Tarkin fumed. “Acquire it and open fire!”
He turned his attention to the screens as turbolaser beams from the Star Destroyer’s starboard-side turrets found the Lux-400, and it vanished in a short-lived fireball.
“The Truant is no longer on the wanted list, sir. Minimal collateral casualties.”
Tarkin strode forward on the walkway to the primary data pit. “Have you confined the rest of those ships?”
“They’re not going anywhere, sir, and Lord Vader’s picket is currently closing on the group. Still no sign of the Carrion Spike.”
“Do the sensors detail any instances of ships jumping to lightspeed?”
“None, sir. No instances of Cronau radiation — though the interdiction field would make that a long shot, in any case.”
Tarkin shook his head in bewilderment. Had the shipjackers had a last-moment change of plans? Or had they been forewarned?
“Is the homing beacon still transmitting?”
The tech attended to his various instruments. “No signal from the tracker, sir. Nothing.”
So they had discovered it. But when?
Tarkin continued to move forward until he was standing just short of the viewports, just short of the chaos beyond. Vader’s voice fractured his introspection.
“Which vessel appeared first?”
“The YT-One-Thousand freighter,” Tarkin said.
“Then we’ll begin with that one, since it arrived closest to the projected arrival time of the Carrion Spike.”
“Begin what, Lord Vader?”
“The failure of the corvette to appear does not owe to any impromptu change of plans, Governor. The dissidents are trying to throw us off the scent, and I intend to search each interdicted ship until we have answers.”
Tarkin watched the picket accelerate as Vader made haste for the immobilized antique, ignoring the flaming hulk of the passenger liner and the scattering of lifeboats and escape pods to all sides.
Tarkin let his gaze become unfocused, so that the stars and the strewn ships lost all definition. His thoughts returned to the plateau and the lessons he had learned. Sometimes, especially when he, Jova, and the others had gone without food for several days — and despite their best efforts to stalk faultlessly — an elusive hunt took on such desperation that the importance of thinking like the prey was abandoned. Vader was correct: The dissidents hadn’t had a last-moment change of plans; early on they were aware of the trap being set for them. Creatures understood themselves to be most vulnerable during flight and evasion. That’s when they paid strict attention to warnings issued by other animals. Fleeing for their lives, they picked up scents on the wind; they sharpened their senses, granting themselves the ability to hear and see their pursuers at great distances. They took all advantage of knowing the territory better than the ones chasing them. The savannas and jungled areas of the plateau would perk up when Jova and his band were about, because they were the intruders, and usually up to no good.
His loathing and frustration notwithstanding, Tarkin could respect the dissidents for their cleverness and foresight, but clearly their plan had been hatched with the aid of confederates, and those allies were now beginning to play their part in keeping the Carrion Spike from being reclaimed.
Tarkin had lost all sense of how long he had been standing in the viewport bay when Vader’s fury brought him back to the moment.
“This freighter is to be tractored aboard the Executrix for a thorough inspection. The crew is to be kept in detention until I’m through interrogating them.”
Hung upside down
VADER STOOD OMINOUSLY motionless in the illuminated cargo hold of the YT freighter, breathing deeply and looking as if he was ready to draw his lightsaber and cut everything around him to shreds. Tarkin, too, thought it unlikely they were going to discover anything of interest among the haphazardly stacked shipping crates, but he was willing to have a look nonetheless.
The foul-smelling and disheveled old ship sat in the glare of spotlights in one of the Star Destroyer’s ancillary hangars, like some stultified and wary insect. Circular in design, with an outrigger cockpit sandwiched between a pair of rectangular mandibles, the Reticent had seen better days a century earlier, and was now barely spaceworthy. The cargo ramp beneath the cockpit had been lowered, and glow rods set up inside and out to flood the hold with light. Vader and Tarkin’s cursory search had revealed consignments of tools, medical supplies, bolts of fabric, trays of gaudy costume jewelry, tankfuls of alcoholic beverages, and droid parts. Recording devices and scanners in hand, Lieutenant Crest and two other stormtroopers — all three without helmets or armored plastrons — were following Vader and Tarkin as they nosed around.
The Reticent was the only ship to have been sequestered following the catastrophe at the edge of Obroa-skai space. The rest that had fallen victim to the faulty interdiction field had been checked out and allowed to go on their way, which for most of them meant directly to the system’s namesake planet for repairs, after collisions with escape pods and debris from the wrecked Mon Cal star cruiser. That ship and the Detainer had also been towed to Obroa-skai, with the death toll from the crash estimated at eleven hundred beings. The state-of-the-art Immobilizer whose fail-safes had malfunctioned had been returned to Corellian Engineering for reassessment. Legitimate holovids of the events had flooded the HoloNet, most of them cammed by passengers aboard the luxury liner, and by media teams who had received word from unidentified sources of an Imperial operation taking place at the periphery of the star system. As for Carrion Spike, she had yet to turn up in any system. By the time the task force’s fastest frigate had reached Thustra, Tarkin’s rogue ship had already jumped to unknown space.
Crest was reading from a datapad.
“The ship’s identification signature doesn’t appear to have been altered. It hasn’t even changed names in decades. The crew acquired it three years back from a dealer on Lantillies. The itinerary we sliced from the navicomputer corroborates the captain’s story. They jumped from Taris to Thustra to pick up replacement parts for a fleet of Sephi flyers that were sold in bulk at the end of the war to an Obroa-skai emergency medevac center.”
“How was the pickup and delivery arranged?” Tarkin asked.
“Through a broker on Lantillies — maybe the same dealer in pre-owned ships. He gets a line on what’s needed when and where and dispatches crews to make the transfers.”
“The Reticent’s crew are freelance operators?”
Crest nodded. “They describe themselves as itinerant merchants.”
“Where were they bound after Obroa-skai?” Vader wanted to know.
“Taanab,” Crest said, “to buy foodstuffs. Parties at Thustra, Obroa-skai, and Taanab have substantiated all this.”
“And the communications board?” Tarkin asked.
Crest turned to him. “It isn’t set up to record incoming or outgoing transmissions, but the log checks out, at least in terms of supporting the captain’s claims about who contacted them and where the freighter was at the time.”
Vader scanned the hold, as if in search of something unspecified. “How long did they spend at Thustra?”
“Three hours, Lord Vader.”
Vader glanced at Tarkin. “What, I wonder, was their rush?”
Tarkin considered it. “Apparently the goods — the flyer replacement parts — were already crated and waiting for them. The medcenter on Obroa-skai had requested that they expedite the delivery.” He fell briefly silent. “The Reticent’s hyperdrive is vastly inferior to that of the Carrion Spike. No better than a Class Five, I would imagine. That means that even though they arrived in the Obroa-skai system at almost precisely the moment we were expecting the Carrion Spike, the Reticent had to have gone to hyperspace much sooner than the Carrion Spike would have. The timing could owe to nothing more than coincidence, but one question to ask is just what the dissidents were doing in the Thustra system for so many hours.”