by James Luceno
The musicians were a stanza into the piece when a human page approached the Trade Federation rostrum and asked for Viceroy Gunray. The Kuati chair of the delegation directed the page to the far end of the directorate’s curved table.
With palpable apprehension, Gunray watched the page advance.
“I’m sorry to intrude, Viceroy,” the human began in Basic, loudly enough to be heard over the trumpets, “but apparently there is some problem with your shuttle. Eriadu Spaceport Control needs to speak with you at once.”
Gunray made his face long and stuck out his already prominent lower jaw. “Can’t this wait until after the summit concludes?”
The page shook his head. “I apologize, Viceroy, but this is a security matter. I assure you, it will require only a moment of your time.”
The Kuati chair, who had been monitoring the conversation, swung to face Gunray. “Go attend to the matter. If luck is with you, you won’t have to endure Supreme Chancellor Valorum’s opening remarks.”
Lott Dod came to his feet as Gunray was preparing to leave. “Should I remain in your absence, Viceroy?”
Gunray thought about it for a moment, then shook his head. “Come with me. You are better at dealing with procedures and legalities than I am. But let us be quick about it, Senator, I don’t wish to miss any more of the summit than I have to.”
One hundred meters above the floor of the summit hall, Qui-Gon and Boiny hurried through the network of walkways, gantries, and trusses that spanned the upper reaches of the building from wall to wall. The martial bellowing of the trumpets resounded off the curved walls, playing tricks with the sound. Sunlight, colored by the enormous ocular window in the center of the dome, poured in.
Suspended by brackets from the ceiling, or cantilevered from the walls, the walkways had openwork floors and tubular handrails and were just wide enough for a human of normal size to pass through. At regular intervals, especially where walkways intersected, were balconies that permitted maintenance to be performed on speaker arrays or banks of spotlights.
There were innumerable places where a lone shooter, armed with a remote or a blaster, might conceal himself.
Qui-Gon and Boiny hadn’t gone far before they encountered the first security agent, who raised a hand weapon as they approached and demanded to know what business they had there.
Qui-Gon explained in as few words as possible, at the same time regarding the agent through the Force to determine if his demeanor of righteous authority was genuine.
Disconcerted by Qui-Gon’s revelations, the agent activated his comlink and notified every agent in the vicinity to recheck the documents of anyone in the walkways, whether their badges identified them as fellow agents or technicians. In the same breath, he ordered that all exits leading to the periphery corridor behind the media booths be sealed off.
Within moments, Qui-Gon, Boiny, and the agent were joined by additional security personnel. Forming up into three groups, they fanned out into the walkways.
Qui-Gon and Boiny angled away from the perimeter and out over the floor of the hall. Directly below them stood the two lines of trumpeters and drummers.
They reached another intersection and split up.
Stretching out with his feelings, Qui-Gon moved warily toward the next balcony.
A security agent rushed into view, a blaster rifle cradled in his arms.
“I received word over the comlink,” he said. “There are two technicians on the next balcony. I suggest we start with them.”
The agent stepped aside to let Qui-Gon pass. Qui-Gon sprinted forward. But the Force drew him up short.
He began to turn.
Someone shouted, “Jedi!”
Qui-Gon spun and saw Boiny running full-out toward him. The security agent was between them, the blaster rifle still angled across his chest.
Boiny pointed to the agent. “That’s—”
The agent glanced at Qui-Gon.
“He’s with me,” Qui-Gon started to say.
The agent crouched and fired, hitting Boiny square in the chest and hurling him backwards on the walkway. Then he whirled on Qui-Gon, firing steadily.
Qui-Gon unleashed his lightsaber. But the blaster bolts were delivered with such speed and precision that he was hard-pressed to deflect all of them. Two whizzed past his blade, grazing his left arm and right leg.
He stumbled slightly.
Drawn by the sounds of the blasterfire, a trio of agents raced into view from the same direction Boiny had come. Havac’s shooter drew a second weapon from a shoulder holster and unloaded on the agents, wounding two of them.
Qui-Gon changed the cant of his blade to deflect bolts off to each side, rather than back at the shooter, for fear of hitting any of the reinforcements. By now the agents were returning fire, but showing little concern for Qui-Gon’s predicament.
The shooter was dazzlingly fast with his hands and body, dodging bolts and throwing himself from one side of the narrow walkway to the other, concealed body armor absorbing the few shots that did manage to find him.
Qui-Gon leapt forward. Slashing horizontally with his blade, he severed two of the walkway’s tubular vertical supports.
Then he slashed downward to rend the struts that braced the platform.
Abruptly both sections of the cleaved walkway tilted, sending Qui-Gon and Havac’s shooter staggering toward each other and the increasing gap between the now dangling ends of the platform.
A crazed yell tore from the shooter’s throat. He slipped to the floor and began to slide along the grating, firing both weapons at Qui-Gon as he fell.
* * *
Into the brief silence the musicians inserted between the second and final fanfares, came a rush of voices raised in panic.
Seated stiffly at the center of the Coruscant delegation’s rostrum, Valorum wasn’t sure what had provoked the screams until he saw Sei Taria, with one hand pressed to her mouth, pointing toward the hall’s ceiling.
In the maze of walkways below the dome’s oculus window, blaster bolts darted and crisscrossed in the tinted light. Others glanced from a lightsaber’s green blade. Sparks showered down on the drummers and trumpeters like a benediction.
Sei screamed.
Jedi Masters Adi Gallia and Vergere rushed forward, their swords ignited.
Then a figure plummeted from one of the walkways.
From the Trade Federation’s side of the hall, the chair of the directorate watched open-mouthed as a blaster fight erupted in the overhead trusses and gantries. On the floor, at the same time, three Jedi and several judicials were moving quickly if surreptitiously toward the directorate rostrum.
The Kuati glanced between the ceiling and floor. Had the summit been engineered to trap the directorate? he asked himself. Would the Republic be so bold as to attack them in public?
The security droids had gone from standing at attention to postures of readiness, crouching slightly, with arms crooked and left legs extended behind. They were programmed to answer to any or all of the directorate members—or at least relay a directorate member’s commands to the central control computer on board the Trade Federation vessel—but the droids responded best to the Neimoidians.
The Kuati chair looked around for Viceroy Gunray and realized that he hadn’t returned. At a loss for what to do, he swung to one of his aides.
“Activate the force field!” he ordered.
The sounds of blasters and panic on the floor infiltrated the media booth Havac had secured. Seated in a chair with a hand weapon leveled at Havac, Cohl heard the holocam click on and saw Havac glance at it.
“Am I correct in assuming that you intend to kill me?” Havac asked. “Killing is what you are good at, after all.”
“You’re doing pretty good for an beginner, Havac.”
Havac snorted in disdain. “I’m prepared to die for the cause, Captain.”
“Maybe you are,” Cohl said. “But I’m not going to give you that privilege. You’re going to die for killing Rell
a. Besides, your cause is lost.”
Havac glanced at the cam again. “You think so?”
Cohl gestured toward the transparisteel window. “You hear those blaster bolts? The Jedi found your shooter—the one controlling the droid. Valorum is out of danger. I never thought much of the plan anyway, seeing how Valorum is trying to dismantle the Trade Federation, the same as you are.”
Havac laughed shortly. “You failed to see the truth, Cohl. You really are too old for the game. What makes you think that we were ever after Valorum?”
Cohl’s grin straightened.
Grimacing in pain, he pushed himself out of the chair and limped to the window. The blaster fight had thrown the hall into utter chaos. The members of the Trade Federation Directorate were standing behind their curved table, surrounded by their security droids, everyone safe inside a shimmering force field.
Off to one side, a group of Jedi and judicials were closing on the Federation’s rostrum.
Cohl swung to Havac, his eyes blazing.
“You’re after the Trade Federation!”
Havac couldn’t restrain a triumphant smile. “It was just a matter of getting them to activate the force field.” He indicated the devices that were aimed down at the hall. “The scanner detected the activation. The holocam is going to do the rest.”
“The remote,” Cohl said, as if in a daze.
He lunged for the cam, meeting Havac halfway. They slammed into each other and fell grappling to the floor of the booth. They rolled toward the door, each man fighting for superiority, the blaster between them, in the clutch of four hands.
Cohl swung his elbow into Havac’s face, knocking him sideways, then used Havac’s momentum to pitch himself on top of Havac, pinning him to the floor with his knees.
Havac squirmed, but held tightly to the blaster, triggering a bolt into Cohl’s abdomen. Cohl fell partially back, then slumped forward, bringing all his weight to bear on the weapon and forcing it down into Havac’s chest.
With what little of his strength remained, Cohl squeezed out a final bolt.
Dangling by one hand from the swaying walkway, Qui-Gon looked down at the floor of the hall.
The trumpeters had stopped midfanfare and were scattering for cover, abandoning their horns as they ran. Everywhere else delegates were fleeing their seats, literally climbing over one another in a desperate attempt to escape.
Valorum was on his feet, but completely encircled by Senate Guards and Jedi Knights.
Saesee Tiin, Ki-Adi-Mundi, and Obi-Wan had taken up positions in front of the Trade Federation rostrum, their lightsabers lifted to deflect fire from the droids.
But the directorate members had raised their force field, which meant that no bolts could enter or leave the translucent energy shield.
The thirteen droids reached over their right shoulders for the blaster rifles secured to their backpacks.
The judicials loosed a storm of blaster bolts, which the force field simply consumed.
Then, all at once, the droids pivoted through an about-face.
The members of the directorate mouthed commands and curses and began to back away from the curved table.
The droids fired.
As the Jedi and judicials watched helplessly, bolts tore into the table and chairs and into the flesh of the members, shaking them about and hurling them to all sides of the rostrum.
The firing ceased as abruptly as it had started.
For a moment, the droids stood with their cooling blasters, then they put them back over their shoulders and turned to face the hall.
Stunned by what he had witnessed, Qui-Gon clambered onto the shaky walkway and dropped cross-legged to the slanted floor, staring off into space.
THE INNER CIRCLE
“The Nebula Front has largely disbanded,” the judicial officer explained to Qui-Gon. “The few we’ve been able to track down contend that they knew nothing about Havac’s plans for Eriadu. Some of them had never even met Havac, and assert that the name was applied routinely to almost everyone in the Front’s militant faction. The Eriadu operation was conceived in great secrecy, in any case, since the militants were convinced that there was an informant among them.”
“The informant was one of the moderates,” Qui-Gon amended. “It was through him that I learned about Cohl’s designs to raid the Trade Federation freighter at Dorvalla, and, on Asmeru, about a clandestine operation Cohl was executing for Havac.”
The judicial, a thin, brown-haired woman with a personable manner, made note of Qui-Gon’s remarks on a desktop datapad. It was just the two of them in a small cubicle in the Justice Department’s cavernous headquarters on Coruscant. Almost a standard month had gone by since the assassinations.
Deactivating the shield the members of the Trade Federation Directorate had thrown about themselves—unknowingly ushering in their own demise—had required a team of technicians, using a pair of field disruptors. The two Neimoidians who had survived the massacre, Viceroy Nute Gunray and Senator Lott Dod, had not protested when the same disruptors had been employed to dazzle the thirteen droids into states of guaranteed submission. Diplomatic privilege had permitted the Neimoidians to depart Eriadu without answering any questions.
Supreme Chancellor Valorum had ordered the Justice Department to commence an immediate investigation, but the chief investigators had soon found themselves thwarted by Lieutenant Governor Tarkin. Tarkin insisted that, since Eriadu had failed to provide adequate security, the case should be handled by Eriaduan investigators. There was some concern that Tarkin, fearing retaliation by the Trade Federation, would seek to shift the blame to other parties. But, instead, he had simply impeded the investigation by allowing evidence and eyewitnesses to vanish. Ignored, the judicials Valorum had asked to remain behind on Eriadu had finally decamped.
Qui-Gon had tried to stay abreast of developments in the case, but the chief investigator who served as liaison with the Eriaduan team had only just returned to Coruscant.
“Havac turns out to have been Eriaduan,” the judicial officer continued. “His real name was Eru Matalis, a media correspondent and holodocumentarian, with a longstanding grudge against the Trade Federation. At some point he became the leader of the Nebula Front’s cell on Eriadu, and rose through the ranks to a command position in the organization.
“A search of the safe house the Nebula Front maintained in Eriadu City revealed that the Front had contacts in all quarters of government and law enforcement, and presumably knew as much as anyone about security for the trade summit. Evidently, Havac—Matalis—used his contacts to obtain security badges, uniforms, and documentation for the assassins Cohl had hired, and perhaps arranged to have weapons concealed inside the hall, prior to the summit itself.”
“The operation must have been planned as soon as the trade summit was announced,” Qui-Gon said. “Or soon after the attack on the Supreme Chancellor, here on Coruscant. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know whether that attack was genuine, or designed from the start to sidetrack us from what was being set in motion on Eriadu.”
“Not unless Cohl or Havac learn to speak from beyond the grave,” the judicial said.
“What of the assassins who were captured?”
“Everyone in custody upholds that Valorum was the target—even the two who you discovered with Havac in the media booth. As they tell it, Havac’s goal was to make it appear that the Trade Federation’s droids had killed Valorum, at the behest of the directorate. That would have led to the dismantlement of the Federation, which is what the Nebula Front wanted all along.
“We considered the possibility that something went wrong with the droids’ programming, and that the attack on the directorate was a mistake. But Baktoid provided ample proof that that could not have happened.”
“Could Baktoid have been involved in abetting Havac?”
“They vehemently deny any involvement. In fact, their technicians helped us analyze the battle droid—the so-called commander—which was found to contain
a mechanism that allowed it to be controlled independently of the central control computer, but only for a brief period. Havac’s holocam prompted the commander to act, and the twelve other droids followed the commander’s lead. As soon as the central control computer realized what was occurring in the summit hall, it shut down all of them.”
Qui-Gon considered it for a moment. “Havac must have had help getting the droid into Trade Federation hands.”
“Absolutely,” the judicial said, nodding. “But diplomatic privilege has prevented us from learning all that we wish to know. For example, Eriadu Spaceport records show that the directorate arrived with only twelve droids. So the thirteenth—the assassin—had to have been acquired while the delegation was on the surface.
“Gunray, the new commanding viceroy of the entire Trade Federation, alleges—through his lawyers, at any rate—that someone on the directorate must have accepted or introduced the droid. Senator Lott Dod claims that when he drew Gunray’s attention to the extra droid, the viceroy appeared to be every bit as puzzled as Dod was.”
“What about the message that took Gunray and Dod from the summit hall?”
“Legitimate—as far as can be determined. A plasma leak was detected in the engines of the Neimoidians’ shuttle. The leak touched off scanners at the spaceport, and someone at the spaceport contacted security at the summit hall. The problem is, we haven’t been able to learn the identity of whoever it was that contacted security. Viceroy Gunray insists that the comlink the page led him to was inactive when he reached it. The page has verified this. By the time Gunray and Dod were headed back to their seats, the violence had already broken out, and security agents restrained them from reentering the hall.”
The judicial shook her head in exasperation. “It all comes down to Havac.”
Qui-Gon folded his arms across his chest and nodded, though not convincingly. “So it would appear.”
“It’s a pleasure to see you again, Senator Palpatine,” the exquisite figure in the holoprojector field said. “I look forward to the day when we can meet again in person.”
