Before the Storm

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  “Today we will remove them, as the steward of a granary must remove the vermin to keep the stocks pure. And when next you stand on N’zoth and look to the sky, you will know that none but the children of N’zoth stand above you.”

  Then Nil Spaar stepped away from the hypercomm and looked back to Dar Bille. “You may give the order,” he said generously.

  Dar Bille’s crests swelled with pride and gratitude. “All vessels of the Black Fleet—this is the primate of the flagship Pride of Yevetha,” he said in a strong clear voice. “On the word of the viceroy, I direct you to commence your attacks. May each of us honor the name of the Yevetha today.”

  Wearing an approving look on his dirty, deep-lined face, Negus Nigekus slammed the check hatch shut and threw the locking bolt home. The ore sheds were more than two-thirds full, and there was still a month to go before the gypsy freighter returned to New Brigia. Perhaps this time there would finally be enough profit over the cost of their supplies to clear the last of their passage debt.

  Nigekus would never have dreamed that after eighteen years working the chromite digs in the hills above the village, the little colony would still owe a debt to the captain of the freighter that had brought them there. In the beginning the land had been generous. And with the Cluster under the Empire’s protection and their claim to New Brigia accepted by Coruscant, there had been more than enough buyers for the blue-white metal to ensure good prices. War—so long as it stayed at a safe distance—was good for business.

  In the first four years there wasn’t a quarter when the community failed to pare its debt. Even with the extra costs as families left the longhouses for cottage shelters, even feeding new mouths too young to contribute, and the mothers who gave their labor share in the nursery rather than the mines, even the summer when the crops withered and the winter when the processing dome burned, there was always something offered against their obligations.

  But then the land had grown stingy, and, not long after, the Empire was gone. With the spacelanes from Koornacht to Galantos and Wehttam no longer secure, the colony’s best buyers lowered their offers or stopped bidding at all, pointing to the risk of piracy.

  In time only Captain Stanz and the Freebird came calling, and his price was the lowest of all—an insult to the sweat and labor of the two hundred who each morning hiked up from the village to the diggings and each evening returned bowed by their labors. But Stanz was a pirate in heart if not in fact, and had no sympathy for them.

  “This is droid work yer doing,” he said, “picking rocks from the ground. You can’t expect a living wage for droid work. Even at these prices, it’s hardly worth my trouble to come here.”

  Nigekus doubted the truth of that, but there was no point in arguing. He had no choice but to stand there and listen to Stanz’s poor-mouthing as he figured the load and calculated the overage, using whatever prices the old Bothan’s whim dictated. And for years the overage had hovered around the figure for a quarter’s interest, sometimes a little more, more often a little less, with the shortfall added to their debt.

  If the community had had its own hauler, even a worn-out Corellian freighter or a battered space barge—but that was a dream beyond reason.

  Still, the land had suddenly turned kind again, with two new diggings bringing up rich ore that reminded the surviving elders of the promise that had coaxed them there from Brigia. If they earned no more for this load than the price Stanz had paid on his last visit, the overage should cover not only the interest but the balance.

  To guarantee that, Nigekus had decided that this time he would hold back a third of the ore until Stanz set the price. It was a tactic not without risk, or it might have been tried long before. If the Bothan took offense, the community could lose its lifeline—and the offender might lose his life.

  But Nigekus was determined to see New Brigia escape Captain Stanz’s thrall before the dust-cough that now plagued him at night rendered him fit only to sweeten the dirt of the gardens. If Stanz snapped his neck in a fury at being caught as a cheat, Nigekus would lose little.

  “He will only spare me the last weeks of the coughing death,” he had said to the other elders in winning their approval. “And you can then kill him without shame, and claim his ship as honor payment to my family.”

  Negus Nigekus walked slowly but proudly across the common toward the processing dome, his thin body warmed by the knowledge that a turning was coming.

  It had been hard for him to admit that he could no longer make the climb to the diggings and do more than take up space in the pit. The aches of hard labor were easier to bear than the deep ache of feeling useless, of standing with the children and feeling that he had become one of them, a mouth that could not earn its table share. He was grateful to have found a way of escaping that feeling.

  Before Nigekus reached the dome, a shadow flashed across the common. But by the time he looked skyward, there was nothing to be seen. The whine and clatter of the machinery had covered the sound of the approaching dropships until very near the end, and the landing sites were downriver around the bend, safely out of view. Shaking his head, Nigekus entered the dome, ignorant of the threat already moving up the valley toward the village.

  When he left the dome just a few minutes later, his inspection complete, everything had changed. Tall creatures in green and brown body armor were advancing through the village in a wide line, their weapons turning the cottages into burned and broken shells. A child’s screaming pierced the din of the machinery behind him, then ended with ominous abruptness.

  Nigekus was ignored or overlooked long enough to take half a dozen uncertain steps out into the common, long enough to realize in horror that some of the blackened objects littering the ground were carcasses, long enough to feel a wild rush of indignation over the fact that he did not even know the species of the invaders.

  Then he found his voice and cried out his rage, raised both fists in defiance and started across the common toward the nearest of the soldiers. A silver-barreled weapon turned his way, and Nigekus fell in agony, his last breath full of fire.

  Two of the diggers at Pit 4 had seen the descending ships, making that crew the first to start back down to the village. The pall of black smoke rising over the ridgelines drew the other crews away from their work and onto the well-trod trails. Some had shouldered their tools as weapons, but most were armed only with fear for their families. They had had no enemies on New Brigia, and energy weapons were a luxury the colony could not afford.

  The Yevethan troops, masked against the smoke and the stench of the vermin, waited patiently in the village for the diggers to return. There was no need to do anything more. As Nil Spaar had predicted, the sight of the ravaged village gave the diggers the final spur to a reckless charge.

  It was a methodical slaughter. Standing back to back in a circle on the common, the soldiers allowed the diggers to reach the valley floor, then cut them down.

  The last few deaths were suicides in all but name. With both the carnage and the futility before them, the remaining Brigians dropped their inadequate weapons, gave up their cover, and walked down the slopes to the village, offering themselves as targets rather than be left alive to remember.

  When it was over, and the breeze falling through the valley had blown all but the last tendrils of smoke away, only the Yevethan troops, the ore sheds, and the processing dome were left standing.

  It was no accident that those buildings had survived. As the troops returned downriver to their dropships, a fat-bodied cargo transport landed on the common. Within an hour its empty belly easily swallowed both the contents of the ore sheds and the machinery from the processing dome.

  Once the cargo transport was safely clear of the target zone, Star Dream completed its sterilization of the valley with a long salvo from the cruiser’s heavy batteries.

  The bodies turned to vapor and vanished, and the blood was scorched from the rocks. The ground turned to black glass, and the river exploded into steam. When t
he barrage was over, nothing was left of the vermin but the holes they had carved in the ground with their hands and the trails they had beaten into the hills with their footsteps.

  Star Dream returned to N’zoth triumphant in her glorious victory, carrying a passage price in chromite in her hold.

  In a garden city on J’t’p’tan, a world gentled by patient hands, a woman awoke from a dream to a nightmare. A falling star became a starship, the starship a warship, and the warship a fountain of death raining on the face of the world. In the dream, or the nightmare, the Current ran wild with the thrashings of murdered souls, and ran dark with the stain of blood.

  “Rouse everyone, at once,” Wialu said, shaking her daughter. “Hurry—something terrible has begun.”

  New Brigia was the smallest of the thirteen alien settlements visited by the ships of the Black Fleet in the first hour of the Great Purge.

  Polneye was the largest, and the only one to fight back.

  Orbiting a star on the far side of the Cluster from Coruscant, Polneye was an orphan child of the Empire. It had been established to serve as a secret military transshipment port for Farlax Sector. Cloaked in high-altitude clouds whose rains rarely reached the ground, arid Polneye became home to a vast open-air armory and supply depot.

  Bustling hub-and-spoke landing and holding zones sprawled across the dusky-brown flats. Eventually, even the largest vessels capable of grounding could be accommodated, with cargoes unloaded, assembled, and transferred by small armies of droids.

  As the traffic through Polneye grew, so did the population. At first it was a purely military billet, staffed by the Supply Command on a normal rotation. The planet was chosen to satisfy certain strategic criteria, not for its suitability for habitation. But over time, as more and more jobs were bid out to civilians, the center of each landing zone had grown into a small city largely comprised of semipermanent residents.

  When the beaten remnants of the Imperial Fleet abandoned Farlax and retreated into the Core, the military staff fled in whatever ships were available on the ground. But the civilian population, which by then numbered nearly a quarter-million scattered across fifty sites, was left behind to fend for itself.

  And though, suddenly, transports no longer dropped through the clouds with thrusters roaring to land on Polneye, the droids and cargoes that had been waiting for them proved a rich enough treasure to ease the shock of abandonment. Virtually everything a great army and a fleet of starships required to function could be found somewhere in the cargo containers left scattered on holding pads across the face of Polneye.

  There were few missteps, and little was wasted or discarded. Polneye was blessed by strong leadership at the outset, and the cargoes became the raw material for a transformation—from client to self-sustaining settlement to a unified state of eight consolidated cities.

  So it was that the Yevethan warships Honor, Liberty, and Devotion arrived over a planet boasting a healthy population of nearly three hundred thousand sentients, seventy thousand droids—and six operational TIE interceptors.

  “Weapons master! Attend me! Why has the attack not begun?”

  The weapons master of the Star Destroyer Devotion bowed deeply to Jip Toorr before speaking.

  “Primate, there is an ionization inversion above the clouds over this planet. Together, the two are interfering with the targeting computers on all our ships. I am not confident that the accuracy of our firing will satisfy your expectations.”

  “The viceroy has expectations as well, which we both must fulfill,” said Jip Toorr. “How do you propose that we do so?”

  “Sir—there are scout fighters waiting in their bays to confirm the success of our attack. I ask that three of them be launched now and sent below the clouds to direct the fire of our batteries.”

  “Will this provide the accuracy needed to ensure the success of our mission?”

  “Without fail, Primate.”

  “Then I so order it. Tactics master, launch three scout fighters. The weapons master will direct them.”

  The last of the navigation satellites on which Polneye’s traffic control system had depended had failed nearly a year earlier, or the arrival of the Yevethan task force would have been detected as soon as the ships exited hyperspace.

  But the ground components of the traffic control system were still operational. Alarms began to sound the moment the Yevethan scout fighters cleared the ionization boundary, calling technicians to rarely tended stations. Many other Polneyi ran outside to look up and see what sort of visitors had come calling.

  Those whose eyes were sharp enough saw three tiny black ships circling just below the clouds. One was over the city called Nine South, a second over Eleven North, and the third over the ghost city of Fourteen North, which was still being cannibalized for its structures and equipment.

  Then fire poured down from the sky. Fierce turbolaser pulses tore holes in the clouds and split the air, and all three cities vanished under acrid mushroom clouds of golden dust and black smoke. Even after the firing stopped, thunder rumbled across the open reaches of Polneye like death drums.

  On what had been one of the wide, flat landing pads of Ten South, those who had come out to watch the visitors land were evenly divided between the stunned and the screaming. A man near Plat Mallar went to his knees and vomited. Turning away from the sight, Mallar found a woman clawing madly at her allsuit with such force that she was bleeding profusely from beneath what was left of her nails. The sight galvanized Mallar out of his paralysis, and he began edging his way toward the east edge of the pad.

  Then a cry went up, as someone in the gathering saw that the tiny ship that had been circling over Nine South was moving to a new position over Nine North. In a matter of moments, the crowd broke and ran, some for the feeble but comforting shelter of the terminal buildings, some for the open spaces beyond the city, as far from the city as their legs would carry them. Mallar fought free of the sudden stampede, then turned and ran as well.

  Twelve students in Mallar’s second-form engineering classes had been granted the privilege of learning to maintain and fly the TIE interceptor berthed in 10S Technical Institute’s docking bay and equipment garage. The bay was halfway around the terminal hub from where he had stood with the crowd, and though he ran as hard as he could, he didn’t expect to be the first of the twelve to arrive.

  But he was. The bay doors were standing open, and members of the junior form were hastily clearing away the droids and vehicles blocking the entrance, but the cockpit of the interceptor was still unoccupied.

  Mallar did not hesitate. Grabbing a helmet and re-breather from the equipment lockers, he clambered up on the interceptor’s right-side wing brace and popped the access hatch release. “You!” he shouted, pointing at the nearest student. “I need a power droid over here, now!”

  By the time Mallar settled in the cockpit and started the power-up sequence, two other would-be pilots had arrived. With a cool and purposeful efficiency that would have done a carrier deck crew credit, they helped hasten the dull gray power droid into position beside the fighter.

  The moment the power coupling clicked in the starting port, Mallar ran up the capacitors for both ion engines, then dropped them back to a neutral idle. There was no point in completing the rest of the system checks. There was no time for repairs, and crashing was no more fearful a prospect than the next attack from beyond the clouds.

  “That’s got it,” Mallar called over the microphone. “Uncouple me, and then clear the bay—I’m flying her out.”

  Ordinarily, the TIE would have been towed out of the bay and onto the landing pad on her skids by a tug droid. But that would take precious time, and Mallar was already afraid he was far too late. The moment the last of the other students fled out the bay doorway, he shoved the throttle forward.

  The interceptor jerked forward as the engine backblast lifted loose debris and rained it on the fighter’s combat-hardened solar panels. Picking up speed rapidly, the ship began to l
ift just as it passed through the bay doorway, and the upper edge of the left panel dragged against the durasteel frame with a screech that shivered everyone in earshot, including Mallar.

  Then, with a bump and a lurch, the ship cleared the bay, bursting out into the bright, diffuse light of a Polneye midday. Pointing the twin booms of the wing-mounted cannon skyward, Mallar threw the interceptor into a full-power climb.

  The tiny black ships were still circling high in the air like carrion birds. Activating his targeting system, Mallar was heartened to see that three more of the settlement’s TIE interceptors were in the air. Selecting the nearest target and steering toward it, Mallar then did something no instructor had ever authorized—powered up the four Seinar laser cannon.

  With an insistent beeping, the targeting system informed Mallar that it had identified the primary target as a TIE/rc reconnaissance fighter. But to Mallar’s surprise, there was no safety interlock preventing him from firing on what the interceptor took to be a friendly target. Moments after the target was identified, the attack computer locked on.

  TARGET IN RANGE, said the cockpit display as the indicators changed from red to green.

  He squeezed both triggers, and the ship quivered around him as the quad cannon spoke.

  No one was more surprised than Mallar when the target stayed in his sights and then exploded in a yellow-white gout of flame. Whether it was the interceptor’s superior speed, Mallar’s crude headlong rush up from the surface, or simple surprise, the TIE/rc never responded to the approaching ship’s presence.

  As he blew past the falling debris, Mallar heard voices over the interceptor’s combat comm, exulting. But he himself felt neither joy nor relief. He was shaking and covered in clammy sweat, the reckless momentum dissipated, the awful reality sinking in.