They also provided the means for entering the estate. Most travel to and from
the estate took place by airspeeder. Forty-five kilometers of a twisting,
single-lane track con-.nected the estate to the main throughway to the south,
but several gates interdicted it, and a number of narrow passes between natural
rock outcroppings made for perfect ambush points if an invasion were attempted
along it. Likewise, a ring of well-hidden Comar Tritracker Air Defense batteries
meant approaching the estate in an airspeeder without authorization could be
suicidal. Various sensor arrays positioned around
the estate also monitored likely avenues of approach through the rain forest.
Slicing into the planetary computers and making use of Zaltin surveillance
satellites, the Ashern team had pulled down realtime holograms of the estate and
the thermal images of the guards on their rounds. They also found the
placement of the sensor devices in the rain forest and noted the human patrols
tended to concentrate on the side of the estate facing the mountains and the
waterfalls. After studying the specifications for the sensors in use around the
estate, they realized that the sensors on the mountain side of the estate had
been muted so the movement of water and the sound from the falls wouldn't
constantly be triggering alarms.
Entering the estate, they made their appro ach from the far side of the mountain
and ascended to the summit by dusk. Once darkness fell, they descended, keeping
as close to the waterfalls as they could. They sped their descent by rappel-ling
down beneath one of the longer falls, letting the curtain of water hide them
from the estate's sensors. Once at the base of the mountains, they moved in
along the fringes of the sensors' range, cutting a labyrinthine path through
the jungle.
The SpecNav troops led the way. Though they were as big as stormtroopers,
Sixtus's men were deceptively swift and deathly quiet. Iella was more than happy
they were on her side. As scary as facing stormtroopers might have been,
fight-ing against these men would have been worse. At one point
they had been selected to join the Imperial Navy's most elite fighting unit, and
the product of their skills proved that choice had been a wise one.
Iella heard a single click over her comlink, so she hurried forward, remaining
low. She reached Elscol's side and looked off in the direction where the smaller
woman pointed. Silhou-etted against the lights from the house she saw two
Thyferran
Home Defense Corps guards wandering along. Elscol tapped her finger twice
against her comlink and huge shadows rose up to eclipse the guards. Iella heard
no screams or shots being
fired. but another double-click played over the comlink, indicating the guards
had been neutralized.
The rest of the group moved up to the edge of the clear-
ing around the estate. Barely twenty-five meters separated them from the mansion
solarium. Iella dropped to one knee next to one of the guards and felt for a
pulse in his neck, but her hand encountered a sticky wetness that told her all
she needed to know. The sound of a stun shot being fired or the light from the
blue burst could have been seen. These men had to die.
Elscol tapped two of the SpecNav soldiers on the shoulders and they sprinted
forward across the lawn to the shadows beside the solarium. Iella found herself
holding her breath, waiting for a reaction from the house. A single click from
the comlink told her the SpecNavs felt safe. Elscol sent them a double-click,
and Iella prepared herself to run.
The SpecNavs pulled an electronic device from an equipment satchel and slapped
it over the solarium's door lock. Iella saw lights on the device flicker and
shift color, then five of them all burned green at the same time. They went out
after three seconds at which point one of the SpecNavs pushed the door open.
Another double-click came through the comlink, and Iella was up and running.
With each step she braced herself for a shot from the darkness, a burning red
bolt that would hit her, lift her up and send her flying across the yard. She'd
seen it happen to others before, more times than she could remember. The look of
surprise on the victim's face as confident immortality dissolved into dismay
and despair haunted her. In death, especially violent death, no one ever looks
pretty.
She made it to the door and passed through, then cut to the left and hugged the
wall on the other side of the doorway into the main house, opposite the first
SpecNav trooper. After her, came Elscol; then Sixtus. They both ran through the
doorway, then double-clicked an all clear so Iella and the SpecNav moved up.
Other members of the team fanned out through the mansion's lower floor and
secured it without incident.
Elscol and Sixtus moved up the stairway to the main floor. Iella followed them
up and found the main floor dark save for a muted yellow light coming through
one open doorway further along the main hallway. The darkness didn't sur-
prise her terribly muchthe raid had been timed to reach the estate halfway
between midnight and dawn to take advantage of the fact that most people would
be asleep. That a light was still on seemed odd, but carelessness couldn't be
ruled out.
Nor can someone's working late. That's supposed to be Dlarit's office. Iella
crept forward cautiously. Though only ten meters separated her from the lit
doorway, she took two minutes to make it that distance. At the edge of the
doorway she tilted her head and got a quick glimpse into the room. What she saw
prompted a smile and made her double-click her comlink and invite the others
forward.
She strode into the office and shook her head. Wearing his finest Thyferran Home
Defense Corps uniform, Aerin Dlarit sat sprawled in a high-backed chair behind
his desk. The holoprojector plate built into the desk displayed a meter-tall
replica of a monument featuring a larger-than-life statue of Dlarit atop a
pedestal. The hologram slowly rotated in the air, complete with a throng of
miniature well-wishers gasping and applauding at its base.
Elscol drew her blaster pistol and dropped her voice to a whisper. "Get the
holocam up here. He dies a monument to his own ego and misplaced trust in the
Empire."
Iella laid a hand on her arm. "Wait, I have another idea. One that may work even
better."
"He has to die."
"With what I have in mind, he will, but a thousand times over." Iella drew her
own pistol and clicked the selector lever over to stun. "We've already killed
two guards, so they know we're serious. Trust me, this will work."
"If I don't like it, he dies anyway."
Iella smiled. "You'll like it. We'll get more play out of it."
Iella explained, and Elscol balked until Sixtus cracked a
smile. That swung Elscol over, so Iella fired one shot into the sleeping
General, then set to work. The party exited the
estate the same way they'd come in, and though burdened as Iella was carrying
away General Aerin Dlarit's dress uniform, the journey seemed not nearly as hard
as before.
19
Commander Erisi Dlarit's TIE Interceptor dropped from the belly of the Corrupter
and let gravity seduce it down into Halanit's atmosphere. The cant-winged craft
bucked a little as it entered the frigid planet's atmosphere, reminding Erisi
that the Interceptor would surrender some of its maneuverability to friction
and drag. Maneuvers she could pull in the vacuum of space would get her killed
below.
The Rebels refer to these fighters as squints, but in atmosphere I prefer to
think of them as winces. From the moment Ysanne Isard had appointed her to lead
the Thyferran Home Defense Corps aerospace wing, Erisi had lobbied hard to equip
her two squadrons with X-wings. While slower and slightly less agile than the
Interceptor, the X-wing's shields and ability to use proton torpedoes in
addition to its lasers made it a superior fighter.
It mattered not at all how eloquently I argued, what facts I used, Iceheart
would never have agreed to my request. Erisi realized her own sense of
superiority had collided full on with Isard's need to see anything and
everything Imperial as better than anything the Alliance had to oppose it. Isard
sees herself as the pinnacle of Imperial excellence and demands that ev-
because we are not up to her standards.
Erisi really couldn't blame Isard for treating the Thyferrans and the THDC as
the Empire's stupid, inbred cousins. Though the Corrupter had already been en
route to Halanit when the Ashern raid took place, word of it had been
communicated to the ship. Her cheeks burned as the image of her father slumped
naked in his chair exploded in her mind. Mortifying in the extreme, the
incident meant that the Corrupter's Imperial crew felt no reason to hide their
contempt for the THDC personnel on board.
The fact that her father had been involved hurt her deeply. What made it even
worse was that Iella Wessiri had been identified from the hologram. The Imps
took that as a sign that Antilles had entered into a full alliance with the
Ashern, but Erisi read more into lella's participation. Iella caused my father
to be embarrassed so as to get at me, to
avenge herself for my betrayal of Corran and the rest of the Rouges. This was a
message directed at me by hera private declaration of war.
Erisi glanced at her monitor and snarled into the comm unit. "Four, close the
formation up." Behind her four In-tersceptors came a quartet of the
double-hulled TIE bombers. Her Interceptors were nominally flying cover for the
bombers, though once they dropped their thermal detonators and proton bombs to
open up the main colony, the Interceptors' mission changed to engaging ground
targets and suppressing ire at the stormtrooper-laden shuttles that would
follow.
The TIE bombers swooped down through the air and spiraled in on their target.
Erisi and her flight came around to
follow them in. She couldn't help but remember countless
training exercises where she'd used an X-wing to stoop like a hawk-bat on such
lumbering craft. Two would be dead in my
initial pass and the others would die as they attempted to flee. Below her, the
bombers began their runs. The thermal
detonators fell lazily from the bombers as if harmless. Their explosions flashed
golden light through the glacier and bled
up into the great gouts of steam they produced. The light breeze below quickly
cleared the steam off, revealing a hole
roughly a kilometer around and nearly half that deep. Steaming water pooled in
the bottom of it, and Erisi knew the thermal detonators had cleared the glacier
down to the transparisteel canopy that protected the Halanit colony from the
harsh climate of their world.
The bombers' second pass eliminated the canopy. The high-yield proton bombs
shattered the transparisteel shield, fragmenting the sheets at ground zero. A
shock wave rippled through the double-walled barrier, ripping whole
transparisteel plates free from both layers as it went. The warm air from
beneath the shield rushed upward, blowing debris up and out, then cond ensed in
the frigid air. At the same time, around the hole's jagged edges, cold air
poured down into the colony.
Rolling her Interceptor up on the port stabilizer assembly, Erisi spiraled the
fighter down in through the hole the bombs had created. The chasm into which she
flew stretched out above and below her fighter like the grandest of Coruscant's
boulevards. Long suspension bridges linked both sides of the chasm at various
levels and quickly icing-over waterfalls splashed their way down into the
depths in front of her. Lights from hundreds of viewports dotted the chasm's
depths with yellow circles and squares.
Erisi hit the triggers on her lasers. A stream of green laser darts scored a
ragged line along one face of the chasm, piercing the viewports and reducing
them to darkness. As she shot, she glanced at her primary monitor, waiting for
the missile warning alarm to be activated. It's going to be missiles or
turbolasers, and if they're going to use them, it'll have to be now.
She continued her flight deeper and deeper, strafing targets as she went. One
line of fire scattered a crowd on a balcony. Another swept across a foot bridge,
chasing a man who foolishly thought himself faster than a laser bolt. Nearing
the bottom of the chasm, she chopped her throttle back and pulled up in a loop,
start them boiling.
She knew, with the canopy being breached and the ichthyoculture pools having
been transformed into giant
stewpots that the Halanit colony was dead. Those who didn't freeze to death
would starveeach a terrible way to die. She realized that her old comrades in
Rogue Squadron would be horrified at the carnage, as she would have been if the
Empire had carried this attack out on Thyferra, but she felt no remorse for the
people doomed by her action.
They were already dead. Their need for bacta had been desperate, because without
it their marginal colony could not survive. They could not afford bacta because
their colony was so poor, hence anyone with enough neurons to form a synapse
would have seen that the only sensible thing to do was to abandon Halanit or
choose a method of exploiting the world to generate enough money so it could
sustain itself.
/ have no obligation to save the stupid from themselves. Even if we had given
them bacta, another crisis would have wiped them out. The fact that they refused
to face reality does not make it incumbent upon me to shield them from the
disaster they so fervently court. Erisi's eyes narrowed as she started a
strafing run back toward the surface. And they compounded their stupidity by
consorting with thieves and using bacta for which they could not pay.
Despite the lack of fire defending the colony, she knew they were anything but a
defenseless, inoffensive community. Their accepting the bacta from Wedge and the
others was the equivalent of stabbing a knife into the Thyferran economy. If
Thyferra al
lowed them to do what they did, other worlds would similarly duck
their obligations. Other individuals would emulate Wedge, and pirates would
swarm over the bacta convoys. The rightful reward for providing a vital fluid to
the galaxy would be denied to Thyferra in an attack as destructive as the one
she was mounting.
Rocketing up through the hole in the shield, Erisi rolled out and began a long
elliptical orbit over the breached shield. "Interceptor One reporting. No
hostile antiship fire in evidence."
"We copy, One. The Captain congratulates you on your run and requests you join
him for the march through the colony."
"I copy, Control. As ordered." Erisi smiled. We've shown
Convarion that THDC pilots are not the incompetent nerf-brains he thought we
were. Now he will show me how powerful stormtroopers are so I won't forget who
is superior to whom. Not that I ever could, but I shall say nothing. Convarion
would never believe himself to be my subordinate anyway.
Gavin didn't realize it was an explosion that had awakened him until a second
and third blast sounded. He threw off thick layers of blanketshis Tatooine
upbringing guaranteed that he felt cold even in Halanit's hot bathsand snarled
as he thrust his feet into cold boots. He fastened them, then stood and strapped
on his blaster belt as Farl Cort appeared in the doorway of his room. "What's
happening?"
Before Cort could answer, Gavin's ears popped with the change in the colony's
air pressure. Air began to rush out of the room, tugging at the hem of Cort's
cloak. The little man's face went ashen. "They've breached the shield."
Gavin grabbed him before he could fall. "Who's they?" "Imperials, I guess.
There's a Star Destroyer in orbit." "Sithspawn! You should have gotten me up
when it arrived." Gavin wanted to pound his head against the wall. He had been
certain that he'd been careful enough to hide his trail so the Corrupter
couldn't follow him. When it showed up at the convoy hijacking, he'd immediately
broken his flight and dove away from it. The Xucphra Alazhi's bulk shielded him
from the destroyer's turbolasers. He knew he was dead unless he exercised the
only option available to him, a jump to lightspeed, which he did blindly.
He held the jump for fifteen seconds, which were the longest fifteen seconds in
his life. Jumping blind into hyperspace was about as stupid as making fat jokes