“Lovely place,” Jaina said, her voice muffled by the breath mask.
Frost clung to the rocks, and steam rose into the air from heating and recirculation vents deep in the spice mines. Near the foreshortened horizon they saw the metal and wire-mesh flower of the massive transmitter. Czethros would use it to send his coded, high-powered signal burst announcing that now was the time for Black Sun’s ultimate takeover.
The flat, broken land was strewn with boulders and chunks of powdery white salt dried into lumps and low pillars. Cracks split the landscape. Jaina saw very few places for them to hide; her jumpsuit, along with Lowie’s ginger-brown fur, would stand out like a striking beacon.
They had no choice but to send Em Teedee.
His fingers already numb with cold, Lowie bent down to manipulate the tiny cords. Using a special quick-release knot, he attached the two canisters of explosives below the hovering droid’s casing. With her hands, Jaina showed Em Teedee the distance he needed to keep between his casing and the rough surface of the planetoid.
“You have this much play between the explosive and the ground right now,” she said. “We’ll need you to fly as low as possible to keep from being seen, but don’t let the explosives hit a rock.”
“Indeed, Mistress Jaina. I assure you that I won’t.”
Lowie grunted something, and Em Teedee snapped, “What do you mean by ‘famous last words’? I intend to follow our plan exactly!”
Lowie touched the buttons on the shaped charges with his claws and chattered to the droid.
Em Teedee answered in alarm, “Six standard minutes? Do you think that will be sufficient time?” The Wookiee shrugged.
“These aren’t high-capacity charges, Em Teedee,” Jaina said. “I don’t think they’re made with long timers.”
“Very well, I shall do my best.” The little droid hovered off the ground and then, with a burst of his microrepulsorjets, skimmed across the powdery surface of Kessel like a glinting silver bullet. Keeping low, he wove around rocks, over fissures, across the broken and rugged terrain.
A troop of guards would likely be stationed in a protective hut near the transmitter, just waiting for Czethros to send his signal. The droid had to get there before they saw him.
Em Teedee increased speed, still painfully aware that he could not allow the canisters of explosives to strike against a hard rock or a projection of encrusted salt. His internal clock counted down the seconds that remained on the bomb timers. The transmitting dish seemed very far away.
Em Teedee pushed his microjets faster and faster, drawing closer. Finally, the structure loomed up ahead of him: scooped amplifiers and curved screens to focus the communication beam. The miniaturized droid rose like a tiny satellite over the lip, then dropped toward the center of the flower. There, an aiming antenna would direct the signal while the pulse ricocheted off the parabolic petals and increased its power, sending it out to all secret receiving stations attuned to the Black Sun’s command frequency.
After he landed in the center, Em Teedee gently touched the explosive canisters to the central control point, jerked upward against the quick-release knots to detach the short cables, then rose into the air. He had very little time left, and he was anxious to get away. Stealth had required him to take longer than anticipated reaching the station, and now that there was nothing to delay him, the droid shot upward and sped away.
He must have made a fine glittering target, because two guards barreled out of a small hutment beside the transmitting station. They were curious at first, gazing up at him, then began shouting. One of the men turned back to the transmitting station as if he realized something must be wrong. The other guard grabbed for his weapon, but didn’t seem to know what to shoot at.
Em Teedee streaked across the rocky landscape and vanished into the distance.
Jaina and Lowie stood up, waving him on toward the doorway that would lead back into the pressurized docking bay.
When the translating droid was only a hundred meters away from them, the transmitter erupted in a blossom of orange fire. Shrapnel blew sky-high—some of it perhaps even into orbit, because of Kessel’s low gravity.
Jaina and Lowie watched as the fires from the explosion slowly sputtered out for lack of oxygen. Huge sections of the antenna fell, teetering before they collapsed. A few seconds later, the shock wave and the sound reached them at the docking bay doors, high-pitched and tinny due to the thin air.
“Let’s go!” Jaina said. “They’re really going to be after us now.”
They ducked back inside the spice mines of Kessel, hoping they could find a safe place to hide.
When Czethros learned of the disaster, his roar of rage was almost as loud as the explosion itself. His blazing cyber-eye scanned back and forth, looking for someone to blame.
“Timing is everything!” he bellowed. “If I don’t send my signal, the uprising will never commence—and unless we do this all at once, the New Republic will find a way to crush each separate little brush-fire.”
A guard nodded. “I understand, my Lord Czethros.”
“Of course you understand! An idiot could understand. But what can you do about it?”
“Nothing that I know of, my Lord Czethros.”
The Black Sun lieutenant stormed back and forth in Nien Nunb’s office, which he had commandeered. He knew his superiors were counting on him, and he knew that the leaders of Black Sun were not very forgiving when something went wrong.
“I thought you had imprisoned everyone who could cause problems for us,” Czethros said, whirling about. “What did you forget to take into account? Who is still missing?”
“I don’t know, my Lord Czethros.”
“Of course you don’t know, or the situation would already be under control!” He pounded a hand on the Chief Administrator’s low tabletop. He wished the Sullustan were taller so that his office and its furnishings would have been a bit more comfortable for a man of his size.
Czethros glared at the guard. The other armed mercenaries milling about in the hall nervously awaited their turn for a reprimand. Each hoped he would survive the wrath of Czethros.
“It’s safe to say we have some sort of little rodents unaccounted for. The saboteurs know what they’re doing, and they intend to ruin my plans. Make sure all our prisoners are securely locked away. Then I want full teams to comb every inch of the spice mines. We must find whoever is responsible for blowing up my transmitting station. I want them—dead or alive. I don’t care which.”
He turned, not deigning even to look at his crew anymore, then slowly glanced back over his shoulder. “Of course, if you don’t find them for me to torture”—his cracked lips curled in a faint smile—“I’ll be forced to take out my frustrations on some of you instead.”
16
Anja had never felt so out of control.
While the Jedi all around her in the minisub worked with brisk determination to diagnose and fix the ailments of the Elfa, she felt herself slipping away into a zone of pain somewhere between madness and death.
Her vision narrowed and filled with static at the edges. She found she could not concentrate on what her friends were doing—the need for spice was too great, no matter how she tried to push it back. The tiny claustrophobic vessel felt unbearably hot, stifling, despite their arctic prison. Unreasonable quantities of perspiration soaked her leather headband, streamed into her large eyes, ran down her neck and back to leave damp stains on her clothing.
The others around her were talking, planning, brainstorming, but it all seemed so far away. A deep ache burned in her muscles and ate its way down to her bones, igniting liquid agony in every joint of her body. Moving her hands or any part of her body produced an instant punishing pain. So she did not move. Each breath became a struggle. Her head throbbed with unimaginable pressure. She realized now that only one substance in the galaxy could put an end to her agony: andris.