Isval took Ryiin by the hand and walked her out of the pit, past the smoke and leers and spice and vice, ascending, ascending, and by the time she reached the top she felt as light as she had in months. The feeling wouldn’t last, she knew, but she’d enjoy it while it did. She wondered what Cham would think of her if he knew what she did, what she had to do. She thought he wouldn’t understand. Cham preached principle, but only those who’d never descended to Level One of the Octagon thought in terms of principle. Isval knew better; maybe Ryiin knew better. The real world didn’t well accommodate principles.
When they reached the top of the Octagon, sweaty and out of breath, they fell in with the crowd there. Ryiin looked about wide-eyed, breathed deep the night’s stink.
“How long’s it been?” Isval asked.
“Weeks since I left the Hole,” Ryiin answered.
“You still good?” Isval asked. This was the point when previous girls had turned back. Rarely, but it sometimes happened.
“I’m good,” Ryiin said.
“Never go back,” Isval said, and Ryiin nodded. “Now let’s get you home. A new home.”
A servicecar took the two of them back to the garret Isval had left earlier in the night. She led Ryiin up the stairs—the drunk was still there—and into the garret.
“It’s not much,” Isval said, showing the room to her. “But it’s safe and it’s yours.”
“What do you mean? You’re not staying? Isn’t this your place?”
“No, it’s yours. It’s paid up through the year.”
“The year!”
“There’s food in the cabinets, and a few hundred credits in the drawer by the cooler. That ought to be enough to get you situated.”
Hearing all that, Ryiin looked unsteady. She reached for a chair, slid into it. Her eyes welled. Isval stripped off her headdress, her clothing, and slipped back into her ordinary shirt, trousers, and weapons belt. Ryiin watched her throughout.
“I don’t understand this, or you. What are you? Why are you doing this?”
“I told you,” Isval said, looking in the small mirror. She took a rag, wet it from water in a jug, and wiped off the mask. “I used to be what you are. What you were. I just…want to help. I wish someone had helped me.”
“That’s not what I mean,” Ryiin said. “Why me? I’m just a nobody.”
“You’re not nobody! You’re not. I picked you…by chance. You were with an Imperial and you two were alone.”
“So you…look for them? Imperials to kill? Why?”
Isval looked back at her by way of her reflection in the mirror. “You have to ask?”
Ryiin could not hold her reflected eyes. “Have you…done that before? Killed Imperials?”
This time Isval looked back at her own reflection. “You have to ask?”
Ryiin said nothing, but she shivered.
“I have a friend,” Isval said. “He wants to save the whole planet. But that’s…too big for me, too much. I just want to save someone, a few people. Maybe you.”
Ryiin smiled.
Isval cleared her throat and gathered her things. “Take care of yourself, Ryiin. I don’t normally check back. Dangerous for both of us.”
“Normally? You’ve done this for other girls?”
“I have.”
“Sounds like you’ve already saved a few someones. Can I ask how many?”
“Many. Doesn’t matter.”
“And each time you…”
Mentally, Isval finished the sentence. Killed someone?
“I’m going now,” Isval said.
“Wait, I don’t even know your name.”
“You don’t need to. Good-bye, Ryiin.”
“Well, thank you. Thank you so much. Not just for saving me, but for not doing it.”
Isval stopped in the doorway but didn’t turn. Over her shoulder, she said, “Why do you care so much?”
Ryiin shook her head, shifted on her seat. “I don’t know, but…it has to stop sometime, doesn’t it? The violence. The killing. Someone has to stop, or it’ll never end. Right? Maybe I’m saving you.” She laughed.
Isval looked down at her hands but didn’t reply.
“What is it?” Ryiin asked. “Did I say something wrong? I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t say anything wrong,” Isval said. “You probably didn’t spend a lot of time in the Hole, though. Good fortune, Ryiin. Don’t go back, all right?”
“That’s it?” the girl asked.
“That’s it.” With that, Isval left the garret, another girl lifted out of bondage. Some of those she’d helped in the past had drifted back, but most didn’t. Their new lives weren’t easy, but at least they were no longer slaves.
She hailed a servicecar and, as the vehicle moved off, Ryiin’s words replayed themselves for her.
It has to stop sometime, doesn’t it?
Isval didn’t see how it could stop, not for her. She had the driver take her back to the Octagon, Level Two.
“You don’t look like a Level Two kind of lady,” he said to her.
“You’d be surprised,” she answered. She exited the car and headed down, into the deeper dark. She found the nook soon enough, the Imperial still lying there semiconscious, his hand broken, his face purpling from the blow she’d struck him. Spit and blood pooled on the ground near his mouth. She pulled her vibroblade and held it to his throat. His eyes blinked open. She imagined he could hardly see.
“Don’t,” he murmured.
She stared at his pain-clouded eyes a long while, the blade ready. She lifted it from his neck.
“Ryiin saved your life tonight,” she said. “Remember that, because if you ever go looking for her, I’ll come back. You hear me? You hear?”
He groaned assent.
She sheathed the knife. “So it’s settled that you’ll live. But you still owe me pain.”
She kicked him in the ribs once, twice, felt them give way with an audible snap. He gasped in agony, moaned. She stepped over him, straddling him, grabbed his shirt in her fist, and punched him in the face again and again until he was as limp in her grasp as a child’s doll. She dropped him to the ground and stared at him, her breath coming hard. She looked at her knuckles, raw and bleeding, just like the rest of her.
She was broken. And it would never stop. Not for her.
Eyes watched her as she stepped out of the alley and headed up a nearby flight of stairs. By the time she’d put a full level behind her, she heard the shouts from below. She’d been sloppy, hadn’t covered her tracks, hadn’t—as Cham always warned her to do—thought through her exit. But beatings happened often in the Octagon, and she appeared to be just another Twi’lek slave. She put three levels beneath her feet and still heard no pursuit.
By the time she’d retained another aircar, the need was gone. She could once more think clearly, and her mind was already turning to the preparations she needed to make to ready things for the attack on Taa and Vader. Cham’s plan was elaborate, and extremely risky. But she loved the brazenness of it.
They had nine days to get everything ready.
CHAPTER FIVE
Cham paced the cracked stone of the crowded landing bay. He smiled to himself, thinking he was worse than Isval. All he needed to do was grumble some and the likeness would be perfect.
The underground base on Ryloth’s third moon seethed with activity. A mishmash of technology, droid ships, and weapons sat arrayed on the launch bay’s floor, with dozens of Twi’lek engineers and droid assistants hovering over them like worried mothers. Parts and tools lay in neat arrangements on the floors, the workers and droids plucking what they needed as they needed it.
No one even glanced up at him, so intensely were they focused on their work.
Cham and his agents had been buying and stealing and building ships and weapons for years. During that time he’d been filling weapons caches on Ryloth and Ryloth’s moons, from crates of small arms to makeshift landing bays filled with droid tri-fighters and vulture
droid fighters. He had a large force at his disposal, and he’d built it under the nose of the Empire, all with the compelled assistance of Belkor Dray.
Over the years his engineers—but particularly Kallon, who was a genius with artificial intelligence—had learned how to reprogram the brains in the droid fighters so they could operate without direction from a central droid control ship. They wouldn’t be of much use in a dogfight with crewed ships, but dogfights were not part of Cham’s plan.
He ran through the steps of the plan in his mind, doubts tugging at his resolve. He was committing everything—his people and his resources—to this one play. It would be worth it if he killed Vader and the Emperor. That could trigger a galaxy-wide rebellion, and in that chaos, with the Empire’s resources spread thin, he could work to make Ryloth free. Otherwise…
He didn’t dwell on the otherwise.
A free Ryloth; that was his goal. And if he had to bring down an Empire to do it, he was prepared to do so.
The tiny comlink implanted in his ear canal carried Isval’s voice to him, as if she were speaking directly into his brain. She had a similar unit implanted, which allowed them to hear even each other’s whispers but not be overheard by nearby listeners. Cham’s communications engineers had created a comm subnet that rode on a group of old Clone Wars satellites orbiting Ryloth along with the rest of the war’s detritus. The comsats gave the movement a secure, private network all over the planet and just beyond the orbit of the farthest moon.
“All’s ready down here,” she said. “All three teams are briefed.”
He bit down twice to activate the implant. “You’re on a decoy team, yes?”
She didn’t hesitate before answering. “No, I’m leading the primary. I have to.”
“Isval—”
“There’s no discussion here, Cham. I’m the best chance we have. Besides…I have to. For Pok.”
He couldn’t argue with her thinking or her sentiment, but the thought of losing her made his legs go weak. He relied on her too much, cared for her too much. He remembered Pok’s death, the sound of him choking, dying…
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “But if this goes wrong, you won’t need me anymore, anyway. You won’t even need you. There won’t be much of a movement left to command.”
She was right and he knew it. “Then let’s make sure it doesn’t go wrong.”
“I’ve checked and double-checked,” she said. “I see it in my sleep.”
Cham did, too, and he’d triple-checked his thinking, and it all seemed solid, but they’d never planned anything on this large a scale, with so many moving parts and contingencies.
“If we don’t bring down the shields, we abort,” he said.
“If we don’t short the shields, there’ll be nothing to abort because we’ll never even get started.”
She was right about that, too, and her calm helped steady him. Normally she was agitated and restless, but she turned as calm as still water when action impended. Cham was the opposite, normally calm and controlled, but antsy in the face of imminent action. He worried for his people, probably too much for a revolutionary.
Once, he’d have led missions like this. Now he only planned them.
“I’ve become a bureaucrat,” he muttered.
“Just don’t let yourself get lazy,” she joked, and he chuckled.
Her tone turned serious. “When do the last droid ships go?”
He glanced around at the three dozen or so vulture droids arranged on the landing bay. “Tonight, I think. When Belkor gives us the all-clear.”
Belkor had provided them with information about Imperial patrols, incoming ships, and sensor scans. Cham had used the information to move the droid fighters and mines to the edge of the system unnoticed.
“And speaking of bureaucrats,” she said, “how’s our little Belkor handling this?”
“Oh, I think he’s seeing things in his sleep, too.”
“No indication he knows about Vader and the Emperor?”
“None.” Cham paused, then said, “Two days, Isval. Our intel has the Perilous prepping.”
“Two days,” she agreed. “We’re ready, Cham.”
“We’re ready,” he echoed, saying it as though he could make it true by speaking with enough conviction.
—
Two days later Cham sat in the makeshift command center on Ryloth’s third moon. Three of his comrades shared the room with him: Gobi at the subspace transmitter, his stubby fingers ready to transmit commands; Xira, monitoring the sensor readouts from the probe droids, her heavy-lidded eyes taking in the rapid stream of data displayed on the screen; and Kallon, the consulting engineer. Xira’s data processing droid, D4L1, stood beside her chair, a hot link connecting him to the incoming data stream.
Nine viewscreens mounted on the wall showed the outer reaches of Ryloth’s system, as seen from the half dozen probe droids they’d positioned in the system’s asteroid belt. The rest of the droid ships they’d prepared lurked in the asteroid belt, too, powered down to almost zero, waiting for Gobi’s remote command to activate. A cloud of mines floated in space, ornaments hanging in the black, waiting for the Perilous to emerge from hyperspace.
For the tenth time in the past ten minutes, Cham wondered if Belkor had lost his nerve and betrayed him, or given him bad information. And for the tenth time he forced himself to stop thinking about it. If Belkor had betrayed them, the movement would be crippled with nothing to show for it.
But Belkor hadn’t betrayed them; he couldn’t, because Cham had made clear what the consequences would be. No, things were going as planned. And if they continued that way, then thousands of Imperials would soon be dead, including the Emperor himself.
Not a terrorist, he reminded himself. But a freedom fighter.
Everything he had worked to achieve for years was about to fail or bear fruit, and all he could do was watch it happen via instantaneous subspace transmission from over six hundred thousand kilometers away.
A bureaucrat, indeed.
—
Vader and the Emperor strode onto the central tier of the Perilous’s bridge. Royal Guards followed and took flanking positions at the main lift behind them. Crew members scurried around or sat at their stations, all of them about the business of preparing a hyperspace jump for one of the Empire’s most sophisticated, powerful starships. Captain Luitt stood near them, but kept a few paces of deck between them. He avoided looking directly at Vader, his discomfort with Vader’s presence palpable.
The captain turned to the Emperor, whose face was shrouded in the shadow of his hood. “I trust everything went well aboard the Defiance, my lord.”
“Hyperdrive is online and course is set, sir,” the helm called, and the information was echoed up to Luitt.
“I’d be honored if you’d give the order, my lord,” said Luitt.
“Oh, no, Captain,” the Emperor said, waving a hand. “I’m a political leader, not a military one. Proceed as you would normally.”
“Engage the hyperdrive,” the captain called, and the command caused a ripple of activity to flow along the bridge crew.
Vader felt the faint thrum in the deck as the Perilous’s powerful hyperdrive engaged. Stars and the black of space disappeared, replaced by the blue churn of hyperspace.
“En route to Ryloth,” called the helm.
“Dim the view,” Luitt ordered, and the transparisteel darkened until hyperspace was no longer visible. He turned to the Emperor. “My lord, if you and Lord Vader would prefer to retire to your quarters, I will let you know the instant we arrive in Ryloth’s system.”
“I think we will remain on the bridge for now, Captain,” the Emperor said.
“Very good, sir,” said Luitt, pursing his lips under his bristly gray mustache. “It won’t be long.”
The captain moved off, looking over the shoulders of his crew, issuing orders, and otherwise staying away from Vader. The bridge crew settled into its rhythm.
??
?I think you make him uncomfortable, Lord Vader,” said the Emperor.
Vader made most of the naval officers he encountered uncomfortable. To them, he was a towering dark figure outside their chain of command who had emerged from nowhere and possessed powers they did not understand.
“His discomfort is useful to me,” Vader said.
“Underlings should always be uncomfortable in the presence of their superiors,” said the Emperor. “Don’t you agree?”
Vader understood the question behind the question and answered accordingly. “Yes, my Master.”
“Good.”
The two surveyed the bridge in a silence broken only by the rasping of Vader’s respirator while the Perilous crossed parsecs in a blink. After a time, the bridge crew broke into a different rhythm as they prepared to return the Star Destroyer to normal space.
“Coming out of hyperspace,” called the helm.
“Coming out of hyperspace. Aye,” the call echoed up the bridge.
“And the test begins,” the Emperor said.
Vader looked at his Master, head tilted in a question, not taking his meaning until he, too, felt the disturbance in the Force.
—
“A ship is coming out of hyperspace,” Xira said, her voice pitched high from excitement.
Cham realized he had been clenching his fists for the last thirty minutes. “Activate the mines. Let’s pen them in. Shield bleeders on standby.”
Kallon’s head-tails bobbed with nervousness and his purple skin looked so pale as to be lavender. The bleeders were his brainchild. As always, he mumbled to himself under his breath.
Cham put a hand on Gobi’s shoulder. “Be ready to transmit to the droid ships, Gobi.”
“I’m more than ready, Cham,” Gobi said, shaking with excitement or tension. “Let’s force-feed these Imperials some fire.”
“Let’s do just that,” said Cham.
Not a terrorist. But a freedom fighter.
—
As the Perilous emerged from hyperspace on the outer edge of Ryloth’s system, the mammoth viewport undimmed, giving a view of several distant gas giants and the nearby belt of asteroids that divided the outer system from the inner. The system’s star burned orange and bright in the distance. Ryloth itself was too far away to be visible.