11: The Hunt

HOTH

The scope on Sark’s carbine sniper rifle had an array of settings, from night-vision to infrared to electromagnetic wave sighting. He sat perched at the very zenith of the AT-AT’s husk, switching back and forth between the settings and gauging distances. The snowfall had coated him to the point that he was indistinguishable from the hull of the ice-caked walker. The scope showed him thermals. He saw wampas, two of them, moving around Echo Base and sniffing at doorways. The Vipers were monitoring them. Earlier, another wampa had been sniffing close by.

They were probably driven off when the Rebels first showed up, Sark thought. Now that it’s gone quiet around here, nature is taking back its rightful place.

Sark tasked one probe droid to keep track of all the wampas. Last thing he needed was for one of those to come climbing up the walker’s body behind him. The things were hard enough to see in all this white-out.

The wind murmured in his ear. He checked its speed and direction—it was at one-quarter value. Not that wind mattered really for a blaster bolt, but he wanted to make sure he was still downwind of the base.

Echo Base was six hundred meters ahead. In the vast open field between his sniper position and the base’s entrance, there was a smattering of debris that looked vaguely like the fuselages of numerous downed snowspeeders. He had definitely spotted a huge bloodstain, along with a frozen bloody smear that, to him, indicated that a dead Rebel pilot had been found by one of the local predators and dragged off. Farther on, about fifty meters before the base’s entrance, there were the trenches that the Rebels had used to fire their blaster rifles in the vain hope that that would suppress the coming walkers.

There was a rocky growth in the distance, on top of which sat a massive metal orb—a destroyed ion cannon, one of those that had put down suppression fire against the Star Destroyers in space, while the GR-75 medium transports got the Rebel leadership out. Sark imagined Princess Leia Organa was on board one of those ships. He was certain she would be one of his targets someday, just as soon as the Kingdom locked down her position.

Organa and Mon Mothma. It will be good to see them erased from the face of the galaxy. With the two women gone, the Rebellion would melt.

There was a chime on his reach-pad. He looked at it. There was an alert from one of the Vipers. The probe droid’s vox—that is, its open-channel communication that was shared by all the other Vipers—was experiencing some irregular traffic. There was a signal anomaly, something that came from a transmitter elsewhere on the planet. Possibly a downed snowspeeder or X-wing, its emergency transponder trying to ping any electronic device in the system to call for help.

Sark ignored it. He looked around at the dead battlefield. He imagined this would one day become just another scene that historians visited in order to understand the great war that the Empire had fought to keep them all safe. Archaeologists might even dig up some of the T-47 snowspeeders out of the ice and analyze them, reconstructing the battlefield.

I’m sitting on history, he thought. Hard to believe this war might finally be over soon.

Sark had tried not to think about that. What would he do once the war was over? He imagined the Kingdom would still have people for him to go after, targets for him to bag or neutralize. Or would they? The Kingdom had been created specifically to contend with the growing Rebel Alliance. Once they were gone—

Distantly, he became aware of a dull roar. At first, he thought it was just thunder, or maybe the wind in his ears. But no, the more he listened, the more confident he became that it was the sound of percussive thrusts from a starship, coming in short bursts. Then there was the whine of decelerators kicking in.

Sark looked up and around, and he was astonished when he saw the IDT-7 dropship coming down from orbit and circling Echo Base from about a thousand feet in the air.

“What the blazes?” he hissed. He got on his radio immediately. “IDT-7 dropship, this is the asset! I am still on site and have not requested evac! So what are you doing back here?” He waited for a response. The channel had nothing but static.

The dropship was starting its approach to land, directly in front of the trenches.

“Dropship! This is the on-site asset! I ask again, what are you doing here? I thought I ordered you to stay back until I called for you!”

They would not respond. Something was wrong. Somehow radio was being jammed. Sark watched in horror as the dropship touched down and huge snowy clouds raced away from its cooling engines. What was the pilot thinking?

The idiot is going to blow this whole thing! If Ageless sees that thing, he’s going to know why it’s here! He’s going to know that I’m—

And then, like a needle of ice threading its way through his heart, the realization slowly crept in. It crawled from his mind and went from a theory to a certainty. He set aside his sniper rifle and looked back at his reach-pad, which was taking in all the information from all the remaining Vipers assembled around Echo Base. He checked that strange alert from earlier, the signal anomaly. He looked at the reading, saw a strange wave bounce-back…

Ageless.

He looked at the dropship in the distance.

But how? How did he do it?

Sark had guessed that Ageless Void would devise a way to get hold of a Viper’s transceiver deck, and call for help. What he had not guessed was that he would find a way to boost the signal, sneaking around the overlapping phalanx encryption that kept its communications secret and secure from prying ears, and completely hijack the signal.

That son of a Hutt. Sark was on his feet, slinging the rifle onto his back by its strap and sliding down the icy ramp of the AT-AT’s hull. He called for help. He somehow knew I was here and he called up to the dropship pretending to be me. They think the mission’s over, they think they’re coming to pick me up!

And the worst part was Sark was locked out of all comms—whatever other transmitter he was using to bounce off of, Ageless had used it to code Sark’s own transmission and put them in a queue of other messages. A queue that would never be sent anywhere. Sark’s messages would never leave this planet. Nor would he, if that dropship left without him.

Rage and horror simultaneously assailed his heart. Because Sark knew what this meant. It meant the pilot of the dropship was walking into an ambush, and if Ageless took control of the ship…

I’ll be stranded here. With no way to call for help, not if he keeps me locked out of local comms like this.

As soon as he landed on the ground, he sank into half a meter of snow and began trudging through it, his SCENE-it programs on high alert for any predators. With just a thought, he activated his endocrine enhancement implants, which shot extra power into his limbs and heightened his natural senses. He felt electrified. The glands in his throat, head and abdomen dumped all its performance-enhancing cocktails at once. His strides lengthened, and he went bounding through the snow like a Togorian ash-hound. He pushed himself like never before.

Because if he failed, he would be one of the things archaeologists dug up someday.

* * *

Captain Orson Kamillo had been flying dropships since the Clone Wars. He was a member of one of the first non-clone stormtrooper regiments that went through basic in Garanga, on Dantooine. Once the Clone Wars ended, he thought his days of landing in “hot zones” were over, he would never again have to dump young men off in the midst of hellfire to go and give their lives for the greater cause. Post-Clone Wars, he had been a pilot for Imperial supply ships around the Bright Jewel Sector. But not a decade later, with rabble-rousers starting to form into a Rebellion, he had been called back to the duty of piloting through warzones, and then reassigned to clandestine operations for the Asserter.

Orson had seen countless worlds, and had been part of three dozen heated battles, all of which the Empire had won. But he had never seen a battlefield like this, nor a planet quite like this one. The world was so dead and seemingly lifeless, and yet there was life. His copilot, Janyer, had run a sweep with the bio-scanners and found a few large animals moving about the abandoned base.

“Think it’s safe, Captain?” Janyer said.

Orson nodded. “I suspect our asset wouldn’t have recommended this as a landing zone if it wasn’t.” He glanced over at the trouble-board. The extreme cold was playing havoc on their engines. Even worse than the vacuum of space. It was all the ice, collecting so quickly around both heating and cooling systems. To Janyer, he said, “You reading anything in those trenches?”

He pointed to the same trenches where the Rebels had dug themselves in, in a vain attempt to suppress the invasion.

“Nothing, sir,” the copilot said. But then his brow furrowed. “Wait…I am getting a strange heat signature. Seems like it could be organic.”

“One of those creatures we were briefed on?” Orson said. “What are they called? Wampoos or something?”

“Too small to be one of them. But maybe…maybe it’s a cluster of their babies? Two or three of them?” He winced. “And there’s something else. Several electronic signatures, EM readings are conducive with complex servos. Droids. We were told a lot of them had been abandoned here, and that IIS left a few behind on purpose in the hopes any Rebels that had attachments to them would return. But…I don’t see any of them.”

“Where are they?”

“Eh, can’t get a lock on. But…wait. I’m getting another heat signature. Closer now. Looks like it’s our guy, and I think he’s carrying someone.”

“Well, to my understanding he was sent down here to neutralize a threat. Maybe it’s his prisoner. We’ll wait for his…wait, there it is.” A chime came over comms on the phalanx-encrypted channel. The confirmation that the operative was close by. There was also a message written on the display that said he was just outside their bay door. “I’ll open the bay. Go back and give him a hand with his prisoner. Then let’s get out of here. I’ll keep my eyes on the scopes.”

“Yes, Captain.”

As Janyer left the cockpit, Orson flipped the switch to open the bay and immediately felt the rush of cold coming from the back of the ship. Roaring winds made it impossible to hear anything going on, and he would never make out anything Janyer said unless the young man gave a shout.

Orson looked out the forward viewport. Ice was already creating a sheet on the transparisteel windows, and was slightly bending incoming light. Snow was caking at the edges. It was getting so that he couldn’t see the trenches anymore. But there was something out there. He swore he saw movement, somewhere out there in all that congealing whiteness.

He checked the sensors for the local weather forecast—Don’t want to be here for one of those flash-freezes. He had been briefed on the strange weather phenomenon of Hoth, and a flash-freeze did not sound like something you wanted to be around for.

Behind him, he heard a yelp, and then a thump.

“Janyer?” he called over comms. “Everything all right back there? Janyer?”

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Silence.

Old instincts caused the hairs on the back of his neck to rise.

Orson gripped the holdout blaster at his side, unbuckled himself, and stood up. He walked down the short corridor and into the bay. The bay door was wide open, and snow was already collecting on Janyer’s body, which lay dead or unconscious on the floor. He panned around, looking at the rest of the bay, where normally a dozen stormtroopers would all be standing and grabbing onto handholds, waiting to be deployed. Right then, the bay had only a few stacked cases of supplies. He approached one of those stacks, blaster pointing around, looking for work.

When he made it there, he found a crimson-plated R-3PO droid cowering, its hands up in formal surrender.

“Zzzzzorry about this,” the droid said.

Orson started to ask what he meant.

Then, all at once, a flexisteel cable wrapped around his neck and he was jerked backward by a set of powerful hands. He tried to fire a shot, but one of those powerful hands moved fast as an adder, grabbing hold of his wrist and twisting it free, just as a single wild shot went uselessly into the ship’s ceiling.

Someone was squeezing the cable around his neck. Tighter and tighter, he saw stars, then all sound became muffled, like he was retreating down a long, dark tunnel.

“Don’t kill him,” said a Zabrak, who stepped in front of him.

“Why? We’ve got a pilot,” said a woman. Her breath was in his ear, which meant she was the one choking him out.

Orson struggled to get free, but felt his legs melt. He sagged to the floor.

“We can still use him,” the Zabrak said. “The copilot, too.”

“They’ll just slow us down. They might try something.”

“I said let him go.”

“As a healer, I am against unnecessary violence,” said a 2-1B droid, which came limping into the hangar bay.

Right behind the medical droid was a couple of astromechs, a Gonk, and a couple of other droids Orson couldn’t place. His consciousness was leaving him, he was gasping for breath.

The R-3PO said, “I agree with the Zabrak. We might have use of these two pilotzzz later.”

The woman kept squeezing. Orson felt his whole body slipping away from him.

“You all figure this out,” said a male Duros, who stepped in through the bay door and walked right past them. “I’ve got a course to set.”

As he watched the Duros head for the pilot’s seat, Captain Orson Kamillo had time to note the orange flight suit of the Duros. He realized these were Rebels. But it made no sense. How had they done this? How had they hijacked an Imperial signal, masquerading as the asset while using top-secret phalanx encryption? How had they done this?

For a brief moment he felt rage, and struggled ineffectually for a second longer. Then he fell down the tunnel while listening to the woman and the Zabrak argue about what to do with him and Janyer.

* * *

Sark’s lungs were burning. Hoth stabbed its bladed winds down into his throat, into his chest, and his eyes burned with the slashing snow, which had just picked up. His imtech detected multiple moving contacts all around him—Movement detected; multiple contacts; silhouette two; likely local predator. Anything with a silhouette size of one was about humanoid-sized, but anything with a silhouette of two was at least twice that size.

SCENE-it only exacerbated his stress when it reported more: Silhouettes converging near; likely ambush; alert.

Wampas. Wampas had his scent and were coming for him.

The snowfall intensified, if that could be believed, and soon he could not even see the dropship ahead of him until its main thrusters flared with blue-white light and it started to ascend. No! No, no, no!

He pushed himself and his implants to their limits, straining his body to the point he thought he felt muscles tearing.

* * *

Namyr finished stowing both the pilot and the copilot into a storage locker, using the same flexisteel cable Kevv had used on Ageless to bind them. She looked over at the Zabrak, kneeling in the doorway of the open bay door as they lifted off. He now had a pistol—Namyr had reluctantly decided to untie him so that he could hijack the Imperial frequency, but she had not yet deigned him safe enough to give him a weapon. He was not yet an ally. And yet in the scuffle he had managed to get the pilot’s holdout blaster.

She watched him closely, massaging her wounded hand. The Kingdom. Was Ageless telling the truth? Did he really belong to that mythical group that had come out of the so-called Nest, which supposedly accepted only the best and brightest darktroopers into their number, to receive advanced specialized training on lone-wolf operations?

If the Kingdom was real, and she had one of its operatives, this could change everything.

And if I lose him now, if I let him get the drop on me, or kill me and Kevv, I’ll have let an invaluable asset escape.

The assassin sat there looking energized. The wampa meat had given him some energy, but he had had to trust the ambush to Namyr—whom he still only knew as Mordenta—and Kevv. He had only come in at the tail end to assist in disarming the pilot. He now looked out into the snow, blaster in hand, his dead eyes ranging across what little of the trenches they could see.

If it had been Ageless’s plan to play a convincing partner, and to sway Namyr and Kevv to not think of him as an enemy, it was working so far. It had been Ageless’s scheme to use those trenches as cover. Namyr had to admit, it was clever. He had recommended they stay clustered together, so that their combined heat signature might appear on the dropship’s sensors as one huge blob, therefore increasing the chances that the pilot and copilot would misinterpret the reading as another wampa. Again, clever. The droids hadn’t needed to hide, since their EM signatures would give them away as nothing more than abandoned machinery of any type.

Ageless had approached the dropship with Kevv hanging from him, so that if the pilot or copilot happened to look outside, they would see, through the crazy swirl of slow, one person dragging what appeared to be his target.

That last part had been a risk. “What if they recognize you’re not in whatever tactical gear Sark came in? What if they notice you’re a Zabrak?” she had asked.

Ageless had answered confidently, “Then we hang on to the side of the ship for dear life as it takes off, and use the multi-tool’s torch to cut our way through the back. But don’t worry, the snow is picking up. I reckon the Force may be with us today.”

Presently, Namyr watched her target just sit there with his holdout blaster, scanning the cold desolation. The dropship’s takeoff repulsors whined as they cued up, and then the engines detonated and the whole ship trembled, like Hoth’s cold had gotten to it.

And maybe it had, because Kevv called from the cockpit, “We have a problem! Could be minor, but it’s looking like the ice has already caked on some of the aetheric rudders. Not a bit deal right now, but once we hit space, the damage could cost us maneuverability—”

“Just get us airborne!” Ageless shouted.

Namyr heard a note of concern in the assassin’s voice. And his eyes…He’s searching for Sark. He’s certain that Sark is just outside.

“Copy,” Kevv returned. “Here we go. Might want to either hang on to something back there or come up here and strap in. Closing the bay doors now.”

Ageless looked over at Namyr. “Might want to call your Rebel friends now. Tell them we’re coming and we need a lift. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that dropships like this don’t have hyperdrives. This one would have been dropped off by a cruiser of some kind. We need the same.”

“Right,” she said, and activated her radio on her hip. She looked at him. “Have you released your lock on my transmitter?”

“I had R-3PO unlock the channel with the Viper’s deck before we left the hangar.” He looked at the droid. “Did it work?”

“Yes, it did,” the droid replied cheerily. It stood guard duty over the lockers where the pilots were locked up. “You ought to be able to call them now, Mizzzzztress Mordenta.”

Namyr eyed Ageless.

He kept looking out at the snow. The dropship rocked and prepared to take off. “Call your pals. And tell them to come prepared for a fight. We may need some cover fire once we reach orbit. There will be sensor buoys around every moon.”

“I’m sure my people know that,” Namyr said defensively. But she would make sure to stress that point anyway. As she lined up the frequency with the relay transmitter of her insertion pod, she kept her eyes on Ageless. The call took only seconds to go through.

* * *

ABOARD THE SHADOW OF ALDERAAN

“Commander Fera, we’ve got something!” Kajjak shouted. The tips of the Twi’lek’s lekku were curling and uncurling excitedly as he adjusted his headset with one hand and waved at the incoming signal data with his other.

Fera had been getting a refill of joffa from a service droid when she heard the call. She was on her fifth cup, her nerves strained to the edge. She raced across the sensor room and leaned over his shoulder. “What’ve you got, Kajjak?”

“Fresh signal…coming in a little corrupted but I think I can adjust the gain…there we go. Now we should be hearing—”

“—ordenta to Home Actual! Come in, Actual!” said a familiar voice through a static-filled transmission.

Fera’s heart had never felt such immense relief. But she kept it professional, and tapped the button to transmit. “Mordenta, this is Actual. We read you loud and clear. Give sit-rep.”

There was the sound of crumbling static, and for a moment Fera worried they had lost her again. But then Mordenta came back, “—just getting airborne now. We have a pilot.”

“We?” Fera said.

“Yes. I am in possession of the package, and we have commandeered an Imperial dropship, an IDT-7. But now we need immediate evac. Please send a ship at once to pick us up. We will be entering orbit around Hoth in…” She seemed to confer with someone, Fere couldn’t hear who. “Five minutes! It’s possible we’ll be spotted by whatever ship dropped off this IDT-7. They’ll probably hail us, and even if we’re in one of their ships, they’ll have ways of figuring out something’s wrong.”

Fera nodded. Yes, they’ll have duress codes only the pilots would know. “Call upstairs to the Shadow’s captain,” she said to Mynyra. “Tell him this a Priority One request and we need to get a ship to Hoth. Now. I know it’s earlier than we planned so if he argues, tell him to take it up with Director Eeja. Remind him that Eeja is good friends with Admiral Ackbar.” Back to Mordenta, she said, “We are working on transport for you right away, Mordenta. Proceed with your plan, and when you’re in a stable orbit, send us your coordinates and trajectory.”

“Will do, Actual. We’ve got…” She broke off. There was a lot of commotion from the other end, lots of voices calling frantically back and forth.

“What’s going on? Mordenta, respond!”

“Uh, we may have incoming soon,” Mordenta said, her voice tense.

“What sort of incoming?” Fera called back.

Mordenta started to say something—sounded like something about sensors, a few contacts on her scopes—but then high-pitched static drowned her out and she was once again offline.

“What is going on, Kajjak?”

“Sorry, Commander, but I don’t—”

Mynyra called from her station, “Star Destroyers! Three of them! I’m seeing intrasystem movement—moving sunward! Looks like…yes, hyperspace distortions around Hoth. I think they just came up behind the second moon.”

Ashen-faced, Kajjak turned to look at Fera. “They must’ve detected something wrong. They must be going to intercept the dropship.”

Fera stared in stark silence. She had two serpents in her guts, battling it out. The nausea was brief as she tried to work the problem. “Okay…okay, when did the Shadow’s captain say we could go assist them?”

“He didn’t,” Mynyra said. “I sent the message up to him while you were talking to Mordenta. The captain declined your request, ma’am.”

“He what? I’ve got an agent out there! An agent in play who needs—”

“But there’s something else,” the Bothan continued. “Another hyperspace distortion. It’s coming from the other side. Commander…” She looked at Fera. “I’m getting an Alliance transponder reading. It’s one of ours.”

“What? Who—”

“Incoming call from Home One!” Kajjak said. “It reads ‘attention Commander Fera.’”

“Home One?” Her mind was racing. Fera quickly caught up. “Patch it through.”

A gravelly, commanding voice came through the speakers at Kajjak’s station. “This is Admiral Ackbar of the Combined Rebel Force Defense Fleet, responding to a call to action from a Commander Fera, on behalf of Captain Izlok of the Shadow of Alderaan. Please respond, Commander Fera.”

Fera knew the admiral had been floating around the Anoat and Bespin systems recently, famously performing hit-and-fade attacks against the Empire. But his sudden appearance was a surprise, for the Mon Calamari did prize his secrecy. She tapped the comms button. “This is Commander Fera. Admiral…what are you doing here?”

“Your ship’s captain sent an alert to my command, detailing your situation,” the rugged voice shouted. He sounded adamant, heated, ready for war. “While he claims the Shadow is insufficient to move in-system and face off against Imperial warships, he asked if I might be so kind. My understanding is that you have an agent in play, and that she has something that would be vital to our cause, and devastating to the Empire.”

“That is correct, Admiral.”

“Then that is the sort of thing I like to hear. How may we aid this agent in need?”

“Admiral…this is a stealth ship, and I assumed it would be easier for us to sneak in, while a larger ship such as yours would be detected and be forced into battle. So I had only planned for—”

“This is the situation, Commander. Deal with it. I am all the help you’re going to get.”

Fera blinked in shock at that. “You’re alone? You didn’t bring a fleet?”

“I brought Home One, and the maddest, meanest, most well-trained crew in the galaxy. And the Force is with us today, Commander! That is all I need. Now give me the details and let us have our argument against our enemy!”

Our argument. He means a direct confrontation. And his voice…if I didn’t know any better I’d say he’s hankering for a fight. Ackbar was notoriously strategic, but also could be stubbornly confrontational. Stealthy until he “felt the fire rise in him,” was how Fera had heard certain Rebel commanders put it. Ackbar had been a slave to the Empire, as had much of his people. And when he’d returned to his homeworld and found them lacking the vim and vigor to fight, he had plowed ahead with his own ships, building a reputation as a fearsome and dreaded enemy to the Empire. Because he was smart. Because he was stubborn. Because he had “the fire that rose in him.” Because he was unafraid.

“All right, Admiral,” Fera said. “Glad to have you. Here’s the situation…”