The Rise of the Empire

by John Jackson Miller

  Skelly was alarmed. “You’re not going to publish—after all this? What kind of deal is this? I thought you were a journalist!”

  The woman took a step back—clearly not fearing him, but simply giving him space to rave. “I’m really more gathering information right now, Skelly. Preparing for…” She trailed off, then nodded toward the wall with his notes about Cynda. “What you’ve described is bad, but it’s not exactly world-shattering.”

  “Oh, yes, it is!” Skelly whipped the holodisk out of his vest pocket and held it between his left thumb and forefinger. “Because I believe that if the Empire keeps up, they could blow the whole moon to bits!”

  Hera held up a hand. “Look, forget the hyperbole. How much damage are you talking about?”

  “I’m not exaggerating!” Skelly said. Pocketing the holodisk, he turned back to the wall and began riffling through attached notes with his good hand. “The moon’s already brittle. The elliptical orbit means Gorse and the sun are yanking at it all the time. Gorse releases the stress through groundquakes. But all the energy stays pent up on Cynda, because the crystal lattices go so deep—”

  “The bottom line, please.”

  “Use enough explosives in the right spots, and Cynda could crumble like a senator’s promise.”

  Hera stared at him for a moment. Skelly stared back.

  “That’s just…beyond belief,” she said, finally. “The power to destroy a body that size? It’s hard to believe something like that exists.”

  “It exists. It’s possible. And I’m beginning to think they don’t care.”

  Hera walked to the wall and started reading. “These notes are all over the place,” she said. “I can’t make sense of some of it.”

  “Trust me,” Skelly said. “I’m an expert.”

  “You’re a planetary geologist.”

  “No, I build bombs.”

  Hera’s lips pursed. “Oh.” She drew the syllable out.

  “I know how it sounds,” he said, pulling down notes and wedging them into his frozen right hand. “But it’s true. The mining companies know, because I’ve told them. But they cover it up, because they’re all part of the conspiracy.”

  “The conspiracy?”

  “The thorilide triangle,” Skelly said, astonished that she hadn’t heard about it. He moved across the room to the other side, with his wall of corporate shame. “The mining firms are corrupt. They’re tied up—ownership, boards of directors—with the shipwrights that have sold the Empire on one construction project after another. Oh, it’s all being done in secret, but you can’t keep everything secret. A billion Star Destroyers isn’t enough. They’re building Super Star Destroyers, and Super Super Star Destroyers, and who knows what else!”

  “I see,” Hera said, gingerly taking a step backward. “And how do you know all this?”

  “The HoloNet!”

  “Oh,” Hera said. “The HoloNet.”

  “It’s all one big web, and it goes on forever,” Skelly said, eyes fixing on the far wall. He stepped over to it and began fumbling with notes. “Did you know it was the moneyed interests that started the Clone Wars? There was a battle droid manufacturer that had too much inventory—”

  Skelly felt Hera’s eyes upon him, and the air went out of his lungs. He stopped talking. The notes, the clippings, all swam before him, not making sense.

  He’d done it again.

  “I’m sorry to have troubled you,” he half heard her say. “Good luck.”

  Skelly kept facing the wall. “Look, I know what I sound like. I’ve been through…well, I’ve been through a lot of bad things. I get worked up. I don’t always say things right. But what I know—it’s still real.” He took a breath. “I’m not crazy.”

  When he turned, she was gone. He could hear light footsteps heading up the ladder. He followed—but saw nothing but the trash bin and the darkened quad all around.

  Deflated, Skelly climbed back inside and shut the grate after him.

  He sat in silence at the bottom of the pit. His head buzzed—and hurt, as it had been hurting for a long time. Skelly’s sleep cycles had been wrong ever since moving to Gorse, and time in Cynda’s always bright caves confused them further. The confusion in the notes still clutched in his malfunctioning hand were one product. But he could still focus to do some things. The data on the holodisk—that, he knew was right. It was his testament, his last chance.

  Skelly remembered Vidian’s call to Lal Grallik. The count was coming, yes. And Vidian could still listen, and do the right thing. But he would be bringing the rest of the Empire with him, and they could still do the wrong thing.

  Skelly sprang to his feet and reentered his sanctum. Opening the curtain to the closet, he exposed his secret workbench there—and, beneath, in sealed packages, the massive stores of explosive baradium he’d smuggled out over the years. Because of his fears about blasting on Cynda, every time they’d asked him to plant charges to open up a wall, he’d used a little less. He just hadn’t given them back what he didn’t use.

  But if they didn’t listen to him now, he’d give it all back. All at once, and so they’d notice.

  Yes, he would.

  —

  Hera shook her head as she stepped back onto the street.

  It had been a calculated risk, freeing Skelly. Her assumption in the detour was that anyone rising up against the Empire, in any way, was worth a look. Some could be helpful. Maybe not yet, but in the movement to come. It was important to know their capabilities.

  But Skelly would never be of any use, and so she mentally filed him away with dozens of others she’d met just like him. Political activism drew more than its share of crackpots. Some had been legitimately driven to madness by the forces they were fighting against; some had been damaged by war, as she suspected was the case with Skelly. Some had no excuse. But while such people were always the first to revolt, they almost never led successful revolutions. Action against the Empire would have to be carefully measured—now, especially.

  Thus far, Gorse had been a bust. Sunless in more ways than one: Its people wandered robotically between the drudgery of work and the dangers of the streets, sensing neither. Even the human who’d helped her against the street gang—whom she now remembered as the man helping the old-timer on Cynda—might easily fit a ready template: the gadabout, looking for a brawl. That would be disappointing, if so, but not surprising: Like everyone else on Gorse, he was trapped in a role the Empire wanted for him. He’d never be a threat. It was too bad: He seemed to know what he was doing in a fight.

  But Hera put him out of her mind. Skelly was the side trip; the real goods lay ahead. And she would find them at the establishment whose unsubtle advertisement appeared on her datapad:

  The Asteroid Belt

  The Pits, Gorse City • Okadiah Garson, prop.

  Open all nite

  Come in and get belted

  “HEY, LADY! I’m talkin’ to you!”

  The big bruiser was talking to Zaluna, for no one else was on the street. But she’d chosen to keep going—until he kept after her. Just steps behind her, he yelled again. “I said, I’m talking to you!”

  “No, you aren’t,” she said, continuing to walk through the mud. “If you were talking to me, you’d use my real name.”

  Picking up his pace, the drunk laughed. “How’m I supposed to know who you are?”

  “Precisely!” Zaluna spun and looked keenly at him from beneath her light hood. “Then you have no reason to talk to me, Ketticus Brayl. Go home to your wife and children.”

  Face lit by moonlight, the behemoth blanched. “Wait. How do you know who I am?”

  “That’s not important,” she said, right hand disappearing in the long, loose sleeve of her poncho—the lightest garment she owned that would conceal her features. “What’s important is that you will leave me alone.”

  Brayl guffawed. “And if I don’t?”

  “Then you’ll have a talk with this.” Her right hand reappeared from wi
thin the sleeve, holding a slim blaster. “Are we through?”

  The drunk goggled at the weapon’s sudden appearance. Then he turned away, staggering off into the steamy night. Resuming her journey, Zaluna put the blaster back in its hiding place, glad no one knew it hadn’t been fired in the thirty-three years since her mother had left it to her.

  It wasn’t true that she knew everyone on Gorse and Cynda by sight, of course—but nearly a third of a century of surveillance had put a lot of troublemakers on her watchlists. And many of them seemed to wind up down here, in The Pits. Some miners acted as if the neighborhood, settled to be close to the old quarries, was a decent place to live now that the strip mining had long since ended. Perhaps for them, it was. But in her experience, roustabouts were trouble waiting to happen. She’d monitored too many bar fights in The Pits, watched dozens of people being shaken down on the streets for money or sport. Whatever the firms paid the miners, it wasn’t enough to keep some of them from hassling good folks for cash.

  Then again, if they were paid more, they’d just drink more—and that seemed to make them all the worse.

  The encounter was just one more headache in a day filled with them. After Hetto’s arrest, the remaining surveillance staffers at Transcept had worked their overtime in silence, everyone afraid to say anything. Every operator’s background was potentially under review, if the Imperial lieutenant was to be believed. Zaluna had hoped that finding the suspect Skelly again would make up for the Mynocks’ not having flagged him for capture earlier—but her hopes fell when she learned that Skelly had escaped from Moonglow’s offices before the stormtroopers could arrive.

  At least no one suspected the Mynocks of signaling him. The factory supervisor had spent an hour defending her security team from the stormtroopers’ insults. Still, Zaluna expected difficult days ahead for everyone at the Transcept office.

  And even if nothing happened, a job she’d enjoyed working at would never be fun again.

  It was a strange thing. So many people on Gorse lived in fear—especially Sullustans and others of smaller stature. Yet working with the Mynocks, she’d felt somewhat immune. There was safety in isolation, security in having information. Yes, her kind of work did have the potential to create problems for others. But she’d suppressed any consideration of that on the grounds that so many of the people she eavesdropped on were bad characters, likely to hassle a poor workingwoman on a darkened street.

  But.

  Increasingly, there had been fewer and fewer roughnecks being targeted for snooping, and more and more people like—well, like Hetto. And now Hetto himself, who faced an unknown fate. It hadn’t made sense to anyone on the work floor. Sure, Hetto had complained about working conditions and pay, but who didn’t? Yes, he’d thought what the Empire had done to the once magnificent caverns of Cynda was an abomination, but that was both old news and a common feeling on Gorse.

  But the data cube was another thing—and Zaluna now knew it was the reason he’d been targeted. When the shift ended, she’d fled home to see what it was Hetto had given her. He hadn’t given her permission to read what was on the data cube, but it wouldn’t be her first time to pry—and she had no intention of passing something along to this “Hera” person without checking it out first.

  She’d used a reader she’d first owned as a teenager, safely detached from the HoloNet—and studied the contents of the data cube in her closet for good measure. The contents were encrypted using a commercial program, but Zaluna had worked several years in electronic data collection and soon found her way past the protections.

  She was amazed at what she discovered. Somehow, Hetto had managed to download the files Transcept kept on everyone it had ever watched on Gorse and its moon, from way back in the Republic era to the present.

  She thought for a moment this “Hera” might be from a rival surveillance firm. Corporate espionage—spying on the spies for profit. Hetto, always broke, could have been hoping for a payoff. She didn’t want any part of a transaction like that. But thinking on it, she realized Transcept sold data to its competitors all the time, and sometimes on a massive scale. This act didn’t seem necessary.

  Looking more closely at it, Zaluna realized that the bounty of personal information on the data cube wasn’t the important part. Its existence served as a guide to the state of the art in surveillance means. Every image, every voice recording, every bioscan, every electronic communication tied to names in the files was tagged with information describing how it had been obtained. With it, a reader knew the location of every surveillance point on Transcept’s local grid.

  Who would need something like that?

  Maybe it was another Skelly, some crank or mad bomber looking to know the Empire’s capabilities, in order to create more mischief. She wouldn’t want to be a part of that.

  But Hetto wasn’t that kind of person. And that suggested someone else who might want it: someone who cared about what the Empire was doing to the people of Gorse.

  Someone who cared as much as Zaluna did.

  If there was a chance “Hera” was of that sort, it was worth a conversation, no matter what the danger to Zaluna. One conversation, no more; she had no desire to end up like him. But Hetto deserved that much.

  It had to be done in secret, though—and that was why her destination bewildered her. “The Asteroid Belt?” She hadn’t set foot in a cantina in thirty years, but she’d seen enough video to wonder why anyone would ever consider one a place for a surreptitious meeting. So many eyes! So many ears! Not to mention the sensory organs of natures she’d never imagined, belonging to all the other species that frequented cantinas.

  Running on adrenaline, she’d unpacked all her devices from the training programs she’d been through years earlier, when she’d learned best practices for placing hidden cams and mikes, and for locating existing ones for repair based on their subspace emissions. Detecting them before they detected her: That would be her edge, she thought.

  She saw the sign up ahead. There was no sense waiting outside any longer. “Hetto, you poor reckless soul, this is for you.” She drew the cloak tightly around her and stepped toward the building.

  THE BROKEN-TOOTHED miner spotted Kanan as soon as the pilot stomped into The Asteroid Belt. “I’ve been lookin’ for you,” the burly man snarled. “We still got a fight from last night to finish!”

  Bruised and dirtied from the Shaketown episode, Kanan started to walk right by. Then his gloved hands shot out, grabbing the miner by the scruff of his hairy neck. Kanan yanked hard, bringing the man’s face down with a smash onto an adjacent table, knocking cards and credits from the sabacc game there astray. The startled card players watched in amazement as Kanan pulled the dazed man off their table—and then climbed on top of it himself.

  “Now hear this,” he yelled to the dozens of patrons crowding the big cantina. “I have had enough of today. Anyone who hassles me goes to the medcenter.”

  “The Empire closed the medcenter!” someone yelled.

  “Correction: Anyone who hassles me goes to the morgue. That is all.” In a single swift motion, he reached down for the mug of ale by his feet—the one that had belonged to the guy on the floor. He drank the contents in one swig and stepped down from the table.

  From his regular station behind the bar, old Okadiah eyed him. “You astound, Kanan. You look as though you’ve been through a bar fight, and yet I could swear you just arrived a minute ago.”

  “That’s because I was in a bar fight,” Kanan said, rubbing his jaw. “Philo’s Fueling Station, over in Shaketown.”

  “But that’s not supposed to reopen for three months.”

  “It’ll be a little longer,” Kanan said, reaching over the counter to grab a bottle.

  “Hmm.” Okadiah shined a glass. “One can only surmise the involvement of a woman.”

  “Add stupidity and mix well,” Kanan said. “But what a woman. She was wearing a hood when I first saw her. But her eyes are amazing. And she’s got moves. I
’m telling you, Oke, if she were to walk in here right now—”

  “I think you have your wish!” Okadiah said, pointing.

  “Huh?” Kanan looked behind him, expectantly. Peering in through the partially opened door was a Sullustan woman in a rose-colored poncho. Clutching a little blue bag in her hands, she cautiously peeked this way and that.

  “Hood, check. Eyes, check,” Okadiah said, smirking. “But I’m not sure I’ll ever understand your type.”

  The woman slipped inside. The door slammed noisily behind her, startling her for just an instant. But she quickly made her way to a table in the corner—and then another, and then another, working her way across the room as if she were trying to avoid being seen by someone that only she saw.

  Kanan watched, puzzled. “What do you make of that?”

  “Perhaps the tax agent’s in town,” Okadiah said.

  Finally arriving near the bar, the Sullustan woman looked in three different directions. Then she bolted across the space, arriving next to the seat at the far end of the counter, near Kanan.

  Okadiah bowed. “Welcome to my establishment, young lady. My friend here is a great admirer.”

  Kanan glared at Okadiah. “It’s not her, you imbecile!”

  Okadiah smiled. “Can we help you with something?”

  Her big eyes looked up at Kanan—and her intense expression softened a little, as if with recognition. “There is something. The bar. Would you mind if I went to the other side of it?”

  Kanan goggled. “You want to sit on the barkeep’s side of the bar?”

  “Kanan does it all the time,” Okadiah said. “He sleeps there, too.”

  “Lady,” Kanan said, “there are no stools on that side.”

  “That’s okay,” the woman replied, her eyes scanning the ceiling. “I don’t want a chair. I want to sit on the floor.”

  Kanan and Okadiah looked across the bar at each other, puzzled. Then they both shrugged—and the woman darted around the opening and behind the bar. Kanan saw her disappear.