Chapter Three: Mercy (Ziost)
She waits longer than she ought to before she answers.
Her lungs fill in time with the ringing rattling through her head, every breath an exercise in artificially induced calmness even as above her the first troop transports streak through the atmosphere on their way down to the landing zone. She keeps breathing; the knot of knife-edged fear that had taken root behind her heart fades into smoldering rage.
(Rage is far preferable to fear.
Fear is a problem; fear makes her overcautious and indecisive. Fear gets people killed. Anger, though? She learned long ago she works better angry.)
She switches the channel open.
"There you are, Cipher." Lana sounds surprisingly calm, given the circumstances. "I understand from Agent Kovach that we have a plan."
She blinks, refocusing. "Apparently we do, although he was rather vague on the details. More to the point, we need to talk about-"
"There's no time for that. I'm nearly ready to launch the evacuation, and you need to get to the transformer array in Central district. I'm sending you a map now." Even as Lana speaks, her wrist chimes softly- Message incoming. Connecting. "If this works, we'll have time to talk."
Does she not- oh, no. "Even if it works, we have a problem. How are you planning to evac through the blockade?"
The signal crackles for a moment, an angry static overlay muting the words. "-sorry, Cipher, please repeat. I don't think I heard you properly. I thought you said- hold on, we've finally got the launch bay doors open. There we-"
She only recognizes about half of the curses that follow (the Basic and Huttese ones, mostly- the rest are Sith, with a few suspiciously Mando'a-sounding words in the mix), all painfully loud, addressed variably at the Jedi, the Republic in general, Theron Shan in particular and Theron Shan's parentage in extra particular. With a wince she pulls the little transmitter free from her ear, and even six inches from her head she can still hear Lana raging. Theron leans in, eavesdropping rather less than subtly, eyebrow arching at some of the more colorful phrases.
"Lana," he says after a moment, "you've met my mother. I really don't think that description is fair."
"I- I- you." Lana sputters as an ominous electrical hum crackles through the speaker. "This is your fault.
"I swear I had nothing to do with-"
She's pretty sure force lightning can't travel through communications devices, but it's probably best not to test it- she cuts Theron off with a gesture and surprisingly, he quiets. "I assumed Kovach had told you we'd located Agent Shan."
"Yes, he did, and-" a new noise, now, metallic, and evenly spaced breaths between the words. Lana's running. "They're coming. I need to move. Get to the transformers. I'll-"
The channel cuts out, and though she tries to ring back through again and again Lana doesn't answer. From this angle she can't see clearly down to the spaceport, but the Republic transports keep raining down like shooting stars, falling fast- too fast. They ought to be slowing. Instead the ships are still at full engine when they reach the surface; the ground shakes with the force of one impact after another and a dozen new pillars of smoke climb lazily into the already ashen sky.
"Same thing happened with the Line." Theron rubs his eyes, the left still swollen half-shut despite the medpacks. He looks exhausted. "They get in range, he just-" he reaches up as if to pluck one of the still-falling ships from the air, makes a fist, and slams it down, hard, into his thigh.
"Great. And I get to go..." After replacing her earpiece she activates the map, letting it project into the air between them. New Adasta's streets are linear, organized, like all proper Imperial cities, and with one finger she traces out the most direct route.
"...right through the middle of them." With a shake of his head he pushes her hand down, drawing a second pattern that crosses her own, goes- under? She can't make sense of it. "No. Go this way."
Even on second glance she can't follow the route. "What do I look like, a selonian? That route doesn't-"
"There's a maintenance tunnel, but it's not on the map. Enter here-" Theron gestures again, his left hand on her wrist guiding her outstretched finger- "exit here. The second door, not the first. Trust me."
Out of the corner of her eye, she watches his expression carefully; he's staring intently at the projection. "I won't ask you how you know that."
"I can't tell you how I know that. Just trust me." His grip relaxes, the pressure of his fingers fading, blending into older memories of touch. "Please."
Any other day, from any other person, the words trust me would have made her laugh until she choked- especially, in the abstract, from an SIS agent in the middle of a war zone. Trust me is the kind of naive faith in the innate goodness of the universe that makes you believe that your side is the right one, that every deal's fair and every promise genuine. Trust me is battles lost and missions failed; on good days it's a panicked run for cover and on bad days it's a funeral.
Today trust me is flying blind on borrowed intel and, even knowing that, she still mostly believes him- because he's playing you, you idiot. Stop thinking with your-
"All right. But only because you asked so nicely." The map disappears, and she lets her train of thought go with it. "Let's go, then."
Theron shakes his head again, starts a slow jog down the steps toward the plaza. "I'm taking the direct route. Wait a minute, then head for the tunnel opening- I'll try to clear a path for you, then head toward Lana. Sounds like she needs some backup."
"Are you insane?" He can run but she's faster, half-wounded as he still is, and catches him by the back of his jacket halfway down the staircase. "I gave you your weapons back, but I'm not letting you out of my sight. We can use my stealth generator. Lana-"
"-was right. This is at least partially my fault." Twisting free, he goes another few steps, down and down to the open plaza below and stepping over the fallen form of a crumpled protocol droid. "And I need to fix it."
The major avenues look clear at first, but she can see crowds of humanoid shapes in the far distance- their path lies right, through the densest of the groups. "By getting yourself killed?"
"You know she's in over her head." (She can't deny it. Lana is many things but at her core she is slow, cautious, deliberate, far better suited to the research she so loves than to a title she never wanted.) "Besides, we may need a backup plan if whatever you're doing with the transformers doesn't work. I have a few other ideas."
Damn him, but he's right.
"Fine, Theron. I'll play along, for now. But if any of those ideas involve scarpering off with Kovach and commandeering a shuttle, I will-"
Theron stops abruptly. "Screw Kovach. If he's the one who sold me out to the Chancellor, he can find his own way off-planet. Let me just- um." One hand goes to his temple, reflexively, before his nose crinkles in irritation.
"Your comm's still dead." It isn't a question.
He sighs. "Yeah."
"Holo's no good on the run, either, and I haven't got a spare… hold on." Slumped against a wall ahead of them there's a dead Chiss in an Intelligence uniform (she doesn't recognize her, either- just like Kovach, another one of too many new faces in her absence), a telltale glint of metal nestled in her ear. The lightsaber wound through her chest leaves little room for doubt, but still she presses two fingers to the woman's throat: no pulse, no breath. No time for sentiment. She pulls the woman's earpiece free, syncs its frequency with her own. "I am going-" turning back toward Theron, she jams the device, rather harder than necessary, into place, "-to need this back. It's Imperial standard issue, so there's at least a ninety percent chance it's got a tracking device built into it. In case you were thinking about being clever."
"Ten percent chance of escape, then. Good to know," he grins, and takes off running.
She waits until he's rounded the corner before she opens the channel. "Not really. Ten percent chance that the agent was still on probation, in which case you'll be electrocuted if you leave the city limits without authorization."
"Very funny. Start heading for the tunnel now, and I'll let you know when I find Lana."
True to his word, when she starts to move again the street is clearer, a gathering mob a block ahead but moving away- after Theron. "That wasn't a joke. Be careful."
"I'm always careful." He doesn't slow.
The tunnel opening is just where he said it would be: a trapdoor and a long ladder down to a gated entryway, held shut with a simple electronic lock that yields to basic codes. When she steps within the walls and ceiling are solid duracrete, lit every few meters by flickering lights casting long shadows, well-reinforced and utterly silent. Not a maintenance tunnel, despite Theron's appellation- no cables, no hatches, no droids at work. She'd bet this was built as an escape route.
(Which raises the question, of course, of how he knew about it in the first place. Then again, she knows six different ways into the Senate Tower on Coruscant- seven, counting the sewer route which she refuses on principle to ever use again- and trade secrets are trade secrets.)
It's nearly abandoned, that much is clear; every footstep kicks up a thick layer of dust that makes her sneeze. She tries to track her route along the map as she moves, backtracking under the military outpost and past the first door- barred with a recent-model laser grid and its frame studded with plasma mines, two holes in the ceiling above looking suspiciously like retracted turrets- leading up to the Command Center building they'd just left. Unlike the ancient tunnel, the defenses at this door look new, no more than a few years old. Something had gotten in there once, it would seem, but it wouldn't be doing it again.
Security breach, Ziost Orbital Defense Command Center- the idea stirs up something vague in the back of her mind, a memory of a report from years ago that she probably skimmed over and deleted in the months after Corellia. Unimportant now, in any case. She'll remember it eventually.
(In those months, in the low months where she would have gleefully let Darth Malgus and Arho tear Ilum and each other apart except that they'd pulled the whole Empire into their stupid petty Sith war, she deleted most of the reports that the Minister forwarded along. Corellia left her with three broken fingers and nerve damage that took months to heal despite Doctor Lokin's best efforts, lingering parting gifts from her torturers; mending the mental wounds that Hunter left behind took considerably longer.
Took- no. Taking. Sometimes she still sees Hunter when she closes her eyes. Some wounds never heal, only scar.)
It's another fifteen minutes' run to her exit point, another bog-standard door and another long ladder back to the surface. The hatch at the top is dented, though, and she has to drive her shoulder into it before it it swings open and she stumbles out into smoke and ruin and the acrid smell of electrical fires.
There should be a fence here- she pulls up the map, just to be sure, blinking through the smoke- and the transformers on the far side. Where's-
She ducks behind the open hatch as a colossal shadow passes overhead, followed by tortured metal-on-stone shrieking so loud it nearly drowns out Theron's worried voice in her ear.
"Nine, can you hear me? You need to get out of there."
"I just cleared the tunnel. I haven't even gotten to the array yet," she says, then sees the cause of his alarm a few meters away: something very large, very spiky and very, very angry-looking shredding entire panels of fencing with lethal-looking claws. It doesn't appear to have seen her, though, so she ducks back into cover and brings her stealth field up. "Ah. Giant spiky monster. Got it."
"The transformers are shot. We're working on a new idea," Theron sounds amused. "Minus the giant spiky monst-"
"Monolith. We're calling them monoliths. One of Vitiate's creations." Lana, on the other hand, sounds distinctly irritated. Theron must have found her after all. "Very nearly unkillable, I'm afraid, so you'll need to avoid them."
She remembers, again, how much she hates this Force-damned planet. "Unkillable. Great. Where's Kovach?"
"He should be two buildings south of your location- how did you get there, by the way?- but he dropped out of contact when the monolith came through. I'm sure he's fine-"
Theron cuts in again. "-but maybe you should go check on him. We all need to talk, right? About the new plan." His tone is a warning. He hasn't told Lana yet, then.
"Of course. I'll get us both on holo, assuming I find him." Slowly, carefully, she edges back out into the open- she learned long ago, to her detriment, that Sithspawn have a nasty habit of seeing right through stealth. The creature's preoccupied, though, having broken through what remains of the fence, its attention focused on gnawing through an electricity pylon. "I'd imagine we've got rather a lot to discuss."
The next structure to her south is a security station (she scans the inside, still, in the interest of caution- nothing alive) and beyond that a squat administrative warehouse, its sliding doors wide open. On some level she doesn't expect to find Kovach- if he was smart, he should have gone to ground by now. If he's still there... well, it ought to be an interesting conversation. She mutes the channel, just in case.
He's still at his post after all; when she enters the warehouse she can hear him, voice raised mid-argument, somewhere behind a stack of crates near the entrance. She hadn't counted on an accomplice- still cloaked, she slides her blaster free of its holder.
Angling herself between two pallets, she cranes her neck for a better view. Kovach's pacing back and forth in front of a holoprojector, his hands outstretched. "With all due respect, you haven't seen what I have. The power the Emperor has-"
"Do not presume to tell me how to run a war." She's heard that voice before, today. Not an accomplice, after all. An employer. The last puzzle piece slots into place, the picture suddenly clear.
"Chancellor, please, stop the invasion. They'll all be killed."
Saresh folds her arms across her chest. "This is a war. Casualties are inevitable. Now, unless you have an update on Sith Intelligence or the SIS, get off this channel."
He slams his fist down onto the projector and turns on his heel as the Chancellor's image fades. "Damn it all. This is bad."
"I'll say." Dropping her field and leveling her weapon, she smiles at him from behind the sight. "And here I thought I'd need to interrogate you. How disappointing."
He pales.
"A triple agent. Even I haven't managed that one- double's as far as I go. Too many cover stories to keep straight, hm?"
"I- please, Commander. Let me explain."
"Please don't bother." She's heard every excuse he could possibly offer a thousand times, echoes of Hunter's ranting and Ardun Kothe's self-serving delusions tangling in her brain. "I'll try to guess, instead. Sick mother? Republic plant- no, your accent's natural. Born and raised on Dromund Kaas, I'd guess."
He nods, lowers his head, looking at the floor instead of down the barrel of her gun. "Yes. Blind to everything, like a good citizen, until I started this work."
"And then you realized how terrible we are."
"You can't see what the Sith are doing?" Kovach still won't look at her. "You do this every day. How can you stand it?"
It should have been a laugh, but it comes out as a snarl. "You smug little shit. You really think you're doing the right thing, don't you? Standing up for the forces of good against the evil Empire… oldest story in the book." She isn't smiling any more. "Except you flipped on the SIS, too. Fed everything straight to Saresh."
His voice is steady. "Yes, Commander. That's right."
She grabs him by the collar and marches him to the door, forces his head toward the sky with her blaster still in her other hand; he barely resists. "Congratulations," she says, turns him toward the spaceport above them, toward the troop transports still burning on the crater-pocked landing pads. "You think you're so much better than us? This is what your good guys do."
"I didn't know this would happen!" Kovach closes his eyes against the view until she pinches him, hard, and his lids fly open at the pain. He doesn't get to not look, not now. "I swear I didn't know. If I'd had any idea-"
"What the fuck did you think she'd do? You knew calling her meant open war. We were trying-" she gestures out at the spaceport with the barrel of her pistol- "to evacuate those people, and you brought them a blockade. You killed them all."
"I've been helping, now. Our plan should-"
"The plan's a bust. If you hadn't been so busy with your boss you'd have noticed that by now. We need to talk to Lana and Theron, figure out next steps." She yanks him back into the room. "Figure out what to do with you, too."
He staggers, but stays on his feet. "Lana and Theron? They're- we're working together?"
"It's a thing we do sometimes against mutual enemies." Her own holo on the floor in front of them, she stands back by his left shoulder and nestles her blaster into the small of his back. "Now smile pretty, traitor."
She'll give him credit for one thing- his voice barely shakes when he activates the holo.
"Minister Beniko," he says. "I understand the plan has changed."
"Yes. We're just finalizing the details now." She can see both of them in the image: Lana in front of a table-mounted holo; Theron mirrored in a portable unit behind her, somewhere else, his head bowed over a console. "But in the future, Agent, when a superior calls you you are expected to answer."
"As you say. I-" Kovach pauses. "I was-"
Theron's jaw tightens; she takes a deep breath in. Here we go.
Lana's eyes narrow. "Spit it out. We haven't got all day."
The words flood out of him in a rush. "I was speaking to my superior. I don't work for you, Minister Beniko. I work for Chancellor Saresh. I'm sorry."
"You're sorry? You're-" Lana spins toward the second holo, toward Theron, her voice razor-sharp. "Did you know about this?"
"He came looking for the SIS a month ago. We were working with him." Theron, careful, doesn't look up. "But I had no idea he was playing us both until I got here, and even then it was only a theory we had- I wasn't even sure until now."
Lana's fists are clenched, rivulets of lightning starting a slow climb up her arms as she turns back toward the projector. "You both knew. Why didn't you tell me?"
"There wasn't time." Something's wrong. She's never seen her like this, not even on the worst days on Rishi and Yavin- she's normally calm, but this is closer to the eye of a hurricane. "And Theron's right. I marked him as SIS almost immediately, but the rest of it was only conjecture. Until I caught him here talking to Saresh, anyway."
"Well, then. We won't waste time on presenting evidence." Gaze fixed on Kovach, she folds her hands neatly in front of her chest. "Rane Kovach, you are accused of treason against the Sith Empire. How do you plead?"
He bows his head. "Guilty, my lord. Be merciful."
"Tell that," Lana stretches out her hand, the projection wavering with her power, "to the people in the spaceport."
His heels rise off the floor first, then the balls of his feet, then his toes; his fingers claw at his own throat. Kovach dangles in the air just in front of her, suspended, twitching, for what seems like an age, and when he brushes against her in his agony she recoils.
She cannot stand it. Clean kills are one thing- she's done enough of them, Force knows, but this…
(There are no nice Sith Lords, her mentor at the Academy told her once. Nice Sith don't survive Korriban.
The ones that seem nice? They just have the longest fuses.)
Lana's toying with him, now, like an animal with its prey; she relaxes for a moment and when he gasps for air her grip tightens, over and over again, her face a perfect black-eyed mask of fury, a thin coil of crimson smoke haloed around her head-
No.
If they were in the same room she'd slap her, shoot her, anything to break her focus on Kovach, but unlike the Force her own hands don't travel through projections. Only one option left, then: her blaster's still in her hand. She can't reach Lana, but she can end this.
She presses the barrel to the back of his head and pulls the trigger.
"So much for mercy." Theron mutters under his breath, face pale and expression a match to what she imagines her own must be.
Lana's doubled over, hands at her temples, but when she straightens she is herself again, aura gone and her wide eyes their usual brilliant yellow. "My head hurts. What did I- oh. Oh."
No one speaks for a long moment.
"So," she says, wiping Kovach's blood from her face, his body unmoving at her feet, "tell me about the plan."