He frowned at her. “You’re the writer.”
“Yes, but you’re talking, not writing.”
His frown only deepened. “You know what I mean. One more jump and on to the serious business.”
Her eyes searched his face. “And then?”
All he could do was shrug. “With luck, live to fight another day.”
She closed her eyes and shook her head. “With luck … There you go again, qualifying every answer.”
He didn’t know how else to put it; how not to qualify his remarks. In thinking about it, he recalled having made almost the same comment when the Reticent had jumped for Obroa-skai. With any luck, Tarkin and Vader will dismiss the ship’s arrival as coincidental, and the crew will simply be questioned and released. But that wasn’t what happened. The Imperials had seen through the ruse, the ship had been impounded, and the crew had been arrested. Word was that neither Tarkin nor Vader had been able to glean much information from them, but Teller doubted that Tarkin would leave it at that. Tarkin wouldn’t rest until he rooted out connections, and once he did … Well, by then it would be too late.
With any luck.
The update on the situation at Obroa-skai had also included a piece of good news. The corvette’s crew had been given a target to attack, which had saved him the trouble of having to choose one from among increasingly bad options. The objective was another Imperial facility rather than some more significant objective, but Teller could live with that. No one aboard the Carrion Spike nursed any delusions about winning a war against the Empire single-handedly. They were merely contributing to what Teller hoped would one day grow into a cause. That, and avenging themselves for what each of them had had to bear; payback for atrocities the Empire had committed, which had inspired them to come together as a group.
“Nice of you to give Cala the privilege of destroying the homing beacon,” Anora said.
“He earned it.”
Anora put her feet on the cool deck, yawned, and stretched her thin, dark arms over her head. “When do we go?”
Teller glanced at the console’s chron display. “We’ve still got a couple of hours.”
“Do you trust your contact entirely?”
Teller rocked his head. “I’d say, up to a point. He’s convinced that he has as much to gain as we do.”
Anora grinned faintly. “I was expecting you to add, or lose.”
“It was implied.”
“Any compassion for our stand-ins at Obroa-skai?”
Teller exhaled in disappointment. “Not you, too.”
“I’m only asking.”
“They knew the risks,” Teller said, straight-faced.
Anora took a long moment to respond. “I know I sound like Hask, but maybe I’m just not cut out for this, Teller.” She eyed him askance. “It was never an ambition of mine to be a revolutionary.”
He snorted. “I don’t buy it. You were fighting the good fight in your own way long before I met you. With words, anyway.”
She smiled without showing her teeth. “Not quite the same as firing laser cannons at other beings or letting strangers take the fall for you.”
He studied her. “You know, I’m actually surprised to hear you talk like this. You practically jumped at the chance to get involved.”
She nodded. “I won’t deny it. But since we’re being honest with each other, I may have been thinking of it more as a career move.”
“Fame and fortune.”
“I guess. And like our stand-ins, I knew the risk. But I underestimated COMPNOR and the Emperor.”
“His reach.”
“Not just his reach.” Her face grew serious. “His power. His barbarity.”
“You’re not the only one who underestimated him.”
Anora glanced toward the command center hatch and lowered her voice. “I still feel bad about dragging Hask into this.”
Teller shrugged. “We could always drop her off somewhere.”
Anora’s eyes searched his face. “Really?”
“Sure, if that’s what she wants.”
“Should I ask her?”
“Go ahead. I’ll give you odds she says no.”
Anora laughed shortly. “I think you’re right.” She fell silent, then said: “Are we going to win, Teller?”
He reached out to clap her gently on the shoulder. “We’re winning so far, aren’t we?”
The subsurface Sith shrine wasn’t the sole area in the Palace where the dark side of the Force was strong. Rooms and corridors throughout the lower levels still bore traces of the resentful fury Darth Vader had unleashed in the final days of the Clone Wars. In one such room a human and a Koorivar knelt in separate pools of ruthless light trained on them from hidden sources in the vaulted ceiling. To Darth Sidious, however, they were not so much living beings as whirlpools in the befuddled waters he had been negotiating since the cache of communications gear found on Murkhana had been brought to his attention; obstacles he needed to maneuver past in order to reach an untroubled stretch of current.
Sidious occupied a simple chair well removed from the twin pools of light, the droid 11-4D off to one side and, slightly behind him, Vizier Mas Amedda close at hand as well. Opposite him across the barren room, a pair of Royal Guards flanked the carved stone doorway.
The Koorivar — Bracchia — was an Imperial intelligence asset assigned to Murkhana; the human — Stellan — the Koorivar’s Security Bureau case officer stationed on Coruscant. Sidious already knew all he needed to about their separate backgrounds and records of service. He sought nothing more than to observe them through the Force, and to evaluate their responses to a few simple questions.
“Koorivar,” he said from the chair, “you served the Republic during the war, and more recently you provided some assistance to Lord Vader and Governor Tarkin on Murkhana.”
Light reflected off the Koorivar’s spiral horn as he lifted his head a bit. “I helped them rid Murkhana of arms smugglers, my lord.”
“So it seems. But tell us what you told them at the time about your initial survey of the HoloNet jamming devices.”
“My lord, I stated that I did not chance upon the devices on my own, nor was I cognizant of any rumors indicating that such a cache existed in Murkhana City. I was merely executing a directive I received from Coruscant.”
Viewing him through the Force, Sidious saw the eddying waters began to relax and surrender themselves to the current.
“Case officer,” he said to Stellan, “by ‘Coruscant’ he means you, does he not?”
“Yes, my lord. The investigation was carried out at my request.” A thickset human man of indeterminate age, he had brown wavy hair and large ears set low on a blockish head.
“Then tell us how you came to learn of this cache.”
The man lifted his nondescript face to the light, squinting and blinking in puzzlement. “My lord, forgive me. I assumed you were aware that the information was provided to ISB by Military Intelligence.”
Sidious’s pulse quickened. Instead of smoothing out, the hydraulic tightened on itself and began to spin more rapidly, as if summoning Sidious to follow the swirling funnel beneath the surface to whatever irregularity below had given rise to it.
It may as well have been the dark side that rasped: “Explain this.”
Humbling himself, the case officer lowered his head. “My lord, Military Intelligence was in the process of conducting an inventory of caches of armaments, vehicles, and supplies that had been left abandoned during the war on a host of contested worlds, from Raxus all the way to Utapau. In the case of the HoloNet jamming devices, MI wasn’t certain if the cache had been on Murkhana for several years, or if it was of more recent origin, and worthy therefore of further investigation. Given that an investigation of that sort fell outside its purview, MI relayed the matter to Imperial Security.”