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  “There’s food in the galley,” he said. “Protein bars and glucose supplements, mostly. Help yourself.”

  “You’re still eating like a soldier.”

  “I still do lots of things like a soldier.”

  Just not the most important things.

  She headed off and he headed toward the cargo bay, sneaking up on the crates as if they were an easily startled animal. They were small, maybe a meter on a side, tiny in the otherwise empty hold. He didn’t know what he had expected. Something bigger, he supposed. They seemed like a great deal of trouble for such small containers. He ran his hands over them and decided he did not want to see the spice after all.

  He headed back to the cockpit to pilot his ship. The hail from Oren was already blinking. He punched it.

  “Go,” he said.

  “Our hackers have the film from the spaceport. I have seen your little incident.”

  “Incident? I was shot. Twice.”

  “Facial recognition on the apparent leader of the hit team gives an ID of Vrath Xizor.” Oren chuckled. “Apparently he’s an elementary school teacher from the Core.”

  “I think we can safely assume that is fake. Who is he, Oren?”

  “Free agent, we think. Probably works for the Hutts. They wouldn’t want the engspice to get to Coruscant. They’re … at odds with our buyer.”

  The Hutts. It seemed they were into everything.

  “Is that all you have?” Zeerid asked him.

  “That’s all I have. How are you planning to get the spice to Coruscant, Z-man?”

  “I’m not telling you a kriffin’ thing, Oren. You have a leak in your organization. I’ll get it there. That’s all you need to know.”

  Oren chuckled. “Good-bye, Z-man.”

  Behind him, Aryn cleared her throat. Zeerid could not bring himself to make eye contact with her. He started punching coordinates into the navicomp and Aryn eased into the copilot’s seat. It had been a long while since anyone had shared the cockpit with him. She had bandaged up her calf.

  “Bandage looks good,” he said.

  “Thanks.” She eyed the math in the navicomp. “That’s not going to get us to Coruscant.”

  “No,” he said. “It’s going to take us to the Kravos system.”

  “That’s a dead system,” she said. “On the edge of Imperial space.”

  He nodded. “Supply convoys stop there to skim the gas giants for hydrogen.”

  “I don’t understand. What’s the plan to get to Coruscant?”

  “I thought you had the plan,” he said.

  “What?”

  He smiled. “I’m joking.”

  “Not funny. The plan, Zeerid.”

  He nodded. “It’s dangerous.”

  Aryn seemed unbothered. She stared out the cockpit as they flew into the velvet of space, waiting for him to explain. He tried.

  “I’m going to piggyback Fatman on an Imperial ship.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means what it sounds like. I heard about it in flight school, back in the service.”

  “You heard about it?”

  Zeerid continued as if she had said nothing. “Centuries ago, smugglers used to jump into and out of hyperspace milliseconds after a Republic ship, say a big supply ship, heading for Coruscant. Smuggler comes out of hyperspace and goes cold except for thrusters.”

  Aryn considered it. “Hard to pick up on sensors.”

  “Right, but only if you come out in the supply ship’s shadow. And only if you come out and get cold right away.”

  “You’d have to know right where they’d come out.”

  “And they did then. And we do now.”

  Zeerid knew all the details of every hyperspace lane in the Core. If he knew where the Imperial ships entered hyperspace and their ultimate destination, he knew where they would come out.

  “Then what?”

  “Then you latch on.”

  Aryn’s eyes looked as wide as a Rodian’s. “You latch on?”

  “An electromagnetic seal. That part’s easy to do.”

  “They’ll feel it.”

  Zeerid nodded. “Gotta be a big enough ship and you’ve got to latch onto a cargo bay or something similar. Something likely to be empty. Then, once you get through the atmosphere, you disengage the seal and float away into clear sky.”

  It sounded ridiculous when he spoke it aloud. He could not believe he was contemplating it.

  Aryn blew out a sigh, stared out the cockpit. “This is your plan?”

  “Such as it is. You have something better?”

  “Who’s ever done it?”

  “No one I know. When the Republic learned of it, they adjusted their sensor scans to look for it. No one’s done it in centuries.”

  “But the Empire won’t know about it.”

  “So I hope.”

  He tried hard not to see the doubt in her expression. It echoed his own.

  “This is all I’ve got, Aryn. It’s this or nothing.”

  She stared out the cockpit, the turn of her thoughts visible behind the green veil of her eyes.

  Fatman was almost clear of gravity wells.

  “I can still drop you somewhere,” he said, hoping she would not take him up on it. “You don’t have to hitch a ride with me.”

  She smiled. “This is all I’ve got, too, Z-man.”

  “Aren’t we a pair, then.”

  She chuckled, but it faded quickly.

  “Aryn? You all right?”

  “I feel like I left Alderaan a lifetime ago,” she said. “It’s been hours.”

  “A lot can happen in a handful of hours,” he said.

  She nodded, drifted off.

  “Aryn?”

  She came back to him from wherever she’d been. “I’m with you,” she said. “And I think I can help make this work.”

  Vrath turned Razor’s navicomp loose, and it generated a course to Coruscant. Even if Zeerid jumped into hyperspace right away—which Vrath doubted—Vrath’s modified Imperial drop ship would still beat Fatman to Coruscant. His work required much travel. Razor had the best hyperdrive credits could buy.

  When the navicomp had finished its calculations, he engaged the hyperdrive and the ship blazed through hyperspace. He dimmed the cockpit and watched a bulkhead-mounted chrono tick away the seconds, the minutes. After a short time, he disengaged the hyperdrive and the black of normal space replaced the cerulean churn of hyperspace. In the distance, day-side Coruscant gleamed against the black of space.

  The planet, entirely coated in duracrete and metal, always reminded Vrath of a giant cog, the mainspring of the Republic. He wondered what would befall the Republic now that the spring had been fouled.

  For a moment, he turned nostalgic for his time in the Imperial Army, when he had turned Republic soldiers into rag dolls at over three hundred meters. He’d had fifty-three confirmed kills before getting thrown out of the service and regretted not one. He’d hated everything about the service except for the killing and how he felt after winning a battle. He imagined how it must feel for Imperial forces to walk as conquerors on Coruscant’s surface, for the navy to own the space around the jewel of the Republic.

  Even from a distance, Vrath could see the silver arrows of two Imperial cruisers patrolling the black around Coruscant. A third orbited a moon. Ordinarily a flotilla of satellites whirled around the planet, too, but Vrath saw none. Perhaps the Empire had destroyed them as part of its forced communications blackout of the planet.

  Two of the dozen or so fighters escorting the nearest cruiser, the new Mark VII advanced interceptors, peeled off and sped toward Vrath’s ship. He made sure his weapons systems were powered down and put his communications gear on open hail. Almost before he lifted his hand from the control panel, the navy pinged him.

  “Unidentified vessel,” said a stern voice that sounded like every Imperial communications officer he’d heard during all his time in the corps. “You are in restricted space. Power down y
our engines and deflectors completely and prepare to be towed. Any deviation from that instruction will result in your immediate destruction.”

  Vrath did not doubt it. “Message received. Will comply.” He powered down his engines and deactivated his deflectors. “I need to speak to the OIC. I have information of interest to the Empire.”

  The fighters buzzed his drop ship. One of them swooped around and under Razor. As it pulled out in front of him, it activated an electromagnetic tow. A glowing blue line formed between the two ships, and the Mark VII started pulling him through space. The other fighter maintained position behind Razor so he could blow Vrath from space should it prove necessary. Ahead, the tunnel of the cruiser’s landing bay loomed.

  The fighter pulled Vrath through the throat of the cruiser’s landing bay until they reached an isolated landing pad where two dozen troopers in full gray battle armor awaited him, along with a tall, redheaded naval officer. He nodded at them through the canopy, unstrapped from the chair, disarmed himself of both his blaster and his knives, and headed out.

  By the time Razor’s landing ramp clanged off the metal deck of the cruiser, he was staring at the dead eyes of fourteen TH-17 blaster rifles.

  “Secure him,” the naval officer said.

  Two of the armored troopers shouldered their weapons and rushed him. He did not resist as one put flex binders on his wrists and the other patted him down.

  “He is unarmed,” the one said, his voice the modulated mechanical sound of the helmet’s speaker.

  “Search the ship,” the naval officer said. “I want to see his flight records.”

  “Yes, sir,” responded the troopers, and seven of them boarded the ship to search.

  “There is nothing of interest aboard,” Vrath said. “I came from Vulta. That’s as far back as the records go.”

  The naval officer smiled, a tight, false gesture, and walked up to Vrath. His unwrinkled uniform smelled freshly cleaned. The freckles on his pale face looked like a pox.

  Vrath could have killed him with a high kick to the trachea, but he thought it unwise.

  “I am Commander Jard, first officer of the Imperial cruiser Valor. You are under arrest for flying in restricted space. Whether your punishment is execution or mere imprisonment is entirely at my discretion and depends upon how satisfied I am with the answers you provide to my questions.”

  “I understand.”

  “What is your name? Where did you come from?”

  He barely remembered the name his mother had given him. He offered the one his profession had most recently given him. “Vrath Xizor. As I said, I flew here directly from Vulta.”

  “What brought you here, Vrath Xizor?”

  “I have information of interest to the OIC.”

  The naval officer cocked his head. “Are you military, Vrath Xizor?”

  “Former. Special detachment from the Four Hundred and Third. Company E.”

  “An Imperial sniper?”

  Vrath was impressed that Jard knew his unit designation. He nodded.

  “Well, Vrath Xizor of the Four Hundred Third, you may tell me your information.”

  “I would prefer to speak directly to the captain.”

  “Darth Malgus will not—”

  “Darth? The commander is a Sith?”

  Jard looked hard at Vrath.

  “He will want to hear what I have to say,” Vrath said. “It concerns the Jedi.”

  Jard studied his face. “Put him in the brig,” he said to another soldier standing behind Vrath. “If Darth Malgus wishes to speak to you, he will do so. If he does not, then he does not.”

  “You’re making a mistake—”

  “Shut up,” one of the troopers said, and cuffed him in the back of the head.

  Three troopers escorted Vrath out of the landing bay and into a nearby lift. Vrath did not resist. It had been years since he’d been aboard an Imperial ship, and they remained exactly as he remembered—antiseptic, purely functional killing machines.

  Just like him.

  “This one was a sniper detached from the Four Hundred Third,” said one of the troopers to another.

  “Or so he says.”

  “That true?” said another. “I heard things about that unit.”

  Vrath said nothing, merely stared into the tinted slit of the trooper’s helmet visor.

  “Some kind of supermen is what I heard.”

  The trooper holding his shoulder gave him a shake. “This one don’t look like much.”

  Vrath only smiled. He didn’t look like much—deliberately so.

  The soldiers trekked him deeper into the bowels of the ship. The corridors narrowed, and blue-uniformed security personal started to appear at doors that answered only to certain keycodes. Vrath had been in Imperial brigs many times, usually for insubordination.

  Before they reached the bridge one of the troopers—the one with a sergeant’s symbol on his shoulder plate—held up a hand for the others to stop. He cocked his head to the side as he listened to something over his helmet’s speaker. He glanced at Vrath as he listened.

  “Confirmed,” he said to whomever he was speaking. Then, to his men, “Darth Malgus wants him on the bridge.”

  The three men shared a look and reversed course.

  “Lucky you, Four Hundred Third,” said the trooper holding him.

  Exploding into motion, Vrath drove a kick into the chest plate of the trooper in front of him, sending him flying into the sergeant and knocking both of them hard against the wall. Then he spun behind the third while slipping his bound arms over the trooper’s head. He maneuvered the binders under the neck ring of the helmet and squeezed, not enough to kill, just enough to make a point.

  The man’s gags sounded loud in his helmet speaker. His fingers clawed at Vrath’s arms. He was probably starting to see spots.

  Vrath released him and shoved him away. The entire exchange had taken perhaps four seconds. The two men he’d knocked against the wall had their rifles aimed at his head.

  Vrath held out his arms for them to take. “Don’t look like much,” he said.

  Fatman came out of hyperspace in the Kravos system. Zeerid immediately engaged the ion engines and flew the freighter into the system’s soup.

  Debris from a partially dispersed accretion disk around the system’s star filled the black with ionized gas and debris. Some fluke of solar system evolution had resulted in an orange gas giant forming a few hundred thousand kilos outside the far border of the disk.

  Zeerid wheeled Fatman through the swirl, deftly dodging asteroids and smaller particles. He maneuvered the ship to the end of the disk and maintained his position, though it taxed his piloting skill.

  “Now what?” Aryn asked.

  “We wait. And when an Imperial convoy heading to Coruscant comes through, we roll the dice.”

  “How will we know it’s heading for Coruscant?”

  “We won’t know, strictly speaking. But Imperial Navy regs call for a convoy heading to an occupied world to have an escort of at least three frigates. If we see that, it’s probably heading to Coruscant.”

  “And if we don’t see that?”

  Zeerid preferred not to think about it. “We will.”

  “What if you’re wrong? What if the convoy isn’t heading to Coruscant?”

  “Then it’ll jump where it’s jumping and we’ll jump to Coruscant, bare naked and within range of an Imperial fleet. You’re not the modest sort, are you?”

  He tried to convey with his grin a confidence he did not feel.

  She only shook her head and stared out at the gas giant.

  They waited. A medical transport came through and Zeerid ignored it. A single cruiser came through later and still they waited. After several hours, Zeerid’s instruments showed another hyperspace distortion.

  A convoy appeared, three supply superfreighters and four frigates bristling with weapons.

  “That’s our ride,” he said. “You ready?”

  “I’m r
eady,” she said.

  The lift doors opened to reveal a short corridor that led to the double doors of the cruiser’s bridge. A pair of armored soldiers stood near the lift, awaiting Vrath’s arrival. Two more stood down the corridor before the bridge doors.

  The three troopers who had escorted Vrath to the lift handed him off to those in the hall.

  “He’s dangerous,” the sergeant said. “Watch him.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the two troopers in the corridor, their expressions unreadable behind their helmets. They flanked Vrath but did not touch him as they led him to the bridge. The double doors opened to reveal the dimly lit, multi-leveled oval chamber of the cruiser’s bridge.

  A score of naval officers—all human—sat at their posts, hovered over their compscreens. A huge viewscreen to the left provided a magnified view of Coruscant and the surrounding space. The hum of low, curt conversation and the thrum of electronics filled the air.

  A swivel-mounted command chair sat on the center of the bridge on a raised platform. Commander Jard stood beside it, one hand on its armrest, conferring with the man who sat in it. Jard glanced at Vrath and spoke to the man, whom Vrath assumed to be Darth Malgus. He activated his audial implant to hear the exchange.

  “My lord,” Jard said. “The prisoner I spoke of is here.”

  Malgus turned his eyes to Vrath and whatever smugness Vrath had felt over showing up some troopers sank under the weight of that gaze. Malgus rose and strode across the bridge toward Vrath. He stood well over two meters, and the black cape he wore looked like a pavilion tent.

  He never took his eyes from Vrath’s face as he approached. Scars lined his face, and a network of blue veins made a patchwork of his bald pate. He was so pale he could have been a corpse, the walking dead. The small respirator he wore hid his mouth and lips. But it was his eyes that cowed Vrath. Malgus was all eyes. The sum of him, of his power, radiated outward from his bloodshot gaze.

  He dismissed the guards who flanked Vrath and, with a gesture, used the Force to pry open the binders on Vrath’s wrists. They fell to the floor of the bridge with a dull clang.

  “You mentioned a Jedi to Commander Jard.” His voice, deep and rough, sounded like stones grinding together.