Tarkin looked at Cassel. “Secure from battle stations and sound the all-clear. I want a forensic team assembled to examine the droids. I doubt we’ll learn much, but we may be able to ascertain the carrier’s point of origin.” He grew pensive for a moment, then added: “Prepare an after-action report for Coruscant and transmit it to my quarters so I can append my notes.”
“Will do,” Cassel said.
A specialist handed Tarkin his duster, and he had started for the door when a voice rang out behind him.
“Sir, a question if you will?”
Tarkin stopped and turned around. “Ask it.”
“How did you know, sir?”
“How did I know what, Corporal?”
The young, brown-haired specialist gnawed at her lower lip before continuing. “That the holotransmission from Rampart Station was counterfeit, sir.”
Tarkin looked her up and down. “Perhaps you’d care to proffer an explanation of your own.”
“In the replay — the bar of interval noise you noticed. Somehow that told you that someone had managed to introduce a false real-time feed into the local HoloNet relay.”
Tarkin smiled faintly. “Train yourself to recognize it — all of you. Deception may be the least of what our unknown adversaries have in store.”
Cold case
IN SENTINEL’S MAINTENANCE HANGAR, Tarkin paced the length of a high, blastproof partition. The storm had blown through and the base had resumed normal operations, but many of the soldiers and specialists were still parsing the fact that Sentinel had come under attack. For the youngest among them, recruits or volunteers, it was the first action they had ever seen.
On the far side of a series of massive transparisteel panels set into the partition, several hazmat-suited forensic technicians were examining wreckage from the battle and running tests on three droid starfighters grasped in cradles suspended from tall gantries. Elsewhere in the hangar loadlifters and other droids were sorting through piles of debris. The tang of lubricants and flame-scorched metals hung in the air, and the noise level created by the labor droids was grating. As Tarkin had warned, many of the vulture droids had transformed into bombs on losing contact with the warship’s central control computer. Regardless, Captain Burque’s salvage teams had managed to recover a droid whose auto-destruct mechanism had been damaged during combat.
Hung in walking configuration with its blaster cannon lateral wings split, the three-and-a-half-meter-long vulture looked less like its namesake scavenger than it did a long-legged alloy quadruped with an equine head. With the central nacelle open and the computer brain exposed and studded with instruments, the droid might have been undergoing torture rather than autopsy. The other two dangling captives — three-armed fighters that mirrored the appearance of the species that had designed them — were similarly exposed and quilled with probes.
Tarkin had lost count of how many back-and-forth meanders he had completed, and was standing opposite the vulture droid when a decontamination lock in the partition opened and a tech emerged, removing the hood of his anti-rad suit and wiping sweat from his face and balding pate with a bare hand.
Tarkin spun around to meet him halfway. “What have you learned?”
“Not as much as we’d hoped to, sir,” the tech said. “Analysis of data received by the command center’s friend-or-foe indicator confirms that the capital ship is a downsized version of a Separatist Providence-class cruiser-carrier, modified with modules taken from CIS frigates and destroyers. Ships of the sort made a name for themselves during the war by jamming signals and destroying HoloNet relays. Parts of the ship’s sensor array tower, which the Seps usually mounted aft rather than forward, appear to have come from the cruiser Lucid Voice, which saw action at Quell, Ryloth, and in a couple of other contested systems.”
Tarkin frowned. “How did the appropriation teams manage to miss confiscating that ship?”
“They didn’t, sir. Records show that the Lucid Voice was dismantled at the Bilbringi shipyards four years ago.”
Tarkin considered that. “In other words, some components of that vessel went missing.”
“Lost, stolen, sold, it’s impossible to say. Other sections of the warship appear to have come from the Invincible.”
Tarkin didn’t bother to mask his surprise. “That was Separatist Admiral Trench’s ship — destroyed during the Battle of Christophsis.”
“Partially destroyed, in any case. The ship was modular in design, and the modules that survived must have been worth salvaging and putting on the open market. Parts dealers in the Outer Rim are desperate for supplies, so the modules may have ended up in the Tion Cluster or the like.” The tech removed his other elbow-length glove and wiped his face again. “The Idellian scanner isolated thirty lifeforms — a crew of humans and near-humans — which is in keeping with the practice of placing sentients in command of most Providence-class ships. But for a ship of that size and armament, thirty sentients is virtually your definition of a skeleton crew. Sometimes the Seps substituted OOM pilot battle droids, and I’m guessing our skittish warship had some of those as well, because whoever cobbled the thing together retrofitted it with a rudimentary droid-control computer — possibly a redundant comp of the sort you used to find on first-generation Trade Federation Lucrehulks.”
“Whoever, as you say.”
“Lucid Voice was built by the Quarren Free Dac Volunteers Engineering Corps — much to the displeasure of the Mon Cals who share their planet with the Quarren. We’re checking to see if QFD or their erstwhile partners, Pammant Docks, might have supervised the reassembly. TradeFed and Separatist technology has been showing up lately in the Corporate Sector, so we’re also looking into the possibility that the ship was built there. The Headhunter starfighters seen in the holovid could have come from anywhere. Tikiars are produced in the Senex, but it’s not uncommon to encounter them in this sector of the Rim.”
Tarkin nodded and motioned toward the hangar. “The droids?”
The specialist turned to face the viewports. “Relatively few modifications to the vulture. Same fuel slug propulsion, same weapons system. Alphanumeric identification indicates that this one belonged to a Confederacy battle group known as The Grievous Legion.”
“And also managed to find its way onto the black market …”
“So it appears, sir.”
Tarkin moved farther down the partition. “And the tri-fighters?”
“Unremarkable. But we’ve no evidence regarding their origin. Not yet anyway.”
Tarkin forced an exhalation through his nose. “Were you able to retrieve data regarding the warship’s point of origin?”
The specialist shook his head. “Negative, sir. The memory modules of the droids don’t log jump information.”
“All right,” Tarkin said after a moment. “Continue with the analysis. I want every weld and rivet investigated.”
“We’re on top of it, sir.” The tech pulled the hood back over his head, slipped his hands into the long gloves, and disappeared through the lock.
Tarkin watched him enter the hangar, then resumed pacing, replaying the attack in his mind.
Harassment of Imperial installations by pirates and malcontents was nothing new, but in almost all cases the assaults had been hit-and-run sorties, and none had taken place so close to heavily defended Geonosis. The counterfeit real-time holotransmission had been designed to draw ships from Sentinel to Rampart Station, in the hope of leaving the former vulnerable. But the attack was clearly calculated to be suicidal from its inception. Even if he had dispatched the Electrum to the marshaling station — even if he had been taken in by the distress call and dispatched half his flotilla — the energy shields and laser cannons that protected Sentinel would have been sufficient to ward off any strikes, let alone from droids. The warship seen in the holovid the attackers had transmitted through the local HoloNet relay had shown up at Sentinel, but where were the modified starfighters, which had to have been flown by living pilots? Despite being crewed by sentients, the mysterious cruiser hadn’t discharged any of its point-defense or ranged weapons. If destruction of the base was the goal, why hadn’t whoever was behind the attack used the ship as a bomb by reverting from hyperspace in closer proximity to the moon? Planetary bodies larger than Sentinel had been shaken to their core by such events.