Rogue Squadron (13 page)

In his report he had tried to stress the positive, but within hours of the report being sent on up the
line, he had received his summons to Imperial Center, formerly known as Coruscant. He was ordered to make his way to the Imperial capital as quickly as possible. As luck would have it—luck he in no way saw as benign—passage had been arranged on a series of ships with a minimum of difficulty. This last ship, a shuttle on loan from the
Aggressor
, effortlessly carried him to his doom.

The wall of light visible through the viewport dissolved into a million million points of light as the ship left hyperspace. Imperial Center, a clouded grey world ringed by Golan defense platforms, seemed even more forbidding than he had imagined. He had expected to see that the world that had become a city would be as dead and cold as the Emperor who had ruled from it. Instead, with boiling clouds burned white by flashes of lightning, the planet’s true nature lay cloaked and hidden, as did his future.

“Imperial Center, this is shuttle
Objurium
requesting clearance for entry on the Palace Vector.”

“Transmit clearance code, shuttle
Objurium
.”

“Transmitting now.” The pilot turned back toward Kirtan. “This code better be good. We’re well within the range of the two nearest Golan stations.”

“It is good.” Kirtan blanched. “I mean, it is the code I was given with my orders.” He started to go on to explain further, but saw the pilot and copilot exchange a quick wink and realized he was being teased.

“Don’t worry, Agent Loor, the days of the Empire blasting one if its own shuttles apart to kill an Intelligence agent are long past. Can’t spare the ships right now, which is what makes me a bit more secure.”

Kirtan forced an edge into his voice. “And how
do you know, Lieutenant, that I am not here solely to monitor and report on your attitudes?”

“You’re not the first man I’ve ferried to his death, Agent Loor.”

“Shuttle
Objurium
,” the comm squawked, “clearance granted. Align course for beacon 784432.”

“Understood, Control,
Objurium
out.” The pilot punched the beacon number into navigation computer, then gave his copilot a more somber glance.

“What?” Kirtan tried to stop himself from blurting the question out, and began to brace for some stinging jibe from the pilot, but he got none.

“We’re heading to Tower 78, level 443, bay 2.”

“And?”

Kirtan saw the pilot’s Adam’s apple bob up and down. “Sir, the only other time I’ve been given that vector is when I had the pleasure of shuttling Lord Vader to the Emperor. It was after the disaster at Yavin.”

Kirtan felt a chill slowly pour into him and move up his spine bone by bone.
Did Lord Vader fear retribution for his actions as I do? Perhaps the Emperor had meant to kill him, but Vader redeemed his life by bringing news of the existence of another Jedi to his master
. Kirtan’s fist hammered his right thigh.
If I had just a little more time I could have delivered my quarry
.

Ahead of the shuttle Kirtan saw lightning flare from the clouds upward toward space. It hit and spread out, faintly illuminating a hexagonal area hanging above the clouds. “What is that?”

“Defense shield.” The pilot punched a couple of buttons on his command console. A miniature model of the world materialized between pilot and passenger, then two spheres made up of hexagonal
elements engulfed the world. The spheres moved in opposite directions around the world, constantly shifting, with the hexes in the upper layer covering more area than those below. “Imperial Center, for obvious reasons, has the most sophisticated system of defense shields in the Empire. A small portion of it will come down to let us in, then that section will be reinforced behind us, while another one will open below.”

“Nothing can get in without clearance.”

The pilot nodded. “Or out. More than one Rebel agent has been caught trying to race back out while ships are coming in. It’s a gamble, but not one that pays off very often.”

The copilot pushed a glowing button on the console. “We’re through the first shield.”

“Our next opening comes two degrees north, four east.”

“Course set, sir.”

“Not much longer until we’re down, Agent Loor. Only thing that could go wrong now is a cloud discharging and trying to hit the upper shield through our opening.”

“Does that happen?”

“Sometimes.”

“Often?”

The pilot shrugged. “The power for the upper shield comes through openings in the lower shield. This tends to ionize a lot of atoms, making lightning travel that much faster along those routes. However, doesn’t look like our hole served as an energy conduit very recently, so we should be safe.”

Turbulence hit the shuttle as it pierced the layer of clouds. Kirtan tightened some of the belts restraining him, then clutched the back of the copilot’s chair with white knuckles. He wanted to blame his growing feeling of nausea on the way the shuttle
bounced down through the atmosphere, but he knew that was not its only cause.
The world beneath these clouds is the last thing I will see before I die
.

The shuttle broke through the vapor shell around the planet and the pilot smiled at him. “Welcome to Imperial Center, Agent Loor.”

Despite his fear, Kirtan Loor looked out at the dark world below and felt overwhelmed by the panorama. Instantly recognizable, the Imperial Palace stood tall, like a volcano that had thrust itself up through the heart of the metropolis that dominated a whole continent of Coruscant. Towers festooned it, as if spires on a crown, and thousands of lights sparkled like jewels set in an incandescent mosaic on its stone hide. Beneath it, dwarfed into insignificance, lay Senate Hill. Its tiny buildings—raised as monuments to the justice and glory of the Old Republic—seemed frozen with fright that the Palace would grow out and consume them.

Spreading out from that central point, brilliant neon lights in all manner of colors pulsed as if nerves carrying information to and from the palace itself. Kirtan followed one river of light as it shifted from red and green to gold and blue, from the heart of the world out to the horizon. As the ship swooped lower, he saw depths to the lightstreams, where buildings had accreted, sinking the streets into twisted, broken canyons. He knew the light could not reach
all
the way down, and his imagination had no difficulty in populating those black gashes with nightmare creatures and lethal danger.

But the lethal danger I face dwells above all this
. Kirtan sat back as the shuttle banked and the nose came up a bit. The pilot leveled the
Objurium
off while the copilot flicked a switch above his head. A red square appeared on the shuttle’s viewport and surrounded the top of one of the palace’s towers.
Lights blinked around an opening far too small to admit the shuttle, even with its wings folded up.

“We can’t be going there. Where will we land?”

“It looks small, Agent Loor, because we’re still three kilometers away from it.”

Kirtan’s mouth hung open as his brain fought to put everything he was seeing in perspective. The streets below, which he had taken to be narrow tracks, had to be the size of major boulevards. And the towers, they were not slender, needlelike minarets, but massive buildings designed to house hundreds or thousands of people on each level. And the structures on the surface, they armored the planet with layer after layer of ferrocrete.

Kirtan shuddered as he realized how deep the warrens had to run on the planet, yet he doubted anyone had set foot on the soil beneath Imperial City for centuries.

It all struck him as impossible that a world could house that many people, but this was Coruscant. It was the heart of an Empire that boasted millions of known worlds. If each one required only a thousand people to deal with it and its problems, Coruscant would have to be home to billions of people. And to see to their needs, billions more would have to be in residence, working, building, cleaning.

Suddenly he went from wondering how Coruscant could house so many people to wondering if even billions of individuals were enough to oversee the Empire.
Or what’s left of it
.

The
Objurium
swept in closer to the tower. The opening appeared to be a black hole waiting to suck him down and rend him atom from atom. Though logic argued against expending the money it cost to bring him to Coruscant just to kill him, he knew that Death hovered close and would be seeking him
out. He had failed and the price the Empire demanded for failure was dear indeed.

Kirtan ran a finger around his collar to loosen it. Arguing against his death, aside from the wasted expense of his travel, was a thought that proved utterly ludicrous to him. The only way he would stay alive was if he had something the person who had summoned him here found valuable. But he was just one person. The only thing he imagined he possessed that was not duplicated by ten or a hundred or a thousand other people on Coruscant was his life.
I have nothing else that is unique
.

The opening loomed close enough for Kirtan to see figures moving around in its shadows. The pilot punched a button on the command console. The shuttle’s wings rose and locked up while the landing gear descended. The shuttle drifted forward, easing into the hangar, then slowly settled to the deck. It landed with only a slight bump, but Kirtan’s nerves magnified it until it felt as heavy as the blow of a vibroblade on his neck.

Steeling himself for the worst, Kirtan slapped the buckle against his breastbone and slid free of the restraining harness. “Thank you, Lieutenant, for your efforts on my behalf.”

The pilot watched him for a moment, then nodded. “Good luck, sir.”

Kirtan pulled on a pair of black leather gloves and flexed his right hand. “Smooth flight back to the
Aggressor
.”

The Intelligence agent stood slowly, letting his legs get used to the planet’s gravity, then walked back from the cockpit and down the egress ramp. At the base of the ramp four Imperial Guards, resplendent in their scarlet uniforms, stood at attention. When he stepped into their midst, they turned as
one and marched him toward the doorway at the far end of the hangar.

The few people Kirtan saw in the hangar did not look at him directly. Even when he turned his head, seeking to catch one of them from the corner of his eye, they paid him no heed.
Have they seen so many people come this way and not return that it is no longer remarkable to them? Or do they think undue attention paid to me would find them being drawn along in my wake?

Being as tall as he was, he could almost see over the red dome of the guards’ helmets. As nearly as he could determine, the four guards were identical in height and other physical dimensions, but their cloaks shrouded them sufficiently well that details that might have differentiated them one from another were lost. Because of that they appeared to be identical to all the holograms he had seen of Imperial Guards, with one minor exception.

Their cloaks had been hemmed with a black ribbon. In the dim light it had not been easy to pick out and its presence almost made it appear as if the guards walked a few centimeters above the floor. The officially mandated year of mourning had ended over a year previously—except, of course, on worlds where notification of the Emperor’s death had arrived late or, worse yet, inspired open rebellion. Here on Coruscant that was not a problem, so Kirtan took the ribbon as a sign of the guards’ continued devotion to their slain master.

They passed through the doorway and into a small corridor that seemed to extend on forever. Kirtan thought he noticed a slight arch to the floor and a tremble in the structure that suggested to him they had entered one of the bridges between the tower and the Palace proper. The close passageway had no windows and any decorations on the walls
had been covered with meter after meter of black satin.

Through the far end and along another corridor, the guards brought him to a doorway where two of their number stood. His escorts stopped when the other two guards turned and pulled open the doors before him. He stepped through them into a large room, the far wall of which was constructed entirely out of glass. A tall, slender woman stood in silhouette before it, though the backlight from the planet’s surface outlined her in red.

“You are Kirtan Loor.” It came not as a question, but a statement full of import.

“Reporting as ordered.” He had tried to keep his voice as even and vital as hers had been, but he failed. A nervous squeak punctuated his sentence. “I can explain my report.”

“Agent Loor, if I had wanted your report explained, I would have had your superiors go to great pains to extract that explanation from you.” She turned slowly toward him. “Do you have any idea who I am?”

Kirtan’s mouth had gone dry. “No, ma’am.”

“I am Ysanne Isard. I
am
Imperial Intelligence.” She opened her arms. “I rule here now and I am determined to destroy this Rebellion. I believe you can aid me in this task.”

Kirtan swallowed hard. “Me?”

“You.” Her hands returned to her sides. “I hope my belief is not unfounded. If it is, I will have gone to great expense to bring you here for
nothing
. Accounts will have to be balanced and I don’t believe there is any way you can pay what you owe.”

11

Wedge Antilles smiled when Admiral Ackbar nodded. “I think you’ll see, sir, that the squadron is coming along quite well.”

The Mon Calamari looked up from the datapad on his desk. “Your performance figures and exercise scores are commendable. Your people are better than some operational line units.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Their level of discipline is not that of line units however, Admiral.”

Wedge looked over at General Salm. The irritation in his voice matched the sour expression on the small man’s face. Having come up through the ranks of Y-wing pilots, Salm had not been pleased when the Rogues staged a training attack on a full wing of Y-wing bombers. Though he had approved the exercise and had flown lead in one of the squadrons, he clearly had not expected things to go so badly for his trainees. The Rogues had lost four of their own fighters, but had destroyed all but six of the Y-wings. Salm was one of the survivors, which Wedge felt was a good thing and would have asked
his pilots to leave Salm alone if he had thought of it beforehand. Despite that, the nearly eight-to-one kill ratio had been better than even Wedge had imagined possible and had made Salm furious.