by Timothy Zahn
She was sitting at the computer desk in her quarters, filling out her report, when she heard the familiar voice in her head. My child?
She smiled. My lord, she responded to the Emperor’s silent call.
Your mission?
Complete, Mara said. Justice has been done.
Excellent, the Emperor said, and Mara could visualize his thin, satisfied smile.
She could also sense that he had a new assignment for her. And now? she asked.
Treason, the thought came, and she could feel his dark, brooding scowl. An image flashed into her mind, the picture of a surprisingly young Imperial governor. One allied with … Rebels?
Mara felt her lips twist. Like that ugly little affair with Governor Choard on Shelkonwa three standard months ago. Didn’t these high-ranking politicians ever learn? His name?
Ferrouz of Candoras sector, the Emperor told her. Data sent.
Mara looked over at the comm panel. The computer’s download light was glowing a quiet blue. Confirmed, my lord.
Then go, the Emperor ordered. But I warn you—this will not be easy.
Mara had to smile at that one. Of course it wouldn’t be easy. Easy tasks could be given to the military, or the heavy-handed thugs of the Imperial Security Bureau, or even Lord Vader and the Executor’s massive firepower. The hard jobs, the subtle jobs—those were reserved for the Emperor’s Hand. I have confidence in my training, she said.
Go, then, and dispense my justice.
I will, my lord, Mara promised.
Yes, the Emperor said, and once again Mara could see his smile. We will speak again after. Farewell, my child.
With that, the image of his smile faded, his voice went silent, and he was gone.
For a moment Mara sat motionless, holding on to that last glimpse of his face. On one level, Judge Chatoor’s dying ploy had held a grain of truth. Mara really didn’t have any friends.
But that was all right. She had her work, and she had the Emperor’s approval and respect, and she had the sure knowledge that what she was doing was right. Friendship was a luxury, and something she could do without.
The last ray of the Emperor’s presence faded away into the darkness of space. Taking a deep breath, Mara turned back to her computer and keyed for the download.
She skimmed the data first, catching all the high points. Then she read it more carefully, studying every detail that the Emperor had seen fit to send her. Then, just to make sure, she read it through again.
He was right. This wasn’t going to be easy.
A rumbling in her stomach reminded her that she hadn’t eaten since leaving for Judge Chatoor’s court fifteen hours ago. Getting up from the computer, she went into the galley and pulled out a packet of ribenes with white-glaze.
If Ferrouz was planning to secede from the Empire, she reflected as she put the ribenes into the cooker, he was certainly going about it the right way. His sector fleet, while laughably small, had been dispersed to a number of different systems close to Poln, where it couldn’t be taken out with a single blow but at the same time could respond quickly to any threat against the capital. He’d done the exact opposite with his sector’s stormtrooper contingents, bringing most of them to Poln Major to bolster the defenses of his communications and the governor’s palace itself.
Then there was the other half of the double planet, Poln Minor. Large enough to support only a marginal atmosphere, the place was honeycombed with mines, both working and abandoned, storehouses, maintenance centers, and large-scale work posts. If pressed hard enough, and if he could get across the gap separating the two worlds, Ferrouz could probably hold out there for years.
Certainly other unsavory people had done so. Poln Minor was reputed to be the home of hundreds of smugglers and other criminal types that years of sporadic Imperial efforts had failed to dislodge. Ferrouz might even have been in communication with some of those groups, opening up the possibility that he might bring them onto his side in a fight, or at least hide behind them should things go sour.
Poln Minor was also the key to any deal he might be making with the Rebel Alliance. A small army could hide within all those abandoned mines, along with a good-sized task force of small ships, ready to throw against whatever force the Emperor sent in response to Ferrouz’s bid for independence. Between the Rebels and his own sector fleet, Ferrouz might be willing to gamble that he would be more trouble than he was worth, especially that far out on the Empire’s periphery.
And finally, just to make things interesting, Poln Major had over the years also become home to dozens of different nonhuman species, many of them unknown groups who had apparently drifted in from Wild Space and the Unknown Regions and settled in and around the capital. The ISB section of Mara’s report warned that some of those aliens might be mercenaries brought in by the governor. Even if that proved to be untrue, the mere presence of unknown aliens with unknown abilities and temperaments always added an extra layer of risk to a ground operation. Ferrouz was smart enough to know that and exploit it.
At least Mara now understood why the Emperor had chosen her for this mission. Someone had to slip into Poln Major, get to Ferrouz, and dispatch him before any of the defenses and responses could be triggered and launched. Ferrouz’s probable successor, General Kauf Ularno, was about as unimaginative a military commander as could be imagined, but the ISB profiled him as stolidly loyal and certainly capable of taking back the capital and evicting whatever Rebels Ferrouz might have already brought in.
The cooker signaled, and Mara pulled out the tray and took it back to her desk. Setting it down beside the computer, she pulled up the map section of the report.
The first step, obviously, was to get to the Poln system. Her current ship was a capable enough transport, but arriving on Poln Major in an Imperial shuttle wouldn’t be a very smart thing to do. Her very first step, therefore, would be to get herself a more inconspicuous ship.
Once she was on the ground, the next step would be to get into the governor’s palace. Given all the extra stormtroopers Ferrouz had brought in, it might be handy for Mara to bring in a few of her own, for both reconnaissance and possible cover.
She felt her lip twist as she gnawed a bite of cream-glazed meat off the ribene bone. She’d worked with other Imperial forces over the years, of course, many times. But that didn’t mean she’d ever really liked it. Commandeering temporary allies meant revealing at least part of her identity, even if it was just the fact that she was a vaguely defined Imperial agent. Such revelations automatically added to her vulnerability.
Worse, walking into a local garrison or fleet anchorage meant taking whatever they had available, whether good and competent or lazy and useless. Picking out random stormtroopers was an even shakier proposition these days, given Vader’s habit of periodically combing through the ranks and transferring all the best and brightest into his personal 501st Legion.
On the other hand, there was a group of stormtroopers Mara had worked with before. A group that had proved itself capable, competent, and trustworthy. A group that even had its own shabby-looking transport.
The downside was that those particular stormtroopers were military deserters.
Taking another bite, Mara keyed for one of her private consolidation search files. Back on Shelkonwa, after that unpleasantness with Governor Choard, she’d told LaRone and the other four stormtroopers to get off the planet and stay out of sight and out of trouble.
The first part of her order they’d obeyed. The rest they hadn’t.
She ran her eyes down the list of little news tidbits that her search engine had gleaned from the Empire’s vast information networks over the past three months. Here, a small-time warlord had disappeared, his control over a terrified countryside ended. There, commerce from a small farming and manufacturing colony suddenly resumed as a pirate nest went up in unexplained flames. Elsewhere, a regional administrator abruptly resigned his post and the increasingly distressed citizen petitions against him stopped arri
ving at the sector office.
Small injustices, of the sort that too often slipped through the cracks of the overextended government machinery. All of them corrected, usually overnight, always accompanied by rumors of a stormtrooper vanguard that had apparently proved that the Empire was finally taking the problem seriously.
And somewhere in the vicinity of every one of those incidents, buried unnoticed in the thick stacks of docking listings, had been a Suwantek TL-1800 transport. Always with a different ship’s ID, of course. But always the same ship.
The self-named Hand of Judgment was alive and well and cutting a private fireline through the galaxy’s criminals and petty tyrants.
Mara had been following the group’s movements since Shelkonwa with decidedly mixed feelings. She’d looked into their story as to how and why they’d deserted their posts, and as far as she could tell it had more or less checked out, though a lot of the key evidence had been buried or destroyed by the ISB’s cover-up specialists. She’d thought about bringing in LaRone and the others and getting them acquitted at a proper trial so that they could return to the Imperial service they’d been trained for and sworn to serve—the service that desperately needed men of their quality.
On the other hand, the ISB would be out for vengeance, and with the distractions inherent in Mara’s job she knew she couldn’t even guarantee a fair trial, let alone an acquittal. And she had to admit that LaRone and the others had found a niche for themselves in bringing Imperial justice to the galaxy on a more informal basis.
The long-term question of what to do with them was still without an answer. The short-term question, though, was much clearer.
They were going to Poln Major with her. Whether they liked it or not.
There was still the matter of finding them, of course. For that, Mara had her computer, its predictor capabilities, and her history of LaRone’s recent movements.
More important, she had the Force.
She finished cleaning the meat off the last of the ribenes and set the tray aside. The last record she had of the Hand of Judgment placed them in the middle of a minor water dispute in Griren Province on the planet Hapor. Taking Hapor as a center point, she keyed for a summary of nearby citizen petitions, complaints, and backpocket police and military reports. A few minutes of consolidation on the computer’s part, a few more minutes of reading on Mara’s, and she had it narrowed to three likely possibilities.
Taking a deep breath, she stretched out to the Force.
She hadn’t spent much time with the renegades, but that brief period had been hardened in the fire of combat against mutual enemies. Deep within her, Mara understood these men, had an indescribable yet solid sense of how they thought and acted. And as she gazed at the three possibilities, letting her mind focus in on those missions and the multidimensional images of the five stormtroopers, one of the listings slid inexorably to the foreground.
She had them.
She took another deep breath, allowing the focus of her mind to open up, letting in the gentle breezes from the transport’s air system, the coldness of the control panel beneath her hand, the delicate leftover smell of the ribenes. Standing up, she headed to the cockpit and keyed in the start-up sequence. The minor world Elegasso, where a local election had been blatantly rigged, was the spot that logic and intuition told her would be LaRone’s next target. The planet was a good distance away, but her ship had a better-than-average hyperdrive, and she should be able to get there within a day or two. It was unlikely that LaRone would be able to arrive, assess the situation, make a plan, and deal with the crooked politicians before then.
All she had to do was get to Elegasso, settle in, and wait. Sooner or later, whatever the Hand of Judgment was up to at the moment, they would find their way to her.
Daric LaRone’s last thought just before the hail of blaster bolts blew the last bit of roof off his partial shelter was that this would be a really rotten place to die.
“LaRone!” someone shouted faintly through the static filling the headset of his stormtrooper helmet. Saberan Marcross, probably, though it was hard to identify voices through the partial comlink jamming the mercenary group out there was using. “You all right?”
“I’m still alive, if that’s what you mean,” LaRone shouted back. “What in space is the matter with these guys, anyway? Don’t they know that stormtroopers always win?”
“Some people have to learn things the hard way,” Taxtro Grave put in. “Can either of you see behind what’s left of that fountain? I think that’s where their heavy repeater is, but I can’t get a clear shot.”
Ignoring the blaster bolts steadily eating away at the pockmarked wall in front of him, LaRone popped his head up for a quick look. Sure enough, he could see the repeater peeking out from behind one of the slabs of broken stone. “I can see the muzzle, but that’s all,” he reported, ducking down again. “It’s at the south end, between the fountain and that big broken slab.”
“That should put the gunner in my field of fire,” Marcross said. “Any chance you two can pull some of their blanket off me?”
“Believe me, I’m trying,” LaRone assured him, wincing as an extra-large chunk of wall blew free and bounced off his armored shoulder. “The guys over here burn fire like they own a Tibanna mine.”
“Same over here,” Grave said. “This would be a really good time for either Brightwater or Quiller to make a dramatic entrance.”
“You listening, you two?” LaRone called. “Brightwater? Quiller?”
His only answer was a fresh volley of fire from the mercs. The other two members of their little group must be out of comlink range.
Or else they were dead.
LaRone bared his teeth in a snarl, leaning around his shelter to fire off a few more shots. They weren’t dead. They couldn’t be. They were just taking their time about bringing in backup, that was all. Across to his left came a sudden crunching of masonry, and he heard Marcross grunt as part of his firing position came down on top of him. LaRone opened his mouth to call to him, to make sure he was okay.
He paused, his ears straining against the high-pitched blaster noise. Someone in the distance was screaming. Someone, or something. The scream grew louder …
And with as dramatic an entrance as LaRone could have hoped for, Brightwater and his Aratech 74-Z speeder bike roared into view over the ridge behind them, the bike’s underslung blaster cannon spitting death and destruction at the mercenaries. The stream of fire that had been focused on LaRone faltered as some of the mercs flinched or else shifted their attention to this new threat—
There was the sudden thunderclap of a shattered Tibanna gas canister, and the whine of the repeater abruptly went silent. “Got him!” Marcross called. Overhead, Brightwater blew past, turning and jinking as he wove his screaming speeder bike in and out of the bursts of enemy fire. LaRone leaned out of his shelter again, shifting his BlasTech E-11 to full auto and raking the mercs’ positions.
He was still trying to draw their fire away from Brightwater, and Brightwater himself was dangerously close to getting swatted straight out of the sky, when a bellowing roar hammered across the sounds of battle. LaRone looked to his left and saw their tricked-out Suwantek TL-1800 freighter rise into view above the ruins of the old city, its heavy laser cannons blazing across the morning sky as they hammered the enemy positions.
Abruptly the static vanished as the cannon fire found the comlink jammer. “Quiller, what’ve you got?” LaRone called, easing his head up for a better look.
“All the targets a growing boy could ever want,” Joak Quiller returned tautly from the Suwantek. “Man, they really have a nest back there, don’t they?”
“Like you wouldn’t believe,” LaRone agreed tightly. “Can you handle them?”
“Of course,” Quiller said. “They’re not exactly geared up for this kind of firepower. We should have gone this route in the first place.”
LaRone grimaced. Except that bringing in the Suwantek would have instan
tly alerted the mercs that this wasn’t just a standard stormtrooper unit with standard stormtrooper weapons and equipment. That was a conclusion LaRone had very much hoped to avoid drawing for them.
Which meant that he and the others now had no choice but to finish the job. Completely. “Just make sure it’s done,” he told Quiller grimly. “Make sure it’s all done.”
Either Quiller caught the sudden change in LaRone’s tone or he’d already arrived at the same unpleasant conclusion on his own. “Understood,” he said. “Keep your heads down.”
Fortunately—LaRone supposed it was fortunate, anyway—this particular band of mercenaries didn’t seem interested in survival if survival meant surrender. By the time LaRone and the others were finally able to leave their splintered cover points, all fifty mercs were dead.
And it was way past time to go.
A standard hour later, having hurried through an abbreviated round of thanks from the grateful farmers who now had their land and their lives back, the five stormtroopers were aboard the Suwantek and getting the blazes out of there.
“Well, that was fun,” Quiller commented from the helm as the sky faded around them, turning from blue to dark blue to starlit black.
“Speak for yourself,” Grave grunted as he applied a burn patch to his arm. His fifth, LaRone noted, and that was just the ones he could see. “That’s one more set of armor down the disposal. My third in two months, if anyone’s counting.”
“That’s because you insist on standing still while you line up your shots,” Brightwater said. “I’m telling you, speeder bikes are the way to go.”
“Yeah, and how’s your armor holding up?” Grave countered pointedly.
“It’s not parade-ground quality anymore,” Brightwater conceded. “But it’s still there.”
“Barely,” Grave said.
“Like everyone else’s,” Marcross said. “LaRone, we can’t keep going this way. Our armor’s being shot off us piece by piece, we’re running out of Tibanna gas, grenades, and other supplies, and that admittedly impressive scream that was coming from Brightwater’s speeder probably means something aboard is about to fail there, too.”
