Recon Wing. Pilots--to your ships! I'll see you all on the other
side."
The mission synchronization clock was counting down toward zero. For a
moment Taggar paused to picture the other pilots, in other
claustrophobic cockpits, nearing other targets scattered halfway across
the Cluster.
Even though 21st Recon had been newly formed to serve the Fifth Fleet,
he had flown with several of them before in other units, other wars.
He could picture all their faces, guess at all their moods.
0015
Good recon, he thought, Sending the wish at them. And good luck.
Taggar's nose had begun to itch, and he wrinkled it up in an
unsuccessful attempt to salve it. He licked lips that had gone dry,
flexed hands that had begun to stiffen from being held too tensely,
checked systems that he had already checked three times.
0005
Taggar's mother, a Y-wing pilot, had died attacking a Star Destroyer in
the frightful clash at Endor. His own good-luck ritual, performed
before the start of every mission, was to r ub his thumb left to right
across his mother's wings, which were taped above the navicom. Mother,
I hope I make you proud today. 0000
The universe suddenly expanded around Taggar's recon fighter. Ahead
lay a gray-green marble frosted with swirls of pale yellow clouds. The
mission timer started to count upward as the imaging systems stirred in
their mountings. Taggar flew a steady line as he read the reports from
R2-R on his cockpit display.
IDENTIFIED ARAMADIA-CLASS THRUSTSHIP IDENTIFIED ARAMADIA-CLASS
THRUSTSHIP IDENTIFIED VICTORY-CLASS STAR DESTROYER IDENTIFIED
ARAMADIA-CLASS THRUSTSHIP IDENTIFIED IMPERIAL-CLASS STAR DESTROYER
IDENTIFIED EXECUTOR-CLASS STAR DESTROYER
The list grew longer as N'zoth grew larger ahead.
Rone Taggar wanted to be afraid, but he did not have that luxury. He
told himself he could be brave for five more minutes. In five
minutes--perhaps less--it would be over.
Taggar tried to whistle past the graveyard, but his mouth was suddenly
too dry.
There had been a tug-of-war between Leia and Ackbar over who would be
invited to be in the War Hall at Fleet Headquarters when the data from
the Koornacht recon incursion came in.
"This is not the time to repay favors or curry favor," Ackbar had said,
holding out for keeping the list as short as possible. "You cannot
control information that's already been freely distributed. We will
need time to evaluate the data and place it in context."
"Everyone on that list has a legitimate right to know what's going on
in Farlax," she had argued. "They're all going to have to be part of
the decisions to come--De-fense Council, Security Council, the rest of
the Ruling Council, Rieekan from NRI. It's not as though I'm trying to
bring in outsiders."
"No," Ackbar said. "You are only bringing in a senator who just tried
to have you removed from office, and another who is likely to try in
the near future. They are part of the same government as you, Leia,
but they are not your allies."
Behn-kihl-nahm's opinion had settled the question in favor of Leia's
side. As the intercepts neared, the room was full of extra bodies, and
there was more than enough to occupy them.
The full-wall display in the War Hall had been divided into twenty-four
identical rectangles. Each contained an intercept chart, with a blank
circle representing the target planet and a red line marking the
expected path of the scout. As the contacts proceeded, the charts
would change to show the position of the ships and the progress of the
scans.
Beside each chart was space for a flat-screen feed from the scout's
imagers. At the moment the name of the target World and the type of
scout assigned to it were displayed in that space.
Ackbar, Leia, and Han stood together at the back of the room, leaning
on the railing at the edge of the raised observer's platform and
watching twenty-four timers counting down in synchrony.
"It kind of reminds me of a tout board I saw at a million-credit
betting parlor on Bragkis," Han said, "and everyone standing around
waiting for the race to begin. 'Who's got a favorite?" 'What odds
will you give me on Wakiza?"" Leia usually found Han's irreverence
refreshing. But she had no patience for it just then and walked away
after shooting him a hot sidewise glare. Han's first instinct was to
follow, but Ackbar stayed him with a touch.
"Let her be," he said. "This is a hard time. She does not have much
water under her."
The room quieted dramatically in the last seconds, as everyone working
attended to the console before them, and everyone watching turned away
from their conversations and looked up toward the display. As zero
turned to plus-1, the entire wall came alive with moving images as the
charts began to change and the first images arrived.
It almost seemed to Han as though the wall were a squirming mass of
tiny creatures made of light. Unless he focused his attention on just
one area, the effect made his stomach turn and his nerves jangle.
Ackbar raised a hand and pointed to the lower right corner of the
wall.
"One casualty already," he said.
Number 23, a pilotless ferret, had missed its rendezvous at Doornik
207, which at last report had been host to a nest of Corasgh. But all
the other charts were beginning to fill in--the flight tracks changing
from red to green, the faces of the planets beginning to be shaded
in.
The early images from N'zoth caused a buzz in the room. They showed
the unmistakable shapes of Star Destroyers, singled out by the
R2-controlled imaging systems on Rone Taggar's Jennie Lee. After
leaving Han, Leia had gone to stand by Ayddar Nylykerka, who was busily
capturing individual frames from the data into a collage of ship
portraits. She listened in while the intense little analyst from the
Asset Tracking Office talked aloud to himself.
"That could be the Redoubtable," he muttered, consulting his lists.
"It's definitely early Imperial-class, despite the modifications to the
forward superstructure-" The buzz turned into a dark murmur a few
seconds later, when the view from Number 1 changed and another, sleeker
dagger shape snapped into focus. There was hardly a person in the room
who could not identify that profile, and the exceptions quickly learned
the significance in a hasty whisper from a companion there was a Super
Star Destroyer in orbit around N'zoth.
From the beginning, the New Republic had opted to build a larger number
of smaller vessels--Fleet carriers, Republic-class Star Destroyers,
battle cruisers--rather than adopt the Imperial design philosophy. Mon
Mothma had given orders to scrap rather than repair or make a museum
piece of the sole SSD captured from the Empire. Consequently, the
eight-kilometer-long behemoth circling N'zoth had anything in the New
Republic Fleet badly outgunned.
"Now, that, that can only be Intimidator," Nylykerka pro
nounced. "All
of the late-production Super-class had that additional shield tower
located on the centerline--" Shocking as that discovery was, the
attention of the audience in the War Hall was quickly drawn
elsewhere.
As the counters approached the two-minute mark and the scouts raced
toward the midpoint and closest approach of their passes, the display
wall was filling with images of warships, until it resembled a larger
version of the collage at Nylykerka's station.
There were Star Destroyers at Wakiza, at Zhina, at New Brigia and
Doornik 881, where the Imperial factory farm had been. The Yevethan
fleet at Morning Bell now numbered at least sixteen vessels, including
four Star
Destroyers, six Aramadia-class thrustships, and a queer-looking
Dreadnaught-scale ship, which Nylykerka excitedly identified as a
long-missing Imperial testbed, the EX-F. Other thrustships seemed to
be everywhere--orbiting all the other Duskhan League worlds, at Polneye
and the former Morath mining operation on Kojash.
Conspicuously missing from the entry scans were the three Imperial
shipyards named in Lieutenant Sconn's deposition Black Fifteen, which
had been located in orbit at N'zoth; Black Eleven, which had been at
Zhina; and Black Eight, at Wakiza. Ackbar noted their absence to Han
and added, "I do not think we will find them--i do not put it past the
Yevetha to have moved the shipyards to concealed locations. I suspect
that that is what Astrolabe stumbled on at Doornik Eleven FortytWO."
At 0205, the signal from Number 16 at Polneye abruptly terminated, the
tracking chart freezing with only forty-two percent of the planet
scanned. Moments later Number 19, at Morning Bell, and Number 5, at
the Duskhan world Tizon, also went dead.
The losses did not stop there. All over the wall, the individual
displays were going blank almost as quickly as they had come to life.
Only half the scouts reached the midpoint of their runs. Three more
winked out almost as one as Leia drifted away from Nylykerka and toward
the middle of the War Hall.
"What's going on out there?" she breathed to no one in particular as
she stared up at the displays.
The signals from Z'fell, Wakiza, Faz, N'zoth---all assigned to the 21st
Recon Group's X-wings--were among the last to vanish, but vanish they
did. No scout managed to scan more than three-fourths of a Duskhan
League target before being destroyed.
There was not a sound in the War Hall other than a muffled cough or a
furniture creak as the five-minute timer expired. Only four scouts
survived to jump out of their target systems--all drones. None had
found any thing during their passes, save for newly dead worlds.
Eyes began to turn from the frozen images on the wall to the woman
standing alone in the center of the room.
"Now we know," Leia said simply. "Controller, put the pilots' visual
IDs up while you queue the data from Number One for replay. I'd like
us to remember who we owe for this."
The blast that disabled Rone Taggar's recon-X came from behind and
below, without warning. Even before the cockpit went dark, he could
tell from the blue lightning dancing over the cockpit that it was a
powerful ion cannon bolt that had overwhelmed the fighter's shields.
Twisting in his harness, he tried to look back and find his attacker.
There'd been no fire from the ground during the close approach, and he
was now out of range for any ordinary ground-based antiship battery.
"Come on, where are you?" he muttered. "Where'd you come from?"
There were dozens of stars bright enough that Taggar could not look
directly at them without squinting--more than enough dazzle to hide an
interceptor or a defense buoy from his eyes. But he didn't understand
why his targeting system had missed it. The recon-X had the smallest
blind spot to the rear of any Republic fighter, and on a normal threat
acquisition--at fifty thousand meters or mo re--he would have bet a
month's pay that he could have held off any equal opponent long enough
to finish the run.
Taggar silently counted off the restart interval, fully expecting the
killing shot to come before he reached 100.
The absorbers worked passively, soaking up the excess surface charge
and using it to feed the restart cell. Its momentum unchanged by the
blast, his fighter was still speeding away from N'zoth. With a
successful restart, he could grab the last thirty seconds of data on
the un-scanned far side and jump away to safety.
The count had reached eighty-seven when he felt the lurch of the
tractor beam grabbing hold of his ship. With the spoiler shaking and
the fuselage chattering around him, Taggar fished in his chest pocket
for the purge stick.
stick home into the socket on the control panel.
The purge charge that jumped from the stick raced through the computer
memories of the fighter, erasing every coherent bit. Its final stop
was the R2 interface, where it passed to a shape charge under the
droid's sensor dome. The small explosion that followed was
surprisingly loud and briefly lit the inside of the cockpit.
Glancing back, Taggar confirmed that the charge had completely and
thoroughly decapitated the droid.
That left only one duty--the suicide needle now available at the other
end of the purge stick, and the dead-man grip of the ship's
self-destruct trigger. Taggar looked out at the Yevethan warship,
measuring the closing distance. He knew that he was taking a chance by
waiting, especially after they'd seen R2-R blow its top.
But he also knew that the corvette would have to lower its shields to
bring him alongside.
When the ship had drawn close enough to loom over the fighter, Taggar
closed his left hand around the trigger and let his head roll to one
side as though he were unconscious. Watching through slit eyes, he saw
light spilling from the underside of the corvette, between the opening
doors of the docking berth. There was no pinnace inside--the berth was
meant for his fighter.
Gambling, he waited longer still, until the coupling lines grabbed the
spoilers and drew the recon-X upward, until the doors began to close
under him. Then he lifted his head, rubbed his thumb across the
pilot's wings taped to the console, and jammed the palm of his right
hand against the end of the purge stick.
A few moments later his head lolled forward against his chest and the
hand closed tightly around the trigger began to relax, his tired
fingers yielding against the pressure of the springplate. Taggar was
peacefully elsewhere when the destruct charge ripped the belly of the
corvette open along the centerline, spilling a churning cloud of debris
from both ships into space.
As bright fire enveloped Beauty of Yevetha, Nil Spaar averted his eyes
from the sight, then turned and searched the chamber for the proctor of
defense for the spawnworld.
"Kol Attan!" he bellow
ed.
His fighting crests shrunken almost to invisibility, Kol Attan shuffled
forward. "Viceroy, I---" Nil Spaar silenced him with a glare and
pointed at the floor. Trembling, the proctor lowered himself to one
knee, closed his eyes, and bared his neck. The viceroy circled him
slowly, flexing his right hand in a motion that brought the dewclaw
curling out to its full length.
"You are a coward as well as incompetent," Nil Spaar whispered at
last.
"Your blood is not worth spilling.
It would be beneath me to touch you. I declare you to-mara, a shamed
one. Go home and beg your darna for death."
When the proctor did not move, Nil Spaar drew a deep breath that
brought a flush to his crests, then sent Kol Attan sprawling with a
vicious kick. "You will not provoke me into giving you an honorable
exit," he said through clenched teeth. "Go!"
As the proctor scrambled away on all fours, Nil Spaar turned his back
to him. "Tal Fraan," he said.
The nitakka came forward with strength in his strides and pride in his
carriage. "Sir."
"You anticipated that the vermin would violate the All in an attempt to
know us. How is it you come to your prescience?"
"I have spent time with them, in the camps on Pa'aal, and aboard
Devotion of Yevetha, where they serve us," said Tal Fraan. "I have
seen how they hunger to debase even the smallest mysteries, instead of
embracing the mysteries as they present themselves. The pale ones,