31

Kirtan Loor’s hands convulsed into fists. Who is more stupid, a fool or someone who relies upon a fool? Zekka Thyne’s initial report about a planning meeting for what the Rogues would be doing to bring Imperial Center down had seemed promising. Thyne had told him who had attended and it had pleased Loor to learn Iella Wessiri and Corran Horn had been reunited. The fact that he’d not known Iella was living right under his nose did not thrill him, but her location had been outside his area of immediate interest until she became part of Rogue Squadron’s operation.

The datafiles that the Imperial Intelligence organized crime division had sent over to him had provided interesting information on Fliry Vorru as well as the Devaronian, Dmaynel Kiph, but of Asyr Sei’lar they had no record. Though he had been chastened before by Ysanne Isard about drawing unwarranted conclusions, Loor decided Sei’lar was probably a member of some Bothan spy network. The possible existence of an independent Bothan Intelligence operation on Imperial Center suggested the Alliance was not a wholly unified front, which meant Iceheart’s strategy for dividing and destroying them piecemeal had even greater merit.

What angered Loor was Thyne’s deception—a deception that became quite apparent from subsequent reports. Thyne had said the first meeting had merely been organizational and had not produced any sort of a working plan. In the five days since that meeting, though, Thyne had been given certain tasks to perform that ran outside the usual duties he had within Black Sun. Initially he had overseen the collection of all sorts of data from the Black Sun’s gambling and spice operations on Imperial Center, but he only collected the datacards. He had no idea what information they contained.

After two days of that he had been shifted over to equipment procurement. While his activities provided Loor with an interesting window on the black market availability of almost anything, it did not give him the sort of information that would be useful for countering the Rogues’ operation. Thyne was overbuying weapons and having them delivered to any number of sites. In this Loor recognized an effort to provide far too many sites for Imperial Intelligence to adequately cover.

It seemed clear to Loor that Thyne had been isolated by the command group and given jobs that, while valuable, were not crippling if bungled. Thyne was not the only person buying weapons on the black market so Loor had to conclude that perhaps none of the arms Thyne had collected would be used. Loor would have decided Thyne’s cover had been blown, but Vorru’s file left little doubt about how the man would have been dealt with if Black Sun knew Patches was working with the Empire.

Several things seemed obvious to Loor. The first was that Thyne had managed to show himself to be unreliable. He assumed this was because Thyne clearly would have loved to supplant Vorru as the head of Black Sun and Vorru, just as clearly, would want to prevent that from happening. Thyne’s animosity for Corran and Iella could have also made him a liability in any planning councils. Loor had decided that Thyne had been ejected from the initial meeting before plans had been discussed and only later learned that Thyne had been concussed and amnesia blanked the substantive part of the meeting.

The spy within Rogue Squadron had not been present at the meeting. The spy’s subsequent reports had been singularly useless. The planning council had compartmentalized the jobs needed to complete the operation, so the spy’s activities proved less enlightening than Thyne’s. Having Rogue Squadron personnel maintain a low profile did make sense, since they were not as familiar with Imperial Center as other members of the conspiracy, but it made their activities useless as indicators of what was going to happen.

The only saving grace in all of it was that things appeared to be building slowly. Isard had told Loor that nothing could happen before two weeks—the incubation period of the new strain of the Krytos virus. The Sullustans taken in the warehouse had been injected with the virus ten days earlier so he was very close to his deadline already. Isard said she’d already introduced the virus into the water supply, so countless creatures were already ingesting it. Loor himself had taken to boiling water and only drinking wines imported from other worlds—even though the virus was not supposed to infect humans, he wanted to take no chances.

Loor sat back in the shadowed depths of his office and rubbed a hand against his forehead. The key to taking any planet was to lower its shields and drop troops. While a planetary bombardment might cause a lot of damage, only troops on the ground could take and hold real estate. Without the shields going down, that couldn’t happen, so the shields had to be the logical target for the Rogues.

The obvious target for taking the shields down was to attack the shield generators themselves. Loading a landspeeder full of Nergon 14 and having a suicide bomber run it into a generation station seemed the most expedient way of dealing with the shields. Two facts argued against that as a strategy—the sheer number of stations would require a metric ton or two for the Rebels to obliterate them all and the Rebels had not, to his knowledge, purchased any Nergon 14 so far. More importantly, destroying the shield generators would work against their future efforts to hold the planet.

A strike against the power generation stations had similar problems. There were even more of them than there were shield generation stations. The planet’s electrical grid was coordinated such that an area that lost its local power plant would immediately have energy supplied by others in nearby sectors. Flickering lights would be the only sign of disruption. In his months on Imperial Center Loor had only seen lights flicker when one of the powerful local thunderstorms broke over a building where he was.

The obvious target was the computer that controlled everything on Imperial Center, but Loor had seen prisons that had less security than the central computer. The center had its own platoon of stormtroopers and the barracks within a fifty-kilometer radius had orders to respond to alarms there with all speed and firepower at their command. The facility itself had been built with more demanding specifications than those of any other building on the planet, including the Imperial Palace. Rumor had it that if the Death Star had been used against Imperial Center, the computer center would have been a recognizable and salvageable piece of debris.

An armed strike on the computer center would seem doomed to failure, but the presence of Rogue Squadron did make it a bit more viable. If they had fighters—and fighters of various types were available on the black market—they might be able to intercept and down some of the incoming troops. That would give the attackers more time, though the outcome would still be dismal for the Rebels. The ground-based TIE fighter squadrons in the area would be able to counter the fighter threat, so placing them on alert was a precaution he would suggest to Isard.

Perhaps the most difficult part of guarding against the Rebel action was balancing on the razored edge of Isard’s plan. She wanted to give Imperial Center to the Rebels, saddling them with responsibility for a population that would drain them of bacta and fluid capital, effectively hobbling them and pinning them in one place. If his precautions against Rebel action were too obvious, the Rebels might do something unusual, giving them the planet before she wanted them to have it or, worse yet, convincing them to scrub their invasion. The idea of facing her anger if things went wrong filled Loor with dread.

Still, there are only four more days until her minimum deadline, two and a half weeks until the maximum. I’m close to success. Loor nodded slowly in the darkness. “If Derricote delivers what he promises with this Sullustan group, the Rebels will take a dying world and their movement will die right along with it.”