6

The private investigatory proceedings of the New Republic’s ruling Council stood closed against Admiral Ackbar. He waited in the anteroom outside, staring at the tall steelstone door as if it were a wall blocking the end of his life. He stared unblinking at the designs and scrollwork modeled by the Emperor Palpatine after ancient Sith hieroglyphics, and they disturbed him.

Ackbar sat on the cold synthetic-stone bench, feeling only his misery, despair, and failure. He nursed his bandaged left arm and felt pain slice up and down his biceps where tiny needles held the slashed salmon-colored skin together. Ackbar had refused standard treatment by medical droid or healing in a bacta tank programmed for Calamarian physiology. He preferred to let the painful recuperation remind him of the destruction he had caused on Vortex.

He cocked his enormous head, listening to the rise and fall of heated voices through the closed door. He could make out only a mingled murmur of mixed voices, some strident, some insistent. He looked down and self-consciously brushed at his clean white admiral’s uniform.

His remaining injuries seemed insignificant compared to the pain inside him. In his mind he kept seeing the crystalline Cathedral of Winds shatter around him in an avalanche of shards, hurling a storm of glassy daggers in all directions. He saw the bodies of winged Vors tumbling around him, slaughtered by the razor-edged crystal sabers. Ackbar had ejected Leia to safety, but he wished he had been brave enough to switch off the crash field, because he did not want to live with such disgrace. Ackbar had been piloting the deadly ship, no one else. He had crashed into the precious Cathedral of Winds. No one else.

He looked up at the sound of shuffling footsteps and saw another Calamarian approaching tentatively down the rose-hued corridors. The other ducked his head, but swiveled his great fish eyes up to look at his admiral.

“Terpfen,” Ackbar said. His voice sounded listless, like words dropped onto the polished floor, but he tried to dredge up enthusiasm. “You’ve come after all.”

“I could never desert you, Admiral. The Calamarian crewmen remain your firm supporters, even after.…”

Ackbar nodded, knowing the unshakable loyalty of his chief starship mechanic. As with many of his people, Terpfen had been taken away from his watery homeworld, kidnapped by Imperial enslavers, and forced to work on designing and refining their Star Destroyers with the renowned Calamarian starship-building expertise. But Terpfen had attempted sabotage and had been tortured. Severely. The scars still showed on his battered head.

During the Imperial occupation of the planet Calamari, Ackbar himself had been pressed into service as a reluctant aid to Moff Tarkin. He had served Tarkin for several years until he finally escaped during a Rebel attack.

“Have you completed your investigation?” Ackbar asked. “Have you gone over the records that survived the crash?”

Terpfen turned his head away. He clasped his broad flipper-hands together. His skin flushed with splotches of bright maroon, showing his embarrassment and shame. “I have already filed my report with the New Republic Council.” He looked meaningfully at the closed door of the chamber. “I suspect they are discussing it even now.”

Ackbar felt as if he had just attempted to swim under an ice floe. “And what did you find?” he said in a firm voice, trying to resurrect the power of command.

“I found no indication of mechanical failure, Admiral. I’ve gone over the crash tapes again and again, and I have simulated the flight path through the recorded wind patterns on Vortex. I continue to come up with the same answer. Nothing was wrong with your ship.” He looked up at the admiral then turned away again. Ackbar could tell that this report was as difficult for Terpfen to say as it was for Ackbar to hear.

“I checked your ship myself before you took off for Vortex. I found no indications of mechanical instabilities. I suppose I could have missed something.…”

Ackbar shook his head. “Not you, Terpfen. I know your work too well.”

Terpfen continued in a quieter voice. “I can reach only one conclusion from the data, Admiral—” But Terpfen’s voice cut off, as if he refused to speak the inevitable.

Ackbar did it for him. “Pilot error,” he said. “I caused the crash. It’s my fault. I’ve known it all along.”

Terpfen stood; his head hung so low that he showed only the bulging, sacklike dome of his cranium. “I wish there was some way I could prove otherwise, Admiral.”

Ackbar extended a flipper-hand and placed it on Terpfen’s gray crewman’s uniform. “I know you’ve done your best. Now please do me one more favor. Outfit another B-wing for my personal use and provision it for a long journey. I’ll be flying alone.”

“Someone might object to having you fly again, Admiral,” Terpfen said, “but don’t worry. I can find some way around the problem. Where will you be going?”

“Home,” Ackbar answered, “after I tend to some unfinished business.”

Terpfen saluted smartly. “Your ship will be waiting for you, sir.”

Ackbar felt a hard knot in his chest as he returned the salute. He stepped forward to the closed steelstone door and pounded on the ornate surface, demanding to be let in.

The heavy door groaned open on automatic hinges. Ackbar stood at the threshold as the members of the ruling Council turned to look at him.

The flowstone seats were sculpted and polished to a high luster, including the empty chair that still bore his own name. The air was too dry for his nostrils and stank with the underlying dusty smell of a museum. He could detect the pungent nervous odor of human sweat mixed with the peppery steam from their chosen hot drinks and refreshments.

Obese Senator Hrekin Thorm waved a pudgy hand at Ackbar. “Why don’t we make him lead the reparations team? That seems appropriate to me.”

“I wouldn’t think the Vors want him anywhere near their planet,” Senator Bel-Iblis said.

“The Vors haven’t asked us to help them rebuild at all,” Leia Organa Solo said, “but that doesn’t mean we should ignore it.”

“We’re lucky the Vors are not as emotional as other races. This is already a terrible tragedy, but it does not seem likely it will turn into a galactic incident,” Mon Mothma said.

Gripping the edge of the table, she stood and finally acknowledged Ackbar’s presence. Her skin looked pale, her face gaunt, her eyes and cheeks sunken. She had skipped many important meetings lately. Ackbar wondered if the Vortex tragedy had worsened her health.

“Admiral,” Mon Mothma said, “these proceedings are closed. We will summon you after we have taken a vote.” Her voice seemed stern and cracking, devoid of the compassion that had launched her career in galactic politics.

Minister of State Leia Organa Solo looked at him with her dark eyes. A flood of sympathy crossed her face, but Ackbar turned away with a stab of anger and embarrassment. He knew Leia would argue his case most strongly, and he expected support from General Rieekan and General Dodonna; but he did not know how Senators Garm Bel-Iblis, Hrekin Thorm, or even Mon Mothma herself would vote.

That doesn’t matter, Ackbar thought. He would remove their need to decide, remove the possibility of further humiliation. “Perhaps I can make these deliberations easier on all of us,” Ackbar said.

“What do you mean, Admiral?” Mon Mothma said, frowning at him. Her face was seamed with deep lines.

Leia half rose as she suddenly understood. “Don’t—”

Ackbar made a decisive gesture with his left fin-hand, and Leia reluctantly sat down again.

He touched the left breast on his pristine-white uniform, fumbling with the catch as he removed his admiral’s-rank insignia. “I have caused enormous pain and suffering to the people of Vortex. I have brought immense embarrassment to the New Republic, and I have called down terrible shame upon myself. I hereby resign as commander of the New Republic Fleet, effective immediately. I regret the circumstances of my departure, but I am proud of the years I have served the Alliance. I only wish I could have done more.”

He placed his insignia on the creamy alabaster shelf in front of the empty Council seat that had once been his own.

In shocked silence the other Council members stared at him like a mute tribunal. Before they could voice their mandatory—and probably insincere—objections, Ackbar turned and strode out of the room, walking as tall as he dared, yet feeling crushed and insignificant.

He went back toward his quarters to pack his most prized possessions before heading to the hangar bay, where he would take the ship Terpfen had promised him. He had one place to visit first, and then he would return to his homeworld of Calamari.

If General Obi-Wan Kenobi could vanish into obscurity on a desert planet like Tatooine, Ackbar could do the same and live out the rest of his life among the lush seatree forests under the seas.

With the pretense of taking out a B-wing fighter to test its response under extreme stress, Terpfen soared away from Coruscant. The other distraught Calamarian crewmen wished him luck before he departed, assuming he intended to continue his desperate work to clear Admiral Ackbar’s name.

But just before the jump into hyperspace, Terpfen entered a new series of coordinates into the navicomputer.

The B-wing lurched with a blast of hyperdrive engines. Starlines appeared around him, and the ship snapped into the frenzied, incomprehensible swirl of hyperspace. He reflexively slid the nictating membrane over his glassy eyes.

Terpfen felt shudders pass through his body as he strained to resist the calling. But he knew by now, after all these years, that he could do nothing to fight it. Screaming nightmares never let him forget his ordeal in the hellish conditioning on the Imperial military training planet of Carida.

The scars on his battered head were not just from torture, but from Imperial vivisection, where the doctors had sawed open his skull and scooped out portions of his brain—segments that controlled a Calamarian’s loyalty, his volition, and his resistance to special commands. The cruel xenosurgeons had replaced the missing areas of Terpfen’s brain with specially grown organic circuits that mimicked the size, shape, and composition of the removed tissue.

The organic circuits were perfectly camouflaged and could resist the most penetrating medical scan, but they made him a helpless cyborg, a perfect spy and saboteur who could not think for himself when the Imperials wanted him to think their thoughts. The circuits left him sufficient mental capacity to play his part, to make his own excuses each time the Imperials summoned him.…

After guiding his ship for several standard time units, Terpfen looked at the chronometer. At the precise instant indicated he pulled the levers that switched off the hyperdrive motors and kicked in the sublight engines.

His ship hung near the lacy veil of the Cron Drift, the gaseous remnants of a multiple supernova where four stars had simultaneously erupted some four millennia ago. The wisps of gas crackled with pinks, greens, and searing white. The residual x rays and gamma radiation from the old supernova caused static over his comm system, but it would also mask this meeting from prying eyes.

A dark Caridan ship already hung there waiting for him. With a flat stealth coating on its hull, the Caridan ship looked like a matte-black insect that swallowed starlight, leaving only a jagged silhouette against the starfield. Protrusions of assault blasters and sensor antennas stuck out like spines.

A burst of static came across Terpfen’s comm system; then the tight-beam holotransmission of Ambassador Furgan’s head focused itself inside the B-wing cockpit.

“Well, my little fish,” Furgan said. His huge eyebrows looked like black feathers curling up on his forehead. “What is your report? Explain why our two victims were not killed in the crash you engineered.”

Terpfen tried to stop the words from coming, but the organic circuits kicked in, providing all the answer the Imperial ambassador needed. “I sabotaged Ackbar’s personal ship, and that should have meant death for both passengers—but even I underestimated Ackbar’s skill as a pilot.”

Furgan scowled. “So the mission failed.”

“On the contrary,” Terpfen said, “I believe it is even more successful. The New Republic is far more affected by this chain of events than it would be if a simple crash had killed the Minister of State and the admiral. Their fleet commander has now resigned in disgrace, and the ruling Council is left without an obvious replacement.”

Furgan considered for a moment, then nodded as a slow smile spread across his fat, dark lips. He changed the subject. “Have you made any progress in uncovering the location of the third Jedi baby?”

During his torturous conditioning, Terpfen had spent four weeks with his head entirely encased in a solid plasteel helmet that kept him blinded, sent jabs of pain at random and malicious intervals. He could not speak or drink or eat, fed entirely through intravenous nutritional supplements. Now, as he sat trapped inside the cockpit of the B-wing fighter, he felt swallowed up in that black pit again.

Terpfen answered in a steady, uninflected voice. “I have told you before, Ambassador. Anakin Solo is being held on a secret planet, the location of which is known only to a very few, including Admiral Ackbar and the Jedi Master Luke Skywalker. I think it highly unlikely that Ackbar will divulge it in casual conversation.”

Furgan looked as if he had just bit into something sour and wanted to spit it out. “Then what good are you?”

Terpfen would have taken no offense even if his organic circuitry had allowed him to. “I have set into motion another plan that may provide the information you seek.”

Terpfen had performed the task with parts of his mind he did not own. Flipper-hands moving not of his own volition had completed what the rest of him wanted to scream against.

“Your plan had better work,” Furgan said. “And one last question—I’ve noticed that Mon Mothma has avoided public appearances for several weeks. She has not attended many important meetings, sending proxies instead. Tell me, how is dear Mon Mothma’s health?” He began to chuckle.

“Failing,” Terpfen said, cursing himself. The laughter in Furgan’s face suddenly vanished, and his holographic eyes stared into Terpfen’s great watery disks.

“Go back to Coruscant, my little fish, before they notice you’ve disappeared. We wouldn’t want to lose you, when there is so much work left to do.”

Furgan’s transmission winked out. A moment later the beetlelike ship turned and, with a blue-white flare of its hyperdrive engines, burst into a fold of space and vanished.

Terpfen hung alone in the darkness, looking out at the glowing slash of the Cron Drift, surrounded by the echoing walls of his own betrayal.