Chapter 13
Zakine silently watched the battle from the bridge of the Punisher. As he'd planned, the Alliance fighters were having difficulty breaking through the swarm of TIE fighters, although that large Corellian freighter – he assumed it was the Millennium Falcon – had nearly made its way through. That barely interested Zakine. The approach of the cruiser carrying Klim Gital – that interested and confused him. The holocrypt message he'd received from Essag, ordering him to stand by to implement Order Three, that completely shocked him, but likely not for the reasons the Emperor assumed.
"Admiral Samsa," called Zakine. "Has Klim Gital's ship docked?"
"Yes, sir, just a moment ago."
"I am leaving you in command, then, Admiral. I believe Admiral Gital may have information of some importance."
"Yes, sir."
"Comm me should an emergency arise," Zakine quickly signaled the lift and left the bridge.
Samsa wondered exactly what constituted an emergency to his superior officer if being mid-battle did not fit the bill. Yet he remained silent, as this was a sign of Zakine's faith in him and the possibility of future advancement. He could handle the Rebels.
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Essag paced, panther-like, around his Palace Throne Room. He tired of waiting for the Rebels to come to him and he tired of Skywalker successfully closing his mind. So he paced, keeping an eye on the scenes from the battle above as the checkpoint holocams followed it.
The Millennium Falcon, that ancient dunghole of a ship piloted by Organa's lover, seemed to be at the heart of the battle along with several Calamarian dreadnoughts with a laughably small amount of firepower. Zakine had seemingly hidden half of his fleet, and kept the remainder of the Star Destroyers far from the fight, though, and Essag tired of that as well. The new technology aboard the Executors should be exploited.
"Commander, open a holochannel to the Punisherbridge," Essag ordered, sitting down on the Imperial Throne and engaging his holocam.
"Yes, sir," the officer replied. "You're connected."
"Moff Zakine, this is your Emperor," Essag spoke into the cam.
Quickly, an officer scurried into view. It was not, however, Zakine. A younger man, clearly nervous, bowed before him.
"Your majesty," stuttered the man.
"Where is Moff Zakine?"
"My Lord, he is…he has had to return to his quarters…briefly," the officer attempted to puff out his chest. "I am currently in command of the Outer Rim Fleet. What is your bidding, sir?"
Essag's eyes narrowed. He didn't need his Force sensitivity to tell him this youngster wasn't being entirely truthful. No Moff would retreat to his quarters during a battle with the Alliance. Not if he were loyal to the Empire.
"Why has he abandoned his bridge during battle, leaving an untested junior officer in charge of the last line of defense between Alliance starships and Coruscant?"
"Sir, my qualifications are-" replied Samsa, trying to stop his knees from knocking.
"Never mind, Admiral. I'll see to it that it never happens again. However, I am displeased that Moff Zakine – wherever he may be – has hidden half his fleet and neglected to display the newest addition to your arsenal on one of those Calamarian dreadnoughts."
"Yes, sir. He intended to do so once…I will inform him, sir."
"No, Admiral. You are in charge at the moment, so I am directing this order is to you. Engage the khyberlasers and show the Rebellion what they are up against. Immediately. Then order the rest of the Outer Rim Fleet to show itself."
"Yes, sir," Samsa saluted as the Emperor's holo faded out, although he knew the impossibility of implementing the second half of the Emperor's order.
Essag hurried into the command center adjacent to the Throne Room. He spotted Tyr Roga analyzing a printout and calculating the information it provided on the datawall in front of him.
"Pault's shuttle landed on the Punisher, did it not?" Essag demanded.
Roga nodded. "The trajectory of the cruiser would lead me to believe—"
Essag turned to Tyr Jolen, entering the command center behind him. "My previous order – the Outer Rim Fleet. Go. Take command now."
"Yes, sir," Jolen bowed and exited the command center, heading toward his Quad Ion, docked in the landing bay levels below the Palace. A shuttle would attract less notice, but he didn't like the idea of trading firepower for stealth. Not with the Alliance around.
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Zakine felt the Punisherturning as he hurried into the airlock anteroom. What the deuce was Samsa doing? Had the Alliance ships broken through in such numbers that the Punisherhad to join the fight? He nearly commed to find out, when he saw Klim and Minister Pault disembarking from their cruiser.
"What is the meaning of this?" Zakine demanded. "In the midst of a battle—"
"Nev," Gital said soberly. "The Emperor intends to destroy us all."
"That's quite an allegation," Zakine replied, considering that it was not quite as outrageous an allegation as it would have been before he received Order Three.
"And entirely true," Pault chimed in.
"You must trust me, Nev," Gital continued. "We have little time. Minister Pault must secure the Imperial Treasury-"
Zakine shook his head. The men were talking nonsense. "I will do nothing until all is explained. Quickly."
"And I will explain nothing in the middle of an insecure dock," Pault bristled.
Zakine considered his next move. He could feel the Punishercompleting its turn, and he didn't like it, but he could comm Samsa from his quarters. The men before him had taken a vastly risky step at the same time as the Emperor issued an incredibly unusual order. He'd hear them out.
"The conference room adjacent to my quarters is entirely secure. I will give you a very short time to convince me of your allegations."
He led the men out of the airlock, never noticing the small Quad Ion tracking closer on the docking bay radar.
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"Those TIEs are on a suicide mission, Chewie," Han commented as he blasted yet another out of the sky. "They're just keepin' us busy." He groaned as an easy shot from the Falcon's turret gun went wide. "Sure woulda helped if they gave us humans instead of those ancient spotter droids to man the guns."
Chewie grumbled in agreement. Droids in any form weren't Han's favorite thing, and even though Chewie had no particular gripe with droids, he believed that sentients, with their powers of intuition and perception instead of reliance on pre-programmed algorithms, were demonstrably better in battle.
**Look!** Chewie pointed.
Han looked up to see one of the Executors moving, turning to starboard to face the battle it had so far ignored.
"Guess they decided they can't just sit there and watch," he muttered to Chewie before opening the comm. "Admiral Ackb—"
Five green lasers shot out of the lead Executor, then focused into one.
"Kest!" Han banked the Falcon steeply into a barrel role to avoid the blinding laser, then turned rapidly to see a billowing explosion far behind him, right where Home One used to be. Han felt a momentary nauseous twinge as he realized Admiral Ackbar and the thousand soldiers on Home One were lost. He liked Ackbar well enough, and now there was nobody around who could override any crazy orders Crix Madine may feel like giving. A part of him might have also slightly wish Mon Mothma had remained on Home One for the battle, instead of, as usual, being spirited away to a distant location to preserve the command. He shoved that feeling away; Leia would kill him for it. Leia…he couldn't think of her now.
"Dammit," Wedge cursed. "That kreffing thing has Death Star weapons."
"Yeah, I think we all saw it," Han replied. "Madine?"
Madine, standing over a monitor on the Freedom, another Calimarian dreadnought, read out the data. "Yes. That was a khyberlaser."
"Well, that makes things interesting," Han blasted another TIE fighter, then noticed a Quad Ion heading toward the Executor that had just destroyed Home One. "Hey—"
He'd had enough of these odd interruptions. The Imperials always locked down for battle. No Imperial plan he'd ever seen involved this kind of tactic, and he was sick of it. He gunned the Falcon toward the Quad Ion, which, he knew, put him right in the line of the Executor's fire.
"Solo!" Madine shouted.
Han didn't listen. He didn't really care what was up with the ship landing in the middle of the battle, but he wanted to blow something other than a TIE out of the sky in revenge for the death of Ackbar. The Falcon sped faster and faster toward the Punisher, nearly catching up to the Quad Ion, but also nearly catching itself in a tractor beam. Chewie shrieked a warning as Han wrenched the Falcon away, seeing the blast of an explosion in the docking bay as the Quad Ion docked forcefully against an airlock.
"Solo!" Madine repeated. "Solo, report back!"
"Whatever that shuttle wants, Madine, the Fleet doesn't want him around. He came in hot – he's hostile."
Just to burn off some frustration, Han tried to tease one of the smaller Star Destroyers into chasing him with a little fancy flying, but no luck. Fortunately, though, a TIE chasing the Falcon spun out of control and hit the Destroyer right its tiny weak spot – the forward viewport of the bridge. It was just dumb luck, Han knew, because those viewports were nearly impossible to target, but he felt a great deal of satisfaction when the Destroyer went down, spinning out of control into Coruscant's shield and then exploding in a fireball.
"Great," Han sighed. "Only fifty-nine Star Destroyers and four Executors with some kind of Death Star technology to go."
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As the Tuelimi shuttle continued toward the Palace Platforms, the Attack Team agreed that they would need to modify their plans. A landing was too risky, given that the battle of Coruscant had gone hot the moment the Corellian freighter had been vaporized. They'd heard Dodonna give the go order to all remaining Alliance troops, and the confusing sounds of the land and low sky battle had filled their comm for the last ten minutes as the Rebels progressed through the streets toward the Imperial Palace, which they would surround after the Attack Team entered. If the team failed to extract or kill the Emperor, the Palace would be destroyed, although the Alliance desperately hoped to preserve the building and its technology, which would be a treasure-trove of Imperial secrets.
Rieekan decided on a low-slow drop of the team; they'd jet pack to the ground. The droids would stay on the shuttle and in contact as necessary.
"Princess, you ever used a jetpack?" Cantos asked.
"No." Leia tried not to remember that the last time she'd seen one in use, the galaxy's most feared bounty hunter had lost control of it after being bumped by a blind man and then met an ignominious end in a Sarlaac pit. "They don't seem to be the most reliable technology in the galaxy."
"There's another problem," Luke said. Leia needed to know what he'd sensed. So did Rieekan, although Luke knew well that he was using Rieekan to get the result he hoped for. "Leia, I think you need to stay on the shuttle with the droids."
Leia's face flushed with anger. Luke raised a hand to warn her to listen before flaring up.
"Essag has sensed my presence – and, more concerningly, yours. I think he wants both of us to come to him, but he's more interested in capturing and making an example of you."
"I don't care what he wants," Leia answered furiously, feeling all of their eyes on her. "If he wants us to come to him, we do it and we give him more than he can handle. And as far as leaving me here, if I knew you were going to pull that kest on me, I would be on the Falcon right now. And I'm not. So I'm damn well going, because I'm here and I'm your only map to an unmapped sector of this kreffing planet!"
She looked back and forth between Luke and Rieekan, daring them to leave her behind.
"I'm trying to keep you away from a powerful Sith who somehow knows of your presence on this planet, Leia," Luke said, while simultaneously sending her the silent message: He knows everything.
He felt Leia's silent shock at the silent message; she had thought that Essag wanted her because she was a high-value Alliance target, not because…she hesitated, knowing that she was one step closer to having her truth revealed publicly, but her face continued to betray nothing but her anger.
"When has trying to protect me from the greatest monsters in the galaxy ever worked before?" she asked, while silently replying I will not hide.
Rieekan stood watching them, agonized by Luke's revelation, since the final decision whether Leia stayed on the shuttle or went to ground was his. It didn't surprise him that the new Emperor wanted to capture Leia. She had always been a high-value target, given her noble lineage, and torturing and killing her would send a strong message to the Rebellion and those in sympathy with it. She was also the only surviving member of the royal family of Rieekan's home planet. He and the other Alderaanians in the Alliance would die for her solely because she was their Princess, unlike those Alderaani who had sat out the war in hiding on Coruscant, after their planet had been destroyed and their consulate decommissioned. He was loathe to put her in danger even greater than that she was in right now, and a showdown with a desperate Sith Emperor felt like a step too far. Yet Leia was right – she was their only map to that which remained intentionally unmapped. Without her, they were walking blind into the Palace. That would harm the Rebellion as a whole, which was bigger than any one person, even the Princess he'd known since she was a little girl and whom he loved like a daughter.
"I'm sorry, Commander Skywalker," Rieekan said slowly. "We need the Princess with us. But every one of us will see to it that she is not taken by Essag."
Luke nodded in assent. He would obey the order, but he knew that despite Rieekan's words, no one on the Attack Team had any chance of protecting her from a Sith. Only Luke could do that; he hoped that he was still strong enough after the injuries of the last few days to do what may need to be done. He also noticed Leia looked satisfied – too satisfied. For all she had seen, she still didn't understand the terrible power of the Dark Side of the Force. The Empire had inflicted all of their damage on her using conventional techniques; she'd seen Vader Force pull Han's blaster from his hand, but her experience of the Force in battle went no further. Luke knew that his descriptions of his battles with Vader and the Emperor translated in her mind in those same conventional terms, because a battle of Force-users was impossible to describe as the mental struggle to control your mind, and keep the other from using your mind, your fears, and your weaknesses against you was the biggest challenge of all. Now he understood, more than ever, Yoda's desire to prevent his rush to Bespin. He had no time to prepare Leia for the onslaught of darkness and no time to teach her how to remain in the light. He wasn't even sure he yet had the capacity to teach it.
"Let's move out," said Cantos, clamping the jetpack to his back and securing Leia tightly into his forward harness. "Don't worry too much, Skywalker. None of us will survive a day if Solo finds out we let something happen to his girl. That's plenty of incentive."
With that, he forced open the exit hatch and, with a blast of the jetpack, propelled himself and Leia toward the level on which the Palace District was built. Leia saw the walkways of the Palace District rapidly approaching; unlike the rest of Coruscant, the Palace District was walkable. One could pretend when walking through the Palace District – if there weren't so much damn evil everywhere – to be in any wealthy city, not on a level of Coruscant built on top of one hundred other levels.
"Sorry, Princess," Jax hit the ground hard and unbuckled Leia's harness. The rest quickly followed, ditching the jetpacks so that they could retain at least some semblance of their disguise as Imperial officials. It wouldn't fool anyone who looked very hard, but at least it would keep citizens, already stunned and scared by the battle, from looking too hard.
Luke landed last, his feet lightly touching the ground despite the thirty meter fall. He'd eschewed a jetpack, and his groan upon landing came not from the jump, but from the sensations that assaulted him as soon as his feet touched the structures of the planet.
"Can you sense it?" Leia asked quietly as they started to move. She already felt the same desire to scream with terror that she'd always felt on the planet.
"Yes. I feel…" Luke studied his feelings for a moment. The feeling was somehow familiar, but he couldn't place it. It wasn't exactly the feeling he'd had at the cave, it was more – yes, he remembered it now. "There's a darkness. I can sense the power of the Sith in this place. But it's like a vision I had when I was on Dagobah. I had a vision of you and Han on Bespin. Fragmented images. But the feelings – fear, suffering, pain of innocents – I feel them here. But magnified," he concluded, not daring to explore this anymore lest he open his mind to Essag.
"Well, at least I'm not alone in hating this kreffing planet," Leia said.
"I am so telling Solo about your gutter mouth when we get back to the fleet, Princess," Cantos laughed.
"He'll only love me mo-" Leia stopped midsentence, grabbed her blaster, and fried the Stormtrooper hiding behind a large sculpture of Palpatine ten meters away before he could raise his blaster. A platoon of Stormtroopers poured out of an alley behind the sculpture.
"So much for the fancy get-ups serving as protection," Cantos yelled as he took out several more.
The acrid smell of blaster fire filled the air as the team battled the oncoming troopers. Once she was certain that all the troopers were visible and engaged in the battle, Leia pulled a small thermal detonator from her ops bag and armed it. She knew that they weren't approved Alliance weapons, but she had to admit she was fond of them. Besides, they'd assure this skirmish ended quickly. She shouted a warning to her compatriots, then tossed the detonator right into the midst of the platoon.
Moments later, the skirmish ended rather one-sidedly when the detonator did its thing.
"Well, that'll learn 'em," Cantos observed to Luke as the team hurried on.