The Rise of the Empire

by John Jackson Miller

  Hera stood before the door and stared. “You’ve got your own wardrobe?”

  Kanan removed a suit. “That’s Lal’s thinking. We never knew what we’d be carrying from day to day, and she didn’t want anyone getting hurt. The suits are meant to be thrown away, so they’re cheap enough. And one-size-fits-all. Or most, anyway.”

  Efficient, Kanan thought, though he decided against mentioning that Vidian would probably approve. He looked back to Skelly and Zaluna. “We’d need you both with us. It could be dangerous—”

  “Tosh,” Zaluna said, rising. “We know what’s at stake.”

  Skelly rolled his eyes. “Let’s go before my meds wear off, and I start thinking clearly.”

  “Okay,” Hera said, pulling down the masks. “We try this your way. But if this doesn’t work out, we go back to my plan.”

  “Dying is never a plan. But you’ve got a deal.”

  IT WAS THE RARE space station that a Star Destroyer could dock with. Among Calcoraan Depot’s many arms was a long astrobridge that mated to an airlock on Ultimatum’s hull. Sloane figured Vidian had calculated some minuscule time savings in it.

  He had met her at the connecting port. Greeted was too strong a word, since as usual he seemed to be engaged in silent comlink communication with someone else. Given how many sights they passed, their ride in the tramcar from node to node felt like a tour—only a tour in which the guide had almost nothing to say.

  They passed an arrival area in which heavily plated robots were being disassembled. She had never seen anything like them. “What are those?”

  “Droids.”

  “Of what sort?”

  “Heat-tolerant. The depot supplies projects across the sector, not just Gorse.”

  She was anxious to show what she knew. “Heat-proof. Baron Danthe’s firm made them, then? He holds the monopoly.”

  Vidian visibly bristled at the baron’s name. “Yes. Many firms supply the Empire, including his.”

  “But those are employees of one of your firms taking them apart.” She recognized the logos on the uniforms.

  “Standard maintenance.” Vidian accelerated the tramcar, indicating the subject was closed.

  They rode on past several more junctions, offering opportunities for more glimpses of the depot’s shipments and more terse exchanges with Vidian. Sloane wondered if Vidian even remembered that he had asked her here.

  “It’s an amazing place,” she finally said. “I appreciate the opportunity to see it.”

  “You don’t find the logistical world too tedious?” he asked as their car began to slow.

  “It’s what makes the Empire go.”

  “Agreed,” Vidian said. He pointed to a small cabinet in the car. “You’ll want what’s in there.”

  Sloane opened the compartment and withdrew a transparent face mask. Donning it, she saw a sign for landing station 77 up ahead. There were hazmat-suited workers all around the floor, taking meter-high cylindrical drums from pneumatic tubes and delivering them to freighters. “The explosives,” he said, gesturing. “Being loaded here and at several other nodes, for return to Cynda. Testing has shown that organics will move explosives more quickly than droids will. Fear is a useful motivator.”

  “Of course.” She looked at Vidian, maskless. “Don’t you need—?”

  “My lungs have been augmented to reject poisons.”

  The car stopped, and Vidian stepped out onto the shipping floor. Sloane followed.

  “The explosives must be deposited deep within Cynda using shafts drilled at precise locations.” He paused and looked at her. “My prep teams are already en route to the moon, but your military engineers could help speed things along.”

  Now we’re to it, Sloane thought. “Of course. They’re at your disposal.”

  “Fine.” A red-clad human stepped forward to Vidian, offering him a datapad. The count passed it to Sloane. “Convey these instructions to your crew.”

  As a pair of workers passed carrying drums, another tramcar arrived from a different direction. Vidian gestured toward the loading floor. “I must finalize my report for the Emperor. Stay and educate yourself.” He walked toward the vehicle. Then he paused and looked back at her. “It’s good to have an ally in the military who understands what I’m doing.”

  It was the closest thing to warmth she’d seen from him. She bowed her head. “Your lordship commands.”

  —

  “That’s our boy,” Kanan mumbled as he set a canister on the deck of the loading floor.

  Hera nodded, anonymous in her orange getup but for the big bumps on the loose-fitting head covering where it protected her head-tails. “He hasn’t sent the report yet,” she said, her lovely voice muffled by the mask. “More luck that he’d drop by here!”

  “If you can call it that.”

  “Skelly!” Hera called out.

  Kanan pivoted to see the hooded Skelly limping through the crowd of busy workers toward Vidian. Worse, he was carrying his pouch of explosives. His blood running cold, Kanan picked up the baradium canister and started walking quickly in that direction.

  Skelly was a dozen meters away from Vidian’s back and reaching for his bag when Kanan interposed himself. He shoved the canister into Skelly’s hands. “Here you go, buddy. Back to the ship.”

  Skelly, his expression invisible through the opaque faceplate, seemed poised to keep on going. “Don’t you see?”

  Vidian? You bet, Kanan wanted to say. Instead, he twirled Skelly around. He nodded to one of the stormtroopers standing guard. “Sorry. Big place. Easy to get turned about.”

  Skelly resisted as Kanan pulled him away from the tramline. Vidian was in the car already, seemingly none the wiser. “Skelly, have you lost your mind?”

  “But he’s right there, Kanan!”

  “Not now!” Kanan pulled him back across to where Expedient was parked. “You want to blow us all up?”

  “It’s him or us.”

  “That’d be him and us,” Hera said. Stepping over, she took the canister from Skelly’s hands while Kanan pulled the bag off his shoulder.

  “Watch him,” Kanan said, turning to Expedient’s ramp. “I’m putting this where he can’t get it.”

  Kanan shook his head as he locked the sack of bombs away. Time had only seemed to magnify the injuries Skelly had suffered at Vidian’s hands; it was getting harder to get the guy to see reason through his pain. As he disembarked, Kanan saw that Hera had stationed Skelly by the ramp with a datapad, pretending to take inventory. That was the best place for him, right now.

  Zaluna approached carrying a canister as gingerly as she might carry an infant. “Will they blow up if you drop them?”

  “Just a little,” Skelly said.

  “He’s kidding,” Kanan said. “But if you do, make sure that hood is secure.” He didn’t want to imagine Zaluna on a chemically induced killing spree.

  Minutes later, Hera returned from a nonchalant walkabout of the loading floor. “Okay, Vidian’s gone to the hub,” she said in a low voice. The layout was on Skelly’s datapad now, having been downloaded from a nearby terminal by Zaluna—but it had taken too long to get, and Expedient was nearly fully loaded. They’d be expected to leave the station after that.

  “We need to slow this down,” Hera added. “And I don’t know how we can get over there.”

  Kanan suppressed a chuckle. “And you were thinking you were going to have the run of the place.”

  “I’m not taking this bunch through the ductwork,” she said, looking about. “And the stormtroopers are everywhere, making sure we’re where we’re supposed to be.”

  Kanan looked back the way Vidian had departed. There were three parallel portals there: a service hallway, with the canister-delivering pneumatic conduit on the left and the tramcar tube opening on the right. Kanan put his finger in the air. “There’s the answer,” he said. “We change where we’re supposed to be.”

  Before she could ask him anything, Kanan stepped away.

&
nbsp; Whistling to himself, he casually strolled over to the conduit where canisters, gingerly moved along on a gentle cushion of air, appeared in the loading area. Glimpsing left and right and seeing no one looking, Kanan disappeared up the service tunnel.

  He saw there what he’d seen when walking past earlier: a spindly-looking silver droid, minding the controls on the outside of the tube. Kanan walked past to a maintenance door on the tube’s exterior. With a twist, he snapped the hatch open.

  “Wait!” the droid chirped. “You can’t do that!” It clanked toward Kanan—who then grabbed it, shoving it bodily into the meter-wide tube. With a shove, he jammed its torso backward, fully lodging it inside. Then he slammed the maintenance panel shut.

  The blockage light was already flashing outside the opening when he stepped back out onto the loading floor. Kanan looked at the light and swore loudly. “The stupid thing’s stuck.”

  Workers gathered at the opening. Sloane marched over. “What’s going on here?”

  “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, enter
ing 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 leapt 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.