Belkor moved from station to station through the tumult, taking in facts, issuing orders, and doing his best to look as if he were trying to rescue the men he actually wanted dead, and in control of events that had long ago outrun him. He had no confirmation that the Moff’s ship had been destroyed, only that it had disappeared from scans. The same was true of the Emperor’s shuttle. Both were hopeful signs, but he dared not actually hope.
He realized he was breathing fast. His uniform felt too tight, the walls seemed too close, the ceiling too low.
“Sir, are you all right?”
“What? Of course, yes. Yes. Carry on, Lieutenant.”
But he wasn’t all right. He wouldn’t be all right until he knew the Emperor, Vader, and Mors were dead.
“Escape pods are landing all over the western hemisphere of the planet and the near moon, sir,” said another lieutenant. “We’re getting thousands of distress signals. Search and rescue is prioritizing rescue grids but, sir, this is overwhelming. They don’t have enough personnel. They’ll be at this for days.”
“Disposition of the Emperor’s shuttle or the Moff’s ship?”
“Nothing yet, sir.”
Belkor nodded, at once relieved and terrified. If he had somehow succeeded, his next challenge would be to concoct a believable enough cover story to exculpate himself.
But first he needed to ensure that the Emperor and Vader and the Moff were dead.
—
Isval heard someone screaming.
“Isval! Eshgo! One of you get up! I need help!”
It was Faylin’s voice. Isval opened her eyes, groggy. She blinked, breathed deep through a throat that felt raw, and…
Ryloth filled the screen, huge and fulgent, and then it was gone, replaced by black, and then it was back, and then gone. They were spinning, bow over stern. Isval squeezed her eyes shut to quell a bout of nausea. She was muzzy-headed, but realized they were going to hit the atmosphere while the ship was spinning. They’d break up and burn all the way down.
“Faylin?” she said, her throat scratchy and pained. “Eshgo?”
Eshgo was slumped in his chair beside her, his chin on his chest. Faylin was blanketed awkwardly over him, trying to operate the shuttle’s controls.
“He’s dead, Isval!” she said. “And Crost and Drim are unconscious! I can’t straighten the ship! I’ve flown sims, but…”
“Dead?” Isval repeated, her thoughts coming slow, but grief bubbling up through the sludge.
“Isval! You’re a better pilot than me! You need to fly this ship or we’ll be joining him! Grieve later! Isval!”
Faylin’s tone helped her focus. She sat forward in the chair and tried to clear her head.
“First the spinning,” Isval said, taking the stick in her hand. “Give me control.”
“I don’t know how to give you control!” Faylin said.
“Yes, you do,” Isval said, finding the calm she always relied on in a crisis. “Remember your time in the sim. The blue botton, near your left hand. Quickly.”
“Right,” Faylin said, calming down some. She pushed the button and Isval fired the boosters, compensating for the spin. The rotation slowed, slowed more, then stopped. Ryloth filled the screen. They were coming in day-side, and too steeply. Isval tried to correct.
“What can I do?” Faylin asked.
“Grab hold of something,” Isval said. “Right now.”
They hit the outer atmosphere, and it felt like running into a wall. The sudden loss of velocity threw them both forward. Faylin exclaimed but held on to Eshgo’s chair. Thumps sounded from the rear compartment, and Isval tried not to think of what that meant for Drim and Crost. Flames sheathed the ship, painting the cockpit in orange light. The metal of the hull groaned and popped. The ship shook so badly that Isval’s teeth ached.
“Flattening,” she said, more to herself than to Faylin. “Flattening.”
The vessel continued to vibrate, but it was the normal bouncing of reentry. “What happened to the other ship?” she asked Faylin. “The one we ran into?”
“What?”
“The other ship, Faylin! Did you see what happened to it?”
“I…yes, it went dark and spun toward Ryloth.”
“Did it burn up? Did you see it burn up on reentry? This is important, Faylin.”
“I didn’t, no. We were spinning ourselves and I could barely…I was just trying to get you back. I thought we were going to crash.”
Isval cursed. The rough vibration of reentry gave way to smooth flight as they entered normal atmosphere. She straightened the ship. Ryloth stretched out below them, bleak and brown and as desiccated by the sun as a dried fruit.
She checked the scanner, but it showed her nothing she could use. She looked out the cockpit and imagined a rain of pods and ships falling to the surface. Possibly one of them contained Vader and the Emperor, but she had no way to—
“Logs,” she said, tapping the keys on the navcomp.
“Logs?” Faylin asked.
“Check Drim and Crost.”
Faylin crawled back into the rear compartment. It took only a moment before she rendered her verdict. “They’re gone. It’s just us.”
Isval nodded, intent on her task, refusing to allow herself to feel grief.
“Did you hear me?” Faylin insisted, her voice quaking. “I said they’re gone.”
“I heard you. Get back up here and sit. I may need you.”
“Isval…”
“Sit, Faylin! This isn’t over and I don’t want them dying for nothing. Do you?”
“No,” Faylin said softly. She gently removed Eshgo from his seat, laid him on the deck, and took his place. “Of course not.”
Isval checked the scan logs and finally found what she was looking for. She jabbed a finger at the screen. “There!”
“What?”
“That’s the shuttle’s trajectory as it went down. You said it was dark, so it was just falling. It would’ve stayed on this path, at least roughly, as it descended. That narrows things down a bit.” She bit down to activate her private comm with Cham.
—
Kallon piloted the transport, knifing through space toward Ryloth. Cham sat in the copilot’s seat and tried to process how he felt: strange, outside himself, almost empty. He’d exhausted most of the resources available to the movement, but they’d brought down an Imperial Star Destroyer, and maybe, maybe killed the Emperor and Vader. He should’ve been exultant but instead he felt numb. He’d been filled with adrenaline for the last hour, and now he was deflating.
He tried again to hail Isval but received no response. He felt Kallon’s eyes on him and kept the concern from his face, though his lekku twitched.
Their shuttle was coming in on the night side, opposite the face of the planet where the Perilous had been destroyed. A dozen more ships flew nearby, all of them packed with rebels and as much matériel as they’d been able to load rapidly and remove from the moon base. They flew at low power and low speed, the output of their engines diffused by bafflers, all in an effort to minimize their sensor profile.
“Scans are clean,” Kallon said, eyeing the readout. “The Empire’s occupied with rescue. Back door is open and no one’s home.”
“We get everyone planetside, then we regroup,” Cham said. He needed status reports. He needed to know where Isval was, that she was all right.
“Sounds good,” Kallon said. “Then what?”
The question took Cham aback momentarily. Then what, indeed? They’d accomplished more than he could’ve hoped, and he’d been so preoccupied with planning the destruction of the Perilous that he’d given only passing thought to what came next. Perhaps he hadn’t believed they could do it. He had a movement to lead, a rebellion, but he wasn’t sure where they were going after today. He needed to give them their next goal, something on which to focus. He needed that himself.
“I’m planning next steps now,” he said to Kallon, just to put him off. When his private comlink with Isval pinged,
he sighed with relief.
“Isval, you’re all right! Thank the—”
“I’m sending you a last known trajectory,” she said, speaking in the clipped, rapid tone she used when pursuing a task. “Use it to establish a likely crash zone. It’ll be big, hundreds of kilometers square, but it’s at least a start. I need you to confirm my findings.”
“What? Slow down.”
“No time to slow down, Cham. Vader and the Emperor went down in their shuttle, but they didn’t burn up. They’re alive. I’m sure of it. And what I’m sending you is their last known trajectory.”
Cham processed her words as the data related to the trajectory came through. He immediately fed the data into his navcomp and ran a subroutine.
“What’s going on?” Kallon asked.
Cham didn’t bother to answer. And he didn’t question Isval’s assertion that Vader and the Emperor were still alive. He trusted her implicitly, and he, like her, had seen Vader do too much, things no one should have been able to do. Cham could not imagine that a mere crash had killed him. He doubted they’d crashed at all.
And Cham wanted Vader dead, he realized. He needed him dead. Isval had been right. Striking a meaningful blow against the Empire meant cutting off its heads.
And so he had his next goal.
“What about the other ship you targeted? Who was on it? How do you know Vader was aboard this one and not that one?”
“The other went down, too, but Vader wasn’t on it. I saw him on this one, Cham.”
The subroutine completed its calculations, confirming Isval’s conclusions. Cham transposed the result to an overlay of Ryloth’s surface and sent it to Isval.
“Calculations confirmed. If that trajectory’s right, we have a search zone,” Cham said. “The Emperor could have been on the other ship, though. What do you mean you saw Vader?”
“Trust me that I did,” Isval said. “So let’s go with what we know. Vader was on that ship. Hard to imagine the Emperor was not with him. Hmm. That area’s heavily forested.”
No doubt Isval was staring at the same map overlay that Cham was looking at.
“Tough area to search,” she said.
Cham was thinking the same thing. “It’ll take too long to find anything in that region. And if they survived the crash, they’ll have sent up a hail already. Rescue will be en route. I don’t know how we get to them first.”
Her response was immediate. “They were dark, Cham, no power. Faylin saw. It’ll take them time to establish a portable communications array with enough reach to contact search and rescue. And there have to be hails and distress calls coming from everywhere on the surface by now. Their signal will be lost in it. We have some time.”
“Not much. A fraction of an hour, maybe.” An idea occurred to Cham. “Unless…”
“Say it. Unless?”
Cham was already working out details in his head. “Kallon can hack the Imperial satellites anytime he wants. He’s been able to do it for years. We’ve just kept it in our pocket because it’s useless alone. Unless we take out that communications station on the equator. We do that, then hack the sats to send out a jamming signal…”
“Communication will be reduced to line of sight,” Isval said, and Cham imagined her slamming a fist on the instrumentation. “That’s it, Cham. They’ll be isolated. It’ll buy us some time to hunt.”
Cham warmed to the task. “We’ll need Belkor. And he’s going to ask about that second ship. I need the last known trajectory for it, too. Did it go down dark?”
“Yeah, even life support was down,” Isval said. “Sending the data.”
The moment it came through, Cham said, “Hold there and wait for me to call you back.”
“Roger, that.” She hesitated, then, “Cham, it’s just Faylin and me now. The rest are…gone.”
Cham’s lekku drooped. A ball formed in his throat, but he swallowed it down. They’d been good soldiers—friends, even. He’d lost a lot of good people today. The weight of it made his head ache.
“Understood. I’m sorry, Isval. Stand by.”
Before hailing Belkor, Cham ordered four of the ships flying with them to head to the search grid Isval had pinpointed and start looking for a downed Imperial shuttle. They accelerated and diverted at speed around the planet.
As soon as they were away, Cham hailed Belkor on their encrypted comlink.
—
Belkor felt the encrypted comlink vibrate against his chest, an irritating insect that wouldn’t stop pestering him. He tried to ignore it, but the annoying hail continued. He stepped out of the communications center and into an adjacent office.
“This is Belkor,” he said tightly.
“Listen carefully and do not interrupt,” said Cham’s voice. “Both ships are down, but I can’t confirm that either is destroyed. I have a trajectory on Vader’s ship—”
“What about the other one?”
“I told you not to interrupt, Belkor.”
Belkor’s jaw clenched so tightly around his anger that he wondered if he’d ever be able to open it again. Cham went on: “You’re going to tell the Equatorial Communications Hub that an incoming Imperial escort ship is carrying wounded VIPs from the Perilous. They are to lower their shields and receive this ship. Do you understand?”
Belkor didn’t even bother to ask how Cham knew about a classified installation hidden in the planet’s equatorial verdure. Every time Belkor spoke to Cham, the Twi’lek said things that made his head swim. He seemed one or two steps ahead of Belkor’s thinking at every turn.
“I can’t do that.”
“You must. That station’s satellite relays need to be destroyed.”
“To what end? It’ll do nothing…”
“We’ll hack the communications sats afterward, have them send a jamming signal.”
The implications settled on Belkor. “You’ll fog the whole net, disrupt communications for the whole planet.”
“I know. Communication will be line of sight only. And that’s what I need. We think Vader and the Emperor are alive but stranded.”
Belkor’s heart was a sledgehammer on his ribs. “We haven’t received a distress call.” He whispered, “Why do you think they’re alive? If they crashed…”
“Because we’ve seen what Vader can do, Belkor, and a crash isn’t going to kill him. We’re going to have to stuff a blaster in his faceplate and pull the trigger to be sure. We bring down communications and they’re isolated. That’ll give us time, and we’ll use it to hunt them down.”
Belkor didn’t miss the use of the collective pronoun, and he supposed it was warranted. Belkor was a traitor, the same as Cham. Given all he’d done, he might as well have been a member of Cham’s Free Ryloth movement. He’d be treated the same way if he were caught.
He realized he was pacing, and his agitation was drawing eyes through the transparent glass that walled his office. He took a breath to steady himself, stopped pacing, and turned his back to the glass.
“How do you know where they are?”
“I don’t know for certain,” Cham admitted. “I have a search zone. But it’s large. That’s why I need the extra time.”
Belkor’s mind turned to Mors. “The second ship. You said it was down. How do you know?”
“My people saw it. That’s all I can say for certain.”
Sweat ran in rivulets down Belkor’s sides. “Well, I need you to say more, Syndulla.” He dropped his voice to an even lower whisper. “The Moff was on it. I need her to stay on it. Do you understand?”
“I do,” Cham said. “Odds are she’s dead, Belkor. Her shuttle was dark and life support was down. We kill Vader and the Emperor, and this mess is clean. And you’re the new Moff.”
“I need to be sure,” Belkor said. “I need the trajectory for the Moff’s ship. Send it to me.”
“I can’t spare any resources to search another landing zone.”
“I’ll check on it myself!” Belkor snapped. “Just send me the damn da
ta.”
“Fine. Good,” Cham said, in the tone one used when addressing an incensed child. Belkor found it infuriating. “Here it comes.”
Belkor’s comlink lit up as it received the data. “It’s through,” he said.
“Then do what I asked and do it now,” Cham said.
Belkor smoothed his hair and gathered what he could of his composure. “I’ll alert the base.”
“Good hunting, Belkor,” Cham said.
Belkor couldn’t quite bring himself to wish Cham the same.
—
Kallon took them through reentry and into Ryloth’s night sky. From there, he accelerated through the whipping winds and eventually piloted the ship into the yawning cave mouth that opened onto an old spice mine, the twisting shafts picked clean ten years or more before the Clone Wars. The ships accompanying theirs fell in behind. Kallon activated his vessel’s external lights and flew into the maze of the mine. He knew the path by heart.
Looking out the cockpit glass at the rough, machine-scarred walls, Cham wondered how long it would be before they had to abandon this base, too. He was running out of hidey-holes and resources, consuming them all in a day. It would be fully worthwhile only if they killed Vader and the Emperor.
He raised Isval before the distance underground made communications iffy.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“We’re safely to the Eastern Base,” he said. “Heading down. Kallon’s ready.”
Beside him, Kallon nodded. “Very ready.”
“What do you have for me?” Isval asked Cham.
She was all business, as usual. Cham smiled. “Belkor is informing the Equatorial Communications Hub of your approach. You’re carrying wounded VIPs from the Perilous. You barely got clear before she went up.”
“Damn rebels,” she said.
He smiled. “Indeed. They appear to be having a good day.”
Isval’s tone turned serious again. “You trust Belkor to do this?”
Cham shook his head. “I don’t trust him at all, but trust has nothing to do with it. He’ll do it because he has to. He’s too far in to turn back. He’ll gripe, but he’ll do whatever we need.”
“All right,” she said. “We’re off to it, then.”