit Moonglow!

  Walking alongside Kanan, Hera paused and looked back. She pulled on his arm, and Kanan turned to see Skelly sitting in the middle of the floor. “I’m fine,” the bomber said. “Just … come back … for my body.”

  He looked at Hera. He couldn’t see her face, but he could imagine the expression of concern. This wasn’t going to work. They’d both realized on the trip from Cynda that Vidian had injured Skelly more than he was letting on; he’d gotten this far by doping himself from the medpacs, but he was starting to fade.

  Kanan stopped and turned the empty cart. “Here,” he said, helping Skelly climb onto the flatbed. “You make one crack about me being your nursemaid, and I’m dumping you on the floor.”

  “Check.” Skelly collapsed flat on his back.

  Hera looked up at the fat disk on the ceiling up ahead. “What have you got, Zal?”

  “These are Visitractic 830 factory surveillance cams,” Zaluna said. Walking in front of the group, she waved one of her devices like a dowser with a divining rod. “Quality stuff—only a few on Gorse. They’re not used for facial recognition. More to make sure the product keeps moving.”

  “Can you kill them?”

  “I’m freezing them before we come into view. As long as nobody’s walking into the scene around us, it won’t look odd.”

  “You can do that?” Kanan asked. “I thought you said they were quality cams.”

  “They are,” Zaluna said, unsnapping and removing her hood. “But nothing leaves a cam factory without a defeat code. Too many embezzling executives have been caught by their own technology. When I was younger, we used to use the codes to mess with other operators. You’d learn about them on Hetto’s data cube.”

  Hera pulled off her head covering and smiled at Kanan. “And that is why I came to Gorse.”

  Kanan yanked his own cowl off. He was dripping with sweat. “These masks sure aren’t for marathons. How far to the hub?”

  Hera looked at her datapad. “Five hundred meters to another junction, then eight hundred more. There’s a reason they use the chutes and conveyer belts.”

  “I never want to see another conveyor belt again,” Skelly mumbled.

  “Wait,” Kanan said. “Zaluna, will your cam trick work if we go faster?”

  “It’s an infrared signal. It works as soon as we get into range.”

  “Fine. Both of you on the cart with Skelly,” he said, cracking his knuckles. He set the hovercart’s repulsors to maximum and grasped the pushbar. “I did this once with a ceiling falling on me. Get ready to hang on!”

  Standing behind a wall of containers on the enormous warehouse floor of Calcoraan Depot’s hub, Kanan decided he was done with riding hovercarts for one lifetime. The ride across Cynda’s sublunar floor amid an avalanche had been harrowing enough, but by putting his formidable muscles into a running start before leaping aboard the cart’s back bumper, Kanan had turned the floating pallet into an unguided missile, caroming off the walls of the hallway. Hera, sitting up front, had nearly ground the heels off her boots bringing the thing to a stop at the end of the second, longer run.

  Replacing their masks on entry, they’d found that Calcoraan Depot’s hub was every bit as busy and noisy as Kanan had expected. Robotic arms, vacuum hoses, and magnets were employed here, plucking materials from a forest of towering storage units and routing them to outer parts of the station. Zaluna had wryly pointed out a wire bin the size of Expedient that looked as if it held replacement latches for restroom doors.

  “We take this place out,” Skelly said, “and we can make half the Imperial fleet prop the door shut.”

  At least Skelly seemed to be feeling better. Kanan wasn’t. They’d found a quiet spot—quiet being a relative term—to park the hovercart near a far wall while Hera did some reconnaissance, looking for a route to Vidian’s executive chamber. Zaluna’s map showed that it was somewhere through the wall but at least one floor up—but there were no details about how to get there. Gantries and catwalks leading over the main floor hadn’t worked. Elevators were secured and guarded. The maintenance hatch in the wall behind him was their last chance.

  Kanan stared down at Hera’s hazmat suit, rolled up in a bundle on the hovercart. She’d taken off the bulky suit so she’d have more freedom of movement for sneaking around. He wondered where she was, and thought about opening the door to follow her.

  Before he could act on the impulse, Hera cracked the door open. She looked frustrated.

  “This is no good,” she said, opening the hatch wide. The corridor behind was lost in shadows. She raised her portable light to reveal narrow apertures lining both sides of a passage that seemed to go on forever. “The entrance is at the far end, upstairs, but it’s a long hallway guarded by stormtroopers. And we have to go past a bunch of Vidian’s red-suits at their desks before you get to that.”

  “I guess we could say we were delivering lunch,” Kanan said. He was about to give up when he saw something moving behind her, passing through one of the narrow openings on the right. “Look there!”

  It was tall and mechanical, entering the corridor in the faraway darkness. Kanan stepped through the hatchway to get a better look. The droid had a gray tubular body and a flat head that rotated all the way around, casting a single red light about as it did.

  “That’s not a guard droid,” Hera said, watching it disappear through a small opening to the left of the passageway. “That’s a Medtech. FX-something.”

  “You get a lot of medical droids at an office complex?” Kanan asked. He waved to the others outside the hatch to follow him inside. “Be careful—it’s pretty dark in here.”

  “No light, no problem,” Zaluna said, big Sullustan eyes widening as she entered.

  “I’ll go anywhere that’s not here,” Skelly said, rubbing his ear. “This place is giving me a headache on top of everything else.”

  The door sealed, Hera led the way, creeping toward the darkened exit the droid had taken. “I didn’t go this way before,” she whispered.

  “Allow me.” Kanan drew his blaster and rounded the corner. Nothing lea
pt out at him. Hera’s light on uniformly placed girders cast long, deep shadows across a wide circular expanse. The place was empty but for what appeared to be furnishings in storage, including a bed, several operating tables of different types, a wardrobe, and a chair large enough to be a throne.

  The medical droid ignored them as they entered the area. It simply glided next to what appeared to be a console and stopped.

  Skelly squinted. “What are we—”

  “Wait,” Kanan said. Light sliced into the area from a quadrilateral opening in the ceiling above the medical droid. With a mechanical whir, robot and console both started rising into the rafters, lifted by a hydraulic press. The rays from above illuminated the rest of the room in front of them before the door in the ceiling closed back. “We’re under Vidian’s health clinic!”

  “Great,” Skelly said, staggering in a daze toward a cabinet. “I could use a medcenter.” Opening a drawer, he slumped against the side of the fixture. The others watched as he began pawing blindly at it with his gnarled right hand, completely missing the inside of the drawer.

  Zaluna looked fretfully at Hera. “Is he going to be all right?”

  “The faster we get in and out, the better for him.” Kanan could see the Twi’lek studying the other furnishings: All were on similar platforms. “But now we’ve got our way in.”

  “You keep saying we,” Kanan said.

  “This was your idea—and the last meter’s always the hardest. Besides, we’ve been lucky so far,” she said, grinning. “Maybe he’s asleep.”

  “Or getting a personality transplant.” Kanan sighed as he pulled at the zipper of his suit. “But I doubt it. People never get what they need.”

  Vidian sat at the center of his web and watched it all.

  His home, like everything else in Calcoraan Depot, had been built to his specifications. A hemispherical room at the center of the station’s hub, it was a place for him to contemplate his plans while he recuperated from the regular maintenance surgeries conducted by his medical droids. He had no need for grand windows looking outside, or giant stellar cartographic displays in the dome above him. He could make his cybernetic eyes display all the images he wanted.

  Others were rarely allowed to enter, but when they did they saw only a neutral gray ceiling, dimly lit by a ring of lights. But when Vidian, chest now covered in a post-operative white robe, looked up, he saw the space station in action, as if he could see through its walls. He inhabited every corner of its durasteel frame, watching the supplies being brought in and sorted for redistribution. He saw the movements of the ships outside the station, and their destinations far beyond. The whole galaxy spread out before him, ready to be transformed by his force of will.

  It hadn’t always been this way. He had been powerless, once, in ways no one knew about. Vidian’s official biography painted him as a heroic whistleblower for a military contractor, but in truth, he had been that most useless of creations: a safety inspector for an interstellar mining guild.

  He had lived under another name, then. That was when he’d learned all he knew about the thorilide trade—and that was when he came to understand the hypocrisy practiced by those with money and power. Lives meant nothing to the manufacturers he visited, and so many of his superiors were bribed that the reports he filed were beyond pointless.

  It was on an inspection trip to Gorse, of all places, that he’d finally been fed up. He decided to get in on the game, asking for and receiving bribes from several of the firms he’d visited. But before he could spend a credit, he fell ill in a mining company lobby. In the miner’s medcenter, he learned his travels had caught up with him. The toxins he’d inhaled, the biological agents he’d touched in countless filthy factories had unleashed a degenerative disease, destroying his flesh. It wasn’t a theatrical end, like falling into a vat of acid, but it took the same toll. Soon, all that remained of that once-energetic young man was a parched sack of organs, somehow coaxed into continued function by the efforts of the surgeons.

  He’d never been much of a person, by his own admission, but now even that was gone. All that remained was a mind, trapped, with no way to reach out. He lay there lost, at the edge of madness, contemplating his existence—or lack of it. Seething with anger over the powerlessness of the life he’d led, and hatred for those who’d won while he had played by the rules. After two years steeping in the acid of his mind, he found a rudimentary way to communicate with one of the caretaker droids.

  And the guild inspector’s deathbed became Denetrius Vidian’s birthplace.

  From there, his life had progressed more closely according to the well-known legend—the only part of his biography that was remotely true. Avenging himself against the industry bigwigs required a new identity, a figure on the same level or higher. Vidian began as a cipher, a name on an electronic bank account. But soon he became the greatest corporate stalker the Republic had ever seen, all while still in the medcenter.

  The Republic had protected the thorilide mining industry against corporate raiders during the Clone Wars, so instead he’d taken stakes in firms manufacturing comet-chaser harvesting vessels. He’d bought a secret stake in Minerax Consulting, pushing out reports that wiped out surface mining on Gorse and other worlds; many of the companies that he once inspected failed—including Moonglow’s predecessor firm.

  Revenge, perhaps, but he didn’t really care. With his cybernetic prostheses, he had been mobile by then, having left Gorse and its bad memories for riches and financial fame. He had left it all behind. He’d become someone powerful, someone he had never been in his old identity—and if he did not have Palpatine’s ear, he at least had his respect. The Republic was full of ill-functioning industries. Vidian was seen as the man who could fix them all.

  He wasn’t about to let a snotty upstart like Baron Danthe undermine him. The Emperor encouraged vigorous competition in his administration; it was a sensible strategy, forcing everyone to give his or her best. But Danthe could only tear down those more talented. The baron had desperately been searching for some weapon to use against Vidian; it was one reason the count had sought Imperial authority over Gorse. He’d managed to demolish the medcenter of his long-ago confinement—and any trace of his true past—with no one the wiser.

  Still, the fool kept trying. The baron had contacted him again, earlier, fishing for information about his plans. Calcoraan Depot operators had even intercepted Danthe calling Captain Sloane, trying to get the same thing. To her credit, Sloane had told the man nothing.

  There was no reason to wait any longer. Vidian stepped from the chair and sent it back down to the basement. He crossed to the secure terminal on the side of the chamber and entered his passkey. With the tap of a control, he sent the document he had prepared to Coruscant. It had been crafted with utmost care; the Emperor would support his action. Vidian was taking a risk with his present course, yes—but he’d also laid a trap, one that would take Danthe out of his nonexistent hair for good. Sloane was a part of his master plan, as were droids he’d shown her earlier.

  When all was done, Vidian would remain in the Emperor’s favor, and the Empire would grow, uninterrupted, because of it. And who knew? There might even be a bonus. Vidian knew the Emperor was interested in projects to create giant weapons of intimidation. He didn’t know all that existed, but it was hard to hide much from someone involved in so many strategic supply networks. The destruction of Cynda, if it could be done, might be of military interest. Moons with its peculiar structure, orbit, and proximity to its parent planet were rare, but it paid to have a variety of tools in so large a galaxy.

  Vidian closed out his connection with the Imperial throneworld and paused. The place was still, apart from the whirring and clacking of the FX-4, motoring between the operating table and the tall diagnostic console beside it. “I know you’re here,” the count said, his back to the rest of the room.

  He heard nothing. And then, light footfalls heading to his left, behind the bank of computer equipment to
the right of the sealed entryway. Vidian strolled casually away from the communications terminal and gave another silent order. A fresh operating table, this one with restraints, rose into view. “I’ve heard you since you entered, both of you. You rode up behind my chair.” He stepped past the medical droid. “There’s no surveillance in this room. It’s just me. I’ve heard your motions, your hearts beating. I’ve seen your breaths coloring the infrared. Don’t make me hunt you. It’s tiresome.”

  Vidian whirled and leapt back toward the terminal on the wall to the right of the entrance. Looking over it, he beheld a crouching young green-skinned Twi’lek woman pointing a blaster in his face. “You’re new,” he said.

  He heard someone move behind him. Vidian stood granite-still as the blow came: a metal surgical stand, smashed over the back of his head. The Twi’lek flinched as the stand’s attachments broke free, clattering off the top of the console. Vidian whipped around and lunged for his attacker in one blinding motion.

  “You’re not new,” he said, clutching the dark-haired man by the neck. The broken shaft of the surgical stand was still in the man’s gloved hands. Vidian lifted him from the floor and looked keenly into his blue eyes. “The gunslinger from Cynda. I may have deleted your image, but I never forget a fool. I’m fascinated to learn what brings you here.”

  Choking, Kanan struggled in vain to strike Vidian with what was left of his makeshift weapon. “Shoot him!” he said between gasps. “Shoot him!”

  Hera did exactly that, leaning over the computer console and firing a point-blank shot into Vidian’s back. Plasma coruscated over Vidian and fed into Kanan, shocking him. Through the pain, Kanan could see the robe that covered Vidian’s chest was tattered, revealing a silver sheen beneath.

  “I wouldn’t do that again,” Vidian said, ripping off the shreds of the garment with his free hand without loosening his hold on Kanan at all. “My skin graft is a cortosis mesh—a holdover from the days when I advised manufacturers in the field late in the Clone Wars. I can assure you, young lady—every bolt you fire against me will carry directly into your friend.”