"Admiral Ackbar has not convinced you to abandon your
petition to the Provisional Council about this matter?"
"No" Wedge folded his arms across his chest. "I would
have thought by now you would have engineered a vote to
deny me the chance to address the council."
"Summarily dismiss a petition by the man who liberated
Coruscant?" The Bothan's violet eyes narrowed. "You're
moving into a realm of warfare at which I am a master,
Commander. I would have thought you wise enough to see
that. Your petition will fail. It must fail, so it shall. Captain
Celchu will be tried for murder and treason."
"Even though he is innocent?"
"Is he?"
"He is."
"A fact to be determined by a military court, surely."
Fey'lya gave Wedge a cold smile. "A suggestion, Com-
mander."
"Yes?"
"Don't waste your eloquence on the Provisional Coun-
cil. Save it. Hoard it." The Bothan's teeth flashed in a feral
grin. "Use it on the tribunal that tries Captain Celchu. You'll
not gain his freedom, of course--no one is that eloquent; but
perhaps you will win him some modicum of mercy when it
comes time for sentence to be passed."
2
High up in a tower suite, up above the surface of Imperial
Center, Kirtan Loor allowed himself a smile. At the tower's
pinnacle, the only companions were hawk-bats safe in their
shadowed roosts and Special Intelligence operatives who
were menacing despite their lack of stormtrooper armor or
bulk. He felt alone and aloof, but those sensations came nat-
urally with his sense of superiority. At the top of the world,
he had been given all he could see to command and domi-
nate.
And destroy.
Ysanne Isard had given him the job of creating and lead-
ing a Palpatine Counter-insurgency Front. He knew she did
not expect grand success from him. He had been given ample
resources to make himself a nuisance. He could disrupt the
functioning of the New Republic. He could slow their take-
over of Coruscant and hamper their ability to master the
mechanisms of galactic administration. A bother, minor but
vexatious, is what Ysanne lsard had intended he become.
Kittan Loor knew he had to become more. Years before,
when he started working as an Imperial liaison officer with
the Corellian Security Force on CoreIlia, he never would
have dreamed of finding himself rising so far and playing so
deadly a game. Even so, he had always been ambitious, and
supremely confident in himself and his abilities. His chief
asset was his memory, which allowed him to recall a pleth-
ora of facts, no matter how obscure. Once he had seen or
read or heard something he could draw it from his memory,
and this ability gave him a gross advantage over the crimi-
nals and bureaucrats with whom he dealt.
His reliance on his memory had also hobbled him. His
prodigious feats of recall so overawed his enemies that they
would naturally assume he had processed the information he
possessed and had drawn the logical conclusions from it.
Since they assumed he already knew what only they knew,
they would tell him what he had not bothered to figure out
for himself. They made it unnecessary for him to truly think,
and that skill had begun to atrophy in him.
Ysanne Isard, when she summoned him to Imperial Cen-
ter, had made it abundantly clear that learning to think and
not to assume was the key to his continued existence. Her
supervision made up in severity what it lacked in duration,
putting him through a grueling regimen that rehabilitated his
cognitive abilities. By the time she fled Imperial Center, Isard
had clearly been confident in his ability to annoy and con-
found the Rebels.
More importantly, Kirtan Loor had become certain that
From his vantage point he looked down on the distant
blob of dignitaries and mourners gathered at the memorial
for Corran Horn. While he despised them all for their poli-
tics, he joined them in mourning Horn's loss. Corran Horn
had been Loor's nemesis. They had hated each other on
CoreIlia, and Loor had spent a year and a half trying to hunt
Corran down after he fled from CoreIlia. The hunt had
ended when Ysanne Isard brought Loor to Imperial Center,
but he had anticipated a renewal of his private little war with
Horn when given the assignment to remain on Coruscant.
Of course, Corran's demise hardly made a dent in the
legion of enemies Loor had on Imperial Center. Foremost
among them was Gen eral Airen Cracken, the director of Alli-
ance Intelligence. Cracken's network of spies and operatives
had ultimately made the conquest of the Imperial capital pos-
sible, and his security precautions had given Imperial
counterintelligence agents fits for years. Cracken---or Kra-
ken, as some of Loor's people had taken to calling the
Rebel--would be a difficult foe with whom to grapple.
Loor knew he had some other enemies who would pur-
sue him as part of a personal vendetta. The whole of Rogue
Squadron, from Antilles to the new recruits, would gladly
hunt him down and kill him--including the spy in their
midst since Loor presented a security risk for the spy. Even if
they could not connect him with Corran's death directly, the
mere fact that Corran hated him would be a burden they'd
gladly accept and a debt they would attempt to discharge.
Iella Wessiri was the last of the CorSec personnel Loor
had hunted, and her presence on Imperial Center gave him
pause. She had never been as relentless as Corran Horn in
her pursuit of criminals, but that had always seemed to Loor
to be because she was more thorough than Horn. Whereas
Corran might muscle his way through an investigation, Iella
picked up on small clues and accomplished with lan what
Corran did with brute strength. In the shadow game in
which Loor was engaged, this meant she was a foe he might
not see coming, and that made her the most dangerous of all.
Loor backed away from the window and looked at the
holographic representation of the figures below as they
strode across his holotable. The ceremony had been broad-
cast planetwide, and would be rebroadcast at various worlds
throughout the galaxy. He watched Borsk Fey'lya and
Wedge Antilles as they met in close conversation, then split
apart and wandered away. Everyone appeared more like toys
to him than they did real people. He found it easy to imagine
himself a titanic--no, Imperial--presence who had deigned
to be distracted by the actions of bugs.
He picked up the remote device from the table and
flicked it on. A couple of small lights flashed on the black
rectangle in his left palm, then a red button in the center of it
glowed almost benignly. His thumb hovered over it for a
second. He smiled, but killed the impulse to stab h
is thumb
down and gently returned the device to the table.
A year before he would have punch6d that button, deto-
nating the explosives his people had secreted around the me-
morial. With one casual caress he could have unleashed fire
and pain, wiping out a cadre of traitorous planetary officials
and eliminating Rogue Squadron. He knew, given a chance,
any of the SI operatives under his command would have
triggered the nergon 14 charges--as would the majority of
the military command staff still serving the Empire.
Loor did not. lsard had pointed out on numerous occa-
sions that before the Empire could be reestablished, the Re-
bellion had to die. She had pointed out that the Emperor's
obsession with destroying the Jedi Knights had caused him to
regard the rest of the Rebellion as a lesser threat, yet it had
outlived the Jedi and the Emperor. Only by destroying the
Rebellion would it be possible to reassert the Empire's au-
thority over the galaxy. Destroying the Rebellion required
methods more subtle than exploding grandstands and plan-
ets, accomplishing with a vibroblade what could not be done
with a Death Star.
Rogue Squadron could not be allowed to die, because
they were required for the public spectacle of Tycho Celchu's
trial. General Cracken had uncovered ample evidence that
pointed toward Celchu's guilt, and Loor had delighted in
clearing the way for Cracken's investigators to find yet more
of it. The evidence would be condemning, yet so obviously
questionable that the members of Rogue Squadron--all of
whom had indicated a belief in Tycho's innocence at one
level or another--would decry it as false. That would in-
crease the tension between the conquerors of Imperial Center
and the politicians who slunk in after the pilots had risked
their lives to secure the world. If the heroes of the Rebellion
could doubt and resent the government of the New Republic,
how would the citizenry build confidence in their leaders?
The Krytos virus further complicated things. Created by
an Imperial scientist under Loor's supervision, it killed non-
humans in a most hideous manner. Roughly three weeks af-
ter infection, the victims entered the final, lethal stage of the
disease. Over the course of a week the virus multiplied very
rapidly, exploding cell after cell in their bodies. Their flesh
weakened, sagged, and split open while the victims bled from
every pore and orifice. The resulting liquid was highly infec-
tious, and though bacta could hold the disease at bay or, in
sufficient quantities, cure it, the Rebellion did not have access
to enough bacta to treat all the cases on Coruscant.
The price of bacta had shot up and supplies dwindled.
People hoarded bacta and rumors about the disease having
spread to the human population caused waves of panic. Al-
ready a number of worlds had ordered ships from Imperial
Center quarantined so the disease would not spread, further
disrupting the New Republic's weak economy and eroding
its authority. It did no good for human bureaucrats to try to
explain the precautions they had taken for dealing with the
disease since they were immune, and that immunity built up
resentment between the human and non-human populations
within the New Republic.
Loor allowed himself a small laugh. He had taken the
precaution of putting away a supply of bacta, which he was
selling off in small lots. As a result of this action, anxious
Rebels were supplying the financing for an organization bent
on the destruction of the New Republic. The irony of it all
was sufficient to dull the omnipresent fear of discovery and
capture.
There was no question in his mind that to be captured
was to be killed, yet he did not let that prospect daunt him.
Being able to turn the Rebels' tactics back on them struck
him as justice. He would be returning to them the fear and
frustration Imperials everywhere had known during the Re-
bellion. He would strike from hiding, hitting at targets cho-
sen randomly. His vengeance would be loosely focused
because that meant no one could feel safe from his touch.
He knew his efforts would be denounced as crude ter-
rorism, but he intended there to be nothing crude about his
efforts. Today he would destroy the grandstands around the
memorial. They would be nearly empty, and all those who
had left the stands would breath a sigh of relief that they had
not been blown up minutes or hours earlier; but everyone
would have to consider congregating in a public place to be
dangerous in the future. And if he hit a bacta treatment and
distribution center tomorrow, people would also have to
weigh obtaining protection from the virus against the possi-
bility of being blown to bits.
By choosing targets of minimal military value he could
stir up the populace to demand the military do something. If
the public's ire focused on one official or another, he could
target that person, giving the public some power. He would
let their displeasure choose his victims, just as his choices
would give direction to their fear. Theirs would be a virulent
and symbiotic relationship. He would be nightmare and ben-
efactor, they would be victims and supporters. He would
become a faceless evil they sought to direct while fearing any
attention they drew to themselves.
Having once been on the side attempting to stop an anti-
government force, he could well appreciate the difficulties
the New Republic would have in dealing with him. The fact
that the Rebellion had never resorted to outright terrorism
did not concern him. Their goal had been to build a new
government; his was merely to destroy what they had cre-
ated. He wanted things to degenerate into an anarchy that
would prompt an outcry for leadership and authority. When
that call went out, his mission would be accomplished and
the Empire would return.
He again took up the remote control and returned to the
window. Down at the memorial he could see small pinpricks
of color that marked passersby on their way to and from
other places. He glanced at the holograms striding across his
holotable and saw that none of the people were of conse-
quence. He followed the course of one woman, allowing her
to clear the blast radius, then pressed the button.
A staccato series of explosions went off sequentially
around the memorial. To the south the grandstands teetered
forward and started to somersault their way into the depths
of Imperial Center. A half-dozen people who had been seated
on them fell like colorful confetti. One actually grabbed the
edge of the platform next to the barrow and hauled himself
up to safety, but a subsequent blast tossed him back into the
pit from which he had narrowly escaped.
Other explosions twisted metal and shattered transpari-
steel windows in the surroundi
ng buildings. Grandstands
clung to the sides of buildings like mutilated metal insects
with bleeding, moaning people clutched in their limbs. Dust
and smoke cleared to show the central ferrocrete ring around
the memorial had been nibbled away, with a huge chunk of it
dangling perilously by a reinforcement bar or two.
Loor finally felt the blast's shockwave send a tremor
through his tower. The hawk-bats flapped black wings to
steady themselves, then dropped away from their perches.
Wings snapped open, sending the creatures soaring into a
slow spiral that would take them down to the blast site. Loor
knew enough of them to know the hawk-bats would first
look to see if the holes in the buildings revealed previously
hidde n granite slugs, but when deprived of their favorite
prey, they would settle for the gobbets of flesh left behind by
the victims.
"Good hunting," he wished them, "eat your fill. Before I
am done there will be more, much more for you to consume.
I shall let you feast on my enemies, and together, here on a
world they call their own, we shall both thrive."
3
It seemed to Wedge that the mood of the Provisional Council
was as dark as the room in which they met and as sour as the
scent of bacta in the air. The dimly lit chamber had once
been part of the Senatorial apartments Mon Mothma had
called home before the Rebellion and her role in it forced her
to go underground. It had been redecorated in garish reds
and purples by Imperial agents, with green and gold trim on
everything, but the paucity of light quelled the riot of color.
A desire to hide signs of Imperial occupation of the
apartments was not the reason for keeping the room dim.
Sian Tevv, the Sullustan member of the Provisional Council,
had been exposed to the Krytos virus. While there was no
evidence he had contracted the disease, he had undergone
preventative bacta therapy and had some residual sensitivity
to bright light. The Council made a concession to him by
lowering the light, and another to the non-human members
of the Council by circulating a light bacta mist through the
air to prevent possible contagion. This increased humidity