14

Tonin decided that it might be a good thing to be the King of the Droids.

He was now a mighty leader, in command of hundreds of utility droids aboard Iron Fist.

He had modified many of them, with magnetic treads replacing their wheels, so that they might maneuver on the outer hull of the vessel. They clustered at the engines and the hyper-comm antennae, using their internal tools to chew and splice their way into external system ports and accesses.

More moved within Iron Fist at Tonin’s commands. Some were in the engine compartments. Others had spliced into the computer data cables. One was now in the security system that monitored Lara’s quarters; it fed modified recordings of her to the observers, so she could do whatever she pleased in her quarters while they saw only footage of her sleeping. Others dragged cables and dataports through the walls, giving Lara access to more and more secure portions of the ship and the computer archives.

Even so, half of the utility droids Tonin commanded confined themselves to ordinary ship’s functions … for Tonin had to make sure the ship’s central computer didn’t notice a sudden drop in the utility droid population. If droid MSE-6-P303K spent its day doing Tonin’s bidding, droid MSE-6-E629L would spend half its day doing the duties assigned by the ship’s computer, then would visit one of the special interfaces Tonin had had installed at points in the ship, assume the identity of MSE-6-P303K, and spend the other half of its day doing that droid’s duties.

So far, the ship’s main computer hadn’t noticed. This was, Tonin reflected, because Tonin was so much better at this task than the ship’s computer was. Perhaps the ship’s computer considered maintenance of a fleet of MSE-6 droids beneath its dignity.

The droid-guard in the corridor transmitted a warning to Tonin; it indicated someone was approaching Lara’s door. Tonin decoupled himself from Lara’s terminal and rolled hastily into her closet. But when the door opened, it was Lara herself who entered, looking tired and even dazed—but not hurt or unhappy, so far as Tonin could read human emotions. “Good morning, Tonin.”

He beeped a greeting at her, then returned to his post at the terminal and extended his scomp-link once more into its data port. To the terminal’s screen, he transmitted, YOU WERE GONE FOR A LONG TIME.

“I’m sorry. I had to go on a mission. I think I got a communication through to Mon Remonda, though.” She sat on her bed, pulled her boots off, and lay down. “I also gave myself a mild concussion and got personally congratulated by General Melvar for ‘tenacity and courage in pursuit of the enemy.’ ”

THE CONCUSSION WAS PROBABLY A BAD IDEA.

“Don’t be so sure.” She gave him a little smile. “What have you been up to?”

WE HAVE HOLOCOMM ACCESS WHENEVER YOU NEED IT, BUT IF YOU USE IT, THEY WILL DETECT IT VERY QUICKLY. AND MY DROIDS FOUND AN UNMAPPED SECTION OF THE SHIP.

“Show me.”

Tonin accessed this morning’s most interesting recording and transmitted it to the terminal’s screen.

It was a very low view, as was to be expected due to the MSE-6’s tiny size, of a bank of rectangular viewports seen from an adjoining corridor. Beyond the viewports were chambers that were obviously medical wards. One was an operating theater. Another held cages filled with sapient and near-sapient life-forms: Ewoks, rodentlike Ranats, Bilars with their stuffed-doll features but lacking the carefree expressions of most of their kind, a pink Ortolan with its trunklike nose pressed against the front bars of its cage, meter-long Chadra-Fan with their furry faces and gigantic ears, and more.

She sat up, her tiredness apparently forgotten for the moment. “Is this everything you have on this chamber?”

YES, FOR NOW.

“We need more. Get a holocam droid into that chamber, assign it there permanently. And get a droid with a computer link in behind the walls, see what sort of data we can intercept. This is really important.”

IT WILL BE DONE.

“Now, I’ve got to sleep.” She flopped back onto the bed. “Concussions are no fun.”

DON’T DO THAT ANYMORE.

Admiral Rogriss froze with his wineglass halfway to his lips. “You want what?”

Face smiled. “Surely you have one available.”

Rogriss set his glass down with a thump. “Available to me, yes. I can’t make it available to you.”

“Even to destroy Zsinj?”

“Even then. Factor in the likelihood that Iron Fist will destroy her. Factor in the likelihood that you Rebels will destroy her—accidents do happen. Then append the certainty that you’ll take the credit for Zsinj’s destruction regardless. I become a failure who, at worst, collaborated with the enemy and, at best, lost an Interdictor cruiser. No, no, no.”

“Well, we can do a lot of things to keep this from happening,” Face said. “First, we’ll assign two of our own Imperial Star Destroyers to protect your Interdictor. Second, if you inform only the most trusted members of the Interdictor’s bridge crew that they’re temporarily working with the New Republic, the majority of the crewmen will never figure it out—they’ll see our Star Destroyers out of their ports and presume that they’re Imperial. Later, you can say that the Interdictor blundered into a fight between the New Republic and Zsinj and was able to get in the killing blow while everyone else was figuring out whom to shoot.”

“What will you give me?”

Face frowned. “How’s that again?”

“If I do this, I’ll be giving you an Interdictory even temporarily. Will you give me, say, a Mon Calamari cruiser for one of my missions?”

“I’ll give you a framed and autographed holo of Face Loran, Boy Actor.”

Rogriss brightened. “Excellent! I can trade it for a framed and autographed holo of Tetran Cowall. I always preferred his holodramas anyway.”

Face seized his chest over his heart. “A good shot, Admiral. I concede the duel.” Then he gave the admiral his most frank and evaluative stare. “Realistically, you’re not giving us anything. You’re joining us on a mission of mutual interest. If we succeed, we both win. If you lose your Interdictor, you can be assured we’ll have lost both Imperial Star Destroyers assigned to protect it … and many more ships besides. I guess it boils down to the question of what’s more important—accomplishing your Zsinj mission because it’s good for the Empire or because it’s good for Admiral Rogriss.”

The admiral touched his own chest, an echo of Face’s gesture. “You shoot well yourself.” He looked away, at the white bulkhead wall, and was silent for several long seconds. “I’ll do it,” he said.

“I’m glad.”

“We must have a rendezvous point.” The admiral held up his wineglass.

Face touched it with his own. “Good to be collaborating with you, Admiral.”

Lara could almost feel the stare of Tonin’s holocam eye on her. The R2 had been very solicitous since her return from the Comkin mission. Worse, it seemed to sense the way her spirits lowered as she reviewed the data they continued to receive from the secret chamber on Iron Fist.

It was awful stuff. She didn’t get into the worst of it in the summary she recorded for Mon Remonda. The attached data file would give the New Republic the most gruesome details.

“Project Chubar is what they call the techniques used to raise the intelligence of sapient and near-sapient beings. The name derives from a character in a series of children’s holos about a bilar, a cute mammalian creature, who is a clever pet of a young girl. The holos used animated graphics instead of actors. It’s a twisted sort of touch that Face Loran supplied the voice for Chubar. Maybe you ought not tell him that one of his roles was the inspiration for the name of the project. Anyway, Chubar involves chemical treatments and a teaching regimen to bring a humanoid’s mental functions up to those of human average—sometimes higher. In the case of creatures that are already intelligent—for instance, Ewoks—the process enhances mental traits that bring its type of intelligence more in line with a human’s. Less reliance on sensory data and more on analysis, for instance.

“Project Minefield derived from Chubar. It involves a second, and much faster-acting, set of chemical treatments that affect the victim’s mind on a much shorter-term basis. While the chemicals are at their maximum effect, Zsinj’s agents can implant a delusion and a mission in the victim’s mind. The delusion is usually that some awful situation is in effect and can’t be stopped until the mission is accomplished.

“Both the delusion and the mission are associated with a trigger, usually a code phrase. Until the phrase is used, the victim is unaware of what has been done to him … in theory. Some of the doctors’s annotations indicate that the victims sometimes suspect that something is wrong. But when the phrase is used, the mission pops to the top and becomes the victim’s number one priority. Um, this conditioning wears off after a while. The length of time it remains viable varies from species to species, but seldom exceeds one standard year.”

She scrolled through screens of data on her terminal. “The code phrase can have a variable in it. Let’s say the mission is ‘Kidnap someone’ and the trigger phrase is ‘I need a new speeder, someone broke mine.’ You’d tell the brainwashed agent, ‘I need a new speeder, Elassar Targon broke mine,’ and the victim would interpret that as ‘Kidnap Elassar Targon.’ It’s a fairly versatile setup.” She skimmed through more screens of data. “So far, the treatment only works on mammalian species.

“Project Funeral is Zsinj’s major operation using the Minefield technique. Our brainstorming session pretty much nailed its purpose and intent—fomenting suspicion between the humans and nonhumans of the New Republic. Addenda to the files suggest that the project has recently been suspended, pending a new direction or a shutdown. In other words, it’s been stopped dead, at least temporarily.

“I’m going to do what I can for the test subjects on Iron Fist. I’ll end their suffering, one way or another.

“End Session Three.” She switched off the recording and leaned back in her chair.

She felt strange. Growing up on Coruscant, raised in the planet’s long-standing traditions concerning other species, she’d always believed in the basic superiority of humans. Oh, it wasn’t necessarily wrong to have affection for a member of another species—a household servant, or a reliable merchant who knew his role in life—but Coruscant was a world for and made by humans. Imperial doctrine solidified these traditions into something like duracrete.

Then, as an infiltrator in the Rebel navy and, later, Wraith Squadron, she’d run again and again into evidence suggesting that these traditions simply made no sense. With Wraith Squadron, her long-standing assumption of superiority over even the nonhumans she’d liked simply wilted away.

And now, with only a droid—held by the Empire in even lower esteem than nonhumans—for a friend, longing to return to a society full of what she’d once considered aliens, she once again knew that the Gara Petothel that had been her childhood identity was dead. Dead and unmourned.

And the nonhumans in their cages deep in Iron Fist’s belly were beginning to haunt her dreams.

Words popped up on her screen, ARE YOU SAD?

“No,” she lied. “Just tired. But it’s time to get back to work.” She leaned forward again. “What’s our situation with the hyperdrive?”

WE HAVE UNITS IN PLACE ALL OVER THE ENGINES. THEY CAN BEGIN THEIR SABOTAGE AT ANY TIME. BUT THERE ARE NOT YET ENOUGH IN CRITICAL POSITIONS FOR US TO BE CERTAIN THAT THEY CAN DISABLE THE HYPERDRIVE.

“Keep pouring on resources,” she said. “We have to be able to bring those engines down when we want to.

“Let’s see here … even though we have some access to the ship’s computers, we can’t afford to play around with them too much. We’ll be detected. Zsinj’s slicers aren’t bad. So I’ve been thinking about the most efficient way to give Solo’s force an advantage in any direct confrontation with Zsinj’s fleet. To me, that suggests messing with Iron Fist’s strategic coordination of Zsinj’s fleet. We might be able to flag friendly ships as enemies, temporarily, and enemies as friendly. Can we proceed that way?”

YES.

“Chance of being detected?”

VERY LOW, IN OUR INITIAL PHASE OF MANIPULATING THE PROGRAMMING. ONCE THE PROGRAM IS ACTIVATED, DETECTION CHANCE IS 99% IN THE FIRST SECOND OF OPERATION, WITH ODDS INCREASING EACH ADDITIONAL SECOND. PROBABLE DURATION OF PROGRAM ONCE IT IS RUNNING IS ABOUT TWELVE SECONDS.

“Not good enough. How about something to lower the ship’s shields?”

PROBABILITY OF SUCH A THING SURVIVING EVEN IN LATENT FORM FOR MORE THAN A FEW MOMENTS IS VERY LOW. THE MAIN COMPUTER’S SECURITY MEASURES LOOK FOR PROBLEMS THAT CATASTROPHIC.

“So most forms of self-destruct are not even worth looking into.”

THAT IS CORRECT.

“Well, then what—” She stopped as a new idea occurred to her. “Ooh.”

•    •    •

The document on Wedge’s screen was labeled “Routine Examination,” but Wedge knew it to be anything but. It was a fitness report, the accumulated conclusions of Mon Remonda’s most experienced medics and analysts.

About Myn Donos.

The review board had been unable to confirm or deny that the torpedo launch was an accidental discharge. That was a break in his favor.

However, the medics collectively pronounced him borderline. One medic said it was a certainty that he’d lose control again; the trauma from the loss of his squadron and his conflicting feelings concerning Lara Notsil made it inevitable. The others disagreed, but indicated that his stress levels made him a less than ideal candidate for missions.

It was the sort of data-based torpedo that could sink a career. All Wedge had to do was accept their conclusions, scrub Donos permanently from the active flight list, and the problem he represented would go away forever.

But one party hadn’t voted yet, and that was Wedge’s gut instinct.

A knock sounded on his door. “Come,” he said.

Donos entered, saluted. “Reporting as ordered, sir.” His expression was somber, but was not the rigid mask Wedge remembered from most of their earlier interviews.

“Have a seat.”

Donos complied, then quirked a smile. “Shall I take off my boot, sir?”

“Not this time. Lieutenant, I’ve asked you in here to find out what role you’d like to play in the Vahaba mission.”

“If I could do anything I wanted?”

“That’s right.”

“I’d be back in my X-wing. That’s where I feel I belong.”

“And if that were denied you?”

“I’d like to be put in command of the Millennium Falsehood.”

Wedge leaned back. Donos’s comment had taken him momentarily off guard, though he believed he’d kept his surprise from his face. “That has been my role.”

“I expect you’d rather be back in your X-wing, sir.”

“I don’t recall inviting you to attempt mind reading, Donos.”

Donos’s expression became more serious. “No, sir. But we’ve flown in the same squadron. Learning to anticipate the reactions of your squadmates—emotional ones as well as physical reflexes—is a survival trait. Maybe you find it a gross insult for me to make predictions this way, sir, but I’d say you wanted to get back in your X-wing cockpit and were doing these Falsehood runs because of duty. Because you’re most qualified—second, perhaps, to General Solo. If I can’t fly my own snubfighter, I’d be happy to free you up to fly yours.”

“Very generous of you. What if you couldn’t pilot at all?”

“Then I’d volunteer for a gunnery position on the Falsehood.”

“And in any of these three roles, what would you do about Lara Notsil?”

Donos hesitated, and his expression went from somber to melancholy. “I’d follow orders, sir.”

“What orders would you prefer?”

“Let her go.”

“And if you were ordered to fire on her?”

“I’d do it. I’ve sworn an oath to the New Republic. To hold its needs above my own.”

“And if you killed her? What would you do then?”

“I don’t know, sir.” Donos’s eyes lost focus as they stared off into the distance—perhaps to some future. His expression suggested that this future was not appealing to him. “I don’t know who I’d be then, sir.”

“Fair enough.” Wedge regarded the lieutenant for a moment.

This wasn’t the Donos he’d met several months before. Not a man whose every worry, every crisis was kept bottled up inside.

Wedge typed a few words into his terminal and sent the file on to the ship’s central computer. “Donos, for your information, you were right. I’d rather be in an X-wing, and for the upcoming and future engagements I plan to be. And so will you. I’m certifying you fit to fly. You’ll be back with the Wraiths at Vahaba.”

Donos’s eyes opened wide. “Thank you, sir.”

“Thank me after you’ve performed your duties to my satisfaction. That’s when I’ll know I haven’t made a mistake. Dismissed.”

Vahaba was a red giant circled by numerous planets. At some time in the past, a celestial catastrophe had destroyed the largest of those worlds and scattered its remains in a thin ring around the sun. The asteroids were spread across such an enormous distance that the Vahaba Asteroid Belt was not a hazard to navigation; any capital ship could blast through it at full acceleration with minimal worry about collision with one of the belt’s misshapen stony satellites.

Not that Mon Remonda was close enough for her handlers to feel even that minimal worry. To Han Solo’s eye, Vahaba was a distant red dot, and none of the system’s planets was visible to the naked eye. Solo’s fleet hung in space so far out that no set of Imperial sensors within the planetary system would pick them up. Meanwhile, pairs of X-wings off Mon Remonda and his fleet’s other cruisers scoured the system.

And found nothing.

He resisted the urge to gripe, to drum on his chair arm, to ask once more if there were any updates. Or to tell the new sensor officer to quit looking at him. He’d felt the woman’s curious gaze on him ever since Stellar Web joined his fleet.

To the bridge crew, Stellar Web was an unknown, tagged Contact M-317. It hovered some considerable distance from the rest of the fleet, far out of the range of the most capable visual enhancer. Messages from Contact M-317 were supposed to be sent directly to Solo, and the communications officer was under direct orders not to monitor, not to record them.

Solo and a few others knew the distant ship to be an Imperial Interdictor-class cruiser, the new flagship of Admiral Rogriss. But it would be best for that information not to spread.

“New contact, sir.” The sensor officer’s quiet words nearly jolted Solo out of his seat.

“Let me see,” Solo said, and brought up his own chair’s terminal screen.

It lit up with a wobbly visual image. Distant ships, forming up slowly into an attack group. Solo nodded. Two Star Destroyers, one Imperial-class, one Victory-class. Two Dreadnaughts. One smaller ship, a featureless needle at this distance; Solo couldn’t recognize it.

“Standard for a Zsinj group,” Solo said. “The question is, is this all he’s deploying to Vahaba, or is it just part of his fleet?” He raised his voice. “What’s the source of this recording?”

“A wingpair from Corsair Squadron, off Mon Karren” said the comm officer. “They recorded this, using only visual sensors so they’d be harder to spot. Then one of the pair returned with the data while the other stayed out there to monitor.”

“Where is this?”

“At the approximate orbit of the outermost planet, on the approach from Halmad.”

“Reinforce the X-wings monitoring this group with another pair. As our reconnaissance units come in for refueling, assign half of them to concentrate on the orbit of the outermost planet, on the direct-line approaches from other surrounding stars.”

“Yes, sir.”

Solo settled back. His heart was pounding just a little faster.

“Sick of it yet?” Face asked his temporary wingman.

“We are growing absolutely sick of it, Face,” said Runt. The need for hyperdrive-equipped reconnaissance pairs had placed him with Face for this mission.

The starfield outside their cockpits was brilliant, unchanging. They cruised at sublight speeds at what would be considered the boundary of the Vahaba system.

“Good.” Face changed the timbre of his voice, dropping it a register, making it smooth, insidious. “ ‘Please don’t insult my intelligence. Please don’t tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about.’ ” He forced a falsetto. “ ‘I don’t, I really don’t. Please put down the blaster. You’re frightening me.’ ” He dropped into the lower register again. “ ‘Fright is the least of what you will suffer.’ ”

“Are we wrong?” Runt asked. “Or is this as terrible as we think? The writing is awful. You are not improving on it.”

“Sometimes you rise above your material, sometimes you don’t. I had to learn this when I was seven. It has never left me.” He dropped his voice again. “ ‘Now, tell me where the map is, or I—’ ”

“New contact, course thirteen degrees, down eighty-two.” Runt’s voice was suddenly crisp, professional.

“Roll for visual inspection, kill forward thrust, kill cockpit lights, passive sensors only.”

“Acknowledged, One.”

Face rolled his X-wing upside down. It would have been an unsettling experience in a vessel not equipped with an inertial compensator, but to his perspective it appeared only that the universe rotated around him. He shut down most of his vehicle systems and visually scanned the area of space Runt had indicated.

Nothing; the target was too far away. He brought up the visual enhancer on his sensor board and directed it toward the target area.

A minute’s worth of careful panning and searching yielded the target: a group of four ships in close formation. The smallest of them was too tiny to identify by class, but the other three were not. Three Star Destroyers, one of them an ancient Victory-class, one an Imperial-class, and the other—

“We have her,” Face said. “Iron Fist. Give me a minute while I calculate range, Six.”

“Yes, sir.”

Face ran numbers through his navigational computer and compared them with what he knew about the likely sensor ranges of Imperial capital ships. “All right,” he said. “Six, I want you to run ahead at one-third acceleration for ten minutes, then set your course to Mon Remonda’s station and transit back there. You were recording, weren’t you?”

“Yes, sir! Wait, let us check. Yes, we have it.”

“Good. Go.”

The news hit Mon Remonda’s bridge like a concussion missile. Solo came up out of his chair, began issuing orders. Captain Onoma did the same. Often their words overlapped one another.

“Recall all starfighters in close range,” Solo said. “Launch our hyperdrive-equipped shuttles to the regions we sent recon units to and have them transmit the new coordinates.”

“Battle stations,” Onoma said. “All spacetight doors to be closed in three minutes.”

“Transmit our course to Contact M-317,” Solo said. “Dispatch Skyhook and Crynyd to form up with M-317. They’re to shadow her at all times, protect her at all costs, not to interfere with her operations.”

“Bring our course to one-oh-six-point-two-two-four, elevation thirty-six-point-oh-nine-nine. Transmit same to fleet.”

“Tell the Falsehood crew to stand down and go to their secondary mission parameters; we won’t need them as bait.”

A low, unsettling rumble filled the bridge. Solo felt the hair on his arms and the back of his neck rise. He swung around to see Chewbacca standing in the doorway, his expression happy, uttering the jubilant hunting call. “That’s right, Chewie,” he said. “It’s our best shot yet.”