tragedies do not enrage your conscience, then shame on you. If we
cannot stand together against such a predator, the New Republic stands
for nothing of value."
Leia paused to drink in the utter silence that reigned in the great
chamber.
"In consultation with Admiral Ackbar and the Fleet Office, I have
ordered additional forces to Koor-nacht to strengthen our position
there. I have charged General A'baht, the sector commander, with the
task of eliminating the Yevethan threat and reclaiming the conquered
worlds of Koornacht. He has the necessary command authority to do so,
and he has my full confidence.
"We will take away the Yevetha's ability to make war on what they call
the vermin. Not only because we, too, are vermin in their eyes, but
because they have shown us an evil heart, and evil must be challenged,
even though the cost may be great.
"Any government that objects to this decision is free to withdraw from
this body. And this body is welcome to choose a new President--the day
after Nil Spaar is defeated and the Yevetha disarmed."
Leia fully expected the silence to follow her away from the podium.
But she had not gone two steps before a tumultuous roar of approval
washed over her from the floor below and the galleries above. Turning,
she saw virtually the entire Senate on its feet, affirming her decision
by acclaim.
The acclaim was not unanimous--dozens of dissenting senators had
remained in their seats or headed for the exits in disgust. But they
were a startlingly tiny minority of the whole. Leia stared, barely
comprehending the miracle she had wrought. Her words had reached them,
and moved them, and united them--for a moment, at least, a moment of
principle over politics.
She would have been moved to joy, but for the fact that at the end of
the straight line she had drawn, Leia saw Han's death.
Maltha Obex
It was a cold day on Maltha Obex, even by the standards of a planet
locked in the grip of a century-long ice age. A brutal storm half a
continent wide was scouring the northern latitudes with driving winds
and sheets of tiny, hard snowflakes as coarse as sand. The storm had
forced Team Alpha to abandon its excavation site on the ice field east
of Ridge 80.
Team Alpha's cold shelters had been fighting their tie-downs' all
night, as though eager to take flight and tumble headlong across the
wastes. When team leader Bogo Tragett suited up to check the status of
the excavation dome, he found the rip-proof tunnel connecting his
shelter to the dome torn lengthwise and shredded to tiny y ellow flags
whipping from the tension cables. Visibility fell to near whiteout
with the gusts, hiding a bright blue work dome that was no more than
five meters away from Tragett.
Inside the dome Tragett found an ice-cold heater, a massive drift of
crystalline white, and a continuing swirl of snow particles blowing in
from under the dome's cartial floor. The heater had chewed through a
three-ay fuel supply in something less than ten hours land then quit,
surrendering.
Tragett did likewise. Crossing to the supply shelter through a still
intact connecting tunnel, he hailed Penga Rift and asked for a pickup,
then paged the rest of the team and told them to pack whatever personal
and team gear they could backpack or carry. Then it was a matter of
waiting for conditions to ease enough for the expedition's
weather-rated shuttle to fight its way through to them.
That wait stretched to three hours, in the course of which Tragett's
shelter broke loose from its tie-downs and was thrown against the
upwind side of the excavation dome. Before the shelter itself had
collapsed and torn free, it had caved in a third of the dome and turned
the faces of two team members as white as the landscape.
But Dr. Joto Eckels never gave as much as a passing thought to
offering Team Alpha a respite aboard Penga Rift. He regretted the loss
of equipment and the investment of time at N3, with no return on
either--but there were many more sites, and far too little time.
Trusting that Tragett would see to the motivational needs of his team,
Eckels had dispatched the shuttle to the relatively balmy coastal site
S9, where the dawn temperature had been twenty-six degrees below
freezing under quiet skies.
"We preloaded the shuttle with the entire spare excavation kit, from
domes to bits," Eckels informed Tragett as the shuttle turned south
instead of skyward.
"You can draw whatever replacements you need from there. I'd say you
should have no trouble getting set up by nightfall--be ready to go
again first thing in the morning."
Tragett, a veteran and a pragmatist, understood the issues driving the
decision. "Affirmative, Penga Rift. But if that's the plan, I'd like
to rotate Tuomis out, bring someone else down. He's been fighting
shelter fever, and he's a little shaken right now."
"Site setup is half outside' work," Eckels said.
"Might turn him around, just being able to see that horizon. And hard
work is a lot better for the disposi
tion than lying there all night listening to the wind howl.
Let's wait twenty and review the options when we see how he is in the
morning."
With the Team Alpha crisis past, Penga Rift returned to its normal
orbital pattern, and Eckels contacted the other teams in turn for their
daily updates.
Team Beta was conducting a deep-water survey from a camp on a massive
slab iceberg; Team Gamma was working the ridges above Stopa-Krenn
Glacier in search of post-catastrophe Qella habitations and nomadic
artifacts.
"You have one more day to wrap things up there," Eckels informed the
Beta team leader. "Then I'm moving you to S-Eleven. With Alpha being
driven out of N-Three, we still haven't gotten into a city site--which
is why I'm making that our top priority for the time remaining."
"Understood, Dr. Eckels. No objection here--we're clearly into
diminishing returns."
Eckels's news for Gamma, delivered half an orbit later, had a similar
flavor. "You have a hundred hours to find a no-fooling,
hip-deep-in-midden habitation before I pull you off and split you up so
we can go double-shifts at S-Nine and S-Eleven. We have all the skin
flakes, callus scrapings, scat sheddings, and ice-burned limbs the
Institute can use. We're not leaving here without at least a peek at
how they lived--before if not after, and both if at all possible."
"Acknowledged," said the Gamma leader. "Let me talk to Tia about
yesterday's side scans. There's a spot I want her to get a second look
at."
"Transferring you now."
Eckels studied the schedule on his datapad's display a moment longer,
then stored it. He knew that he was pushing the team hard, both those
on the surface and the analysts and catalogers in the lab. But he saw
no real alternative. They had custody of Penga Rift for twenty-nine
more days--after which Dr. Bromial's Kogan expedition, alrea
dy
postponed two months, would take over. That broke down to thirteen
produc tive days at Maltha Obex and sixteen wasted days in transit back
to Coruscant.
All that time just to drag our hands and brains from one side of the
galaxy to another--the universe is an offense to any reasonable concept
of order.
Eckels found himself envying his client for having a ship like Meridian
at his disposal. The black-hulled sprint that had made the pickup had
completed a round trip to Coruscant in less than the time it would take
the elderly research vessel to complete one leg. But the Obroan
Institute would never invest its precious resources in something as
ephemeral as speed.
"Archaeology is not a race," Director bel-dar-Nolek would say. "It is
a profession for the patient. We, who think in centuries and
millennia, can hardly notice a handful of days."
But bel-dar-Nolek no longer did fieldwork. The longest trip he
regularly made was a twenty-minute walk from his home to his office at
the Institute.
Leaving the comm booth, Eckels started aft toward the labs. But before
he reached them, he found himself paged over the shipcomm.
"Captain Barjas, to the bridge, please. Dr. Eckels, to the bridge,
please."
Eckels recognized the voice of the first officer, who had been with the
ship for nine years and uncounted expeditions. Eckels also recognized
the note of urgency that made Manazar's words more than a Polite
request.
Turning, Eckels reversed his steps, adding a jot of haste to them until
he passed into the crew section and climbed the triangular ladder to
the bridge.
Barjas had arrived before him. "Doctor," he said with an acknowledging
nod.
"What is it?"
Barjas pointed at the navigation display, Manazar out the forward
viewport.
"Incoming ship," Barjas said.
Manazar added, "And they don't seem too happy that we're here."
Wary of being followed, Pakkpekatt had guided Lady Luck through a
series of three hyperspace jumps en route to Maltha Obex. The extra
jumps added less than an hour to their travel time, but vastly
increased the difficulty for anyone attempting to divine their
destination.
Having taken those extra precautions to ensure that they would be
undisturbed, Pakkpekatt was all the more concerned to discover that
though the planet was dead, it was not deserted.
"Vessel answers as Penga Rift, registry Coruscant, ownership Obroan
Institute for Archaeology, captain Dolk Barjas. Supplementary: Length
one-twenty-six, beam thirty-two, no registered armament, rated speed--"
"Agent Taisden, can you suppress that vessel's comm ability?"
"Local," Taisden said. "Not hyperComm."
"Do nothing, then," said Pakkpekatt.
"Colonel, you weren't thinking about taking that ship out, were you?"
Hammax asked, his face showing concern. "That's not only a civilian
boat, but a friendly--and from the size of her, probably berthing
upward of thirty."
"My concern is that we have sufficient privacy to do our work here,"
said Pakkpekatt, slowing Lady Luck to give them more time before being
detected.
will entertain all options."
"This entire expedition has been black ops from the start," said
Pleck.
"Why not just drop the curtain over the whole system, commandeer the
ship under NRI authority, and lock in a comm blackout?"
"I do not think we have as much authority here as you would like to
presume--either in fact or in appearance," Pakkpekatt said. "If you
were her captain, would you surrender your command to the crew of a
private yacht that showed up without its registered owner?
Only the greenest captain would fail to suspect piracy in such
circumstances."
"Okay, so when we blip in on their sensors, they're not going to be
intimidated," said Hammax. "But surely we could get General Rieekan or
Brigadier Collomus to have them ordered out of the system. We could
even wait out here, out of range, until they've been spanked and sent
home."
Taisden was shaking his head. "Listen, I did a turn in the Senate
liaison office. The colonel's right. Without a native population
here, Maltha Obex is an open system, and Article Nineteen of the
Charter applies. The Obroan Institute has as much right to be here as
we do.
The NRI doesn't have the authority to claim territory for itself--not
even the Fleet has that power. They have to go to the Senate Defense
Council for a presumptive finding of a security interest to support the
claim, give public notice to the member nations--" "So how do we get
them to leave without telling them who we are and why we're here?"
Hammax demanded.
"That's another question, isn't it?" asked Pleck.
"What are they doing here?"
"They are here because we sent them here," said P akkpekatt.
That drew puzzled looks. "We did?" Hammax asked.
"Effectively. Before the vagabond escaped our control at Gmar Asklion,
I asked General Rieekan for Qella genetic material, and for reasons of
expediency the agency enlisted the Obroan Institute to locate and
retrieve it. But we now have what they came here to retrieve for
us--they should be gone."
"Well, then, it's simple," said Hammax. "If we sent them here, we can
order them to leave. We just have to tell them that we're here to take
over the operation and their services are no longer required."
"I don't think so," Taisden said. "From the comm traffic, it sounds
like they have at least three operations under way on the surface.
They're not going to believe that this ship, and the four of us, are
here to take over."
"Doesn't matter what they believe," said Hammax.
"If we hired 'em, we can fire 'em. And maybe this yacht
isn't very intimidating, but everyone here knows that the colonel can
be. That could turn out to be all the authority we need."
"And if they don't go for it?" Taisden asked.
"They're civilians, Colonel---even worse, scientists.
They don't herd well."
"Then there's one other option. Colonel, that's basically a Dobrutz
liner," said Hammax. "I know something about the type, because I've
spent some time in one. The Alliance had a fistful of them, pressed
into service as small troop transports during the Rebellion."
"Go on," said Pakkpekatt.
"See, that ship down there has a single comm array, mounted outside the
nav shields because of the interference from those miserable DZ-nine
shield generators," said Hammax. "It was a known vulnerability.
I'm sure I could take it out without collateral damage. Shouldn't
require more than two shots. Might get it in one."
"Thank you, Colonel," said Pakkpekatt, advancing the throttles.
"However, I believe I will hold that option in deep reserve. There is
something here that still eludes me. Perhaps I can encourage these
interlopers to reveal
The inbound vessel had remained silent until it was nearly on top of
Penga Rift. Then the first signal had come over the emergency comm
channel, lighting up several warning bars on the panels at Manazar's
elbow.
"Penga Rift, this is a priority alert.. You are operating in a
restricted area, and your vessel is at risk. Please verify your
transponder identification profile."
Startled out of inattentiveness, Manazar nearly sent the confirming
data without questioning the request.
Only at the last moment did he recover his poise and respond, "Unknown
vessel, this is Penga Rift. Please identify yourself--this ship is not
equipped with an interrogator module."
"I say again, Penga Rift, this is a priority alert. You are operating
in a restricted area, and your vessel is at risk. Please verify your
transponder identification profile."
As though to underline the seriousness of the request, a concealed
weapons bay had opened on the underside of the new arrival's hull. The
retractable laser cannon that emerged cycled through its full range of
motion, then locked on Penga Rift.
That was the point at which Manazar called for the captain and the
expedition leader. Then he quickly checked to see if the transponder
THE BLACK FLEET CRISIS #3 - TYRANTS_TEST Page 31
