by Timothy Zahn
Disra felt a tight smile crease his lips. No—of course it wasn't the real Tyrannic out there. Tierce's hunch had been right: Coruscant had indeed launched a mad attempt to steal a copy of the Caamas Document.
And not only was the trap ready and waiting, they even had one of the Mistryl's Eleven here to watch that pitiful attempt turned into a humiliating defeat. The real Thrawn couldn't have arranged things better.
"Instruct General Hestiv to let the incoming Star Destroyer pass the outer perimeter," Thrawn told Dorja. "He's then to put all defenses on full battle readiness and prepare for enemy attack."
"Yes, sir."
"And then, Captain," Thrawn added, "you will similarly prepare the Relentless for combat. Track the incoming Star Destroyer as it approaches and plot its course, then bring us to stand directly between it and the base. At that point, you will order General Hestiv to bring full inner defenses to bear on it."
"Yes, sir," Dorja said, sounding slightly puzzled but nevertheless unquestioning. "Will you be coming to the bridge?"
"Of course, Captain." Thrawn stood up, favoring D'asima with a slight smile as he gestured her toward the conference room door. "In fact, I believe we all will."
* * *
The sudden noise snapped Ghent out of his doze and sent him jerking upright in his chair. He looked around the work area wildly, saw he was still alone. Only then did his sleep-fogged mind realize the sound was some kind of alarm.
He looked around the room again, searching for the source of the trouble. There was nothing he could see. Obviously, it must be elsewhere in the station. A moment's search in the climate-control section of the board, and he found the cutoff switch.
The sound faded away into an unpleasant ringing in his ears. For another moment he looked at the board, wondering if it would be worth trying to tap into the main comm system and find out what was going on. Probably not; whatever it was, it probably didn't have anything to do with him. He frowned suddenly. The board in front of him seemed to be flickering. Flickering?
The frown vanished into relieved understanding. Of course—he was getting reflections of light coming in through the viewport in the living area behind him. Getting to his feet, wincing as his knees informed him he'd been sitting in one place too long again, he hobbled in through the open door and peered out the viewport.
The source of the flickering light was instantly apparent: an awesome display of multiple turbolaser and proton torpedo blasts coming from the distance near the base's outer defense perimeter. And framed in the center of all that flashing firepower, bearing inexorably straight down on him, was the huge bulk of an Imperial Star Destroyer.
Ghent caught his breath, staring at the incoming ship. Suddenly all of Pellaeon's and Hestiv's talk about danger and threats, tucked snugly away in the back of his mind for the past few days, came rushing to the forefront again. That Star Destroyer was coming for him—he was sure of it. Run! the thought flashed into his mind. Run out of here, down the long tunnel into the main base. Find General Hestiv, or that TIE pilot who'd brought him here from the Chimaera, or just find somewhere to hide.
But no. Hestiv had warned him about spies inside the main base. If he went there, one of them would surely get him.
And besides, he remembered suddenly, he couldn't go anywhere. He'd triple-sealed the single access door, passwording it with a layer of computer locks that would take any enemy hours to slice through. Even he, who'd set the blocks up in the first place, would probably need half an hour to undo them.
And half an hour would be too late. Far too late.
For another minute he watched the incoming ship, wondering distantly what they would do to him. Then, with a sigh, he turned away. He was trapped here, they were coming for him, and there was nothing he could do.
Returning to the work area, this time closing the door behind him, he went back to his seat. The Wickstrom K220s had finally finished the complex analysis he'd set for them to do before all this happened. Keying the results over to the Masterline-70, pushing the events outside once again into the back of his mind, he got back to work.
* * *
It took Navett half an hour to locate and purchase the pressurized tank of flammable fluid he needed and another fifteen minutes to fit it with a sprayer hose. Forty-five minutes gone, during which time the alarm over the dead Bothans in the pet shop had probably spread to every corner of the city. But that was all right. The ugly furry aliens couldn't stop him now; and the more time it took him to get ready here on the planetary surface, the more time Klif and Pensin and Horvic would have to wheedle their way aboard that Ishori ship overhead.
They would die there, of course. They knew that. But then, he would soon be dying down here, too. What was important was that, before they died, they would complete their task. The streets around the Ho'Din tapcafe, so quiet and deserted in the late night, were buzzing with activity here in the early afternoon. With the fluid tank pressed into the seat beside him, wedged at an awkward angle against the low roof, Navett drove slowly down the deserted alleys along the sides and back of the tapcafe, systematically spraying a thick layer of the liquid along the lower walls and the ground around them. The front wall, facing as it did onto a busy street, was too public for him to do the same there without arousing instant suspicion. But he had other plans for that area anyway. Returning to the back alley, again making sure he was unobserved, he fired a blaster bolt into the fluid as he drove past the tapcafe.
He took his time circling through the alleyways until he came around again onto the main street, with the result that by the time he let the landspeeder coast to a stop across from the tapcafe the fire he'd started was blazing furiously away along the outer walls. Pedestrians were running frantically to and fro, waving and yelling as they either fled from the flames or formed themselves into ghoulish knots at a safe distance to watch; and as Navett retrieved the Nightstinger from the back seat the tapcafe's front doors swung open and a crowd of equally hysterical customers and waitstaff began streaming out through the smoke. Checking the Nightstinger's indicator, confirming that he still had three shots left, Navett settled down to wait.
He didn't have to wait very long. The stream of refugees from the tapcafe had barely begun to dwindle when a white Extinguisher speeder truck came roaring around the corner and braked to a hard stop at one corner of the building. Through the side window Navett could see the driver gesticulating as his partner scrambled out and started climbing the outside ladder toward the pressure turret on top.
He never made it. Resting the muzzle of the Nightstinger on the seat back for stability, Navett shot him down. His second invisible blast took out the driver; his third and last blew off the speeder truck's filler tube cap, sending the fire suppressant gushing onto the street to flow uselessly away from the flames.
He lowered the now empty blaster onto the floor, giving the crowd around him a quick look. But no one was paying the slightest attention to the human sitting alone in his landspeeder. Every eye was locked solidly on the blazing building, with probably only an occasional brief thought turned to the puzzle of the two Bothan Extinguishers who had suddenly and inexplicably collapsed. The flow of customers from the tapcafe had stopped now. Navett gave it thirty more seconds, just to make sure everyone was out. Then, drawing his blaster and laying it ready on the seat beside him, he started the landspeeder and eased his way through the crowd toward the tapcafe's front doors.
He was through the main part of the crowd before anyone even seemed to notice what he was doing. Someone shouted, and a Bothan wearing the green/yellow police sash jumped out in front of him, waving his arms violently. Snatching up his blaster, Navett shot him, veered around the body, and leaned hard on the accelerator. Someone behind him was screaming now; bracing himself, Navett increased his speed—
He hit the tapcafe doors with bone-jarring force, smashing them into shards as the landspeeder ground to a halt right in the middle of the destruction. He was out before the debris finished
bouncing off the vehicle's roof, snatching the cage of mawkrens from the back and sprinting through the smoke and heat toward the door to the basement and the subbasement beyond it.
He was halfway down the first flight of stairs when, behind him, he heard the explosion as the heat set off the remaining fluid in the pressurized tank he'd left in the landspeeder. And with the front of the tapcafe now as engulfed in flames as the rest of the building, he was truly and irrevocably cut off from the outside world.
No one in the universe could stop him now.
There was just a hint of smoke in the subbasement—nothing serious, just a foreshadowing of what would inevitably come. Their equipment was just where they'd left it, but he took a minute first to run a quick check on the fusion disintegrator.
It was a good thing he had. The old woman had been here again, gimmicking the device to overload and burn out the main control coil when it was first started. Grinning humorlessly to himself, Navett ungimmicked it, then spent a few more precious minutes reconfiguring the focus to extend the disintegration beam a few centimeters out from the canister mouth.
Finally, he was ready. Strapping the mawkren cage awkwardly to his back, he dropped into the hole he and Klif had dug and turned on the disintegrator.
The beam cut through the soil beneath his feet like a blaster bolt through snow, sending a gale of microscopic dust flowing up past his face. Fleetingly, he wished he'd thought to bring a filter mask with him. Too late now. Squinting against the eye-burning wind, he kept going, wondering what the Bothans were doing about the myriad of alarms he was undoubtedly setting off. Running around uselessly, no doubt, particularly once they saw that the source of the intrusion was totally inaccessible to them.
And some of them would probably sit back and relax, smugly secure in the knowledge that losing the power conduit he was digging toward wouldn't affect their precious shield in the slightest. Possibly they were even having a hearty laugh at the foolish Imperial agent who thought he could shut them down so easily, or who perhaps thought he could crawl through a ten-centimeter-diameter conduit. They wouldn't be laughing that way for long.
It took only a few minutes to dig the rest of the way down to the power conduit. The conduit shell was heavily armored, and it took nearly ten minutes more for the disintegrator beam to eat its way through. The power cables themselves flash-burned almost instantly once that happened, of course—they were, after all, only normal power cables, not designed to withstand anything more strenuous than high-power electrical current. He kept at it until he had carved himself a decently sized hole in the outer shell, then shut off the disintegrator and switched on the coolant pack built into the bottom. A few minutes of systematic spraying, and the area was once again cool enough to touch. He shut off the coolant and sat down by the opening... and in the sudden silence, he heard a quiet new sound.
The beep of a comlink. Coming from the disintegrator.
He frowned, checking the device. There it was, wedged into the refill intake for the coolant pack. Smiling tightly, he pulled it out and turned it on. "Hello, there," he said. "Everything running to your satisfaction?"
"What in the name of Alderaan dust are you doing?" the old woman's voice demanded. He smiled more broadly, wedging the comlink into his collar and opening the mawkren cage's false bottom. "What's the matter?" he asked, pulling out a small tube of food paste. "I didn't actually take you by surprise or anything, did I? That was a cute trick with the smoke at the pet shop, by the way. I take it you planted that before you left this morning?"
"Yes," she said. "I figured you had all your good stuff upstairs with you, or else had it hidden behind walls or ceilings."
"So you planted a delayed-action smoke bomb so the Extinguishers would come in and open up the walls for you," Navett said, opening the cage and extracting one of the tiny lizards. "Very clever."
"Look, you haven't got time for this chitchat," she growled. "In case you haven't noticed, that building is burning like a torch over your head."
"Oh, I know," Navett said. Holding the lizard with one hand, he dabbed a drop of the food paste onto the end of its nose and set it down into the hole he'd cut, pointing it in the direction of the generator building. A touch on one end of the cylindrical bomb activated it, setting it to explode when the lizard reached the blockage where the conduit passed through the reinforced wall and sent its individual power cables splitting off into a dozen different directions. He released his grip, and the mawkren scrambled away through the narrow space between the power cables and the conduit shell, following the scent it was too stupid to realize was attached to its own nose.
"What do you mean, you know?" the woman asked. "Unless you do something real clever real fast, you're going to die in there. You know that, too?"
"We all have to die sometime," Navett reminded her, dabbing the nose of another mawkren and sending it to follow the first. It had barely vanished down the conduit when the faint sound of a small explosion echoed down the tube.
There was nothing wrong with the old woman's ears. "What was that?" she asked.
"The death of Bothawui," Navett told her, dabbing another mawkren and releasing it as a second explosion sounded. Now that the fumes of disintegrated dirt were dissipating, he could tell that the odor of smoke was getting stronger. "You know, we never did figure out what your name was," he added, pulling out another mawkren and wondering uneasily just how fast the fire above him was spreading. If either the flame or smoke got to him before the mawkrens and their tiny bombs were able to blow a hole through the group of unarmored power cables just inside the generator building, he could still lose. "So what is it?"
"What, my name?" she asked. "You tell me yours and I'll tell you mine."
"Sorry," he said, releasing the mawkren. "My name might still be of use to someone down the line, even after I myself no longer am." There was another explosion—
And then, to his relief and immense satisfaction, a breath of cool air drifted up into his face. The power cables had been blown apart inside the wall, and the generator building had been laid open to him.
"Look, Imperial—"
"Conversation's over," Navett cut her off. "Enjoy the fire." He clicked off the comlink and tossed it aside. Then he tipped the cage over, allowing the rest of the mawkrens to swarm free. For a moment they swirled around his lap and feet, getting their balance and sniffing the air. Then, in a sudden concerted rush, they clawed their way past each other to disappear down the conduit. Drawn now not by food paste on their noses, but by the tiny spots of liquid nutrient he and Klif had so carefully positioned three days ago as they'd sprayed for metalmites. And there remained just one final task for him to perform. Reaching into the bottom of the cage, he pulled out the last item there: the remote arming signaler to activate the rest of the cylinders now being carried toward their rendezvous with destiny. A few more seconds and his self-guided bombs would be spilling out into the generator building around the startled Bothans' feet, skittering across the polished floor straight to the key points of the whole installation.
Along the conduit, he could hear the faint sounds of explosions now as the mawkrens reached their targets and the cylinders' proximity fuses began to ignite. A few more seconds—a minute at the most—and the section of the planetary shield protecting Drev'starn would collapse. The death of Bothawui had begun. And with it, the death of the New Republic. His only regret was that he wouldn't be around to see it all happen.
Overhead, the sounds of flames could be heard now, the crackling noise mixing with the fainter staccato of the bombs still going off in the distance. Smiling up at the ceiling, Navett leaned his back against the dirt wall. And waited for the end.
* * *
The discussions aboard the Predominance had just entered their fourth round when the deck below them gave a sudden rumbling vibration. A sound and sensation that Leia had become all too familiar with over the years.
Somewhere in the depths of the Ishori ship, a turbolaser cluster h
ad just fired. The captain was on the intercom even before the rumble had died away. "What is the firing?" he snarled.
The answer tumbled out in Ishori, too fast and too faint for Leia to follow. "What is happening?" Gavrisom demanded. "You agreed there would be no hostilities while—"
"It is not us," the captain snarled, diving for the door. "Aliens have taken over one of our weapons clusters and are firing at the ground."
"What?" Gavrisom asked, blinking. "But how—?"
But the captain was already gone, taking the door guards with him. "Councilor Organa Solo—?" Gavrisom began, breaking off as another rumble rolled through the ship. "Councilor, what is happening here?"
Leia shook her head. "I don't—"
And suddenly she jerked in her seat, inhaling sharply, as a surge of fear and pain and death shot through her. On the planet below, voices were crying out in terror...
And in that single, horrifying instant, she knew what had happened.
"The planetary shield's down," she snapped, getting out of her chair and rushing to the viewport. She reached it just in time to see a third massive turbolaser blast burn its way from the underside of the ship toward the surface. There was a flash of white as it sizzled through the atmosphere; and then the distortion cleared, leaving an angry, black-tinged red glow behind.
Drev'starn, the Bothan capital, was on fire.
She turned back, heading for the door. "It's down, all right," she shouted to Gavrisom as she ran past him. "At least over Drev'starn."
"Where are you going?" Gavrisom called after her.
"To try to stop the shooting," Leia called back.
Outside, a dozen armor-clad Ishori were charging down the corridor, blaster carbines at the ready. Pressed against the bulkheads, trying to stay out of the way, her two Noghri guards looked up at her. "Councilor—?"
"Come on," Leia told them. Unhooking her lightsaber from her belt, stretching out to the Force for strength and wisdom, she joined in with the flow.
