The galaxy was full of middling worlds like Peralta. Population three billion, mostly human, spread across five continents. Sixty percent ocean, forty percent land. Mountains, forests, plains. Hot around the center, cold at the poles. Notable primarily for its industrial factories, which produced charging coils for a quarter of the Empire's turbolaser batteries. The ramp-up of shipbuilding since the Yavin debacle had made the middling world abnormally important, but it had still taken two weeks since the Rebels seized the main spaceport for Grand Admiral Takel to respond.
It wasn't his fault. His fleet had been tied up with other things, and there was something more important on Peralta than turbolaser coils.
It was a banal name too: Luke Skywalker. The surname was vaguely romantic, the Outer Rim hicks donned in desperately attempts to seem loftier than they were. But Skywalker had somehow slain the Death Star, which made him the most wanted man in the galaxy. Presenting him to the Emperor would win Takel far more favor than chasing Peralta's rebels away from the spaceport.
It might have been a mistake to call in Jabba's mercenaries, but there was no proof that crack Imperial commandos would do better against a Jedi (Really, it would have been best if he had kept Boba Fett's number). This was a delicate matter, and Takel was pondering how to deal with it as the Magic Dragon arrived in upper orbit.
It had taken almost a year to fully repair the ship from the damage it had sustained at Shenandor. The Magic Dragon had only seen skirmishes against Mandalorians since, and nothing against the Rebels. Fleet intelligence said there was no proof of Rebel backup coming toward this sector, but there was no proof it wasn't coming either, so the grand admiral had taken steps to ensure he had enough forces to do whatever was necessary here.
Nearly getting hacked to death on his bridge by a feral Jedi had taught Miltin Takel, a man naturally bent toward audacity, the value of caution.
As soon as he was in orbit, the grand admiral received a situation report from Reprobation, the strike cruiser that had been warding this planet for the past few months. Then he ordered Magic Dragon to begin launching its ground forces, which were set to reinforce the Imperial and PPM troops currently holding South Antea. It would take time for them to land outside the shield dome, snake through the hills, and combine with their allies, but unless a Rebel fleet flashed in from nowhere, time was in Takel's side.
So far, so good. Unfortunately, that meant he also had to deal with Tate Vancon.
"You couldn't have come soon enough, Admiral," the governor said when Takel received his call on the bridge. "Consantius has held the spaceport for two weeks. Two weeks. When you retake that port, I want him alive so he can be tried for treason."
"Don't worry, we'll attack the spaceport most delicately."
"Good. We can't afford to have it destroyed. The Empire can't afford to lose Peralta's product. We're not a planetful of insurrectionist trash. We are a loyal world with a few bad seeds."
"And I'll pull them out of your soil," Takel said tiredly. "Just be warned. A delicate operation may mean a slow operation."
Vancon sniffed. "I'm… prepared for that. Please, Admiral, save my world."
"Never fear, Governor. You can trust your friends in the Empire."
Takel was grateful to end that conversation. He turned to the viewport and saw the planet turn beneath. A middling world, yes, but Takel was from a middling world himself and he knew great destinies could come from modest places.
He'd squeeze the Rebels slowly, and when they reached their peak of desperation, he'd make his offer for Skywalker. He'd need a little more help to do that, but it was coming. He wasn't sure exactly when his help was getting here, but it would.
Like the governor, Takel would just have to be patient.
-{}-
It was better to be alive than dead, but living still hurt. After crossing the Benton, Juno was distracted from her emotional hurt by the physical kind. After two weeks of battle, North Antea's main hospital was running low on supplies. Dozens of Rebel soldiers were laid up in its wards, as well as civilians whom Senator Consantius insisted be treated for every ill. Juno understood he wanted to win hearts and mind, but she would have appreciated better sutures for her shredded abdominal muscles. They'd also run out of anti-burn treatments, which meant she'd have to rely on bacta to more slowly replenish the charred flesh.
Walking still hurt. Carrying objects still hurt. Sometimes talking or breathing hurt, and her doctor insisted she stay in the hospital for five days of observation, which left her painfully frustrated. But at least she was alive.
Naturally, Skywalker came to visit her every day. With that stubborn humility of his, he'd insisted that he'd done what anyone else would have done and waved off her thanks.
On his second visit, however, she asked the question that was really bothering her.
His response was a thoughtful frown. "I don't think the Force helped us when we were crossing the river. At least, I didn't try to use it consciously." Then the self-deprecating grin. "Of course, I'm still not sure how to use it exactly. If anything saved us, it was my lightsaber."
"Then the whole time we were across the river… You never used it?" There he doubted. Softly she asked, "What you said to me after I finished my story… was the Force telling you those things?"
The smile vanished. "I don't know. I'd like to think so."
Juno found that she did too, but it was so hard to believe. She'd forced herself to run through those final moments on Shenandor, something so painful she'd avoided doing it for eighteen months. Starkiller had never given any intimation of harming her. Indeed, his last kiss and the light in his eyes as he'd broken away were burned into her memory. That man had been so far from the sullen, secretive Imperial slave she'd first met on Executor. No, that man she'd seen in his final moments had been the one who'd resurrected her on Kamino, who'd rescued her on Empirical and fought to a death against the Emperor's lethal lightning so that the Rebel leaders might escape.
If that man had truly, of his own free will, chosen to sacrifice his live for Darth Vader's…
She still couldn't make sense of it. But Luke Skywalker had turned the bleak end of Shenandor into a riddle instead of a wound.
A riddle hurt less, but she couldn't ponder it indefinitely. As soon as the doctor allowed, she left the hospital and went back to the spaceport. She needed a crutch to move and moving sometimes hurt, but she'd been through the worst of it and could endure the rest.
Things had changed. The battle for Antea was still a stalemate, with the Imperials and PPM marshalled south of the river and the Rebels to the north, but it were moving toward a climax. A newly-arrived Imperial star destroyer had sent down ships full of troops to reinforce the south side. Alliance command had still failed to respond to Peralta's plight. Things seemed poised to tip in the wrong direction. Even the planet itself seemed to notice; the long cold that had gripped Antea was lifting. Snow was softening and starting to melt. A cold wet front passed through the river valley and when she transferred to the spaceport the surrounding hills were obscured by pale fog.
The inside of the complex, however, seemed the same. The command center was filled with familiar faces and she was glad to see them: Nevetts, Trake, even Consantius. Even Luke Skywalker and his little droid.
They greeted her warmly, but the news was not good. Trake said, "The Imperials don't seem to be trying to break through the north hills, just reinforcing the south. My guess is, they're bringing new armaments they can use to attack us from across the river. Maybe even take out the shields."
"Then we destroyed the missiles towers for nothing," Juno said grimly.
But Luke shook his head. "That bought us at least a week's time."
"And how have we used it?"
"By making preparations," said Consantius. "Commander Skywalker hasn't been the only one fiddling with ships on our landing pads. We've emptied out that big Damorian hauler and prepared it for flight."
She gave the ex-senator a look of surprise. "You're planning on evacuating."
He sighed; the charismatic politician looked weathered by hard reality. "Our situation is slipping toward the untenable. We haven't provoked any risings in other cities, and Alliance command…" He shook his head. "We gambled on getting their attention. It seems we failed."
It was everything Juno had been afraid would happen. They'd been under siege for two weeks now; if help was coming, it should have gotten here already. Once more, she thought with fresh bitterness, people she'd trusted had let her down.
Nevetts crossed his arms. "I don't know how anybody thinks we can evacuate with that Impstar overhead. The strike cruiser was bad enough, but the destroyer?"
"To escape will require a distraction," said Consantius. "And a distraction will require a sacrifice."
Juno narrowed her eyes. "Are you suggesting something?"
For a moment it looked like he would; then the ex-senator shook his head. "I'm afraid I'm out of those. I'm sorry to impose on you, General, given your condition…"
"I understand." She'd narrowly escaped death, just to be thrown into an impossible situation with no good outcome. At least it wasn't the first time.
The meeting continued for half a standard hour. They struggled for options and found nothing good. When they decided to disband, Luke waved Juno over to a corner of the command room, where his astromech droid was plugged into a console.
"Artoo's been hard at work trying to find that possible security leak," he explained.
Juno had almost forgotten about that. The destruction of the missile towers had succeeded without the enemy catching wind of their plan. Nor had anyone gone after Consantius the way they had Luke, though the ex-senator had been kept under guard within the spaceport for the past week.
But it was a valid concern, now more than ever. "I take it he's found something," Juno replied.
Luke nodded. "Artoo's been running diagnostics on all the spaceport's internal sensors. He was looking for signs of irregular or unauthorized movements. He also looked to see if any of the secondary communications arrays have been sending out messages."
"And?"
"Nothing. So while you were recuperating we spread out the search and checked as many independent comm relays in the city as we could. After all, word of my, uh, arrival got around. It could have been some civilian in the city who contacted Vancon or the Empire."
The whole thing seemed impossibly daunting. "Did you find anything?"
"No… but yes."
She raised an eyebrow.
"It was Artoo's idea actually." Luke patted his droid's metal dome. "He pointed out that an outbound signal would have to reach through the jamming field they've thrown up over the city. The best way to do that is with a compact, tight-beam transmission at a single target."
"Like that Imperial strike cruiser sitting over our heads?"
"Exactly. Artoo began checking our systems for any brief, irregular bursts directed at the strike cruiser."
"You said our secondary comms have been inactive. And our main one's been broadcasting a distress call nonstop for the past two weeks." To no avail, she left unsaid.
"Right," Luke nodded, "and that's what he found. Show her, Artoo."
The droid whistled and brought uncovered data to the console's flatscreen. Juno leaned close to look over a running list of timestamps.
"What am I seeing?" she asked.
"A record of every time the main comm array repeated our distress call. But look at these here." He tapped a few lines of red text as they scrolled down the screen. "These were separate messages piggybacking on the main outbound signal. They were small, short, and directional."
"Aimed at the strike cruiser?"
He nodded again. "They're so compact they looked like minor distortions in the transmission until Artoo looked more closely. They've been sent out at very irregular intervals- once every couple of days, mostly."
"I don't suppose we know what they're saying."
"It's all encrypted text. Artoo hasn't been able to break the code."
What couldn't that little droid do? She asked, "When was the last transmission?"
"Twenty-seven hours ago."
"Early night-cycle, then. Was it sent from this location?"
"Artoo thinks the only way to send that kind of piggy-backing signal would be through this room. But there are multiple consoles from which you can access comms, and frankly, we have a lot of people going in and out of here."
He was right. Nobody had to flash identicards to get into this room. The top members of her army all knew each other by sight. The Rebel Alliance was built on trust between its members, but as Juno had painfully learned, that could be a weakness as much as strength.
"Someone's been using our comm signals against us," she said. "I don't suppose you've told Nevetts about this?"
"We haven't told anyone. I figured you would know your people better than anyone."
Juno wished that were true, but at the end of the day she was still an offworlder who'd come to Peralta six months ago because (she admitted now) she'd been looking for a novel place to die. The soldiers here weren't friends; they were barely even comrades. Still, as chief communications officer Nevetts was one her most vital people. The thought of him turning traitor churned her stomach.
It also roused more questions. Nevetts had known of her mission to bring down the missile silos. If he'd been the spy, they'd never had succeeded in bombing the towers.
"It's got be someone else," she muttered. "This room has security cameras. Can Artoo bring up footage for the times the spy sent out messages?"
R2-D2 whistled an affirmative. Luke warned, "These cameras don't cover the whole room. And we don't know which console- or consoles- the spy worked from."
"We can at least look for familiar faces and establish a pattern."
"I guess you're right. Artoo, show us what you've got."
For the next hour they watched footage from the overhead holo-cams. They took note of who appeared in each image, and Juno was disturbed and confused to see Nevetts in all of them. As her comm chief he spent a lot of time in the command center and new the systems better than anyone. She desperately looked for another possible culprit.
It was Luke who spotted it. One other person was visible in each time stamp they viewed, always hovering at the edge of the camera range as though trying to avoid it, shifting between different consoles, never using the same one twice in a row. And, he noted, always using it when Nevetts had his back turned.
It wasn't proof, but it was damned incriminating. Juno said, "It makes sense, doesn't it?"
"It does," Luke sighed.
"You sound disappointed."
"It's hard to be betrayed by people you're coming to trust."
She snorted softly. "You're just getting started."
"We don't know for sure," he said, "but there's an obvious way to find out."
"You think your Jedi powers can sense that?"
"I'm not a Jedi. But… I'd like to handle this myself. And if this gets messy, you're not in the shape for a fight."
Juno wanted to argue but couldn't. Skywalker was right too damned often. "Don't do this by yourself. Take some help. And not just your droid."
R2-D2 whistled indignantly, like he was all his owner could ever need. The droid might even be right, but Luke stroked his dome soothingly. "She's got a point. Don't worry, General. I'll bring the help I need."
-{}-
The medical ward inside the spaceport was modest compared to North Antea's main hospital, and its supplies had dwindled to almost nothing in the two weeks of Rebel occupation. It was small and cramped but contained a half-dozen rooms for private medical consultation.
Luke was waiting in one of them, on his feet but leaning against the unused examination bed, when the medic escorted Drasca into the room. The tattooed woman stopped when she came through the door and frowned.
"I'm sorry, is this the wrong room?" she glanced over her shoulder at the medic. "I thought you had the results of my cranial scan."
"Commander Skywalker wants to see you first," the medic said politely, then stepped out of the room. The door slid shut behind him, leaving Drasca along with Luke and R2-D2, who waited patiently in the corner of the room.
She kept her composure. Hands dangling at her side (right one close, of course, to her holstered service pistol) she asked, "Is there a problem, Commander?"
"How's your head?" Luke asked.
"I feel fine now. When the doctor called I got worried."
"You're lucky you weren't killed. Whoever was trying to kidnap me wasn't concerned about collateral damage."
"I don't know. They hit me from behind so I missed the whole show. I'm sure you defended yourself ably."
"Not ably enough," he said, thinking of Ferol. "I suppose they didn't kill you because a blaster shot would have given them away."
"That's what I assume. I guess I was lucky. Barring the concussion." She frowned. "You're not here to ask me about my head, though."
"I am. Among other things. I don't want to intrude, but I was wondering about your relationship with Lieutenant Nevetts."
The frown went deeper. "I'm not the kiss-and-tell type, Commander. And I didn't mark you for a voyeur."
"I'm simply wondering how long you've been close to the lieutenant, and why."
"Why? Everyone needs someone. Even when there's a war on. Especially then." She raised a brow. "Do you have someone, Commander?"
He wouldn't let her distract him. "I've noticed how often you're in his company. It's raised some questions."
"Then you might as well ask them instead of making weird insinuations."
"I've had Artoo here look over some footage from the command center. Artoo?" On request, the droid rolled forward and projected security records from his holo-imager. "We've noticed that you've been in there a lot more than necessary. Given that you're just a sniper, there's really no need to be in there at all."
"The lieutenant spends most of him time there. Am I not allowed to visit him?"
"You also seem to be using the consoles," Luke pointed out. "Usually when Nevetts isn't looking."
She finally went for her blaster. Luke's hand was closed to his lightsaber; he grabbed it, flicked it one, and slashed out. In a flash he took of the barrel of her gun, leaving her holding only a smoking remnant.
At the same time, R2 sent his signal to the adjacent rooms. The door behind her hissed open; Berbar and two more soldiers stepped into the threshold, weapons lifted. Obligingly, Drasca dropped her pistol and raised both hands.
"You're not as clever as you think you are," she told Luke. Her Peraltan accent suddenly disappeared, replaced by an outer-Core one like Juno's.
"I never said I was."
Behind her Berbar said, "What are you, huh? An Imp plant?"
She ignored him and told Luke, "They know who you are and where you are. You're not getting off this planet."
"Neither are you," Berbar grunted.
With a touch of sadness, Drasca said, "That was never the plan."
Luke had heard about Imperial spies carrying suicide pills; sometimes in their clothes, other times locked in false teeth. The second he saw muscles bunch on her neck he opened his mouth for a shout. He barely got out a sound before Berbar's finger twitched. The blast took Drasca in the back and she collapsed forward. Luke released his lightsaber, caught her with both hands, and immediately laid her on the ground.
"Did she do it?" Berbar lurched forward.
Luke stuck two fingers in her limp mouth, running tips over gums and molars. "No. We got her in time."
"Best news all day. Do you want to do the honors?"
"I guess I can." Luke retrieved his lightsaber, wiped his fingers dry on his jacket, then took out his commlink. "General, this is Commander Skywalker. We have a prisoner."
"That's good. Have your people more her to a secure location." Juno's reply wasn't as enthusiastic as he'd hoped. "You should get to the command center right now."
He braced for the worst. "What is it?"
"A second star destroyer just entered the system."