9: Close Quarters

ABOARD THE SHADOW OF ALDERAAN

Fera stalked the dark sensor room from one end to the other. She was looking at an operation that might have gone sideways. Something was wrong. Mordenta was overdue for a check-in, she had not given them an update in almost half an hour and everyone in the sensor room was on edge. Fera was already thinking about Commander Soolek. Once the woman heard about this failure, she would alert Director Eeja and he would have Fera pulled immediately off the operation. She would—

“Commander Fera?” said Mynyra. The Bothan waved a furry a hand to her screen. “We’ve got a problem here, ma’am. I just ran a bounce check on the transmitter of Mordenta’s insertion pod. It’s not responding.”

Fera leaned over Mynyra’s chair, the glow of the computer screen illuminating the tattoos across her face. Fera touched those tattoos, especially the one on her chin…

“Run a software check,” she said. “Make sure it’s not a problem on our end.”

“Yes, Commander.”

“Commander?” said Kajjak.

She turned to him. “What is it? Please tell me it’s good news.”

“It’s Special Operations Group’s lead commander, ma’am,” he said.

Soolek. Fera sighed. Speak of the Dark Side and it will manifest itself in the room. “What does she want?”

“She wants a sit-rep.”

“Tell her she’ll know something when we know something.” She addressed her whole team. “Okay, people, listen up! I need you to turn on all your reserves, because we’ve got an agent down there and she is helpless without us. We cannot do a blasted thing for her if we cannot communicate. So work the problem, figure out a solution. If we have to, we work out an approach vector for a second shuttle and drop a sensor buoy around Hoth. We don’t leave her hanging! Let’s move it, people!”

The team got to work with fierce determination.

Fera looked at the holographic map of Hoth, with the red glowing dot showing where Namyr’s pod was estimated to land. Where are you at, Mordenta? Talk to us. She sent up a silent prayer to Force spirits to protect her agent. Her success could mean the difference between defeating the Empire and living in its shadow for all eternity.

* * *

HOTH

Namyr heard the line.

FIGHT!

That’s what they called it, “hearing the line.” In the self-defense courses at the Farm, the instructor taught female officers how to deal with grown men, had warned them that men would almost always have the advantage—Because males of almost every species are inherently stronger. The instructor finished each class by lining the women up along the wall and having just one of them attack him. The job of the women on the wall was to yell, “FIGHT! FIGHT!” repeatedly. Women who had taken such classes sometimes claimed that later in life, when their lives were on the line and there was nowhere to run, they heard the line of the other women on the wall, as if they were right there in the room with them.

Right now, in a dark hangar bay on Hoth, a thousand parsecs away from the Farm and alone with her enemy, Namyr heard the line.

FIGHT!

The harangi came at her neck, tip first. Without thinking, she went to catch the blade hand. Even as obviously weakened as he was, and even with her STACsuit giving her a strength boost, the Zabrak was surprisingly strong and lightning fast. His blade sliced across her armored forearm, tore a gash down the length of her bicep, and managed to penetrate some of the flesh. Namyr shuffle-stepped backward and ducked the next attack. The blade hissed inches from her head, then she came at him with an uppercut that landed.

Ageless Void gave her a push-kick to the abdomen that sent her stumbling backward, smashing into a plasteel crate, tumbling over it, and slamming to the floor. He leapt over the crate to come at her and Namyr performed a kip-up to return to her feet and was just in time to block the next thrust of the harangi.

FIGHT! she heard from the line. It was as though the women from the Farm were in the hangar with her, cheering her on.

Then she caught the next slash, grabbed the enemy’s wrist in both hands, and pulled him close. He head-butted her with frost-covered horns, and though the world spun and she tasted blood, Namyr hung on and twisted him around. She delivered an elbow to his jaw. He absorbed it like it was nothing. Then she placed her left ankle next to his right ankle and performed a shin-press, a classic Teras Käsi move, then reaped his foot out from under him. The Zabrak fell to the floor and she tried stomping his head, but he rolled out of the way and whipped back to his feet.

The two of them stared at each other a moment, both panting, both bleeding from the mouth. He push-stepped towards her. Namyr push-stepped away. Then he lunged at her, faking high then going low. She blocked the attack, gave him a spinning back-kick in the gut, and he delivered a jab to her chin, then a cross to her chest—

FIGHT!

She staggered backwards but recovered fast and delivered a jab of her own, then a cross, then a head-hook. Ageless slipped the first, parried the second, and did a bob-and-weave on the third, coming up and overwrapping her extended arm, pulling her in close, and giving her another head-butt that sent her reeling. He slashed at her chest, but her armor was too thick. He stabbed at her neck but she blocked that one.

Namyr’s back was up against a stack of crates. He came at her. She jabbed and he performed a split entry, his head slipping the jab, his inside hand landing on her jaw.

It hit so hard she saw stars.

Ageless saw his opening. He gave her a hammer-fist to the temple, then an elbow to the chest, followed by a cross and then an uppercut to the jaw. It was a dizzying onslaught of attacks she could not hope to keep up with.

The enemy will likely be a male! her instructor had yelled at her repeatedly. You will have to fight harder, you will have to be more creative, you will have to become feral!

Two more elbows and a head-butt. The world spun sickeningly around her.

FIGHT! the women of the line called.

He came down with the harangi, aimed right at her eye.

FIGHT!

Namyr’s right hand came up to block and she stared in shocked fascination as the blade went straight through her right hand, completely impaling it. Her killer seemed just as surprised. Blood streamed down her arm. Pain spread its fingers through her flesh. Fear, acidic and immediate, poured into Namyr’s stomach, but muscle memory kicked in and she dismissed the fear and kneed his groin. He didn’t budge. She elbowed his jaw and he just looked at her. He wasn’t huge, but he was as solid as a refrigerator. Her hand still impaled, Namyr cried out and kneed him again. But he did not let that faze him. He pushed forward, his other hand clenching her throat and squeezing. All the blood stopped pumping to her brain.

His hand was cold, like a block of ice. His eyes were close to hers. She could see the fury in them, but also something else. She saw exhaustion in them.

He head-butted her with his horned head and she cried out in pain.

FIGHT! The women of the line were screaming. She heard her instructor, bellowing at the top of his lungs, FIGHT!

She kneed him again, and this time he made some space from her. It wasn’t much, but it was enough. With her head and back pinned against the wall, Namyr raised one foot up, placed her heel into his hip, and pushed with all her strength. He was strong. Even with her STACsuit helping her, he barely moved. He was a seasoned killer and he knew when he was close to victory.

FIGHT! FIGHT!

He squeezed her throat tighter. She felt the world slipping away from her. Sound became muffled.

If you die here, she told herself, you don’t get to see Ash again. Ever.

Her hand still impaled, Namyr’s fingers reached over the handguard and gripped his fist. Nerve endings sang. Her blood was spilling from her hand, trickling down to her shoulders. And she pushed his hip with her foot again. He slipped back an inch, then three inches, then a full foot. Now he let go of her throat to push her foot off his hip, and she had just enough room to slide along the wall, stumbling over a plasteel crate and falling onto a hammock that some ship’s mechanic had no doubt hung up here so that he could sleep in between shifts.

The Zabrak yanked his knife out of her hand. Namyr screamed as the blade tore out of it and streaks of blood splashed across her face.

“Mujea!” she screamed loud enough for her commlink to hear. It was the code that meant she was in desperate trouble, so her people on the Shadow would know what happened if she went silent on comms. “Muj—”

He came at her.

She crawled backward and fell over the hammock, landed on the floor, and for a moment, for just an instant, she saw the opening. Ageless Void staggered over to her. His legs…They look like a droid’s legs when they’ve frozen. She realized he’d been out in the cold too long, his legs were going numb.

He came right at her, preparing to stab down at her stomach. As he knelt down to finish her off, Namyr kicked upward at her killer’s chin. It connected. He grunted, then stabbed downward, hard and fast. In an instant, Namyr placed her heels in his hip, turned her uninjured side towards him, stuck out her arm, and wrapped it around the downward-slashing arm. And she held on for dear life. Her right arm was wrapped around his left. The assassin’s harangi-wielding hand was trapped in her armpit. But he was strong, and was slowly pulling it out.

Muscle memory kicked in again. She had been here before, in training, and remembered what to do. She wrapped her legs around his waist in guard, a position she had drilled incessantly at the Farm. She kept squeezing her legs around his midsection and hooked her ankles behind his back, not letting him escape, not letting him gain leverage, not letting him gain space to wriggle his knife hand free.

Then, his free hand came down on her face. A huge, meaty fist smashed her nose, then her temple, then her jaw. Namyr’s ears rang and she tasted copper. No self-defense class had ever gone this brutally, she had never experienced an opponent this savage and strong. The entire world emptied out and all that was left was her and this man, this killer. He smashed her face again, and again, and again. Something cracked. Blood ran down her nose and from her lips.

FIGHT!

Namyr heard the line and squeezed tighter, then reached up with her free hand and grabbed hold of his ice-covered collar. She got a good hold of it and pressed her forearm into his throat. That got an immediate reaction. The assassin knew at once what she was trying to do. She was attempting a collar choke, trying to use his own jacket to cut off air and blood to his brain.

But she could not get a good choke with just one hand. One of her arms was currently occupied, wrapped around his knife-wielding arm. But then, in her addled brain and fear-induced shock, she remembered a trick. It just came to her, like the shouting of the other women in the line, like a half-remembered but catchy refrain from some old cantina song. With her arm still wrapped over and around his knife-wielding arm, Namyr grabbed the lower half of his jacket’s lapel. Her free hand grabbed the opposite-side lapel. Now, as she pressed her forearm into his throat, she could create a tighter squeeze.

The Zabrak’s eyes bulged. He knew. He knew he was in danger as she inched closer and closer to a workable choke. The combination of her skill, her STACsuit’s strength-enhancing endoskeleton, and the Zabrak’s exhaustion, was giving her just enough of an edge.

Do it, Namyr! someone shouted into her mind. Sounded like Ghe’sh, the chief instructor at the Farm. Do it now! Finish it!

He tried to bring his fist down again, but Namyr hugged him close, placing her forehead against his hard chest. Now he couldn’t get a good shot at her head—a thing she learned by accident when sparring the other guys, and a tactic reinforced by her grappling instructor a million years ago at the Farm.

Hang in there! Let him swing away! Endure the hits! Don’t let go of the choke!

Her mind heard the instructor’s voice, and her body obeyed. She squeezed tighter, their bodies even more a strange and hideous tableau of desperate violence—him struggling to be free of her so that he could swing his knife into her throat, and her doing everything in her power to prevent that. Her head buried in his chest, he resorted to pummeling her ribs with his one free fist.

The air shot out of her lungs, but the STACsuit had good padding.

FIGHT! HANG ON! FIGHT!

Now he lifted her completely off the floor. She hung on, legs still clamped around his waist like iron bars, blood dribbling down her numb face, dribbling down her arm. He was easily able to slam her against the wall, easily able to slam her into the crates, the doorframe. He slammed her into a pair of glass windows that someone had probably meant to install at some station somewhere, and the glass shattered.

But he could not shake her loose. That he could not do.

She heard the line.

FIGHT!

Namyr knew this was it. Her only chance. She had caught him by surprise with a bit of Teras Käsi grappling, sloppily applied. He also had not counted on the STACsuit’s added strength. If he got loose now, if he gained leverage, he would stab her, and keep stabbing until she was dead in a pool on the floor. He would not let her get a second chance, and she was not a good enough fighter to change tactics. He would murder her and no question.

And then Mother does not get her prize and the Empire wins!

She could not give her killer a second chance. No kriffing way.

He stood straight up, and her legs stayed in their durasteel grip. Then, all at once, he dropped to the ground and slammed her on her back. His weighty body came down on top of her like a sandcrawler. The back of her head smacked hard on the rock floor and she saw stars. His weight on top of her, it crushed her lungs. Her breath left her again. Her grip on his lapel weakened—

FIGHT!

—and she reapplied the grip a half-second later, squeezing tighter. Squeezing so tight her fingers began to scream with pain. The tendons in her injured hand were singing, maybe they were half severed.

She looked into his eyes. The Zabrak stared rage at her. Then surprise. Then something else. Sadness?

His face was turning purple. She had the choke on right.

He punched her one more time in the side of the head, then slowly, very slowly, he went limp.

She kept squeezing.

He was lying unconscious on top of her and she was bleeding and squeezing and screaming.

And she heard the line.

FIGHT!

She didn’t let up.

The Empire does not get to win!

She kept squeezing. Thirty seconds passed. I did it. I accomplished the mission. I—

Namyr suddenly remembered why she was here. Not to kill the operative known as Ageless Void, but to save him. To rescue him. She had been in such survival mode since his attack that she had almost forgotten that.

She quickly released her grip on his collar and rolled him over. She put her ear to his mouth. Still breathing, thankfully. She had no binders to cuff him with, since her gear had been utterly destroyed upon landing. She started looking around for something to—

She heard the giant footsteps approaching. She turned first left, then right. She had just enough time to feel true despair and curse the Force before the wampa came charging at her. It was upon her before she could blink, and its yellow, slobbery jaws opened wide to her and she said a silent farewell to Ash, wherever she was—

A blaster bolt came out of nowhere and hit the wampa dead in its left eye. Its head jerked to the side, its whole body fell that way. It fell to the ground, spasmed twice, then died.

In utter shock, Namyr blinked. Panting and bleeding and shivering, she looked around. At the far end of the hangar bay, there stood a blue-skinned being with huge red eyes, and bandages across his head. The Duros was in an orange flight suit, and held his A180 service pistol in hand, still aimed at the dead wampa. Slowly, he approached her. When he was two steps from her, the Duros paused and looked at her. Then he looked at Ageless on the ground. Then back at her.

“You…look horrible,” he said.

Namyr’s lips were busted, numb. “Who…?”

“Oh, my name is Kevv,” he said. “Judging by your dress and the fact that he tried to kill you, I gather you two aren’t on the same side. Therefore, I assume you’re Alliance. What’s the plan for getting out?”

* * *

Kevv looked the woman up and down. She was battered and bloody, and clearly still in shock from all that had transpired in these last few minutes. He gave her a moment to collect herself while he walked over to look at the wampa. He gave it two more shots to the head, just to be sure. Then he took the lasso of flexisteel wire from around his waist and started hog-tying the Imperial agent. Kevv had looted the flexisteel wire from the gantries that still hung in the cargo bay in sublevel two.

“Who are you?” the woman panted. Kevv was no judge of Human beauty, but the woman looked rugged, with her hair cut short and pulled back tight. She wore only a bulky-looking full-body suit of black armor, some of which had been slashed by the Zabrak’s harangi blade.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

“My name is Edreezel Kevv, like I said. I’m a pilot, recently of the Deep Core Group. And you are?”

“Mordenta.”

He nodded. He realized it was probably a codename, and that he was likely looking at one of the Alliance’s “wet operatives.” Probably a Zero Soul. He knew them mostly by rumor, though he had had a few encounters with them before. “Were you sent by Mother?”

Mordenta blinked at that. “How do you know Mother?”

Kevv shrugged. “I ran an op on Sarapin where I piloted one of your kind into an Imperial weapons factory. I was part of his exfil plan—the exfiltration point was at the top of a smokestack. I heard the wet operative talking to someone he called ‘Mother’ on his commlink. Ran a similar op with a different wet operative on Bogden. You are a Zero Soul, then?”

She nodded. Still shaking, she hugged herself to keep warm. No doubt the adrenal dump to her system still had her dazzled.

Kevv pointed. “You need to get that looked at. We have a 2-1B here.”

“What?” Then, as if suddenly remembering, she looked down at her bloody hand. “Oh. Yes.”

“Come with me. I’ll haul our friend here.”

“Okay. But be careful.”

“I won’t hurt him. Much.”

“I’m not worried about him.”

Kevv took her meaning. “He’s tied up with flexisteel wire, exhausted from injuries, lack of food or water, and freezing near to death. What is he going to do?”

“You’d be surprised what his kind can do.”

“What, you mean Zabraks?”

“No. I mean Imperial Intelligence.”

Kevv gave the Zabrak another look. “You mean he’s not just some desperate trooper who got left behind?”

“No. From what I’ve been told, he is one of the most dangerous single beings in the galaxy.”

Thirty minutes later they had her bandaged up, using strips of cloth from both the Zabrak’s clothing and Kevv’s own. While Mordenta was being tended to by 2-1B, Kevv was rooting around inside the Zabrak’s duffel bag. He found some materials that might be useful, especially the multi-tool and the harangi. “These ought to help us dice that wampa up nicely,” he said. “We’ll need the food. And we should act fast, before the meat goes bad. We can freeze whatever we can’t eat right now—if there’s one use for Hoth, it’s as a freezer.” He looked at her. “You know how to skin and prep an animal?”

Mordenta shrugged, testing the range of motion in her hand after 2-1B finished with the stitching and bandages. The hand seemed more or less okay, and 2-1B said she was lucky the blade had missed all essential nerves and tendons. As for her face, a small application from 2-1B’s suite of injectors had brought the swelling down, and also stopped the bleeding. The pain, though, the pain still persisted. “I haven’t done it in a while,” she said. “But I think I can remember my wilderness survival training.”

“Good, because that’s a big animal and I’ll need the help.”

“What about him?” She pointed to the Zabrak lying on the ground, still unconscious.

“I don’t know. What about him? Do you know his story?”

“His codename is Ageless Void, he’s an operative for the Empire, but that’s all I know. I was sent in to bag him. Alive.”

Kevv nodded. “So, you weren’t sent here to rescue survivors.”

“No. And to my understanding the Alliance doesn’t believe there are any survivors, at least none that weren’t taken prisoner. The Empire is still chasing some of our people across the galaxy. Princess Leia Organa is missing, the rumor is she got out with Captain Solo, but there’s no solid proof.” She looked at him. “Any chance any of them came back here?”

Kevv shook his head. “This place is a ghost town, a giant snowball. It’s a miracle Varzi and I made it as far as we did.”

“Varzi?”

“My friend. The other pilot. You probably saw him out there.”

Mordenta winced. “I saw…what was left of him. When I came in, I mean. I’m sorry for your loss.”

“This is a rebellion against a tyrannical government,” he said, looking squarely at her. He checked the power pack on his A180. “There will be losses.”

She nodded. “But not us. Not today.”

“No. Not us.”

“We’d better get to work on that wampa, if we want to make sure we make it out of this.”

“Can you call your people, have them come and rescue us?”

“I already have done,” she said. “I sent a message along my commlink. I haven’t gotten a response yet, but the message ought to be relayed out to the transmitter inside the insertion pod that brought me here.

“But you said no one’s responded,” Kevv made clear.

“Not yet. Perhaps there’s just some interference from the weather. I’ll try again after—”

“Your message didn’t get out,” said a groggy voice. They both turned and saw the Zabrak looking up at them from the floor. “And no one is coming to extract you.” His face was bloody and swollen, and there was a cut above his lip.

“Well, look who’s up,” said Kevv.

“What do you mean?” Mordenta asked the Imperial. “How would you know?”

“I found your insertion pod,” Ageless said. He was still hog-tied, so he struggled to roll onto his side and get a better look at the two of them. “I sliced into the transmitter and connected it to a transceiver deck I took off an Imperial probe droid. I spliced them together and now the transceiver deck is coded. It will not open to anyone without the code. That’s me. So, any message you sent after that, it went first to my transceiver deck, and there it waits, in a queue of any other messages you’ve tried sending…and it will not transmit to your insertion pod until I allow it.”

Kevv watched the woman closely. Half of Mordenta’s face was still swollen and bruised, Part of her face was as blue as Kevv’s own flesh. She knelt down beside Ageless, but Kevv noticed she kept her distance, and had her MR-185 blaster pistol in hand. “You’re lying.”

“I’m not.” Ageless nodded towards his duffel bag. “The black box inside my bag. Get it. Take a look if you want. Use the slicer rig to check it out—but unless you’re a master slicer yourself, and also happen to know about droid hardware and architecture, you’re never getting around the code.”

Kevv took out the black box he was talking about, examined it, turned it over in his hands. He was no slicer and no engineer, but he knew a durasteel black box when he saw one—it was not too dissimilar from the design of the black boxes that concealed the flight recorders of many starships. And it did indeed have power sockets on its side that were reminiscent of the access ports a droid would use to jack in. “I don’t think he’s lying,” Kevv said wearily. Their problems were compounding by the minute.

Mordenta, her stoic face seemingly chiseled from ice, walked over and snatched the box out of Kevv’s hand. After jacking in with the slicer rig, she scanned it for a few seconds before tossing it across the table and giving vent to a curse.

“You idiot,” she said. “You slamo! Do you understand what you’ve done?”

“Guaranteed my way out?” Ageless said, and smirked.

“Dank farrik! You’ve cut us off from our only escape! We came here to save you! We came here because—”

“Because Horizon Lost has been sent here to kill me. Yes, I know.”

That stopped her short.

But Kevv was only confused. “What is Horizon Lost?”

“Another operative,” Mordenta said. “Like him. From what I understand, they’re all cut from the same cloth.”

“More or less,” said Ageless, wriggling across the floor as best he could to rest his head against a wall, so that he didn’t have to keep twisting to look at them. “So, it looks like we need each other.”

“We don’t need you, Imp,” Kevv said, and spat on him.

“Yes, we do,” Mordenta said cloudily. “He has to access the Viper’s spliced transceiver deck, which I need to send a message up to the Shadow—that’s the ship that brought me into the system. They won’t come until I tell them when and where. They won’t risk sending people to pick me up, not without confirmation I’m alive.”

She looked at Ageless with supreme disgust.

“I came here to save you. If you heard our communications, then I know you heard that part.”

“I did,” he said. “But I also heard your intentions. You aren’t here to ‘save me,’ you’re here to ‘acquire me.’ Difference. What have they got lined up for me, Rebel?” He made Rebel into a curse. “Huh? A nice prison cell in some smelly secret base on Tatooine? Is that what’s waiting for me? Maybe on Nal Hutta or Dantooine or in the debris field left of Alderaan?”

“Keep Alderaan’s name out of your mouth! You disgust me. Anyone that still supports a government that would do that—”

“Like you people did to the Death Star?” he countered.

“Please. We destroyed the weapon that destroyed Alderaan! To keep it from happening anywhere else again!”

“Do you know how many people were on the Death Star? Can you guess how many of them I knew, people I trained with? We’re all just following orders here, Rebel. And do you think all of us support what Grand Moff Tarkin did? Do you think all of us support the Emperor or any of his lapdogs in everything they do?”

Kevv tilted his head quizzically. “If you don’t support their actions, then why follow them?”

“Because before the Rebellion they weren’t this bad,” Ageless said. “They made missteps, yes, and sometimes they crossed the line, but all governments do that. It wasn’t until Scarif, when you killed so many to take the Death Star plans, that you provoked the worst elements of the Empire!” He glared daggers at them both. “You caused this! All of you!”

“How do you figure that, Imp?” Kevv chuckled. “We were fighting against tyranny—”

“And overstepped yourselves and crossed the point of no return, summarily losing the moral high ground.” He snorted. “Every government has idiots like Tarkin and men with messiah complexes like Palpatine, but you beat them in the political arena! Do you understand that? You beat them by voting, by protesting, by making your will known! Not by rioting and cyberattacks! Not by provoking them! By provoking them, you give monsters like Tarkin and Palpatine and Vader and all the rest of them all the ammo they need to paint you as the enemy!” He spat out a bloody gob of spit. “You did this! You made a bad problem worse! With your terrorist attacks and bombings! You made the Empire escalate things! You helped make them what they are! You did!”

Kevv had never seen such adamant rage leveled at him. Those eyes…they were the windows into a soul that had been transformed, radicalized, indoctrinated, and could perhaps never see any other perspective again.

“You talk about ‘voting’ to get rid of this madness?” Kevv said, his voice an icy whisper. “How can we vote when democracy was taken from us?”

“It was a democracy that voted Palpatine as supreme leader,” Ageless said. “He is the lawfully appointed ruler, and it can never be argued otherwise. To oppose him means you are, by definition, outlaws. Criminals. Malcontents. Belligerents.”

“This is how you justify it? This is your argument for how we are somehow responsible for what happened to Alderaan? Us? The Alliance?”

“Not just you,” the Imperial said. “All of us. You, me, her, and the assassin that’s surely out there right now, hunting us. The whole damn lot of us. We all participated in this. By not participating. By not standing up and saying something when it mattered.” Ageless snorted. “If we had been paying attention, the madman never would’ve gotten into power, never would’ve gotten beyond Naboo politics, never would’ve gotten close to the Chancellor’s seat, never would’ve dissolved the Republic and formed an Empire. We didn’t do anything when it mattered, we only started fighting after we failed to defend democracy.”

Ageless leaned forward and glared sabers at them. “You—didn’t—defend—democracy!”

Kevv and Mordenta exchanged a look.

Ageless hove a sigh. “I’m hungry. Are you going to carve up that wampa, or am I going to have to crawl in there and gnaw off a piece with my teeth?”

* * *

As Ageless watched the two of them skinning the wampa, he felt his stomach starting to ache. The hunger was finally catching up to him, starting to turn in on itself.

There were several effects caused by extreme hunger. One of them was headaches, another was hallucinations, and yet another lesser-known effect was honesty. The body will try to resist by eating what it has in reserves of fat, and the mind will make do by trying to go idle and shut down or at least ease up on many systems. Tiredness and sleepiness would follow. The body would begin negotiating with the brain, seeing what it needed and what it could do without.

But once body and mind agreed that they were in a crisis, they both sort of became fed up with the pretenses of dignity and politeness and modesty and all other manner of social mores that made it easy to get along with your neighbor. When that happened, honesty fell from the lips as easily as drool from a rancor’s mouth.

And what Ageless had said back in the medical center suddenly struck him as true. It was something that had been hiding deep beneath the surface, a tickle at the back of his mind, an itch that had started…when? He couldn’t say exactly, but a hatred of both the Empire and those of the Rebellion for letting it get this far had started to grow. And he was a man used to facing his own weaknesses and crushing them, and so he knew that he also had a part to play in the fall of democracy. Virtually all of them did. The only ones free of blame were those who had been children when Palpatine made his transition from Chancellor to Emperor, when he began taking steps to dissolve the Republic.

Even the Jedi were to blame. Whether you believed the rumors that they had been framed in some big conspiracy or not, at the very least one had to admit that they had been too complacent.

We all were.

Why run from it now? His mind and body were exhausted, battered, hungry, and frozen. And now he knew that the Imperial Intelligence Service, an agency he had followed with great fervor and a passion to put an end to all this fighting, was no more or less corrupt than the institutions around it. He had thought—hoped—that the Service’s ability to cut through artifice and see the truth hidden by corrupt officials and egomaniacal Moffs and nearsighted Rebel leaders would one day avail them some new, shining bastion of truth and democracy.

But Director Abaca had betrayed him. As had Ida. Abaca had sent Zumter to Hoth, into Echo Base, to have a nice desolate world on which to kill and abandon the operative known as Ageless Void. What did this mean for him now? After all he had done for them, where was he supposed to go?

And why did they betray me? What were they protecting if not the Rebellion? Again, if they were Rebel sympathizers, there was no way they would have allowed him to assassinate so many of their top leaders. So, who was routing the money for the Rebels, and what was their real goal?

Already his mind was working on the problem—just as it had become obsessed with sussing out the malware code, it now turned itself to a new mission.

“I can tell you’re ruminating on something,” said Mordenta, pausing to wipe her brow. Her hands were bloody from tearing off the wampa’s hide. “What is it?”

“You wouldn’t understand,” Ageless said. His eyes watered—the smell of the wampa’s innards was a new kind of revolting he had never experienced.

“I might. Try me.”

At first he just ignored her. Then, more hunger-born honesty fell from his lips. “I have a plan.”

“Yeah?” said Kevv, slicing off another piece of the wampa’s thigh muscles. “Let’s hear it. There’s a lot of meat here, but three of us will go through this in a few weeks, and that’s assuming we can freeze it all in time. So if you’ve got a plan to get us out of here, I’m all ears.”

“You’re a pilot. The two of us,” he said, nodding to Mordenta, “are spies, assassins. We’ve got another one out there. I’d be surprised if Horizon Lost isn’t already in position somewhere, atop a hill, his sniper rifle aimed right at us.” He looked out the dark bay door. Night was falling fast. “Probably a silenced rifle with invisible blaster bolts, like your MR pistol there. The probe droids will be retasked, given new orders to post themselves within sight of all doors, all exits, and within range to shoot anyone on sight.”

Mordenta stabbed the harangi into the wampa’s thigh. She nodded. Flexed her injured hand, the one Ageless had stabbed with that same blade. “And the Vipers will all be programmed to send him live vidfeed of what they see, so that he knows which doorways we’re exiting from.”

“Right,” Ageless said. “And if he has to move, he’ll reposition himself to take the shot. Shouldn’t be too hard, there’s only two of us, as far as he knows. He won’t know about the Duros here.”

“Why wouldn’t he know about me?” asked Kevv. “The probe droids could’ve told him.”

“If the Vipers had seen you, they would have either stunned and captured you, or blasted you on sight. Either way, you wouldn’t be here with us.” His eyes narrowed. A thought suddenly occurred to him. “Which means that they weren’t watching that doorway when you and your friend came in.”

“So?” Kevv said.

But Mordenta seemed to see where he was going. “A blind spot?”

He nodded. “Not enough probe droids, yeah. The Empire probably didn’t want to drop too many. A dozen Vipers sending out constant communiqués would be easy for any returning Rebels to spot.”

“So? What does this information do for us?” the Duros asked.

Ageless pursed his lips, thinking. “It means we have a shot here. It means we can use what he doesn’t know against him, as long as we work together. We have a Gonk droid here, that ought to give us enough power to boost the transceiver deck’s signal to call your Rebel pals, and have them come rescue us. It means you’re going to have to let me go.” He added, “And give me a weapon. Horizon Lost is out there, and he’s coming.”

Mordenta gave him a look. “Let me guess. You won’t give us access to the transceiver deck unless we do.”

Ageless smiled at her. “You understand our situation perfectly.”

The Human and the Duros exchanged glances. Neither seemed convinced enough to trust him, but neither seemed to have a better idea.

To move the negotiations along, Ageless decided to add a bonus. More direct honesty fell from his lips. “And if you help me get out…I’ll give you something your bosses have always wanted.”

“Yeah?” Mordenta said. “What’s that?”

“The Kingdom.”

Mordenta seemed to consider that. The Duros watched her. Watched him.

“What is the Kingdom?” the Duros said.

“A myth,” Mordenta replied. “He’s reaching.”

“You sure about that?” Ageless said.

For a moment, none of them spoke.

“Keep cutting,” he told them. “We need to eat. Or at least I do. And you will, too, if this plan doesn’t work. We’ll need our strength to face him. He has advanced imtech and his body is filled with enhancements, endocrine injectors, upgrades my body always rejected. So he’s like me but better.” He nodded. “And he can’t wait to get you in his sights.”

Mordenta looked at him. “You know him pretty well?”

He nodded. “His real name is Korvas Sark. And he lives for this kind of stuff. We all do. That’s why the Voice chose us.”

“The Voice?”

“We call it the Voice of Ether. We don’t know who’s behind it. I know it’s not the director and it’s not anyone else I know—the Voice of Ether calls us and gives us our missions. The Voice tasks us. They are somebody with Security Clearance Level Black-Four, that’s all I know.”

“So the Voice would be the one that sent Sark after you.”

“That’s right.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“What does the Voice want you dead?”

For a moment Ageless wondered how much he ought to share, then said, “I believe it’s because I found something I wasn’t supposed to.”

“What?”

“Doesn’t matter. Stay focused on the task at hand. Getting out of here.”

After a few seconds, Mordenta returned to cutting up the wampa. Then she took some things from the Duros’ survival kit to make a fire, and started cooking some of the meat while the Duros prepared other pieces to be put on ice. Ageless watched them both, gauging their mien. When finally she spoke again, Mordenta looked at him. “This Sark. He ever been to Hoth?”

Ageless shrugged. “How would I know? Everything within the Kingdom is compartmentalized, no agent knows what the other agents get up to.”

“Do you think he brought a ship with him? Could we maybe find the ship, and forget about finding him?”

He shook his head. “No. He would’ve been dropped off. He wouldn’t want the ship left on the surface, because he knew I might try to—” He stopped. It hit him like a bolt out of the blue.

“What?” Kevv said. “What is it?”

“His ship.” Ageless looked at Mordenta.

“What about his ship?”

“You just gave me an idea.”

“I hope it’s a good one,” she said.

“It is. Much better than just calling your Rebel friends to come get us. And less dangerous, I think.”

“Oh?”

“We’ve got droids here. Lots of them. And one of them is a protocol droid. Where is R-3P0?”

Kevv snorted. “He was torn apart by the wampa, remember?”

“Is he still operational?”

The Duros shrugged. “Mostly. I tried to reattach his legs and torso. He’s…a little off, but he can walk.”

“Go get him.”

Kevv called for R-3PO, and one of the nearby R2 units, who had been watching the organics from afar, went in search of it. After a few minutes the crimson-plated protocol droid came tottering into the hangar bay from a dark corridor. “Yes? Did zzzzomeone call me?”

“Yeah,” Ageless said. “I’ll bet you’re programmed to interpret code, in particularly layered encryption and obstruction code, aren’t you?”

“I have indeed had upgradezzz for such tasks, zzzir.”

Ageless nodded. “I thought so. Why else have a protocol droid here? The translation circuits allow for upgraded modules for just such a reason.” He tried sitting up, with mixed results. He looked over at Mordenta. “You came in on an insertion pod because you were trying not to be spotted. But Imperials don’t have to worry about that. Sark would have had a pilot drop him somewhere on the planet, then circle around in the sky, waiting for him to call back.”

“So?”

“So, he’ll be using an encrypted Imperial code. An overlapping phalanx encryption, if I had to guess. Nearly unbreakable.”

Kevv shrugged. “And what does that mean?”

“Do you know what else uses overlapping phalanx encryption?”

They both looked at him, puzzled.

Ageless looked at R-3P0. “Do you?”

“Imperial probe droidzzz, sir. Better known as Viperzzz.”

“Exactly.”

For a moment, neither of the two Rebels seemed to get it. Then it slowly dawned on Mordenta’s face. She brightened. “The transceiver deck you took from the Viper! Could you—”

“Maybe,” he said. “With the help of R-3PO here, yeah, just maybe.”

“Maybe what?” Kevv asked. “Somebody care to fill me in here?”

“If I can get the transceiver deck to patch me into the encrypted channel the Vipers are using to communicate, and if our protocol droid here can translate the obstruction code for me, I could make a call up to whatever shuttle is up there waiting to pick Sark back up.” He smiled. “I can make them think I’m him, and call for a ride out of here.”

The Duros tilted his head quizzically. “Will it work?”

“Worth a shot. And if not, we can always try your Rebel friends anyway.” He looked at them both. “So, what do you say? Partners?”

R-3PO stepped forward, staggered, and would have fallen over if Kevv had not caught him. “Partnerzzzz.”

From the shadows, a few other droids rolled or stepped forward, including the two astromechs and 2-1B. Apparently they had all been waiting nearby, listening in. “I would also like to find purpose elsewhere,” 2-1B said.

“Looks like the droids are all in,” Ageless said to Mordenta and Kevv. “How about you two?”

A cold wind blew through the open bay door while the three of them considered each other. Night was approaching. Ageless watched the two of them mull it over. They would come around. They had to.

Listening to the wind, he imagined Sark out there waiting on them. Sark was an amazing operator. Ageless had met him, trained with him a couple times before they were both given their codenames and sent off on their first missions. His imtech was second to none, and he missed nothing. They sent him to kill me, he thought. And he agreed to do it. That fact kept hitting him hard, just like the truth he had admitted earlier.

If the Empire was broken, and the Rebellion could not be trusted to do the right thing, which side did that leave him on?

My own side, he thought. Where else is there to go when this is over but out in the cold?