6: Convergence
IN HIGH ORBIT AROUND HOTH
APPROACHING THE SECOND MOON, BIRILLA
The insertion pod drifted through space, having successfully slingshotted silently from Hoth’s third moon, Quesla, and placed her on a course for Birilla. The pod was a coffin carrying its single occupant. Namyr lay on her back, preparing for the next set of g’s. Ahead of her was the ice planet. Not too far away—say a few million kilometers—was an Imperial Star Destroyer monitoring the Hoth system, waiting for some Rebel to do something exactly as stupid as what she was attempting. The Rebel stealth ship Shadow of Alderaan had come as close to the planet as it dared, and then launched the insertion pod with her in it. There would be a ballet going on between the sensors on each ship—the Imperials picking up on the cooled ions released from the one-of-a-kind engines of the stealth ship, a prototype built by Bothan engineers, and the Shadow of Alderaan herself skating the limits of the Star Destroyer’s sensor range.
But that was all happening outside of her metal coffin. Inside the insertion pod, Namyr’s gloved hand moved over the dials, pulling up a holographic screen, cuing up commands to begin the final slingshot maneuver. She made slight adjustments to her course, having to adapt to a few rogue rocks that had escaped the asteroid field that hovered around the Hoth system in clusters.
The pod was a giant bullet fired into the vacuum of space, and it was pretty spartan, no hotshot sensor suites or defenses, it didn’t need them. But external cams it did have. Those revealed the planet ahead. A white snowball. Two huge ice-covered continents parted by oceans of frozen water. And somewhere down there, reportedly, a single stranded Imperial agent that needed to be brought in. Alive.
Namyr shifted in her gel bed as much as she could. The insertion pod was far too small to have an artificial gravity generator, and only weak inertial dampers, so her restraints kept her head, neck, torso and legs all stable. Only her arms were free, and even those would be locked down when she made her final approach and juiced it.
SLINGSHOT MANEUVER COMMENCING IN TEN MINUTES, flashed the warning across the screen. With a gesture she dismissed the warning. Three seconds later, another message flashed: INCOMING MESSAGE FROM MOTHER. She tapped the screen to accept.
Mother’s familiar tattooed voice came over a small speaker built into the headrest. “This is Home Actual calling Mordenta. Do you copy, Mordenta? This is Home Actual.”
Mordenta. An old Twi’lek word for “a thing bound for death,” and her codename for this op. Namyr snorted out a laugh. Sometimes she thought the random name generator they used for these operations would eventually run out of ridiculous combinations, but then it always surprised her.
She tapped for comms. “This is Mordenta. I read you, Actual. Five-by-five. Over.”
“You’re coming in clean, Mordenta,” the voice of Mother said. “We’ve got a bead on you. Heat sensors show you sliding right into the moon-planet system. Your trajectory looks clean, it doesn’t look like you’ve been detected by the Imps. Birilla is dead ahead, about a hundred thousand klicks. It should be coming up on your screen now.”
She checked her external cams. There it was, the moon Birilla racing up out of the darkness. The sickly yellow hunk of rock emerged from the planet’s night side like a predator rising from its cave, ready to strike. It would soon come between her and Hoth.
“Copy, I see it,” Namyr reported. “Slingshot maneuver commencing in nine minutes.”
“We see that. Prep for final briefing. I’ve got the usual team here, Mordenta. Lokossha, you want to give the update?”
The stern, mocha-colored face of Operations Specialist Lokossha Uhrn came up in her left periphery, making it look as if she and the colonel were both staring down at Namyr in her gel couch. Like disapproving parents.
“Hey there, Mordenta,” she said casually. “So, yeah, we’ve got some new things to share. Some actionable intelligence just came in from our neighbors on Ansion, and we got a tip from our people at Deepcover, too. We’re gonna have to go fast here, cuz your mission objectives have been updated and we don’t have much time before your slingshot, during which we’ll lose all comms, so listen up.
“Intel suggests the Imps have someone in play already. The operative is known only as Horizon Lost. Unknown sex, unknown race. An Imperial probe droid has also confirmed the presence of at least two Rebel pilots that somehow managed to survive and ran from a local predator, known as a wampa. It is unknown if they survived, but be on the lookout, because the Imperials really want them bad. Ageless Void is the primary target for both us and the Imps, but the pilots would be the icing on the dream-cake for the Imps.”
“Understood, Actual,” Namyr responded.
“We are sorry that your pod couldn’t fit more weapons and gear,” Mother said. “Once on the ground, remember to follow on-site procurement protocols.” Meaning after she landed, the first thing she ought to do was immediately start looking for weapons, in case those she brought with her proved insufficient.
PREPPING FOR SLINGSHOT, a message said.
A few inches from her head, Namyr heard the distant humming of engines kicking on. The small press of acceleration, then weightlessness again. Her metal coffin was making adjustments to her speed and trajectory. The reason she was being dropped in like this was twofold: first, because the Alliance hadn’t had a way of getting her closer in a larger vessel without being detected, and second, using orbital dynamics in such a way would gain her speed, which would gain her time. And right then time was not on their side, because the Imps had a lead on them.
“I’m going to be slingshotted soon, Actual,” she said.
“Copy that. We’re looking at your vitals here,” Mother said. “Adrenaline’s a little up, but otherwise you’re as cool as Hoth herself.” They were monitoring her bios through her STACsuit—a nickname for the Strength, Tactical Assist and Combat suit. It was another prototype made by the Bothans. The full body suit had light armor and insulation to keep her warm, but its best feature was the actuator-skeleton threaded underneath, empowering the spine and each of her major joints in a way that allowed her to lift twice the weight she could normally could.
“Copy that, Actual,” Namyr said, taking deep breaths to prepare herself for what came next.
A chime went off. A red light flashed above her head.
“I’m hitting the orbital slingshot pocket in the next minute,” she told them. “Anything else you want me to know before I go dark, Actual?”
“Negative, you’re good to go, Mordenta. Just make sure you do the exercises to keep yourself out of G-LOC.” He was referring to heavy g-induced loss of consciousness. “You’ll need to be conscious in case something goes wrong on landing.”
“Copy, Actual.”
“We’ll make contact with you once you’re planetside. Stay sharp. Actual out.”
* * *
The engines started humming louder, and the whole pod shook to the point her teeth were vibrating. There was a distant whine somewhere. Main thrust was coming. She was slowly pressed harder and harder into her gel bed. Namyr performed the last of the diagnostics checks, then lay her arms down and let the automatic restraints take them. She was in the hands of the Force now, or deities far beyond her ken.
There was a countdown to the first major burst. A few small pumps of the orbital maneuvering systems. Those got her on a good orbit with Birilla. The moon was highly volcanic. On her screen, Namyr saw jets of debris rocketed away from the airless rock, adding to the cloud of space debris that had been thickening around Hoth for ages, agglutinating into cluttered asteroid fields.
She heard the clinks and clanks of small pebbles bouncing off the pod’s outer hull. Then a loud bang. The pod hit something much larger, and jostled her. No problem, maneuvering systems to the rescue. A series of small, gentle bursts and she was back on track.
One of the screens showed her on a parabola, coming around the moon fast. She was going to blast hard for the moon, skirting close, picking up speed until she reached the vertex of the parabola, and then the pod’s spare thrusters, which had been storing fuel for just this purpose, were going to scream into life. In theory, the speed and trajectory, along with the pod’s small size and gray-painted hull, ought to get her past all sensors, and hide her between moon, planet, and the debris field. A team of orbital dynamicists had worked this whole thing out a day in advance, getting the timing of all the cosmic bodies down pat.
She went weightless. The engines all shut off, and she was on a plunging course towards Birilla, heading for the vertex. The sensation was deceptive. She could be lying in bed at home, and not flying at ninety thousand kilometers per hour. Orbital slingshot assists looked a lot more exciting on paper, and they could be unnervingly mundane for the one experiencing them. Because there was this moment just before the final engine thrust when you knew it could all go to poodoo.
Total silence. Except, of course, for the regular panging of debris off the hull. Her dull fear was punctuated by that arrhythmic panging.
Now her coffin passed behind the moon, into its dark side. The hull popped as it contracted from the cold. It would pop again when she come back around to the sunlight, when the heat would expand the hull.
The whole universe seemed at peace. She was just a passenger in the night, a leaf on a breeze in a lonely dark forest.
Fifteen seconds to the final boost to get her to the planet. Namyr braced herself for it. This could be some serious g’s. She gripped the armrests. Took one last look at her comms screen. She was completely in the dark now. Flying alone. Neither Mother nor anyone on the Shadow of Alderaan could aid her. Should anything go wrong back here in Birilla’s shadow, there was no help, no hope. If engines failed, she could get trapped by Birilla, go around and around in a decaying orbit, and crash-land decades from now. Probably no one would ever know what happened to her.
Wonder if Ash would cry.
Ash. Her girlfriend. They had not seen each other in a year. Ash was on another assignment of her own, a deepcover operation behind enemy lines. Was it possible she had already—?
And here’s the juice!
The engines came roaring to life. Several controlled detonations happened behind her in sequence as she was slammed first to one g, then two, and was soon passing three. Her STACsuit helped her to breathe, and she flexed her muscles to force blood through her body. After twenty seconds, the two-ton bantha that had been sitting on her chest finally stepped off, and she blinked. She experienced a little bit of “gray out”—the world was drained of color, but at least she didn’t go into G-LOC, so that was good.
Color slowly returned to everything, and she saw that she had made it clean through, and now she was sailing through a thin asteroid field, coming in at the tail end of it. She was not in any danger of colliding with the large rocks that occasionally escaped the ring system. Again, the orbital dynamicists did her a real solid, plotting her a precise course.
Now, maintaining this speed, Namyr was going to travel west to east around the planet, matching the planet’s spin before beginning her descent. Her coffin rocketed around the planet, seeing twelve sunrises before she started to feel the first tremors. The bottom of her pod started to skid off of Hoth’s upper atmosphere. Here, she had only nominal control: a few diagnostics checks, a few landing programs she gave permission to run. But really, what other choice did she have?
Down I go.
* * *
The pod was just a fraction of a second off its course, and now she was worried.
It needed to use the orbital maneuvering systems to turn and aim its tail end at the planet, so that it could fire the last of its fuel reserves and slow her down enough that the primary, secondary, and tertiary parachutes could bring her to a relatively gentle landing. Orbital dynamics had nothing to do with this part, but the people who prepped the pod’s landing cycle took Hoth’s turbulent atmosphere into account, and so it should be—
She was slammed forward suddenly, against her restraints, and it felt like a Wookiee had headbutted her. She was out. In a hazy and dark land filled with strange whistling sounds, she wandered vacantly, becoming lost. When she woke up, she was burning up, sweating profusely, and alarms were blaring. Must’ve been out a few minutes. Something had gone wrong and the pod got slung around. She was slammed forward again, experiencing some G-LOC. Namyr was vaguely aware of a screen in her right periphery saying that the primary chute failed to deploy all the way. The secondary chute had gotten tangled up in that, ruining them both. The on-board flight computer was smart enough to make an executive decision and cut them both loose. It had just enough fuel left to do a full reverse-burn, even using up what was in its orbital maneuvering systems.
Now there’s no chance of any more course corrections. This is it. Whatever course I’m on, I’m on it for good. The tertiary chute deployed, and she felt the jarring jerk first upwards, then sideways as Hoth’s heavy upper winds took her sailing.
Something else went wrong. She smelled smoke. And something else. A metallic, tangy smell she could almost taste.
Alarms were going off. She wiped them off her screen. More alarms returned. It was a litany of problems—heat-sink panels coming loose, nav systems shorting, life-support shutting down. She began to troubleshoot, her fingers dancing across the screen, her mind trying not to panic. Breathe. Keeping breathing. Focus. Think.
Something had gone wrong with the underside of the pod. A fire. She could feel the temperature rising still. She was being cooked. Beads of sweat fell into her eyes, and she was in a spin. She could both feel it and see it happening. One of the external cams was miraculously still working. She saw…clouds? Looked like white cliffs off in the distance, spinning into view and back out again. Nausea turned her stomach and her brain into mush.
Her suit injected her with anti-motion sickness meds. It helped.
Thank the Force for Bothans.
She was still plummeting. Out of control.
Then, a stroke of luck. She broke through the clouds into saner wind currents. The spin slowed. The parachute was doing its job. But she was still falling fast. Way too fast. She wasn’t sure how bad this is going to be, only that it would not be gentle. Could be it all ended here, now, before the mission even got under way.
She thought about sending a message back to Mother, tell her to say something to Ash. Maybe tell her what I wanted to say at the Officers Ball. Her hand dropped just inches away from the main comms screen. She faded…faded…
* * *
No alarms when Namyr woke up this time. Just smoke. Smoke and a vague sense of pain and discomfort all over. That was from her internal organs. They all got a shock from the impact.
She did not know how long she was out, but now she was looking at her hands like they were stray kittens that came wandering up to her, looking for food. They reached for her face. She wasn’t sure what she could do for them. Then, she coughed. And laughed. There was smoke all in her vision. Only one light was on inside the pod, and it was a screen that flickered on and off quickly. By that light, she spied a familiar-looking latch above her head. Took her a second to recall what it was. Oh, right, that’s how I get out.
The trouble-board display on her left tried to issue all sorts of warnings. She wiped them all away.
Laughing and coughing and gagging, she forced her stray-kitten hands to find that latch. Gritting her teeth, she pulled it. There was a loud hiss. Another panel slid open to her right. She reached over and hit that button. Another hiss. And this time she heard a couple of gears turning. She reached up and pushed the ceiling away from her head. As light and fresh, frigid air came pouring in, Namyr noticed her arms were covered in white foam.
What’s that about?
Oh, right, the extinguishers. Probably saved my life. In fact, I know they did. Looking around at the control panels, Namyr could now see scorch marks. She was probably only alive now by the ingenuity of genius engineers who thought of automatic rescue features, and fail-safes for those features, and redundancies for those fail-safes.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
The freezing wind howled through the small porthole.
She tried to step outside. Couldn’t. She was caught in a spider’s web. Oh, right, the restraints. She slowly peeled those off. It felt like she was forcing herself up out of a dream. Once finally free, she sat up, and realized that the pod had landed horizontally. It was supposed to land vertically on its landing struts. Then she realized, with a sudden chill, that had it landed on its other side, she would be trapped, with the only door facing the ground.
No engineer thought of a fail-safe for that, it seemed. She was granted that favor by luck alone. Let’s hope the Force holds out. Her mother used to talk about the Force. She’d had an uncle that was a Jedi and she believed in it vehemently. Namyr had never seen any evidence, but she would believe in it now if it would help.
Something roared in her ears. It was the wind. And when it came, it bit into her cheeks, shocked her body, and felt like it sliced down to her bones.
“Gods below,” she gasped, her breath coming out in huge clouds. Namyr hadn’t issued that curse in years. Such was her shock at the sheer wall of cold that hit her. Snow flurries swirled around her in chaotic patterns. She heard something crackling and looked around. Some sort of dark lubricant was leaking from the insertion pod, squirting into the air and flash-freezing instantly. It crackled and fell to the snow.
The air…It tastes funny. She looked all around her at a dark, star-spackled sky. The moon of Birilla, which had assisted her, hung in the black canvas above. Its light gave a strange almost-glow to the untouched snow that stretched out all around her in all directions.
There was a moment when familiar childhood fears crowded around her like old friends. A thousand tales of dark worlds and dark spirits found her again, and for just a moment she believed. She believed all of them. The pantomime spirits, the jolly men of the forest, the weeping women in the well, the ghosts that came with the first snows…
Her fear was only temporary, and likely brought on by a minor concussion. She got a grip. Mind back on the mission. Still got a job to do.
Namyr took an awkward step out of the pod, walked halfway down its curved side, then jumped down. She landed pretty good, if a little wobbly in the snow. Strength and equilibrium were returning, and the STACsuit assisted in balance. She walked slowly across the snow. It was knee deep and crunchy. The wind pushed waves of snow across the surface, across the pod, and the snow whispered like it had a secret.
The wind bit deeply. If not for the STACsuit, she would likely be frozen to death within the hour.
She turned and faced the pod. Stars, it’s a miracle I’m even in one piece. Multiple somethings had gone wrong, looked like. The hull was battered in places, torn clear in others. Heat-sink tiles on the bottom were completely melted away, and the top portion, which held all her spare tactical gear, had been gutted. Looked like an explosion from the inside. Her guess? Some of that tile melted off, she lost insulation, and superheated gases created around the nose during entry got inside and caused a reaction. The explosion threw everything out of whack.
She patted herself down, and she seemed to be all in one piece. No punctures, no bleeding.
Reflexively, her hand patted her right thigh for reassurance. Her only weapon was there, an MR-185, and the pistol rested in her tactical thigh holster. Yet another Bothan specialty, the 185 had a setting that allowed it to fire a near-silenced blaster bolt that was also invisible. Perfect for stealth missions. It drew too much power when silenced, though, and only had eleven shots.
Namyr walked around the pod, and took a look at the nose. Ah, she was in luck here. The nose seemed to be mostly intact. That’s good. The nose housed all the long-range communications gear. If her luck held, she would still be able to use the pod as a transmitter. Wherever she went on the planet, she could broadcast to here, and the pod would send her message up to the Shadow and thence to Mother.
Off in the distance, by blue-milk moonlight, she saw the remains of a huge shield generator. Those would have been destroyed by Imperial walkers at the very start of the invasion.
Then she slowly turned, panning her head slowly right to left. Such a barren, desolate world she had never seen. Then she looked down at her feet. That was where she saw the animal tracks. They were huge, almost the size of a bantha’s, and wreathed with claws.
Wonder what made those.
* * *
Namyr made contact with Mother and the Shadow of Alderaan. The Shadow’s crew confirmed her position using short radio bursts so that their position could not be triangulated by any Imperials listening in. The wind, not to be forgotten, howled across the landscape and seemed to carry with it the ghosts of any who died here. And the cold found its way in. Even through her tight STACsuit, even through her insulation, it still found its way in. Namyr had never experienced anything like it. Hoth’s cold wanted in. It would not be denied.
You will not kill me, she thought.
But most of her gear was gone. Practically all her survival gear had been destroyed in the landing.
You will not kill me, she reasserted.
Already, she was shivering.
Namyr had endured evil winters back home and trained at secret Rebel base camps to learn how to survive, to scrape a living off of rocks and dust, to find water if there was water to be found, and to make shelter if there was any shelter to be made. She believed she could survive this. If making the Empire pay for all they had done meant suffering a little, she could do her part. Ash’s parents had been tortured and killed by the Empire. And for what? On suspicion of aiding Rebels, which they hadn’t done. Oh yes, she could endure a little cold.
But the cold wanted in. It intruded on every thought, wedged itself between every movement.
Stars above and below, give me strength. Force protect me. Guide me.
She looked down at the large footprints in the snow. Checked the settings on her MR-185.
A beep went off at her commlink. That was the greenlight. Time to move.
She spoke into her commlink, and when she did, she could not keep the shivering out of her voice. “M-Mordenta on s-s-site…I hear your command, Actual.” She tried to compose herself. Stars below, but it was freezing. Like nothing she had ever imagined possible. Snow and ice were already caking her eyes. “P-performing f-final prep.” She finished checking her STACsuit and her weapon. Satisfied, she said, “Commencing operation, now.” She switched off the commlink and headed in the direction of Echo Base.
* * *
ABOARD THE REBEL SHIP SHADOW OF ALDERAAN
1.5 PARSECS OUT FROM THE HOTH SYSTEM
They had pulled the Shadow of Alderaan back from the outer reaches of the system after detecting the Asserter moving around the farthest planet. It was Fera’s idea. Better safe than sorry. The Shadow’s ability to cool its drive trail, coupled with its unique sensor-scrambling paint job, made her one of a kind. But both the special engines and the paint had their limitations, and the word was that many of the Empire’s ships had seen some upgrades at drydock after Yavin. And there was no way to know if Asserter had those enhanced scanners or not.
The Shadow had been pulled in close enough to drop an even smaller stealth ship, called Black Cowl, to drop Mordenta’s insertion pod close enough that it could make its way around Hoth’s three moons using slingshot orbits. They had pulled back once they knew she was clear. Now, in a small comms room reserved for intelligence officers in the belly of the Shadow, Fera paced back and forth, staring at the twelve people that had been assigned to her team, all of them techs with advanced knowledge of encrypted communications and remote slicing.
“We’re clean on outgoing transmissions,” said Mynyra, the Bothan signals specialist. She had cream-colored fur that rippled in waves when she was thinking hard on a problem, as she was doing now. Her clawed hand moved across her touchscreen, selecting sections of the radio wavelengths to study. “I don’t see any indication that the Empire is hacking our comms or intercepting our agent’s transmissions.” She looked at Fera with a nervous sigh. “Mordenta’s insertion appears to be clean.”
Fera nodded. “Run another scan. I want to be sure.”
“Yes, Commander.”
Fera ran a finger over her chin. As a Mirialan, her people often gained tattoos over a lifetime, each new section of tattoos telling the story of who they were, where they had been, the trials they had suffered, the joys they had experienced. Fera’s fingers often found the elegant swirl that went across her chin, as if drawn to it, recalling the one major mistake that had cost her so much. The tattoo had been added after the Kopal Incident, after she had missed one of the most glaring pieces of evidence that should have told her what the Empire was planning. It was a reminder of a failure to perceive what was right in front of her, a warning that missing out on key pieces of information could mean the difference between success and utter tragedy.
If only I had seen.
That thought returned to her in moments like these. It was a mantra in her voice, echoing inside her head, and it dogged her whenever she was this close to something that could sway the war. Her fingers ran along the tattoo repeatedly, watching as Mynyra ran the second comms scan and once again confirmed they were clean.
“What do we have on bounce-back?” she asked Kyrocobba, the one-armed Wookiee that was handling sector intel. “Any other ships coming in-system? Any traders or smugglers? Any ships at all?”
The Wookiee let out a series of growls, letting Fera know that there was nothing. Well, almost nothing. The Hoth system was practically deserted, but there were a few people hanging around it. Besides the Empire, there were two or three separate collections of freighters lingering at the edges of the system.
“Smugglers?” asked Denzen, the Rodian sensor specialist who had first detected them.
“Maybe,” Fera said. “More likely salvagers. Or pirates. Probably here waiting for the Empire to leave so they can swoop in and see what’s left of Echo Base. Maybe turn it into a new hideout of their own.” She sighed. It was always the same. After every battle between the Empire and the Rebellion, you could bet on the scavengers showing up to take the leftovers.
Tapping a button, Fera called up to the Shadow’s captain, who responded immediately. “Yes?”
“What sort of resources do we have on this ship, Captain? How many starfighters?” Usually Fera would know these things before leaving port, but they had left in such a hurry she had not been able to get the full rundown of the Shadow’s resources.
The captain fidgeted. “You’re not thinking of sending them out, I hope. My fighters still haven’t seen refit, and some of the pilots have been seriously injured.”
“I’m asking in case we need another grab team to assist my agent, in case we ourselves are unable to. Is there anything else we could send after her? Anything at all?”
The captain thought. Shrugged. “We have a captured Sentinel-class shuttle, the Midra’hara, which we took from some Imperials we caught literally napping while waiting on refit at port. It’s not much, and it’s a little banged up, but it has a hyperdrive. A damaged one, but still a hyperdrive.”
Fera sighed. A Sentinel-class shuttle was intended for troop transport, not exactly dexterous enough for evading Imperial Star Destroyers. “Thanks anyway, Captain.” She signed off with a heavy sigh. This operation had been quickly thrown together, and Fera now wished she had had more time to plan. Mordenta was going to need every—
“Something here, Commander,” said Kajjak, the burly Twi’lek counterintelligence specialist.
Fera walked over to his computer screen. “What’ve you got?”
“A report coming in from ok’chah, ma’am,” Kajjak said, pointing to the latest scan from the bug aboard Asserter. “Looks like someone aboard Asserter is reporting it up the chain of command. One of the probe droids they left down on the planet reported an anomaly. A ‘meteorite with suspiciously high metallic content,’ is what the report said. I think maybe the Viper detected Mordenta’s insertion pod, after all, and misinterpreted it as one of the meteorites that regularly hit Hoth. But it also seems to suspect something else.”
Fera’s gut tightened. “They’ll send a Viper out to inspect it. When they do, they’ll know we have an asset on site.” She pointed to Mynyra. “Get Mordenta up on comms, I want her aware. Tell her she’s likely to have company, either more probe droids or boots on the ground. Either way, she needs to know.”
“There’s something else, ma’am,” Kajjak said.
She looked back at him. “What is it?”
“I’m not sure, but one of the probe droids is reporting strange movements all around it in the dark. It suggests some sounds that are similar to footprints, but it can’t lock them down. It believes it is being stalked, and not by a local predator.”
Fera wondered what the significance of that was. Her fingers ran along her chin, tracing the tattoo. Then she had it. “It’s him,” she said.
“Ma’am?”
“Ageless. He’s going after the probe droid.”
“Why would he do that, ma’am?”
“Because he wants to call for help,” she said. “And the poor soul doesn’t know that his own people want him dead. He’s about to call up to the Asserter for help and he doesn’t know they will kill him. He doesn’t know we’re his best way out.”
* * *
ABOARD THE STAR DESTROYER ASSERTER
IN ORBIT AROUND IKCHEA, IN THE HOTH SYSTEM
“Any reports from the Vipers?” Sark asked, tossing his duffel bag into one of the chairs in the conference room. A large durasteel table dominated the room, and the empty chairs arrayed all around it looked recently used, in disarray, like a big meeting had just let out. He was alone in the conference room with the ship’s executive officer, a man named Dhosgrath. He had been briefed on the matter and was told by IIS to assist Horizon Lost in any way he could.
“The probe droids have been reporting every half hour, as usual,” Dhosgrath informed him curtly. The XO stood with his hands clasped behind him near a transparisteel window that looked out over Ikchea, a dust-covered airless world, and the farthest planet in the Hoth system. “But there has been no confirmation on any Zabrak walking about near the base, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Sark looked the XO over, sizing him up. His SCENE-it imtech reported, Stiff posture; eyes dilated; intimidated.
Sark tapped a switch on the conference table, pulling up the three-dimensional hologram of Hoth and making himself quite at home. Captain Dhosgrath did not bristle or rebuke, but Sark could read demeanors well and the XO clearly disliked the familiarity with which the IIS operative behaved with materials that were not his.
Using gestures, Sark enlarged the southern hemisphere of the planet, which was where the former Rebel base was located, mostly embedded under the ice, inside a network of both natural and artificial caves. He also pulled up a screen that revealed the many images that stormtroopers had taken while performing sensitive-site exploitation. In one of those images, a dark figure in a black cape was just walking out of frame. At that figure’s booted feet lay a Rebel, apparently dead, though there was no sign of blaster bolt or other injury.
Sark figured he knew the context of the image and moved on, memorizing the layout of Echo Base before making the trip.
“Do you have a ship prepped?” Sark asked.
“We do.”
He nodded. “Good. Show me to my weapons and gear. And tell the pilot I want to be dropped here.” He pointed to a ridge of rocky, ice-covered hills.
Dhosgrath remained still. Not a wrinkle formed in his finely-pressed gray uniform. He betrayed nothing, yet Sark sensed his dismay, even without using his imtech. “That’s far from the base itself,” he said.
“It is,” Sark agreed. “But if I have to get closer, I’ll walk.”
“It’s just one individual. From what I’ve heard, he’s likely hurt, and probably starving and freezing, as there is no food, no power—”
“This is no ordinary target, Captain. He came from the Nest.”
The XO winced in consternation. “The Nest, you say?”
Sark looked squarely at Dhosgrath. “Are all the probe droids still functioning?”
“As I told you, they’ve been transmitting every half—”
“But are all of them transmitting? Has there been a glitch? Anything at all?”
“No. Why?”
“Look for it. When it happens, that’ll be him.”
“You think he’ll take out one of our Vipers?”
“It’s what I would do.”
The XO blinked in surprise. “Why?” he said.
“How else is he going to call for help?” Sark gave a cold smile. “And when he does, do me a favor and pretend to be on his side. Tell him to meet you somewhere, and that you’ll have a shuttle ready for him. Then inform me, but don’t send any troops or droids after him—that might look suspicious to him. Leave him to me.”
“But, if you’re right, and we can trick him into thinking we are on his side, couldn’t we lure him somewhere and blast him from the air?”
Sark looked Dhosgrath up and down. He almost felt sorry for the captain. Imagine having that small of a mind, that lack of imagination. “He’s very perceptive, Captain. And if he gets even a whiff that you’re coming to kill him—like maybe he reads something in your voice—you wouldn’t be doing anything but sending him a transport off that planet. I want him trapped there. I want him cold and hungry and desperate.”
“Okay, then. Why not just let him starve?”
“Because you’ve already given him six probe droids,” Sark said. “That’s six separate chances at getting a hold of a transceiver deck. Six chances to get a message out to someone, anyone.”
“Who would he call?”
Sark pointed at the window. “Who do you think is out there? You think that void is empty? You think there aren’t pirates out there, smugglers waiting to salvage what’s left of Echo Base? And do you really think all the Rebels fled and never looked back? If Ageless Void starts to suspect he’s been completely abandoned, who do you think he might call?” The realization slowly dawned on the captain’s face. Sark smirked. “That’s right. And don’t you imagine the Rebels might like to get their hands on an IIS operative, a Nest agent?”
Captain Dhosgrath bristled at that. “You really think this man would betray the Empire?”
“Why not?” Sark said, turning and heading to the shuttle bay. “From the sound of it, it betrayed him.”
* * *
ABOARD THE SHADOW OF ALDERAAN
“Commander, one of our satellite buoys around Hoth’s third moon has a possible confirmation on a drive trail from a freighter-sized vessel,” said Kajjak. “Probably Imperial. It moved in-system, then released what looks like…yes, it looks like an IDT-7 gunship.”
Fera walked over to his screen and looked at the data. An IDT-7. Those were most often used as dropships for ground infantry. “That’s Horizon Lost. I’d bet hard credits on it. They’re sending him down to sweep. Dank farrik! Do we have confirmation on the IDT-7’s landing spot?”
“Not yet, ma’am. Still working the data.”
“Get it. I want to know exactly where it’s going.” She pointed to Mynyra. “Get me a secure comms channel down to Mordenta. She needs to know about this.”
“Still working on that, ma’am. Hoth’s weather makes comms tricky.”
* * *
THE SURFACE OF HOTH
An hour later, Sark was alone on the ice. From a window, he had watched the giant snowball of Hoth swell into a wide, white nothingness. When his dropship touched down, the pilot called over his radio, “You are go!” He had to yell so that Sark could hear him over the keening winds. Sark stepped out onto the frozen rock, directly into the footprint left by an AT-AT walker. The walkers had started their approach to Echo Base from here, using the hills as cover before invading the Rebel hideout.
As soon as he was out, Sark scanned his immediate environment. His imtech reported, Area clean; no contacts. He gave the call over his radio. “I’m clear!”
Without delay, the IDT-7, which was usually meant to drop off whole platoons of troopers, activated its repulsors and gained altitude. Within seconds its engines were roaring and it was high in the clouds, clawing for orbit. It would stay in geosynchronous orbit until he called for it again. It would not return for him before he killed Ageless.
He climbed to the top of the ridge, knelt, and let his naked eyes range across the frozen wasteland. Then he took out the electrobinoculars and scanned the area. For eight hundred meters, he saw nothing of import, just flat nothingness, interrupted briefly by a huge snowy mound.
Wait a minute…
Something caught his eye. His imtech reported, Unusual profile; suspicious alloy detected.
He zoomed in.
After a few seconds he saw what it was. A long, metal foot sticking out of that icy mound. That’s when he realized it was no mound at all, but the remains of a destroyed walker. He had heard that one or two AT-ATs had been taken down by a clever trick a couple of pilots pulled with tow cables, which had exposed weaknesses in the walkers’ necks, making them easier to destroy with turbolaser fire. The thing was coated in days’ worth of snow and ice, and almost looked like a natural part of the landscape now.
Sark pegged that as his first bit of cover. He hefted his blaster rifle, checked the signals coming in from the probe droids for any extra insight, and then began his approach. The wind kicked up another notch, and ice and snow swirled around him. Soon he was swallowed by clouds of white, another ghost of Hoth.