24: Other Interested Parties
ABOARD THE EXECUTOR-CLASS STAR DREADNOUGHT EXECUTOR
LOCATION: ENTERING THE ANOAT SYSTEM
ROLE: FLEET COORDINATION AND LARGE-SCALE OPERATIONS
CURRENT MISSION: PURSUIT AND CAPTURE [TARGET CLASSIFIED]
The exercise was called “small orbit,” and it was Obi-Wan who first taught it to him. It started by pulling on the Force, drawing it inwards, to the center of the body. Try to imagine compressing all of that energy into a ball, Kenobi had said, just days after the Council had conferred on him the level of Jedi Knight. Compress it tightly, yet be sure to handle it gently. Wait until you feel a tingling sensation inside your stomach, then move it back to your spine, then up to your neck, then to the top of your head, then let it fall down through your tongue and into your chest, and finally, let it come to rest again in your belly. That is the small orbit exercise. It will help you feel the flow of Force, how you can guide it, and how it can guide you.
Vader sat in total darkness inside his meditation chamber. Pain moved through him in waves, and he drew on it and let it feed his connection to the Dark Side. And he ran through small orbit, continuously, thoroughly soaking himself in the anointing of the Dark Side and feeling its ebb and flow. Here and there, he thought he sensed the mind of something else peering back at him, a being made of pure darkness that stared at him from the cold abyss.
Who was that? A person? An apparition? Whatever it was, its connection to the Dark Side felt strong, and Vader also felt that he had barely begun to explore this…creature. It was incorporeal, and it was saturated with menace.
What is it?
It was just one of the many mysteries he and his Master had begun to explore in recent years. So many secrets were hidden behind that black veil, where only the Dark Side held dominion. Other mysteries had plagued him for years now: the Star Forge relic found in the Unknown Regions; the lost Sith treasure at the Juvian Verge, which the Emperor had long searched for; and, of course, the voice that had whispered to him twice now, once when he awoke after Padmé’s death, and then again when the Death Star was destroyed. Like the Dark Fiend he now sensed staring back at him, that voice had remained a mystery, but he knew that he had heard it, and that it was a woman’s voice.
Vader also had the mystery of his own mind, which both Kenobi and the Emperor had warned him would be a thing worth his time to unravel. All Jedi must decode their own thinking, Obi-Wan had said. Qui-Gon taught me that, and you will find it out, as well. You are never done growing, never finished learning about yourself. The study of the Force is a lifelong endeavor, but a study of oneself must last even after. It must last forever.
That was very different from what Lord Sidious had advised, though. You must find the source of your ignorance, my friend. And then command it. And then kill it. Only by dominating yourself can you truly dominate others. He had said it while sitting on his throne room on Coruscant, overseeing Vader’s continued training. The man’s smile still haunted Vader, who felt the urge to please Sidious at all times…but also hated himself for it. And, as it happened, the Dark Side fed on self-hate, as well, and its power was so intoxicating that the process of power and hatred became cyclical.
He drew on his pain. He drew on his self-doubt and self-hate. He drew on his disdain for Sidious’s dominion over him. He drew on his sorrow for what he had done at the Jedi Temple and for his last words spoken to Kenobi and—
The walls of his meditation chamber trembled. The Dark Side swelled all around him, and as he tightened his fists he ended his small orbit exercise and instead pulled dark energies into the palms. Exquisite pain, sorrow, and hatred, it all fed him a rush of dark power that was more than intoxicating. It was liberating. He felt no borders or boundaries holding him back. Nothing stopping him. Nothing. Nothing at all. Except…
The son of Skywalker.
The Emperor’s words rang out in his mind.
The son of Skywalker must not become a Jedi.
Vader had countered by suggesting that, if Skywalker could be turned, he could become a powerful ally. And he had seen the lustful grin from his Master in the hologram. Can it be done? Sidious had asked.
And Vader had vowed that he would either come to the Dark Side, or he would die. And Vader felt that was true. Only—
“Lord Vader?” came a formal, slightly tremulous voice from just outside the chamber.
Instantly, he snapped himself out of his reverie and used the Force to tap a switch beside him, which simultaneously opened the meditation chamber and brought his helmet down atop his scarred head. The lights came on and he spun in his seat to face Admiral Piett. The man stood precise and polished, his seamless gray uniform and tall black boots making him an imposing figure in his own right. “My apologies for interrupting you, my lord—”
“What is it, Admiral?” Vader said.
“My lord, we have come to the Anoat system, and we’ve made contact with the bounty hunter,” Piett said. And Vader smiled inwardly, for he could detect the barest traces of disdain the admiral had for Boba Fett and his kind. Piett had an excellent sabacc face, but it broke fractionally whenever there was talk of bounty hunters. “He contacted us on the encrypted channel you asked us to assign to him. He is fairly certain the Millennium Falcon is there in Cloud City. He says he ran into some trouble trying to locate other Rebels. He sought them out so that he could verify Han Solo’s position.”
“I see,” Vader said, rising slowly. The Force guided him to the conclusion Piett was hinting at. “So, he wanted to secure the bounty himself, without our interference. He feared if we assisted him at all, he would not get paid. What changed his mind?” But Vader could already sense Piett’s surface thoughts, and saw the mental image of what had gone wrong down on Bespin.
“Though he hasn’t said so, my lord, I feel that Fett pushed his luck, and now there is the threat that the Rebels will leave Bespin before he can secure them himself.” He added, a bit begrudgingly, “Fett did, however, manage to use certain informants of his to stall Cloud City’s leadership. He’s confident the Rebels are still there.”
“Fett has control of his arrogance most of the time, but a lifetime of being the best can sometimes dull your senses, for lack of anyone truly worthy to challenge you.” Even as Vader said the words, he wondered if that was what his obsession with Skywalker really was all about. A challenge. One unlike any he had had in decades. Another being trained in the Force. Not only would it do him some good to battle the boy, it would also give him the chance to do something he had not ever really done. Be a teacher. He had been a mentor…once. Perhaps twice. But that had not gone well and she was dead now. At least, he assumed so. He could not sense Ahsoka’s presence anywhere so—
Vader pushed the past aside and focused on the present. “But we’ve had undercover operatives on Cloud City for years, correct? And they are all activated?”
“Yes,” Piett said. “And they’ve done their best to figure out exactly where the Rebels are, in order to keep them in play. Fortunately for us, our operatives made contact with Lando Calrissian just a few days before the Millennium Falcon arrived, and made arrangements that should any Rebels arrive, they should be welcomed as friends, and then delayed by subterfuge.”
And then he gave another begrudging admission, “And Fett did at least tip off one of his paid informants when he followed the Rebels to Bespin. That informant, a conman named Dizel Okrun, posed as an Imperial beforehand and made sure the city’s leaders were well on our side.”
Vader nodded. It was both elegant and convoluted, but that was often the case in the arts of warfare and spycraft. The Empire had employed Boba Fett and other hunters, who in turn employed their own informants, who fed them information from any number of unwitting persons. Intel was going in all directions, some of it overlapping, confusing the narrative, making it impossible to determine the truth.
Vader took a datapad from Admiral Piett and read the report.
Fett had had the wit and skill to follow the Millennium Falcon here when no one else could, it seemed, and had then hired this Dizel Okrun on Cloud City to pose as an Imperial officer and convince the city’s leaders (including Calrissian, who had not known Solo was on his way at the time) to play along and offer the Rebels sanctuary, should they show up. A day later, actual Imperial undercover spies had shown up to reinforce this threat to the city’s leaders, yet those same spies had not known Fett had already done this, and so had not conferred with him. Meanwhile, Fett was working to secure the bounty all on his own, when he hit some sort of snag.
“Half of these people do not even know the full story of who and what has been moving around them,” Vader mused. “You and I are the only ones with the overview, Admiral.”
“Yes, my lord,” Piett said.
“Has Calrissian secured Captain Solo and his friends yet?”
“No, sir. But we’ve contacted him, and he says he has them at play. He assures us that they completely trust him. He merely awaits your signal to have his people seize them.”
Vader pondered that a moment. “No,” he finally said. “Tell him to await my arrival. I will see to their capture personally. Tell him that as long as he does as we say, the Empire will support his administration in keeping the Mining Guild out of Bespin.”
“You wish to take the Rebels in hand personally, sir?”
“Yes. I would like to make sure this capture is final. We have had too many failures up to this point. Wouldn’t you agree, Admiral?”
Piett’s sabacc face almost failed him again. “Yes, my lord,” he said. “Too many.”
“Alert my shuttle crew. I’m going down there.”
“Also, this Fett person…he insists that he be there for the capture. To ensure he gets his reward.”
“Of course, he does, Admiral,” Vader said, smiling behind his mask. “Of course, he does. That is why he raced here himself, without alerting us. That is why he hired this Okrun person to pose as an Imperial officer, invoking our authority, to stall Solo. So many clever plots, they almost begin to step on one another.” He looked at Piett. “Is there anything else?”
“One small matter, my lord. We have a Kingdom operative on board. He was on Hoth during our operation to find a traitorous spy from IIS, but he was injured. And now he’s joined the hunt for a fugitive intelligence officer named Zumter. We have reason to believe Zumter is on Bespin. The operative is committed to completing the mission. His codename is Horizon Lost, and with your permission, he would like to join your shuttle down to the planet.”
* * *
CLOUD CITY
ABOVE THE FINANCIAL DISTRICT
R-3PO was in the pilot’s seat of the L1-9 airspeeder, heading east over the Stock Exchange Building. Behind him in the tiny copilot’s seat was R4, his interface arm jacked into the speeder’s mobile terminal so that he could help with navigation. R-3PO was no skilled driver, but the droid knew roughly the basics of piloting airspeeders, and so when he spied the strangely-shaped black ship that “Omega” had described, he knew at once he had a decision to make. IG-88 was heading west in a black, mantis-shaped ship, and even had he not gotten Omega’s description, R-3PO would have known this was the ship of a droid.
For one, the mantis-shaped ship was moving too fast and banking too hard for the soft tissues and joints of any organic beings. Indeed, some of the turns IG-88 was taking were so intense it would have probably snapped a humanoid’s neck. The ship, which registered on his public traffic screen as the IG-2000, was fifty meters to his left in a skylane going in the opposite direction as he.
“We must be careful here, Arfour,” he told the little astromech.
R4 twittered quaveringly.
R-3PO waited for the ship to come nearer, then banked hard to port, receiving bleeps from speeders all around him. He came up behind the IG-2000, throttled up, and was just in time to join the Rebel team “Theta” in their own airspeeder. Without saying a word to each other, R-3PO and Theta sped up until they converged on IG-88’s tail. And just as the IG-2000 started to climb above another skylane, both R-3PO and Theta came up and bumped it.
The ship slewed for a moment in midair, then, in a shocking display of dexterity that R-3PO should have expected, the IG-2000 whipped around, its front guns facing them, and opened up with a salvo that tore through both of their airspeeders.
The canopy of the L1-9 exploded, and what was left was sheared off by turbolaser fire that nicked R4. R-3PO banked hard to the right to escape the merciless barrage, and he saw the Rebel team’s speeder crash onto a thankfully empty glideway, and it went skittering like a stone skipping across water until it smashed into a building and went still.
R-3PO managed to shout, “Unable to zzztall IG-88! He is still on his way to your location! I repeat, he izzz still coming to you! I apologize, zzzir! Deeply, I apolo—” The airspeeder crashed onto a rooftop and R-3PO would have exploded along with the wreckage, had R4 not activated his hover-thrusters, snatched the protocol droid’s arm with a pincer, and pulled him out into the sky.
* * *
HIGH ABOVE CLOUD CITY
APPROACHING ESCAPE VELOCITY
“I apologize, zzzir! Deeply, I apolo—”
The transmission ended.
Kevv twisted around in his seat to look behind him. “Well, there goes that plan,” he said. Namyr and Ageless both chimed in that it changed nothing. But it does. It changes everything, and they know it. We’re about to have the same problem we had with Fett, another bounty hunter is about to put a serious wrinkle in our plans.
Kevv looked ahead at the YT-2400 ahead of them—the public traffic screen showed the Hard Leaf gaining clearance to leave. Zumter was likely on board that shuttle and he was about to get away. It had yet to gain enough speed to escape the gas giant’s considerable orbit, but it was fast approaching the upper atmosphere and their airspeeders could not go much higher. Already Cloud City was becoming a mere speck below them, lost amid the enormous orange clouds that gave it its name.
Kevv checked his belly cam. Aimed it behind him. At first, he saw nothing alarming, but soon he saw a fast-moving black dot, coming right up underneath him.
“He’s coming,” Kevv said.
“Nothing we can do,” Ageless said. “Just stay focused on that YT! We need to—”
“Mordenta?”
“Yes?” Her voice came through comms tense and agitated. She was afraid this was all going to be for nothing.
Kevv said, “What did the lady say about this airspeeder when she gave you the key fob?”
After a moment, Namyr answered, “She said it has the chassis of a T-33 but the engine of a V-wing.”
He nodded. “Yeah, I thought I detected serious sensitivity in the handling, and she gives a heck of a kick when I throttle up past six hundred meters.”
The Human seemed to guess at what he was thinking. “Think you can handle it?”
“I don’t know,” Kevv said. “But I’d love to give it a try.”
“Handle what?” Ageless said. “Give what a try?”
“You’ll see. Guys, I’m going to do my part. You get Zumter! Okay? Promise me you’ll get Zumter!”
“We’ll get him,” Namyr said.
“He’s not getting away,” Ageless said.
“All right. Hopefully I’ll see you guys around the way. Wish me luck.”
As Kevv throttled back, he thought he heard Namyr say, “May the Force be with you,” and then he banked hard to right, kicked up the power to the twinjets to the point that they almost stalled out. The airspeeder spun a one-eighty, its front end now facing the oncoming IG-2000, and when Kevv throttled down the repulsors to drop a level, he simultaneously pushed all power through the twinjets and correction thrusters. He was slammed so hard into his seat he almost blacked out.
Instantly, alarms went up. Fire shot out of the back of the speeder. He had known that was going to happen, because he had already redlined every system when he rerouted power to fix Fett’s sabotage. One of his hands held the control wheel in a firm yet supple grip, while the other held the airspeeder’s attenuator.
He dove towards IG-88.
The droid’s ship instantly opened up with a salvo of red turbolaser fire and Kevv jinked first right, then left, then barrel-rolled several times to avoid getting hit. One of the bolts singed the side of his airspeeder but did nothing else. Kevv was going off instincts alone, he had no targeting reticle, no radar, no sensors of any kind, only the belly cam to let him know what was around him.
And Kevv kept on a course directly to intercept IG-88’s own. He was just five hundred meters away. His enemy here was a droid, and had it been any other sort of droid he might have assumed it would not care about its own life. But it was a bounty hunter, and that meant it had goals. And no creature, organic or otherwise, had goals unless they wanted to live. It had to have self-preservation as a priority.
It has to. But even in his head the words did not sound so certain.
But for his plan to work, the droid needed to care about its own existence.
Four hundred meters away. Now three hundred meters.
Droids worked off of logic and input, with a single mission as their overall purpose, and all input was run through the filter of that purpose. So it must know I’m a Rebel. But in case it didn’t know, Kevv opened up on a broadband channel. “I am with the Rebel Alliance! You are interfering with our mission of liberty and freedom for all sentient beings! Freedom for all! Freedom from tyranny! You will not divert us from our mission! We threw ourselves at the Death Star to ensure its destruction! What makes you think we’re afraid of you?”
Two hundred meters away.
Kevv’s whole body tensed. This could be it. He could die here. But the droid now knew for certain he was with the Rebel Alliance, and it knew they could be suicidal in the pursuit of their mission.
I’m suicidal. You’re not. I can die and still achieve my mission. You can’t. Calculate that.
One hundred meters.
His alarms were screaming. Fires were now in several aft compartments. Smoke spat out the front engine turbines.
Kevv could now see the strange insect-like shape of the IG-2000, and he saw that it had stopped firing. It had stopped because, even at this distance, if it managed to destroy Kevv and his airspeeder, the debris would still be a destructive wall in its path.
Fifty meters.
Thirty.
Kevv braced himself for death. Then, suddenly, the IG-2000 banked hard away, throwing itself off its chasing trajectory. Kevv throttled up and pulled back hard on the stick to perform an Idellik maneuver, where he came up in a long, wide arc, spun himself around, and came up behind the IG-2000. But the droid’s ship did something totally unexpected—it performed a Koiogran turn, about-facing on Kevv’s airspeeder and aiming all its forward guns at him and letting loose.
This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.
Kevv barrel-rolled to starboard and he heard an explosion behind him as his airspeeder’s twinjets sputtered and began to detonate. He pulled a column of black smoke behind him, and was trying to look for an exit strategy when inspiration struck him. He waited for the IG-2000 to start pursuing him again, then performed more aerobatics to get in front of its guns. The droid was all too happy to let Kevv get in front, until perhaps it realized his trap—the flames and smoke from the tail of his airspeeder completely consumed the IG-2000, and a moment before he sensed (through the Force or simple experience) that the droid was about to fire at him again, Kevv pushed his control wheel down and dove towards the planet.
Pulling back hard on his throttle, he cut his speed by half, getting himself slammed against his seat restraints. He waited for the droid’s ship to catch up. Thankfully, the maneuver had worked better than he’d planned, and the IG-2000 overshot him, zooming past at nearly double Kevv’s speed.
The droid killed its speed.
Kevv smiled. Just what he was hoping.
Every system redlining and malfunctioning and exploding, flames and smoke now reaching into the cab with him, he pushed to come up alongside the IG-2000 and, with a swift barrel-roll into its side, sent the droid’s ship first slewing, then spinning out of control as it plunged into the orange clouds beneath Cloud City.
But Kevv’s engines also died. And he went into those clouds, too. In the blurring image outside his window, he saw the gaseous plumes consume him. He went deeper, and deeper, and he saw strange bulbous monstrosities. Beldons—the creatures that secreted tibanna gas—were everywhere. The beldons were pink and sometimes dark green, and as large as ten kilometers. Kevv saw them through the clouds, and for a moment thought, They’re beautiful. Like little moons, floating along—
The alarms stopped blaring, because the electronics were all melted and busted. He saw Cloud City a kilometer away. There were slow-moving dots in the distance. Cloud cars. Emergency vehicles. But they would not reach him in time. Kevv was about to either burn alive, choke to death on smoke, or survive long enough to be destroyed by the titanic forces deep within the gas giant. He would be smashed, compressed, and then ripped apart, his particles being lost in the giant storms below. The airspeeder might fare better, might become crushed by gravity as it moved through layers upon layers of gaseous sludge before coming to rest near Bespin’s iron core.
This was it. The cold math of physics. Nothing left to save him. He and his pal Varzi had made it through the hellish battlefield of Hoth, and now both were about to be dead. We went as far as we could, Varzi. Didn’t we?
But hopefully Namyr and Ageless got their man. Hopefully Zumter yielded some intel that would save innocent lives. Hopefully—
Suddenly he was slammed hard against his controls, and for a moment it felt like he was arrested in midair. A dark shadow fell over him. Gasping and coughing on tainted air, Kevv looked around through the black smoke filling the cab. He saw through the window as he went impossibly up.
Up and up and up.
That’s not possible, he thought between coughing fits.
Then he looked up through the hole in the airspeeder’s roof—a hole he had not even been aware had been blasted away by one of IG-88’s last salvos—and there, beyond an eight-hundred-meter-wide beldon, he saw a Lambda-class Imperial shuttle. And, high above it, in orbit, was a Super Star Destroyer. And Kevv was caught in its tractor beam.
The smoke filled his lungs. He coughed until his throat hurt. The last thought he had before blacking out was, Need to jump out. Because he would rather die than be interrogated. He would rather die than give the Imps anything. But darkness took him too soon.
He closed his eyes, hoping he would see Varzi soon.
* * *
“Gamma is down,” Namyr called.
To Ageless, it almost sounded like her voice cracked. As a fellow Rebel, her attachment to the Duros would be greater than his. Even so, he felt as though they had lost some critical component to this operation. Having watched the battle between Kevv and IG-88 on his speeder’s belly cam, Ageless now realized what an asset the Duros had been. He was an amazing pilot, and had gained them a bit of time. He found himself wishing there was a Force, after all, and that it would accept Kevv into whatever afterlife a true warrior deserved.
But right now we’ve got other problems.
The Executor was here. Its focus so far appeared to be on the aftermath of the chase, and so far, it did not notice that the YT-2400 called Hard Leaf was being pursued by a pair of airspeeders that had no business being at this altitude.
“We need to make this happen!” he cried. “Now!”
“Agreed,” Namyr said. “I’ll pull ahead of the ship, cut my speed, and make them cut theirs. That’ll make them level out, give you time to do…whatever it is you’re going to do.”
But they both knew what he had to do. There was no getting Zumter at this point unless he, Ageless, got aboard the Hard Leaf. So, all systems redlining, he throttled up to full speed. Namyr pulled ahead of him and shot in front of the YT’s cockpit, and Ageless heard the thunderous boom! as the Hard Leaf’s captain suddenly killed his thrust. It was enough for Ageless to come up over the freighter without having to pass through its exhaust, the ionic discharge of which could have screwed with the electronics in his XJ-6.
He soared above it, trouble-board singing with a dozen different alarms. Any second now, the XJ-6 would simply stall and revert to a semi-autopilot status for the driver’s safety. It would do this by killing its speed and taking some of the steering away from him, then guiding him back lower to Cloud City while sounding a distress beacon. There would be no overriding that, not without some serious slicing, which he would not have time to do before the Hard Leaf escaped.
And I’ll need all the time I can get to slice into the freight elevator.
Because that was the only way inside.
Ageless could scarcely believe he was really going to try this.
There was sudden turbulence, which buffeted him. The Hard Leaf’s captain must have just seen the Executor away in the east, because the ship abruptly banked hard to starboard, likely fearful of a tractor beam. And with good reason. Most capital ships’ tractor beams had an effective range of around a hundred twenty kilometers, but Ageless happened to know that the Executor’s range was a sight longer.
He made a final adjustment just above the Hard Leaf’s ceiling, directly over the forward freight elevator.
An alarm screamed at him that the oxygen was thinning around his vehicle. He could already feel it. There was too much drag, and it was getting much colder inside the cabin. They were in the upper atmosphere of the planet and their systems were failing. Namyr’s airspeeder’s thrusters were already sputtering. Any minute now its emergency systems would pull her back towards Cloud City. She blocked the Hard Leaf’s path again, once more forcing it to cut its speed.
Then Ageless saw the ship’s quad cannon activate, and spin around, facing Namyr’s airspeeder.
“Mordenta! Get clear! They’re targeting you!”
“I see it!” she shouted, and shot away.
Now or never, he thought.
Without any more hesitation, Ageless barrel-rolled so that the XJ-6’s roof was facing the Hard Leaf’s roof. He was upside-down, looking “up” at the top of the ship. Then he took in a deep breath, held it, and flipped the switch that pulled the XJ’s roof back and suddenly he was assaulted by frigid winds pushing against him as he unbuckled himself and half jumped, half fell onto the Hard Leaf’s hull, and clung to its main sensor dish for dear life.
* * *
Namyr watched from afar, mouth agape, as Ageless Void slammed into the Hard Leaf, slid backwards a meter or so, and found purchase on the sensor dish. She barely made him out, since it was still night, but she saw his silhouette scrambling across the hull. She watched him slide, crawl, and climb down the freighter’s hull as it now tilted back and shot for space. Ageless’s stolen XJ-9 set itself to autopilot and peeled away, heading safely back down to Cloud City.
Ageless wrapped his legs around some durasteel power coils, which freed up his hands to pull out his slicer’s rig. Namyr watched with bated breath—if Ageless fumbled or dropped the rig now, it was over, Zumter was gone, and he would have to leap from the ship and hope that she caught him.
But he won’t. He won’t do that. He’ll stay on that ship until it reaches the vacuum of space and he’ll beat his head against the hull until he’s dead. He won’t let Zumter get away, even if it kills him.
Zabraks were a hardy people, and Ageless had been trained by the best to survive, but even he couldn’t survive the vacuum. And he knew that. And he did not care. Namyr knew she was about to watch either Ageless or Zumter die, and, whereas before either outcome would have been suitable to her, she found herself sending a prayer out to the universe on Ageless’s behalf.
She watched sparks fly as he used the rig’s plasma torch to cut away at the access panel of the forward freight elevator. Seconds later, it opened. Namyr turned away, heading back towards the planet. The last she saw of Ageless, he was sliding into the Hard Leaf’s open elevator shaft.
* * *
ABOARD THE MIDRA’HARA
“We’ve got confirmation on that signal, Commander,” said Denzen, the sensor specialist. “Passive sensors picked it up in waves. The braking radiation matches the profile of a large Kuat Drive Yards engine, probably capable of forty megalights per hour. And I’m also detecting ionization emission cooling on par with a Fondor Shipyards exhaust system variant.”
Commander Fera moved over to the Rodian’s station and looked down at his screen. “That what I think it is?” They were hiding in a cave on the far side of the moon, so they could not look out and see the ship, but Fera knew. In her bones, she knew what it was.
“Yes, ma’am,” the Rodian said. “Passive sensors are showing it clearly. The only known ship in the galaxy that fits that profile is the Executor.”
Kajjak whispered in despair. “Stars above and below. Our people are in trouble down there. Big trouble.”
Fera paced for a moment, massaging her temples. When the solution came to her, it emerged murky and filthy, like an ancient lightsaber pulled from a black swamp, without clear definition on how exactly to use it. How to execute such a plan? She turned to the Midra’hara’s pilot. “Captain, prepare to emerge from the cave, and set us on a slow orbit around to the light side of the moon.”
The captain obeyed without question, though he did have a slightly quizzical look on his face, which his copilot shared.
“What are we going to do, ma’am?” asked Denzen.
“What does it look like?” Fera said. “We’re going to run interference for them.”
* * *
ABOARD THE HARD LEAF
APPROACHING BESPIN’S STRATOSPHERE
Trembling and freezing to his bones, Ageless dropped into the elevator and nearly collapsed. As soon as the panel slid shut overhead and the freight elevator became pressurized, he took in his first full breath of air in over two minutes. He gasped. His whole body gave off a sigh of relief. But the elevator only took five seconds to get to the cargo bay before it opened and he saw the Ugnaught running towards him, blaster in hand.
Ageless threw himself to one side of the elevator, and two blaster bolts singed the wall beside him. He took the WESTAR-34 blaster pistol he had taken from the Trandoshan bounty hunter, peeked around the corner, and gave a single shot, hitting the Ugnaught in his arm and causing him to drop his pistol. Ageless moved forward, pistol trained on the Ugnaught’s center mass. He grabbed the little guy by his collar and slammed him against the wall.
“Where is he? Where is Zumter? I don’t have time, so you only get one chance at this. Whatever he’s paying can’t be worth more than your life.”
The Ugnaught was massaging his wounded arm. He stared sabers into Ageless’s eyes, and growled, “He’s in the crew quarters. In the ship’s bracing arms.”
“Did you set off an alarm when I came in?”
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
“I didn’t have time to.”
“If you’re lying, I’m coming back to kill you.”
“I’m not lying! I have spoken! I have—”
There was a soft pocket of nerves under the chin of every Ugnaught, and Ageless struck it hard with his elbow. The Ugnaught went out like a lightt. Ageless had been taught the anatomies of dozens of different species, his training chiefly concerning how to kill, maim, or immobilize them quickly. He knew the Ugnaught would be out for at least half an hour.
Now Ageless looked around at his environment. The cargo hold was loaded up with large, black, monolith-looking slabs. Frozen tibanna gas. Tibanna was excreted by beldons, huge gas-filled creatures that floated through Bespin’s clouds. The stuff was not typically volatile, especially when frozen like this, but should any explosion occur around it, it tended to increase the energy yield—that is, enhance the size and power of the explosion—by several orders of magnitude. Ageless had been involved in infiltrating a tibanna-mining factory where Rebels were believed to have been hiding. No Rebels had been there, but the education he got over the qualities of tibanna had never left him.
The stuff was dangerous.
But this room is only half stacked, he thought, moving through the narrow passages between each row. Usually, on a hauler like this, there wouldn’t even be room to walk the aisles. Which meant that the crew of the Hard Leaf did indeed intend to make room for an extra passenger. In here, Zumter could move about the ship, eat, exercise.
But if they made room for him, it means that Carjukk didn’t tell them IG-88 was coming to pick up the bounty. Which means the crew of this ship thought they were genuinely taking Zumter to safety, he assessed Ageless figured the Hutt was covering all his bases: if IG-88 captured Zumter, then he, Carjukk, would likely share in the reward; however, if Zumter managed to escape, the Hard Leaf would take him to safety, and Zumter would be none the wiser that Carjukk had double-crossed him. But Carjukk had tried for the extra payday.
He filed that away as one more lesson in never trusting a Hutt.
Ageless kept his pistol at low-ready as he cleared the room, then moved towards the nearest bulkhead. He now believed the Ugnaught when he said he had set off no alarms, because when he opened the door from the cargo hold and entered into the main corridor, he saw only two tall, black, bipedal Q-11-C maintenance droids, and they were going about their business at a circuitry bay. Ageless wished he still had the stun baton he had stolen from one of the police droids during the riot, it would make short work of the circuits in the two droids—but alas, he had dropped it when Boba Fett ensnared him in his rope.
So he had to move fast, in a low crouch, and with soft feet. He crept up behind the first one and reached to the switch at the base of its neck, and switched it off. The other Q-11-C turned and had time to say, “I’m sorry, sir, but you are not authorized to be on this—” before it realized he was a threat, and swung a wrench at him. Ageless caught it on his arm, and the pain rattled him, but he managed to grab hold of its head, spin it around, and smack its off switch.
Unfortunately, being switched off, both of the droids sagged and pitched forward, their legs locked into place. Ageless managed to stop one of them from falling over and smacking the ground, but the other slammed into the wall with a loud clang.
“What was that?” a voice said.
Quickly, he lay the one droid down quietly, then slipped through the door into the circuitry bay, and peeked around the corner, waiting to see who would come and inspect the noise. He saw a pair of Ugnaughts coming down the corridor. Both of them had blasters, but neither of them were drawn—though, one did seem to suspect something was wrong, because his hand had just touched the grip of his DL-44 when Ageless slid out from cover and aimed his weapon at them.
“Easy, fellas,” he said. “Easy. Take out your blasters and put them on the ground. Slowly.” Both of the Ugnaughts did as instructed. Ageless walked over to them and kicked their blasters away. “I just want to know where your secret cargo is. And don’t lie to me. I know he’s on this ship. Is he still in his quarters?”
The crewmen exchanged looks. One of them nodded.
“Get in the circuitry bay.”
They did as told, and once they were in, Ageless shut the door and used his slicer’s rig on the wall paneling to lock them inside, all the while looking left and right down the corridor, checking to see if Zumter or someone else would emerge. It took just twenty seconds to slice into the panel—once inside the ship, the security was pretty lax on these light freighters—and he was able to lock the elevator doors at the end of the hall, as well.
He pocketed the rig and kept moving, performing sneak-and-peeks around corners, “slicing the pie” as they said in the tactical world, covering individual slices of a room as he slowly came around doorways. He checked the galley, the common room, the equipment closet. The corridors on these YTs were pretty much always a giant circle—the hallway just went around and around—so it was all cleared quickly. Except for the cockpit and the bracing arms, of course.
Once he was confident a room was clear, Ageless moved swiftly through doorways, or the “fatal funnels” as they were known in tactical training. Once at the crew quarters, he put his ear up to the door. The hum of the Hard Leaf’s engines made it impossible to hear faint sounds.
Ageless took out his slicer’s rig and hooked up to the panel. He selected the mal-code, and was just looking for an exploit to insert it, when he heard a knock from the other side of the door. He paused.
“I know you’re out there, son,” came Zumter’s voice. “I placed a micro-cam just above the door, for uninvited guests. Any way we can talk this through?”
Ageless had been trained to keep his temper even, to not let emotions cloud his judgment, but in that moment he felt the heat rising in his whole body. “This only ends one way,” he said to the door. “You know that. But if you surrender now, I won’t have to kill you.”
“Yeah. Right.” Zumter chuckled mirthlessly. “And what will you do with me? Shake my hand and sing a song of brotherhood?”
“You’re coming with me, Zumter.”
“I’ve come this far, son. You know I’m not going to let you do that. Why don’t we talk about this?”
“You already missed your chance on that sixty seconds ago.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, for the whole minute you’ve been talking, you haven’t yet said you’re sorry. It should’ve been the first words out of your mouth. Instead, you went right into negotiating for your own life.” Ageless looked down at his rig. The screen showed about forty more seconds until the mal-code could finish infiltrating.
Zumter chuckled again. “You don’t miss a beat. You never did.”
“Step on out, and save us both the trouble.”
“Like I said, I’ve come this far.”
“You don’t have to die.”
“What’re you going to do with me?”
“I’ll hand you over to the Rebels.”
Now Zumter laughed loudly. “So, you are working with them now. Dumb move, son. You can’t possibly think they’ll give you a pardon, any more than they’re likely to give me one. We will both be tried for war crimes when all this is over. Even before it’s over. We’ll spend the rest of the War in a dungeon somewhere, tortured with hypnoscans until we give up every secret. But, win or lose, you and I will never get to see the outcome of this War. They’ll put us in front of a Reb firing squad and no one will ever know which black hole they pitched our bodies into.”
Ageless nodded. His rig vibrated silently, alerting him that the mal-code had wormed its way into the panel’s programmable logic circuits and was ready to open on his command. “Last chance, Zumter.”
“No, son, it’s yours. Put down your blaster and come with me. I’m leaving all this nonsense behind. Let the Rebels have Coruscant and Denon and all the rest of the galaxy. We did our part for an ungrateful Emperor, and now we both know it wasn’t worth it. Empire, Republic, who notices? In the grand scheme of things, who notices? Who even cares?”
“You’re offering me a way out?” Ageless asked.
“I’m offering you retirement. A place away from war and violence. Away from all that stuff the Kingdom and the Nest shoved into your head, making you into a killer, all that weighing on your conscience…it’s not natural, son. It’s not moral. We were wrong to do it to you. We were all wrong.”
Ageless scoffed. “You’re talking about morality? Now? I know about the money, Zumter. I know the deal you made with Carjukk and his Besadii Clan to get clear. I know about your escape plan. You had all of this planned from the beginning. And you knew I was getting close. You and Abaca and anyone else that was in on it. And so you had to silence me. You had to kill me.”
“I’m sorry, son—”
“Like I said, those should’ve been the first words out of your mouth!”
He opened the door and dodged the blaster bolt he had known was coming. Even still, with Zumter’s skills, it hit him in the arm and was thankfully absorbed by his jacket’s diffusion capacitors. It felt like another hard punch to the arm and for a second it went numb as he fired back, moving into the room and firing again and again as Zumter took two shots himself, but he was covered in heavy body armor and retreated back into the room, diving behind a sofa that would give him little cover.
Inside the room was a bed and a large console for HoloNet access. Ageless dove behind those and maneuvered around the room, firing constantly at Zumter, who fired back wildly from behind the sofa. Their blaster bolts fried the furniture and set blankets on fire. Some of the bolts went through the wall and destroyed wires and insulation, all of which caught on fire, too. The room was now heavy with smoke and alarms went off.
Ageless laid down suppressive fire as he made his way from behind the console and dove to the floor, then crawled underneath the bed, slid out from underneath the other side, and came up behind Zumter, who turned just in time to see his protégé fire into his chest. Zumter screamed, and his body armor absorbed some of it, but he still went flying backwards over the bed, dropping his blaster and crawling for cover behind a table that was already half-covered in flames.
Alarms screamed. Smoke filled the room and Ageless cough and look through tears to find his target.
He peeked around the side of the bed, and saw Zumter fiddling with something. His suitcase full of money. From it, he pulled something out. Something cyndrical, and palm-sized. Ageless knew what it was, and before he could fully turn away, the flashbang grenade arced above his head and exploded. His ears felt like someone had clapped them. He heard nothing but a long, shrill riiiiiiing! and his eyes watered from the bright light and magnesium powder the grenade released.
He saw a blur approaching, leaping over the bed. He fired once, but missed, and Zumter grabbed his wrist and tried to wrench the blaster free. And this man had taught him almost all he knew about disarms. The old man, though hurt, nevertheless had a lot of fight left in him, and Ageless was still feeling the effects of the cold from hanging on the outside of the ship, as well as the effects of the flashbang. The two of them punched, clawed, pushed, pulled, and head-butted one another while growling through gritting teeth and coughing on smoke.
The blaster pointed at the ceiling and fired wildly when Zumter tried to grab it. Sparks and flames shot out from the wall and suddenly the room was filled with emergency fire-suppressant foam, which only clouded Ageless’s vision more.
Zumter kept one hand on Ageless’s blaster, and his other hand struck several times at the bundle of nerves at his pupil’s arms and armpits, dulling his grip. Ageless countered with a head full of horns, smashing the old man’s face bloody, then spared an arm to overwrap his enemy’s, setting him up for a control from Teras Käsi. But when Zumter slipped out of that, Ageless transitioned to an elbow lock from Udas’mon, then gave an oblique kick to the old man’s inner thigh to disrupt his balance. When Zumter’s base wobbled, Ageless hooked one leg using the Echani method, then gripped the old man in his throat, pressing his thumb into a pressure point below the jaw in the Noghri style of Stava. Zumter screamed, sagged, and nearly fell over.
This gave Ageless the opening.
He moved in close and married his hips to Zumter’s, then, using his whole body as the fulcrum, hauled his enemy over and slammed him onto the floor. Now he was able to free his blaster from Zumter’s grip, and he pressed the barrel to the old man’s temple.
“Finish it!” Zumter said through bloodied teeth, coughing through smoke. “Finish it, soldier!”
Ageless hesitated. He almost did it—
He deserves it. They all do. After all I did for them. After everything—
But just then, two Ugnaughts came rushing into the room. They wore pilot’s uniforms, and he assumed they were the captain and copilot. They came with fire extinguishers, but dropped them when they saw Ageless, and went for what looked like a pair of handcrafted ion blasters holstered at their sides. “Don’t!” he said, and aimed the WESTAR-34 at them.
Both Ugnaughts froze.
Ageless looked down at Zumter. His mentor. He recalled the betrayal at Hoth. And then, in a flash, he recalled all their years together, all the training the old man had put him through. That made the betrayal even more painful and he felt like screaming.
I have him now. I can take control of this ship. I can kill him and take this ship and disappear with his money. All his credits are right there in that case. I could even use the blank ID slates I found on Hoth. I have all that I need. I could leave Namyr and Kevv and Fera and just vanish into the ether.
But he remembered the Executor was outside. Vader’s ship. And he imagined what would happen if Darth Vader found Namyr. If they got hold of Kevv. And after all they had done to save him…
Suddenly, the decision seemed clear.
“No,” he said coldly. “You’re coming with me. You’re going to the Rebels.”
“They…they won’t pardon you, son,” Zumter hissed. “I’m not enough of a prize for them to forgive you! Not for all you’ve done to them! All the Rebels you killed! They’ll never accept you! They’ll—”
With a crack of his pistol against Zumter’s jaw, the Human went unconscious. Zumter stood there a moment, feeling he had crossed into new territory, though he did not yet know where it led. He looked over at the Ugnaughts. “Bring me some binders. We’ll cuff him, then you’ll take me to the cockpit.”
“Eh, of course,” the pilot said. “But…wh-what course should we set?”
“No course,” he said. “Turn this ship around. We’re going back to Cloud City.”