10: The Impaler
ABOARD THE VICTORY-CLASS STAR DESTROYER IMPALER
LOCATION: IN ORBIT ABOVE BESPIN
ROLE: COMMANDING 5TH FLEET IN TERRITORY-DENIAL OPERATIONS
CURRENT MISSION: GARRISON – MONITORING TIBANNA GAS MANAGEMENT
The deck of a Victory-class Star Destroyer was famously clean, spotless, and filled with smartly-dressed officers moving at a clipped, regimented pace, datapads in hand as they checked and rechecked the energy feed of power regulators, and performed tests in the circuitry bays and maintenance shafts, and barked orders at any dawdling droids. Usually there were squads of four to eight stormtroopers moving about the decks, marching in unison, their E-11 blaster rifles held rigidly to their chests as they made their patrols through the miles upon miles of corridors. Tiny MSE-6 droids, colloquially known as “mouse droids,” would buzz about the floors—often polished to a mirror sheen—and they would pause at this panel or that console and perform minor repairs.
This was the usual scene inside a Victory-class. But that is not what Hej Zumter, director-collator of intelligence for the Imperial Intelligence Service, and co-founder of the Kingdom, found when he came aboard the Impaler. He had been prepared for the smell, had been warned about the Impaler’s situation, and yet still it came as a shock when the ramp of his Lambda-class shuttle opened and he descended onto a deck of complete disarray and confusion.
The lights were out, for one. All power had been knocked out when Home One, a flagship of the Rebel Alliance’s fleet, and commanded by a new mysterious Mon Calamari leader named Ackbar, had performed a smart hit-and-fade attack when it passed through the Bespin system eight weeks ago. The fighting had been vicious, and several direct hits had been made to crucial systems, including the complete destruction of deflector shields, which in turn made it easy to rupture key parts of the hull, venting Imperial troops and officers out into space. Some of them were still out there in the black, frozen, orbiting the gas giant of Bespin.
Zumter had reviewed the battle data, and agreed with senior fleet commanders that it did indeed seem as though it had been a test run of new Mon Cal ships against Imperial ships. If that was the case, it had been a success for the Rebels. Sewage systems leaked in many compartments—Zumter’s booted feet splashed through some of the filth on his way to the turbolift.
The battle had been fast and fierce. Home One had come streaking out of lightspeed at a ridiculously close proximity to Bespin. Her crew had calculated a precise orbit that would allow it to hide in the gas giant’s shadow while borrowing from its immense gravity for a slingshot orbit, bringing it up and around Impaler and the rest of Fifth Fleet, all of whom were late in deploying their TIE fighter squadrons. Home One had released no starfighter squadrons, it had merely turned itself sideways and flown underneath the belly of Impaler, opening fire on its most naked and unprotected side. This was a favorite tactic of the new Mon Calamari admiral, it seemed—Imperial Navy commanders had dubbed it the “Ackbar Slash” and the Mon Calamari’s effectiveness with the simple technique was stunning. It required perfect timing, precise piloting by his crew, and, most ominously of all, up-to-the-minute intelligence.
That was what had Zumter and his people most scared. IIS’s analysis of the battle data showed that Home One’s crew must have had good intelligence on not only the size of the fleet at Bespin, but also the exact height of Impaler’s orbit from the planet, as well as its orbital speed, or else its barrage of turbolaser fire could not have been so precise and deadly.
To Zumter, that meant only one thing. Spies.
Rebel spies were everywhere these days, every spaceport was seething with them. They had organized themselves quite handsomely, and whereas in years past they had shown staggering ineptitude, both Scarif and the Battle of Yavin had proven the Rebels’ spy network was rapidly becoming the Empire’s equal. No one wanted to admit that, but Zumter knew.
He also knew the writing on the wall. In a sense, he had seen the future, and it did not look good.
During the battle, Impaler had had only a little help from smaller Gozanti-class cruisers that happened to be in Bespin at the time, dropping off supplies for the tibanna gas miners. Cloud City, as well as the rest of Bespin, had recently seen increased Imperial traffic. However, after this last attack by the Rebels, Impaler was being asked to clear out of the system and go on the hunt for this Ackbar person.
Zumter took the turbolift up two levels, and exited on a floor teeming with sweaty-faced maintenance officers and overworked maintenance droids. Wires hung like viscera from the ceiling, where a few panels had been removed to deal with components that had melted when turbolaser fire had superheated the outer hull.
No one saluted him, and he saluted no one. He made his way to the admiral’s quarters, weaving his way through beleaguered men who had been weeks without proper rest. No one wanted to admit it, but Zumter had read the reports on morale, and he knew the truth: Home One’s attack had rattled them, none more than their admiral, Kollen. They had thought themselves invincible, but the destruction of the Death Star changed all that, and now this defeat had them realizing it might not have been a fluke. The threat of the Rebel ship’s return had them racing to repair and refit.
When he came to the door of the admiral’s quarters, a few of the maintenance workers around Zumter stared at him as he pounded on the durasteel bulkhead. He did this without stopping, and at a steady rhythm, until a military protocol droid opened the door and waved him in.
“—don’t tell me that, Calrissian!” Admiral Kollen was shouting. “You’ve been stalling for weeks, and now I want to know what you’re doing about rooting out local Rebel sympathizers!” He stood behind his desk, hands clasped rigidly behind his back, as he stared down at the hologram of a mustached, dark-skinned Human with a blue cape draped over his left shoulder. Imperial commanders often minimized the size of other people’s holograms when speaking to them, Zumter had noticed—psychologically it made them feel as though they had a higher place of authority—but this time, even though the caped Human’s hologram stood only about as tall as a mouse droid, he seemed to exude charisma and command.
And he was certainly causing Admiral Kollen to become irate. “Come now, Admiral,” the caped man said, flashing a boyish grin that gave no hint of his fear of Imperial authority. “There are no sympathizers here—at least, no more than you would find on any other world. There will always be small, outlying cells hiding in the dark, but I cannot be made responsible for—”
“I thought you had control over your people, Calrissian!” Kollen spat. “That’s what you told us when last we came and saved your sorry Bespin tails from a pirate raid on your space station!”
“How can I possibly control the thoughts of every single person in my operation?” Calrissian countered. “I’m sure you’ve found Rebel sympathizers in your own navy, Admiral. In fact, I’m sure I read a story about that on the HoloNet not too long ago. Court martials for all of them, if I’m not mistaken. So how can you ask me that question when the Empire has Rebel sympathizers in its own ranks?”
“Do not lecture me on matters of Imperial—”
“Listen, Admiral,” Calrissian said amiably. And Kollen appeared as shocked as Zumter that a civilian would interrupt an Imperial admiral mid-rant. And look so casual about it, to boot. “I don’t own all of Cloud City. You understand that, right? I only lay claim to my own mining and shipping operation. Now, yes, it is a major part of Cloud City’s business, and it affords me a position on many of the city’s planning committees and allows me to bend the ear of many in leadership, but I only have so many resources to spare to go looking for these sympathizers. If you keep harassing me like this, I can’t be sure my next tibanna shipments are going to be on time.”
“Well, you needn’t worry about that, Calrissian,” Admiral Kollen said coldly. “As soon as we are sufficiently repaired, we will be gone from your system. You can defend yourselves. And good luck with that. I pray you do not again come across any pirates or Rebels looking to take advantage of you.” With a stabbing finger he tapped the button on his desk that ended the call and dissolved the other’s hologram. Kollen looked up at Zumter. “What are you doing here, Zumter?”
“You were the closest ship in the region to where I need to go,” he said, stepping forward and laying his briefcase on the table. He folded himself into a chair and unbuttoned his aethersilk jacket and crossed his legs. “Aren’t you going to offer me a drink?”
“What makes you think I have any wine left on this ship? We’ve been lounging in this sector for months, with no shore leave.”
“I know you, Kollen. What do you have in your top right drawer there? Whyren’s Reserve? Corellian Topmast?”
The admiral glared at him a moment. Then a smile penetrated his cloudy mood and he opened the drawer and took out a bottle of amber-colored liquid. He poured them both a finger and then took a seat across from Zumter. He sighed and unbuttoned his jacket. “You’re heading to Hoth?”
“I am.”
“What’s going on out there?”
“Oh, nothing much,” Zumter said, downing his drink and then staring at the glass philosophically. “Just some cleaning up to do. Some little details around the abandoned Rebel base that need to be cleared up. You know how it is.”
“I heard it was more than that.”
“Did you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then, you heard more than me.”
“I hear we’ve detected a possible new Rebel ship, with a hitherto unknown stealth system moving around quietly in the black. Why is Asserter now lingering at the edge of the Hoth system? What’s going on there?”
Zumter shrugged. “I’m not at liberty to discuss.”
Kollen finally drank his drink, and gave the IIS man a suspicious look. “I’m sure you are not. So then why have you come here?”
“To secure a shuttle down to Cloud City,” he said. “And perhaps to take a security detail down with me. Four or five stormtroopers, if you can spare them.”
“What for?”
“I have business to attend to there.”
“In Cloud City?” The admiral chuckled, and pointed to the holo-projector on his desk. “Good luck. They’re all business down there, all opportunists with very little regard for proper paperwork. The Mining Guild likes to go on about how well organized they are these days, but in truth they are a loose operation that have gathered up business leaders piecemeal, and tried to turn them into a union that negotiates with the Empire. They’re looking for worker’s rights, insurance, all that. A lot of sour people looking for handouts, getting in the way of progress.” He laughed. This was Kollen’s favorite pastime, he liked to inveigh against any system that thwarted his own designs.
But Zumter tilted his head quizzically, having caught on to something curious. “They’re asking for fairer treatment from the Empire?”
“They are. Most unusual for them. They’ve been docile until now. Used to be, they jumped when we said so, but now we have to give the leadership bribes just to grease the wheels of bureaucracy. They’re not as afraid of us anymore. Something’s changed. Ever since…” He waved his hand.
Ever since the Death Star’s destruction, he wants to say. Ever since Yavin.
“That’s why you suspect this Calrissian pesrson has sympathizers among his people?” Zumter said.
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Admiral Kollen sighed. “They are far too brave now. That’s all I can say for sure.”
Zumter nodded. “When the weakest of the pack detects a weakness in the pack leader, it often spells trouble for the whole pack.”
“Is that a line from Gr’ahh’anza?”
“Just the truth.”
“Mm. True enough, I suppose. But it doesn’t matter. Necessary as it is to the functioning of hyperdrive production, tibanna gas is not the end-all, be-all. I happen to know of no less than three separate experiments currently running on Sullust to produce an alternative, so that we never need use tibanna again, and can leave Bespin to rot.” He chuckled happily at that thought. “And good riddance. Their accounting and audits here are ridiculous. Their annual reports of tibanna loss through the refinement process are calculated to include significant margins of error, a fact of which all of Cloud City’s operators are keenly aware when managing their own interests, I’m sure.”
Kollen sighed again.
“But let’s get back to something else. Why are you going down to Cloud City?”
Zumter sighed. “I have business there.”
“Intelligence business?”
“Yes.” It was a bit of a lie and a bit of the truth. The best sort of lie there is.
“Is it anything I should know about? Anything concerning the sympathizers that helped organize Ackbar’s attack?”
“I can’t say at the moment. But I will need one of your slicers—any of them will do—and someone who’s good with signals intelligence.”
Kollen took on another suspicious look. “Why?”
“It need not concern you. And I’ll only need them a day or two. Do you have those people to spare or not?”
Kollen leaned back in his chair and pointed at this datapad. “You see that?” he said. The datapad’s screen was scrolling with some sort of list of requests. “Those are all requests coming in from officers and repair droids all across this ship. We are strained to our limits. The Rebels have us chasing them all over this sector and here I am with a ship at only three-quarters operational power. And now the Emperor wants us to abandon this post to go after Ackbar—which I’m only too glad to do, mind you—but I’ve got a dozen turbolasers still offline and coolant leaks on two decks. So you see, I need every man, woman and droid I can scrounge together. We’re even paying engineers from Cloud City to come up and help. Paying them. When they used to do this for free whenever we told them.”
“Is this your way of turning me down?” Zumter said. “By telling me you can’t afford to spare a single person?”
Kollen leaned forward and smiled at him. “It’s my way of saying, ‘Remember this day.’ I want you to remember when I helped you, Zumter. Again. How many times does that make now?”
“Your aid to the Service is always appreciated,” he smiled. “And will not be forgotten.”
“Why do I get the feeling you’re not here on IIS business?” Kollen shook his head. “Something in your air…I don’t trust it, Zumter. I never did.”
“You would make a fine Service agent, then,” Zumter chuckled. “So, when can I expect these troopers and officers?”
The admiral hove a sigh and picked up his datapad to review the incoming requests. “You’ll have them by the end of the day. Now go belowdeck and enjoy the recreation room. Or else grab a hydrospanner and make yourself useful. Spirits know we need the help.”
Zumter stared across the table at the admiral. He admired the man’s tenacity, organizational skills, even his leadership. The Empire had trained him as well as it had trained the rest of its legions stretched across the stars. The efficiency that would bring Impaler back online was truly awesome, a feat only achievable by the hardiest of minds, the most rigid of military spirits. It was what had gotten them this far, after all.
As he stood up to leave, Zumter felt a swell of pride at the thought of being part of this immense machine. Even if they were all just small components to the glory of the Empire, just watching the other men repair Impaler was enough to rouse a deep sense of patriotism in even the most cynical soul. Look at how they struggle to do their duty. How marvelous. How beautiful.
But none of that mattered, and it was all for naught. Because Zumter knew something no one else did, a secret that was passing unspoken through the halls of Imperial Intelligence everywhere, something no one wanted to say aloud but was no less true. And that truth was this: the Death Star’s destruction, combined with people’s outrage over Tarkin’s overreach by destroying Alderaan in the first place, had not only exposed a flaw, a weakness in the Empire’s leadership, it had given rise to something even more insidious than the most powerful of Imperial propaganda.
Hope.
And like a poison, hope was seeping into every vein, every pore, every capillary of the Empire.
For decades, the people of this galaxy had suffered in silence under Imperial rule, and they had come to accept things the way they were. They had come to accept that they and the previous generation of galactic citizens had allowed Emperor Palpatine to flout his power and ignore the rule of law, in favor of his own rule, his own law.
But then Yavin happened, and they saw that it was possible to undermine the Empire, even defeat it. And the citizens of the galaxy started doing something they had not done in an age. They started imagining what it would be like to live in a galaxy without the Empire. And close behind one’s imagination is always one’s hopes. Never far from one’s hopes is one’s dreams, and then all it took was the right moment to spur those dreamers into action.
And Zumter knew of this poison because of a rare device that helped tell the future: the Faith-index. The Faith-index was a somewhat old marketing projection tool, used by all the people who ran the stock markets all across the galaxy, to figure out which direction an economy will go. It absorbed all the data from all the planets and known star systems, collated it, and compared it against past trends. It took in all the information on the public’s view of slavery, factored in things such as the rise or decline of homelessness, any newly-discovered alien worlds, the inflation and deflation of the Galactic Credit, and the general mood and faith of galactic citizens. By doing this, the Faith-index formed a complex equation that sought to predict where the galactic economy was headed.
In nearly a thousand years of use, the Faith-index had only ever been wrong once. Few people had access to the Faith-index’s true readout, which was conducted and viewed by the InterGalactic Banking Clan on Muunilinst and reported to the Emperor himself. But Zumter had seen the latest Faith-index prediction. And it was not good. Once the destruction of Alderaan and the Death Star were factored in, a most ominous trend began to emerge, and a dark prediction was made.
The Empire would fall.
Zumter had hardly believed it when he first heard it, but the Faith-index was adamant, as were the Muuns that conducted the research. They pointed to the rise of discontent among Imperial citizens, the flagrant rioting in many cities on many worlds, the normalization of Rebel sympathizers like the ones Admiral Kollen had feared when talking to Calrissian, and the systems of control that had long ago ossified Imperial politics and stagnated growth.
No matter what happened, no matter what other numbers were introduced into the equation, the Faith-index was clear: the Empire was very likely to become a failed state, either from one rebellion or the next. But just before that, the Faith-index equations predicted, there would be a collapse of the Galactic Credit. Credits, money itself, would plummet in value. This in itself would be just one of the many components to bring about the collapse of the Empire.
And while it did not seem to worry the Emperor, it worried Zumter greatly.
Commander Hej Zumter of the Imperial Intelligence Service, co-operator for the top-secret Kingdom program, had always been a man focused on self-preservation. It had been ingrained in him by a mother who was business savvy and had always made sure to get all the information she could on a podracer before she bet on him. “All of business is like that, Hej,” she told her son. “Don’t just bet on podraces and play random opponents at sabacc—don’t gamble with your life and your wealth. Know who and what you’re betting on, or betting against. And always be ready with a plan to save yourself if everyone else you’re partnered with is making bad bets.”
Hej Zumter had followed that advice. He had used his time at IIS to fill his own pockets. By getting Muun contacts to tell him what was in the Faith-index reports, he and a few co-conspirators had been able to make themselves rich by betting on the right stocks, the right businesses, the right trends in the market. He had a vacation home on Serenno, another one on Naboo, and he owned three separate asteroid-mining companies throughout the Outer Rim, all under aliases.
But using the Faith-index in order to line one’s own pockets was illegal, for it was considered a manipulation of the markets—hence why it was illegal for anyone besides the Emperor and a few select Muuns to know of the Faith-index’s projections. Even the Old Republic had kept it under wraps, and used it merely as a means to predict which way the stock market was headed. IIS performed regular audits of its spies and officers, looking for any extra money in their private accounts that might indicate they were being bribed. Such audits would have revealed all the extra money that Zumter was making illegally off manipulation of the Faith-index.
So, he’d had to find a way of hiding all the money.
Following the Faith-index had never failed him. It allowed him the life of luxury he’d never gotten to experience after his mother finally made the wrong bet, and sent their whole family spiraling into destitution. Zumter could still recall the feeling of immense hunger, the shame of wearing shabby clothes and begging in the streets for a single credit.
Never again, he promised himself. I’ll never scrounge for scraps like I did back then.
So, he had used his IIS contacts to help him cover up his manipulation of certain markets in the Outer Rim, and in return he had paid them handsomely. Some of those people were inside IIS itself. Even Director Abaca had a secret fortune stashed away for a rainy day, and he owed that to Zumter. And some of Abaca’s assistants were in on it, too, including a personal assistant named Ida, who had helped him move his funds around the galaxy.
Zumter believed in the Empire. He did. And he had been horrified by the prospect of it collapsing in his lifetime. But more than the Empire, he believed in self-preservation. He believed in saving himself. That was why, when he heard from Abaca that Ageless Void had accidentally stumbled across their scheme to launder money through Rebel outlets—a scheme that, unbeknownst to the Rebels, had allowed Zumter and his pals to make their ill-gotten gains appear as merely large sums of stolen money being rerouted by the Alliance—he had advised Abaca to initiate a “sweep protocol” to neutralize Ageless.
They agreed the timing had to be right. It could not be done the same day Ageless left Abaca’s office, just in case he had in fact told anyone else about it. That would only make Abaca look suspicious. So they had waited for the right opportunity, giving Ageless Void assignments that kept him busy and away from the internal mole hunt.
Then, Hoth had happened, and it was the perfect opportunity. Everything was set up so that Zumter was deployed alongside Ageless, so that he could kill Ageless and make it look like some random Rebel had shot him.
But Ageless had sensed the attack just before it happened. Instincts or training or both had given him the heads up. He turned and ran, vanishing out into the snow. Zumter’s blaster bolt had hit him in the head—or it looked like it had, hard to tell in that blizzard—and Zumter had assumed if the blaster bolt hadn’t killed him, the cold of Hoth surely would.
That or the local predators.
But no, of course the universe had other surprises for him. Just like the Battle of Yavin, many things had given him a wake-up call. And unlike most fools, Hej Zumter was not the type to ignore signs from the universe. It was what was going to keep him alive, long after the Empire was gone and the galaxy had slipped into chaos. There he would be, on an island somewhere on Scarif or Naboo, walking barefoot in the sand and letting the galaxy figure out its own identity crisis.
* * *
“Horizon Lost is already on site,” said Director Abaca desperately. His hologram appeared on an encrypted channel provided by Impaler’s comms room. He looked stressed, his crow’s-feet were pressed and lining his face with worry. “We’ll have him soon. We’ll have Ageless neutralized and this whole situation will be sewn up. You cannot quit at this moment!”
Zumter was getting dressed, pulling on a pair of dress gloves so that he could look like some of the wealthy elite of Cloud City. He stood alone in the room, looking down at Abaca’s hologram. “I’m sorry, Abaca. But I cannot stick around to see this through. We thought we could end the war at Hoth—and if we had, if we had gotten Princess Leia and the rest of the Rebel leadership—that would’ve changed everything. But that didn’t happen. So it’s over. And this is your mess now.”
Director Abaca appeared stricken. “The blazes it is!” he screamed. “This is your mess! You started all of this! You’re the one who roped us all in on your scheme—”
“You hardly took convincing,” Zumter said. “You knew what you were doing and what you were getting involved with. You knew what could happen if you were found out, if the Emperor or anyone else discovered what we were doing.” He snorted. “You were as complicit as the rest of us.”
“Listen…listen, Zumter…we can still fix this. Horizon Lost is on site and in play—”
“You’ve said that. And while Sark is undeniably one of our best, it is only a matter of time before someone else finds out what we did. Killing Ageless gives us all a head start, delays further investigation, but someday soon someone is going to find out on their own, in some other way, and you had better have an escape plan. Like mine.”
“You can’t do this. You can’t just leave us high and dry like this. If you do…if you leave…”
“You’ll what? Call for my arrest? And how will that go? You want me in an interrogation room, where I can spill the beans about my accomplices? Tell them how we all accessed the Faith-index illegally and used it for our own gains?” He smirked. “I don’t think so. This is my retirement, Abaca. I suggest you start thinking about yours. Goodbye.”
“Why you little slug! I should never have—”
Zumter switched off the holo. “No, you shouldn’t have,” he whispered to the room.
He gave his decision some thought. Director Abaca was hardly an idiot, he surely had his own austerity measures in place for a contingency such as this, he would find his own way out of this mess. For a time. But eventually the ground would shrink beneath his feet and he would find himself facing the ire of the Imperial Intelligence Service. The ire of the Emperor.
Zumter shuddered.
The idea of retirement had only just occurred to him in recent weeks. And, unbeknownst to Admiral Kollen and anyone else, after a visit to Cloud City, Hej Zumter would be gone forever, never to be seen again. He would use one of a dozen fake aliases and disappear. His life as a spymaster had been preparing him for this day.
Better to be out of this war before its end, he thought, heading for the turbolift. He imagined trials for Imperials as war criminals, and he wanted no part of that. Beaches and seas for me. They can have this galaxy. If the Empire is not in control, I want no part in it.
He went to prepare himself for his journey down to Cloud City, and his final voyage as Hej Zumter.