Chapter Three: The Information
Two days after Ryx Station, Padmé sat in her bunk alone. She had watched some of the holonet footage about the station earlier. Of course of the state-run news said the station's destruction and loss of lives was due to rebels implanting bombs. The loyal Imperial navy had tried their best to stop the plot.
Vader himself had given a short speech. He lamented the loss of innocent lives. The emperor called for action for the people of the Empire to not support the rebels. To report any sightings of wanted or suspected rebels. To not donate or join their cause. Padmé turned the holonet off. She couldn't stand the man's lies.
She leaned back and stared at the ceiling. It had been five years since the birth of the Empire. Over those five years she had only come to hate the man she called her husband. Each crime he commited was a stab into her heart. She felt personally responsible for all of it. She had let Palpatine crawl to power. She hadn't seen the signs within Anakin. She had let him fall to the dark side and become Vader.
She rolled her head from side to side to stretch her neck before she bent back over to the small table which was covered in various datapads and holoprojectors. She turned on one of the datapads in front of her and started to go through it. They had received this intel ten days earlier, which had been via a collaboration with a few other cells. The data was extremely classified and high level. Privy only to Vader's high commanders and officers.
Padmé's rebel cell was the only remaining cell left from the collaboration. Two of the cells had been destroyed during the extraction of the data. The other two had been hunted down by Imperials. Their leaders had been publicly executed.
The intel was on Vader's newest weapons plan. Padmé moved through the images of new ion cannons, hyperdrives, cloaking devices, and fighters. Finally she came to the image she was looking for. It was a new type of star destroyer. It was called the Executor-class star dreadnought. It was 19,000 meters long, which was almost more ten times the size of the 1,600 meter long Imperial-class star destroyers. It boasted more than five thousand turbolasers and ion cannons.
The thought of such a ship was almost unimaginable to Padmé. Yet it didn't compare to the last weapon. It was simply named the "Ultimate Weapon." It was a moon-sized, deep-space mobile station designed to fire a single superlaser that could destroy a whole planet. These last two weapons alone created a pit inside Padmé's stomach.
Such military might was not needed. These things were not built to create a safe galaxy, but a galaxy based on fear. Padmé shuddered at the idea of one weapon being able to destroy a planet in a single shot. Worst yet, according to the intel both the projects were already being started.
Padmé knew that this was to be her next goal. She had to do whatever she could to stop both of these monstrosities from being finished. Her team was hunting down whatever information they could. Yet the Empire had made sure these new weapons were top secret. Yet Padmé knew there had to be clues somewhere. The cost alone for just the "Ultimate Weapon" was one trillion credits.
There had to be a money trail somewhere. The Empire was going to have to get resources to build it. Resources had to be to shipped. Padmé knew there was something somewhere that alluded to such big projects. All she had to do was find it.
Even though it had only been ten days since she got her hands on the intel, Padmé could not find a trace. The Empire had made sure their top-secret weapons were indeed a secret. The easiest way she assumed was to follow the metal. It was going to be the one material the Empire was going to need first and throughout the entire project. They had to mine all that ore somewhere. It had to be processed and shipped out. Somewhere in the galaxy the Empire had recently stepped up it's durasteel production.
Her team investigated all the known mining operations. They combed over production logs and shipments. They tracked the shipments of the metal to the factories. They could then track to see what the metal was used to make. The team looked for the obvious: a bunch of ore being shipped to one place, but never leaving. A bunch of ore being forged into durasteel sheets or beams, to be shipped off into one location. Yet they found nothing.
Five days later the Helios Eclipse sat quietly floating in space. Padmé, Rion, and nine other individuals sat around a conference table. Padmé called this her her Lucky Ten. They were her core group, her leaders of her rebel cell. The group was made up of a variety of people.
There was Abenia'sin, the former-slave Twi'lek, and Tadala a Rodian. There was an elderly human couple by the names of Aldo and Cloela Drest. Also there was a young, very arrogant, Arkanian scientist named Decimus Monteth. He had become horrified by the experimentation other Arkanian scientists had done on alien species to study genetic manipulation and cybernetic medical technology.
There was also a clone trooper that went by the name of Razer. He had suffered a bad head injury in battle prior to Order 66. He wasn't sure if his chip was just damaged or if his brain was, but he never followed the Jedi purge order. He fled the military shortly later. Padmé suspected he wasn't completely sane. There was a young but gifted human slicer by the name of Ven. Second to last there was a large, mid-age woman by the name of Posy. She wore a large patch-quilt jacket and spoke with a thick accent no one was able to quite place.
Their best lead on the metal to build the super weapons was from the last member. Ngodi was a Talz from Alcoz III. The planet was recently subjugated into slavery by the Empire. The majority of the Talz population was primitive and unaware of galactic civilization. The Empire enslaved the Talz to mine the mineral rich planet. The discovery of the planet was never listed on the Galactic Registry, in order to bypass Senate regulations regarding the treatment of primitive species. The planet was labeled off-limits, and any Talz spotted off planet the Empire offered a five-thousand-credit bounty dead or alive. Which meant there was at least one planet with mining operations the Empire was keeping secret.
They needed to get access to the Imperial records for that planet. What was being mined? How much? Where was it being sent to? Through networking through some less-than-savory means, Padmé's group had come in contact with some individuals who might be able to help. These individuals were junk and scrap dealers. They also doubled as small-time bounty hunters and had taken in a few Talz to collect on bounties.
They had been to the planet personally, which meant they could get through the Imperial blockade of the system. They could also get close to the planet, if not down to it. Padmé's rebel cell had contacted the group. They were setting up a meeting in four days time. The goal was to enlist their help, or if not move on to more drastic measures of simply overpowering them and taking their ships and clearance codes.
"Aye dun like it," the odd woman Posy said.
"I agree," Rion said. He sat to Padmé's immediate right. His chair was close enough to hers that their knees touched under the table.
"It's only been fifteen days," the Rodian said. "I think we need to give it more time. We've casted our information nets. Let's wait to see what they catch. I'm sure there are still places Ven hasn't tried slicing and hacking into yet." The Rodian nodded at the young girl who sat with her knees up to her chest in her chair.
"No," Padmé said a bit softly. "We can't just sit here. We tried that on Ryx Station."
"Which is why we should just stay put out here in empty space," Rion pleaded. "We've plenty of fuel and supplies. We can stay out here for a while."
"And ruin our chance with this group?" Padmé asked. "If we back down now, they might not agree to another meet up."
The blue female Twi'lek spoke up. "I'm with Padmé. If we don't go through with the meeting now, we might not get another chance."
The leaders of the rebel cell argued back and forth for another hour. Eventually Padmé's idea won out. They would proceed with the plan, at least as far as to see how well the meeting went. There was no plan to go rushing off to Alcoz III after the meeting. It was the stipulation Rion had enforced upon finally agreeing with this plan. After the meetup, the group would then regroup and think carefully about the next step.
The meeting team would be the old human Aldo and Tadala the Rodian. The Helios Eclipse had a small beat up spaceship in its hangar the two were going to use to rendezvous with the junkers. The hangar also held a few more small ships. One of which was a small personal fighter scraped together from old Clone fighters. Padmé suited up in a gray flight suit and jumped into the small fighter. The meeting team had left about thirty minutes prior, and now Padmé took the fighter out of the hangar.
Immediately her com went off. Rion's voice came through, a bit panicked. "Padmé! What are you doing?"
"I'm going on standby," she explained calmly. "I'll be able to get closer to the meet-up in this small ship than the Helios. If anything goes wrong, I can swoop in."
"That's not your job!" Rion shouted. "We already have a team waiting by for back up."
"Then we'll have extra back-up," she said as turned off the com and her fighter sped away from the Helios. She didn't want to argue with Rion. He worried about her too much. But she felt so restless ever since Ryx Station. She knew she should have stayed on board, commanding the operation from the Helios. But she couldn't focus. Her body wouldn't would stay still. Her adrenaline was pumping. She had to get out and away.
Her speeder came upon the meet-up. The large freighter of the junkers was nothing more than a small white speck in the distance of space. Padmé couldn't make out her team's ship docked with it, but assumed it was there. She let her spaceship just float and tried to let her mind float as well.
She looked up at the stars. She knew her location and tried to find identifying stars and constellations. She was by no means a navigator, but she should be able to follow the stars at least towards the core of the galaxy. Suddenly a crackle was heard over the com. Then static. Then Aldo's voice came through, pained and harried. The junkers weren't willing to cooperate peacefully.
"Then we just go back to Plan B," Razer the clone said in a gruff voice over the com. "We take their ship by force."
Padmé grabbed the handles of the control and pushed her small fighter on. By the time she made it to the junker's ship, the rebel backup had already docked. Luckily the ship had four airlock docking bays. She brought her fighter up to one. Luckily it opened once she sent a signal to it.
She entered the ship. No one was waiting for her at the airlock. Hopefully this meant her rebels had secured the ship, or at least the bridge. If no one was there to open the airlock, then someone else must have let her in elsewhere. She brought up her blaster and made her way slowly into the ship.
She heard footsteps behind her. She turned and barely made out the figure before bolts were fired towards her. A flash of green blinded her, and she fell down. Her body was heavy and unable to move. The last thing she remembered before blacking out, was the sound of steps approaching her.