2: Sark
DROHZENSK RUZ (SECOND PLANET OF THE GUR SYSTEM)
THE OUTER RIM
They were on to him. He sensed it. He was already plotting an escape route. It told him that he ought to leave the airport immediately, use the storm as cover, and slide into the T-81 SkyRake waiting for him outside. But his instincts told him to wait. Let them close in a little. Scattered like they are, they’ve got a wide net. If I can get them tight enough, they’ll be too clustered to react.
Korvas Sark remained seated on the bench. Like much of the western hemisphere of Drohzensk Ruz, the whole of Chugurk Spaceport was covered with cameras. He couldn’t just run, but neither could the Rebels make a move against him without causing a scene, and potentially alerting the Imperial troopers guarding all the exits.
There was a woman sitting at the other end of the bench from him, her hands gesticulating in the air, interacting with a holoscreen being emitted from her holopad. In his periphery, Sark monitored her. Suspicious; hand motions too erratic. Across from him, a green-skinned male Twi’lek wearing a slashcoat poured himself into a chair, and tried to look nonchalantly at the datapad in his hand. He started waving at the air, too, sending vids from his ’pad to someone else, presumably a friend elsewhere in the spaceport.
Suspicious; slashcoats out of season, Sark noted..
Blue-white lightning flashed through the windows. The report of thunder came a second later. Rain roared on the roof of the building, and it beaded down the transparisteel windows looking out onto the main hangar, which was lit up like fire with landing lights.
Above him, a man’s face was projected onto the ceiling in hololithic perfection. The anchorman was dressed in an amberlust suit, smiling warmly at his audience as he reported: “—but this could all change if the Korali Corporation goes ahead with plans to explore Mujiida. That would give them the Imperial contract to mine the planet, and them alone. Stock prices for Korali are expected to soar if that happens. But should you buy now, or wait to see how the trends go? For more on this, we go to our marketplace analyst—”
Sark turned away. This world was strange. Near the center of the Vastekk System, Drohzensk Ruz was inhabited by a people that actually tried to create some semblance of a society. The laws weren’t as strict as near the Core, but they were strict by the standards set in the rest of the Outer Rim. All manner of races had migrated here in the nearly two decades since the Empire had taken control of the Galaxy, many of them fleeing worlds that the Empire had overwhelmed when putting down the insurrection.
Sark remained still, waving his index finger lazily, pretending to turn the page of a book on his datapad. As his eyes scanned left to right, he spotted others. A woman with two children orbiting her, one of them tugging at her pants leg: Harmless. A man at the counter ten feet to his right, digging through his pockets for something: Suspicious; detectable bulge, right-front pocket. An old couple, moving slowly, with such ginger steps, right up to the metal detector. Two Imperial Customs officers lent them a hand, while two others began to put their things through an X-ray sensor: Harmless.
Another flash of lightning, another peal of thunder. Sark leaned forward on the bench, sighed heavily, and ran his hands over his filed horns. A finger ran over the chipped one at the top of his dome, which he’d fractured when headbutting a security droid to escape Alderaan a decade before the planet was destroyed.
Sound came in waves. The TLH-12.2 system was a new experience for him. Even certain wavelengths of infrasound came through, and was communicated to the cochlea, auditory nerves, stapes, incus, and vestibular nerves through echo-transmission imtech, or implant technology, which someone had originally developed to cure deafness. Certain sounds were prioritized, while others were minimized, depending on what relevance his SCENE-it software assigned it. For instance, the newsman on the ceiling was all but muted now, while a conversation happening just over his shoulder was amplified.
“Yes,” a man was saying into a commlink. “Of course. Of course, yes. I understand. Yes.” Suspicious; repetitious speech.
So, an enemy standing somewhere behind him, pretending to chat. Distance estimated on sound carry? Seventeen feet.
A picture began to develop in his mind, and when Sark looked up again, there were soft auras around certain persons. SCENE-it knew all sorts of things. Things about gaits, gestures, and behavioral mannerisms. A person without ill intent walks normally, swinging forward one arm while stepping with the opposite leg, but a person with secret motives will adapt a different gait, one where they swing the same-side arm and leg at once. Just one of the many things his SCENE-it implant was programmed to pick up on.
Another flash of lightning. A roll of thunder.
Outside the nearest window, a 75A yacht began to lift off. Its motors roared, then settled into a soft hum as the repulsors took over. Lightning flashed again, revealing the Destiny Avionics logo on the side: a sleek silvery triangle, slashing through a giant blade, the points of the triangle made to look like wings.
Destiny Avionics basically controlled this world, the logo was like their national flag. Or a banner in ancient times, Sark thought, watching the man across from him stand up and walk over to a vending machine, where he conversed with a protocol droid. Logos. Carried by all those loyal to their noble lords. Where had he heard that? Ah, yes. His university professor. How long ago was that? Eighteen, nineteen years? Where does the time go?
Someone entered the reception area fifty feet to his left. A Bothan. Sark actually caught it before SCENE-it did. He saw the urgency of the walk, the well-dressed Bothan was drenched, not carrying an umbrella or parasol or any sort of head covering. They were closing in now, bringing in all the backup necessary.
Bothans were known to head up many Rebel intelligence operations these days.
Yes, they’re on to me.
When he stood up, Sark noted that the woman sitting on the other side of the bench flinched, and her hands did something erratic. Her façade had lapsed. She muttered something just under her breath, probably using whispertech. The Rebels had that now. Sark’s TLH system had trouble picking up her words, for there was a peal of thunder still rolling over the world, and lots of voices all around. TLH did isolate two words—“shop” and “eating”—which meant nothing, because they were probably code words. She was letting the grab team know he was moving.
Sark wondered if these people were Regal Hand, the group of spies believed to be operated secretly by Princess Leia Organa of Alderaan. It hardly mattered at this point. He had to move. His contact hadn’t shown and now he knew why.
He wasn’t armed, he wouldn’t have made it this far through security if he was, so his enemies had that on him, he was sure. Doubtless, they had been planning this for a while, smuggling weapons into the spaceport a week in advance, maybe longer, hiding them in trash bins or behind toilets, assembling them once he arrived. They had their pieces now, but they couldn’t take him here.
And I can’t stay here forever.
He meandered through the gift shop, glancing surreptitiously behind him, checking on the grab team’s progress. The woman had vanished, the bench left empty. The green-skinned Twi’lek in the out-of-season slashcoat was ten steps behind him, asking a question of a service droid.
A vendor tried offering Sark some kind of meat on a stick, an old Tatooine treat of some kind. He declined, and was walking around the vendor when his SCENE-it identified it, without his consent, as vhashlik, a womp rat on a stick.
Sark monitored them all. The woman in the black dress, ten feet to his left, pretending to read her datapad while she walked; two men in rain-soaked jackets, thirty feet ahead of him, pretending to discuss politics; a Bothan in a gray suit, twenty feet to his left, using the same trick as the other guy and chatting it up with a service droid; the woman from the bench, cutting through the gift shop from another lane, pretending to waffle on whether or not to buy the cup in her hand that looked like an antique.
As he walked, grazing the gift ship, Sark heard the clicking of all their feet as they turned away from whatever it was they were doing and rushed to take up different monitoring positions. He heard one of them say, in not quite a whisper, “I have him in an open lane, heading towards you, Mobile One—”
Another of them muttered, “I see him. Changing locale to intercept at the shirt stand.”
Sark stepped out of the gift shop and walked at a casual pace towards the main lobby, following the signs to the restroom. He could have turned away at hearing that, but he wanted them bunched up, and the best way to get a pack of wolves to cluster was to make them think the hunt was almost over, let them converge, funnel themselves into a narrow space. So he headed for the shirt stand, pausing only once to glance up at the ceiling, feigning interest in the newscast, just so he didn’t look too conveniently compliant.
“—you can bet that Korali’s stocks will rise, commensurate with the charter levels the government sanctions,” one of the marketplace analysts was saying to the newsman. “But there is a danger here, too.”
“What’s that, Lozzor?” the newsman said.
“Well, we could see their stocks drop precipitously if the Empire, or any of the still independent worlds for that matter, decide to block this venture. There’s long been this threat of, ‘What if the Mujiidans are still there, and don’t like us coming to visit?’ The anti-first-contacters are gaining support every year, they don’t like the idea of checking in on a potentially aggressive alien civilization, only to discover it’s hostile.”
“Is the fear that we could end up with another Hekeke-type situation on our hands?”
“That’s exactly the fear, Zimeon. Even though first contact with the Hekekans was over four hundred years ago, no has forgotten that lesson. The Hekekans were vastly more aggressive upon first contact than anyone would have ever—”
Sark killed the first of his pursuers without thinking. The gray-suited Bothan had pulled away from the service droid he was talking to and had tried to catch up to his quarry. Unfortunately for him, and fortunately for Sark, the Bothan was far too eager, far too quick. He had been trying to head off Sark, but had cut through a small luggage store and emerged too quickly.
The Bothan bumped right into Sark, and Sark reacted without thought. He’d seen the panic in the Bothan’s furry face, the realization that he had messed up. He saw the Bothan’s hand shooting inside his coat. SCENE-it relayed all the details to Sark’s modified brain, which activated the fast-act neurons in the parasympathetic nervous system. That was the cyberware part; the synthware included the injection of an enzyme that mimicked fast-action cells, responsible for the quick-escape response in fish.
As a result, Sark’s hand moved fast as a viper. He gripped the gray-suited Bothan’s blaster pistol around its middle, thumbing its safety on, preventing it from firing. Using his free hand, Sark formed a yoke grip and smashed his enemy in the throat, crushing his trachea, then rammed a knee into his groin. The Bothan’s grip on the blaster melted and his knees buckled. Sark ripped the pistol away and tossed it into a nearby bin.
It all happened within the span of two seconds. The Bothan collapsed, trying to breathe, but Sark caught him and held him up like a man helping out an old friend.
Two witnesses were nearby, and saw only the final moments of the altercation. Sark looked at them both, feigning concern. “He’s about to have an attack!” He looked at the nearest witness, an elderly Twi’lek. In Twi’leki, he said, “My friend suffers from epilepsy, he’s about to go into a fit. Can you please go and find help? Please!”
The elderly woman nodded and rushed away, while Sark dragged his choking enemy down the hallway, towards the restrooms. He passed half a dozen people who gave them queer looks. Sark held his enemy’s left arm around his neck, while his enemy clutched at his trachea with his right hand, and gurgled, and drooled. He was dead when Sark brought him into the bathroom and dropped him in the fresher stall. Sark sat him down on the toilet and searched him for a commlink. It was up his sleeve, tiny, easily concealable, with a remote speaker in the Bothan’s ear.
It only took a second to sync the radio’s signal with his own whispertech.
“—this is Mobile Four, I’ve lost visual,” said a woman’s voice in his ear, speaking in Basic but with a strange accident. TLH identified it as a mix of Tatooine and Huttese accents.
“This is Mobile Two, I’ve lost visual, too,” a man said.
Another man spoke up: “This is Mobile Three, has anybody got eyes on Five? Anyone?”
“Negative,” said Four. “No eyes on Mobile Five.”
“Negative, no sign,” said Two.
Sark left the Bothan he assumed was Mobile Five in the stall. He peeked out of the restroom, saw none of his followers, then stepped out into the corridor and walked calmly away from the restrooms, heading towards the main entrance.
Glancing all around him to make sure he was clear, Sark removed his jacket. He’d been wearing a red jacket for the sake of his contact. He now turned it inside-out, so that the black inner padding was on the outside.
The voices were still going in his ear.
“Has anyone got eyes on target?”
“Negative. Mobile Two has no eyes. Changing locale, heading down the west corridor.”
Sark passed the main gate for arrivals from the Core Worlds. There, a number of families and friends stood embracing, frozen in time, the very quintessence of reunion and happiness. But surely any of them coming to visit were here against their wishes—no one flew for months through hyperspace to reach the Outer Rim on purpose.
Sark carried on. Didn’t pay the families much mind. Nodded at a Customs agent. Smiled at a squad of stormtroopers on passing patrol. Pretended to peruse the luggage on the belt when one of his female pursuers emerged from the crowd. Hid behind a large man and his family milling about and asking a service droid for directions.
The woman passed him by, close enough for him to reach out and touch her. “Two, this is Four,” she said.
“Go ahead, Four,” said a voice that sounded like it was panting, running.
Sark fell in step behind her.
“Checking in. Any sign of target or Mobile Five?”
“Negative on both, Four.”
Sark kept fifteen meters away, utilizing different objects to break her line-of-sight to him, should she happen to turn around. He dipped behind a service droid, then a ticket kiosk, then a passing Gonk droid, then a vending machine. Once, when she came to a sudden stop and began scanning the crowd, he parked himself behind a large marble pillar and waited.
Thunder rolled overhead.
Glancing around at the crowds coming and going, Sark controlled his breathing, inhaling and exhaling slowly. If he let his nerves get away from him, he could easily make a mistake. And mistakes made by a Bothan-led grab team meant getting snatched and taken to some Rebel terrorist’s dungeon for torture and questioning.
A vending droid came rolling up to him, a glowing, smiling face superimposed over transparent glass, through which its snacks and drinks could be seen. “Would you like a refreshment, pa’ron?” it said in the local slang.
“No, thank you.”
The droid rolled on.
Sark glanced up at the ceiling. “—what some people have called the next big investment of the Muuns,” the newsman was saying. “If Mujiida turns out to be a dead star system, or abandoned, the search for Mujiidan artifacts could be a goldmine, leading to a flood of interested prospectors from all over the galaxy. And if in fact there never was any civilization there at all, the natural resources alone could be worth the journey, yes?”
The marketplace analyst responded, “Oh, certainly. And if that happens, Korali Corporation has stiff competition from the rest of the six megacorporations that control that sector, and will have to work fast to prove their claim and defend it.”
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
The TLH dimmed the newscaster’s audio, as well as most of the voices speaking around him, and amplified the voices of the group speaking over the radio. They spoke fast, some of them out of breath, obviously scrambling to find him. He heard more codenames: Six, Seven, Eight and Nine. Blast, just how many of them were in here looking for him?
Sark paid close attention to the woman—Mobile Four—and watched her to see when she started to move again.
“Four, this is Three. What’s your location?”
“Headed out of the lobby, towards the restrooms.”
“Stay there, I’m almost to you.”
“Acknowledged,” said the woman.
Sark peeked around the pillar and found her rushing towards the corridor he’d just fled, the one with the restroom that held the corpse of the Bothan. He slid out from behind the pillar and began tailing her. He almost panicked and ran when she glanced over her shoulder and looked right at him. But, impossibly, she didn’t appear to see him. Her eyes raked over the crowd and she kept moving towards the restrooms, unabated.
Two people followed her down that corridor, and remained just ahead of Sark, between him and the woman: a male Duros in an amberlust jacket, and a female Human in a red dress. Sark remained directly behind them, letting them block line-of-sight for him. Mobile Four walked right past the restroom where the Bothan sat dead, and went to the far end of the corridor. The Duros in the amberlust jacket turned into the restroom, and the woman in the red dress peeled off to go to the women’s room. If Mobile Four turned around now, she would be looking right at Sark.
At the end of the corridor, Four stopped and scanned the atrium leading to the gift shop. She didn’t sense Sark stepping up behind her, just like Sark didn’t sense, until it was too late, the Duros in the amberlust jacket stepping back out of the restroom behind him. He’d been too focused on the woman, and neither SCENE-it nor TLH had registered the threat.
The trap had been set. The woman, Mobile Four, had in fact seen him, had somehow known he was on her tail, and she and her team had communicated by some means beyond spoken commands. Perhaps subtle vocal cues, a drop in octaves, something that had told them Four was in danger.
But Sark sensed the attack coming. No imtech had warned him this time, just his instincts. It hadn’t felt right. So, when he turned and met the Duros in the amberlust jacket, his reflexes activated and time slowed down.
The Duros in the jacket was fifteen feet away, and his hand was already on his blaster. Sark took two quick, wide strides, and on the third he lunged, slamming into the man and sending him backward. They struggled with the gun briefly, but the man had little training. Sark was trained in isk maega, a martial arts system developed with the philosophy of prioritizing only the moves proven to kill or maim, with heavy influences from both Human and xeno martial arts systems.
The gun was disarmed easily in a vine-style strip, and then his enemy’s face was smashed by a head-butt, then another, and another. The Duros’ flat nose was shattered on the first one, and a waterfall of blood cascaded over his lips and chin, down his shirt. Sark grabbed his enemy by his collar and rotated him so that he was a shield against Four, who Sark knew had to be preparing to attack.
He was right. Her hand was up, but she held only a stun gun, not a blaster. She was running towards him.
Someone screamed.
Sark grabbed his enemy in a high-tie hold, underhooking one arm and overhooking the head. He slung his enemy about, kneeing him in the chest multiple times, then finally fish-hooked his enemy’s face, yanked his head back, and delivered two quick hammer fists to the throat. The Duros was probably dead from the first, and the second only sealed the deal. As his body fell to the floor, Sark realized he was about to lose his Human shield. Quickly, he grabbed his shirt by the bottom and stretched it out, like a net. When the woman fired her stun gun, the electrodes were caught in the shirt, thousands of volts snapping just inches from his chest.
Someone screamed again. Someone else called out for a Customs officer.
Sark tore the electrodes out of his shirt, rushed his enemy, just as she was drawing her pistol. He brought his hammer fist down on her wrist, breaking it. He felt more than heard the snap. She screamed. The scream was cut off when he kneed her groin, gripped her head in one palm, and smashed it against the wall. She dropped like a sack of potatoes.
Sark immediately turned and walked away. He made it down a flight of stairs with two officers rushing past him. Sark put on his most panicked face and shouted, “Officers! Officers! Oh, Saints! There’s a man in a black slashcoat, he’s waving a blaster! Oh, Saints! I think he may have shot someone back there near the restrooms!”
They didn’t ask for any further details, they bolted away.
He had no doubt that someone in a security booth somewhere had already pinpointed him on a security camera. He needed to confuse the search. He was looking for opportunities everywhere. He found one as he was slipping through a small cafeteria. An abandoned tray and plate sitting on a table, plastic utensils dropped into the food. He lifted the disposable fork, and pocketed it.
Seconds later, he emerged from the cafeteria into a short hall, and saw another opportunity. A fire alarm, fastened to the wall near a customer service desk. Sark swept right by it, smashed the glass protector with his elbow, and yanked it. The alarm went off immediately.
Sark followed the map his imtech was showing him. The directions appeared like a translucent wallpaper superimposed over everything, guiding him towards ideal portals, recommending the most expedient routes. People ran past him and SCENE-it reported its findings: Panicked faces, no bulges detected; harmless.
The alarm was blaring. A voice came over the intercom advising everyone to move in an orderly fashion. It took turns in multiple languages.
Glancing behind him, he caught sight of one or two of his pursuers, becoming lost by the tide of panicking travelers, people fleeing the rumors of some fight that had broken out, frightened by the alarm, by the prospect of another shootout between Rebels and Imperials, which happened with some frequency these days. He cut through an evacuated restaurant, dipped behind a kiosk, watched another pair of pursuers run by. SCENE-it haloed suspicious-looking bulges at their side: Suspicious bulges detected; armed. He waited to make sure the coast was clear. Stepped back into the fleeing tide.
Then, just as Sark was rounding a doorway leading to baggage claim, the green-skinned Twi’lek in the slashcoat suddenly appeared around the corner. And he was fast. Fast enough that Sark was certain he had officer-level training. No sooner had their eyes met than they went for each other. Their arms met in a bridge, and Sark slapped the enemy’s arm away in a quick ick-da, and delivered a backfist to his face. Slashcoat responded with a low jab at Sark’s midsection, which took the wind out of him, and then a left hook to the head, which connected fully. Sark was rocked hard, but his implants sent a burst of norepinephrine and acetylcholine to his motor cortex, helping him to recover.
His hand shot inside his coat to grab the plastic fork, jabbed at his enemy quickly, stabbed him in the neck but not deep enough, and it broke against the Twi’lek’s arm on the next attack. Sark took an elbow to the chest. “Oof!” he huffed, and dodged the next one.
Sark shuffle-stepped away, committed himself to a circle step, bobbed and weaved, avoiding the next three or four blows. His mind was racing. His enemy was fast and trained. Sark looked for a way to gain an edge, for any way to weaponize his environment. He saw his chance, kicking over a mop bucket, spilling the water and stepping back, buying time. Grabbed the mop someone had left leaning against the wall, jabbed the Twi’lek in the face with the wet end. His enemy caught the mop by its shaft, slipped on the water, recovered, and brought his arm down on the wooden handle, snapping it half and tossing it away.
Armed with only half a stick, Sark delivered a quick strike to his enemy’s face, smashing his nose with the broken end. Slashcoat took the next strike on the arm, caught Sark’s wrist, and performed a perfect strip disarm.
As the stick clattered to the ground, they exchanged a series of quick, questing slashes with the blades of their forearms, looking for an entry. Slashcoat found his, and delivered a quick backfist to Sark’s chin.
Sark shook it off, and the Twi’lek came at him with a series of jabs and crosses, hissing like a seasoned fighter controlling his breath on each strike. Sark parried two of them, caught one on his elbow. His enemy winced, shook his hand out, growled, and came at him again. Sark used footwork to dance around in the narrow corridor, waiting for the right opening, then committed himself to a split entry, forcing a finger thrust to the enemy’s eyes. His fingers connected.
Slashcoat growled savagely, reeling backward, covering his eye, and Sark leapt on him. He took him in a neck clinch, holding his enemy tight and delivering three quick knees into his sternum. Slashcoat slipped free, recovered quickly, and push-kicked Sark in the midsection. Slashcoat, squinting through one eye, came at him with a flurry of blows.
Sark backpedaled, slamming up against the wall, allowing the enemy to close the distance. When the Twi’lek swung again Sark met it with a bah-rahht, blocking with a bent arm. He trapped the offending arm and arm-dragged it, pulling his enemy in close while spinning him around. He reached around the enemy’s throat, grabbing hold of his slashcoat’s lapel. Sark sunk both hands in for a collar choke.
Slashcoat went for his blaster, but Sark caught his hand and pinned it to his side. The blaster remained forever half drawn, the arm struggling to get free. Slashcoat fired one shot into his own leg. People were screaming all around them now. His TLH system couldn’t keep up with all of the noise, couldn’t sift through all the clutter. It didn’t matter. The Twi’lek fired again, if only by some insane attempt to call for help. It was almost over.
Sark kept squeezing.
Finally, his enemy went limp. Sark released him, and the Twi’lek’s head smacked hard against the marble floor. Blood was leaking from his enemy’s leg, spreading in dark red pools. Sark turned away sharply, wiping away a sliver of blood from his nose. With jittery nerves, he headed back towards luggage claim, calmly joining the stream of panicking travelers, all headed towards the main entrance.
Someone else emerged from the crowd to attack him, but once again his reflexes responded, and he broke the offender’s wrist, used a sappu technique to sweep the offender’s legs out from under him, and sent him to the ground. He stomped the offender’s head against the marble floor and kept walking. A few in the fleeing crowd saw the whole thing, including a Wookiee who looked outraged, but they unable to report it above all the screams.
Sark walked out of Chugurk Spaceport and into the freezing rain—it always rained on this half of the blasted planet. He glanced at the Keepers of the Peace rushing up to him, prepared to fight them: KOP officers, oblivious. He relaxed and let them rush by him and into the spaceport.
He hopped into the SkyRake he’d parked at the edge of the parking lot for a quick escape.
Twenty minutes later Sark was at a hotel owned by a low-level Hutt cartel named Kesittic, nodded curtly to the clerk droid at the front desk, and went up the turbolift to his private room on the fifth floor. The room was not well appointed, just a bed and a single chair that sat desultorily in front of a table with a holo-projector. He sat in front of the hololithic wall and waited for his call to be received. At first his call was accepted at a place called Jozen’s Shop. Their customer service line requested that he punch in the code for what sort of trouble he was having. He punched in a ten-digit number, and was directed to a man who asked him, “What seems to be the trouble, sir?”
“I’ve got two acres of land, and we’re expecting record snowfalls this year,” Sark said. “I think I need a better plow.”
“I understand. One moment, please.” After a few seconds, the man came back. “Sir, I have a number for you to call. I think this person can better assist you. Are you ready to take this down?”
With the wave of his hand, Sark pulled up the notes menu on his datapad, and said, “Go.” He listened to the man rattle off the numbers. He called the number, got a messenger service, and so left a short message.
Sixty seconds later he got a call. He answered it and a voice seemed to emanate from the walls. The Voice of Ether. “Authenticate,” it said.
“Mynock. Bannister. Staircase. Curve. Finality. Maelstrom.”
The line seemed to go dead.
Then, “Challenge code: mountain,” the Voice said.
There were two responses he could give: one would communicate that he was safe and clear, and the other would indicate that he was captured and under duress.
“Response: wounded pride,” Sark said.
“Say status, Horizon Lost,” the Voice said, using his codename.
“Operation failed. My contact didn’t show. I was ambushed and had to get out. I suspect my contact was grabbed and that’s how the Rebels knew I was there.”
A pause.
“Were you spotted?”
“Yes.”
“Were you identified?”
“Probably my face appeared on cameras, but I have a slicer than can get into the system and erase those recordings.”
Another pause.
“That is unfortunate, Horizon Lost,” said the Voice of Ether. “Our client needed you to deliver that encrypted message. Which, I assume, is still stored inside your imtech port?”
“It is,” Sark said tetchily. “Where else would it be?” The implants inside his brain were highly sophisticated and would only show up on the best of scanners. They had the advantage of being able to graft complex messages onto neurons, allowing operatives such as Sark to deliver classified intel in person without fear of it being intercepted over standard HoloNet or radio communications. Not even he knew what was grafted onto the neurons, and no one could ever know, unless of course they had Diviner, a neural decoder specifically designed to un-riddle the encrypted messages. Only two Diviner devices existed in the galaxy, and both were in Imperial hands. The Diviner system was only utilized for the most sensitive of information, as the Rebels had gotten very good at working through Imperial encryption.
He sighed. “I can still deliver it. We can set another meetup, someplace off this rock. The contact has other friends I can arrange a meet with. What do you say? Run it up the chain?”
“I doubt I can get the Hutts to come back to the table after this level of exposure,” said the Voice of Ether. Sark had never met the person behind the distorted Voice before, and probably never would, but he could sense the frustration from the person on the other end.
Feeling under a microscope and judged harshly for something beyond his control, Sark bristled. “It wasn’t my fault. I had incomplete info.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, the forger you wanted me to meet was obviously on the Rebel’s radar, the spaceport was crawling with multiple grab teams, I’m lucky I even got out of there.”
A pause.
“Are we still on?” Sark asked. Another pause, this one longer than all the others. “I still have time to—”
The line died, as expected. Sark sat there for a while, staring at the hololithic wall, with its rotating Destiny Avionics sigil. The entire planet was practically a fiefdom of Destiny Avionics, and their territories were notoriously tight when it came to law enforcement.
He sat there for a while, listening to the silence, realizing that the rain had stopped. It’ll be back soon. Rain on Drozhensk Ruz was more regular than Rebel attacks on Imperial data-dump sites or Banking Clan vault-worlds. They’ve gotten brave since Yavin.
He went to a window and opened the shutters. Outside, the clouds were just beginning to part. They seemed to be moving rather quickly, and he wondered if it was a sudden jet stream summoned up by Catalyst, the local weather-creation system—Drozhensk Ruz’s western hemisphere had suffered cataclysm five hundred years ago and the Hutt-run world had dumped untold sums of credits into the creation of Catalyst. Through regular doses of lasers fired into the atmosphere to control warm fronts, and advanced cloud-seeding technology, Catalyst had rescued this part of the world from death. Uguluth trees and bioluminescent warrja vines grew through the streets and up the sides of buildings, sometimes turning night into day.
He hadn’t been paying attention to the planned forecasts for this month, and didn’t know if the weather had been purposely manipulated or not. There was a roll of thunder in the east, a grumble from an angry beast in retreat.
He wondered if anybody else would be coming for him tonight. Colleagues of the people he killed.
A chime went off on his datapad. A public wave came into his field of view: all citizens were being advised to be on the lookout for Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, they had been spotted in this sector. The local Keepers of the Peace promised the public they were hunting the Rebels down. Good luck with that. The Imperial Intelligence Service, of which Sark had been a part for a decade now, had been looking for them for over three years. So far they hadn’t been able to pin them down, although there had been a close call at Ord Mantell.
Sark waved the advisory away and looked up at the stars, at the crescent moon, so slim it looked like a bitten off fingernail. He saw a flash, almost like a shooting star. Without his lenses, he would have missed it. It was the brief, fiery trail of a star freighter’s reentry.
Sark tried to think of what he could have done differently tonight. That would bother him to no end. He would evaluate and re-evaluate his actions, coming up with contingency plans for future problems like the one he’d faced tonight, so that he would never be caught like that again.
At some, point he dozed off.
He woke up when a chime sounded from his datapad. A message from the Voice of Ether. He waved a hand at the bedside tables holo-projector and looked at a blank screen. The Voice said, “You’re being reassigned, Horizon Lost.”
Sark bristled. He was about to argue. “If this is about my performance tonight, I’ve already assured you that my slicer can handle—”
“It’s not that. It’s something else. There’s been a development.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. How fast can you get a transport off of Drozhensk Ruz?”
Sark pulled up all the local spaceports’ flight schedules on his datapad. “I can get to the Delgrenni Spaceport’s lockers and swap legends within the hour,” he said. “Then I should be able to book passage on any of three freighters leaving from there in the next two hours.” Legends was what operatives called their alternate identities, entire personalities with bank accounts and family histories that had been carefully grown by IIS teams. “Where am I headed?”
“To the far side of the galaxy,” the Voice of Ether said. “Pack warm. You’re going to the Hoth system.”
Sark blinked. The Empire had chased a small faction of the Rebel Alliance out of Hoth not one week ago. It had been all over the HoloNet and local newsbits here on Drohzensk Ruz. And while Sark had no way to be sure, he imagined the Empire had dug through everything, sifted through all the remaining servers left behind, gleaned every piece of valuable intel, and then torched what was left so that no Rebels or smugglers could use it as a base of operations again.
So why was he being sent there?
“I don’t understand,” he said. “Did something get left behind during the exploit?” he said, referring to sensitive site exploitation, the process of quickly and efficiently deriving actionable intelligence from an enemy site. “Did the sweepers miss something?”
“You could say that,” the Voice said. “We found something. In the snow. There is someone there on the planet. We think maybe a sole survivor.”
“You want me to fly all the way across the galaxy to kill one Rebel that will probably be dead of exposure by now? That world is a death trap, what won’t freeze you will eat you.” Sark had never been there—few people had—but like most people in the galaxy he had read up on it after the news of the attack on Echo Base hit the waves and the planet did not sound hospitable. It was loaded with ice but was deceptively lifeless, it had many predators that roamed the wastes, most of them pale white, having evolved to blend in with the environment. Every living thing there was aggressive to the extreme, needing to eat as much as they can whenever they can, in order to pack on muscle and weight to survive the frozen wastes.
“You’re not going there to sweep Rebels,” the Voice said gravely. “You’re going there to sweep one of our own.”
That gave him pause. “One of ours?”
“Yes,” the Voice said. “It’s Ageless Void. He needs to be taken care of, and the entire site needs to be swept clean so that it looks like he was never there. Is that understood?”
Ageless. The hackles on the back of Sark’s neck stood on end. Ageless.
“Is that understood, Horizon Lost?” the Voice repeated, stressing Sark’s codename.
A thousand questions leapt to mind. Ageless. The most senior of them. The Imperial Intelligence Service had formed their small group, called the Kingdom, from elite darktroopers and had run them through a training program known as the Nest, and Ageless had been among the first. Others had come before him but they hadn’t stayed long. Ageless had stayed with the Kingdom the longest, and his performance and approach to the Nest’s training had been the basis off of which all future operatives were treated.
Ageless.
The questions may have been there, but Sark’s training covered any tension in his voice. “Understood. Horizon Lost will proceed to Hoth immediately. I should be off-planet and mobile in two hours. I’ll contact you when I exit hyperspace.”
“Excellent, Horizon Lost. Nest, out.”
Once the holo-projector switched off, Sark sat there in the quiet room, listening to the pitter-patter of rain. It grew in a hiss, and then a rumble, and then a roar. He sat there only ten more seconds contemplating it all, then he stood up and made for the door. The Degrenni Spaceport wasn’t too far but sky traffic could sometimes be murder in the rain.