Incoming transmission…
From the Emperor's Palace…
The Imperial High Command reports:
The battle for Notinisaw is over. Loyal to its oath, the Sixth Army, under the exemplary leadership of Grand General Tagge, succumbed to the superiority of the enemy and the unfavorable conditions. Its fate is shared by the Second Fleet of the Imperial Navy.
The final battle took place under the Imperial flag, which was hoisted on the highest ruin of Notinisaw, visible from afar. Generals, officers, non-commissioned officers, and enlisted men and women fought side by side until the last blaster cartridge.
The army's sacrifice was not in vain:
They died so that the Empire may live.
In other news, both the Mandalorians and the New Republic have claimed to be in possession of weapons of mass destruction, with nuclear bombs and a Death Star, respectively. They have given our glorious Emperor Palpatine 48 hours to surrender all Imperial forces, lest these weapons be unleashed.
Now, I ask you: what kind of a people do they think we are? Is it possible that they do not realize that even if such weapons existed, that the mighty Empire and its gracious ruler would never cower in the face of such a threat? We shall never surrender!
—
Maeve Ordo thanked the Manda for small favors. The Deity didn't seem to be giving a lot of big ones for the Mandalorians these days.
Ordo watched with Professor Dapra'en'nuorsa as Mandalorians loaded a large device into a waiting VCX-100 light freighter, then repeated that same process nine times. "You're sure these damn things will work?" Ordo said.
Dapra looked at her. "No."
"Thanks a lot, Professor," Ordo said. "You sure know how to cheer a girl up."
"Would you rather have me lie to you?" Dapra asked.
"Right now, I really think I would," Maeve Ordo told her. "I hate to try this if there's an even-money chance we'll get nothing but a squib."
Dapra shrugged. "They are untested. Ideally, we would have more time and more weapons. Things being as they are..."
"Well, yes. There is that," Ordo said. Just getting back to Oiho from Concordia had been nightmare enough. "All right. We'll try it, and we'll see what happens, that's all. Wish us luck."
"I do." the Chiss female said.
Ordo boarded one of the cargo ships, and sat next to the pilot. "We ready, sir?" the noncom asked in accents not much different from Ordo's own.
"If we're not, we never will be—which is, of course, always a possibility," the Intelligence officer said. The pilot looked confused. "We're ready, Wilton," Ordo assured him. "Now we see what happens."
The ten freighters entered space and entered the route to Coruscant. Everybody in them spoke the same kind of Basic as Maeve Ordo: all of them could pass for Imperials, in other words. Both sides had used that trick during the war whenever they thought they could get away with it.
One more time, Ordo thought. It's coming down towards the end, but we're going to try it one more time.
Ordo tensed again—for the millionth time—when they entered the Galactic Core. If things there weren't ready, they were screwed again. But the stuff they needed was waiting for them. Ordo let out one more sigh of relief.
Ordo's convoy stopped on one of Coruscant's four moons. A work crew dashed out and spread canvas over the freighters. Then, under that cover, they got to work, slapping gray paint over the butternut that had identified them. As soon as the paint was even close to dry, they put Imperial crests all over the machines. Those couldn't hide their Republic lines, of course, but after almost five years of war both sides were using lots of captured equipment.
And the disguise didn't end with the freighters. Ordo and her comrades put on Imperial uniforms. She became a major, which suited her well enough. If the Imperials captured her in their togs, they'd shoot her. She shrugged. At the moment, that was the least of her worries.
"You have the passwords and countersigns?" she asked the veteran first sergeant in charge of the unit there.
"Yes, sir, sure do. We went out and took a couple of prisoners less than an hour ago," the noncom answered. He was of about Ordo's vintage, a man who'd been through the Civil War and didn't flabble about anything. He gave Ordo what she needed.
Ordo wrote it down to be sure. "Thanks," she said. The retread sergeant nodded.
The chameleon convoy rolled out of Centax-1 before sunup. Ordo wanted to get into Coruscant while it was still dark. That would help keep her vehicles from giving themselves away right where people were most likely to get antsy about them.
If somebody'd spilled the beans—not impossible with Mandalore starting to fracture—a couple of Star Destroyers could have swooped down and ended a lovely scheme before it really got rolling.
But no. The sergeant's raid for prisoners hadn't even made the Imperial forces jumpy. Ordo and her merry band got into the Imperial capital before they came to a checkpoint. The passwords he'd picked up on Centax-1 worked fine. A kid second lieutenant asked, "What is all this crap, uh, sir?"
"Materiel captured from Mothma's fuckers," Ordo answered crisply —she knew what the enemy called her allies. "We're taking it to Coruscant for evaluation."
"Nobody told me," the shavetail complained.
"It's a war," Ordo said with more patience than she felt. "They wouldn't tell you your name if you hadn't had it issued ahead of time."
"No shit!" the lieutenant said, laughing. "All right, sir—pass on."
They entered the planet's atmosphere. They stopped at a fuel dump and gassed up, then went on. They just seemed to be soldiers doing a job. One nine-year-old kid on the roof of a skyscraper gaped, though. He knew they were driving Rebel vehicles—Ordo could tell. He probably knew every machine and weapon on both sides better than the guys who used them did. Plenty of kids like that down on Mandalore, too. It was a game to them. It wasn't a game to Maeve Ordo.
The convoy broke up, each ship going a different direction. Bo-Katan had wanted Ordo to take her device all the way to the Imperial Palace, the former Jedi Temple. But Ordo knew that security would be far too tight there, and they would for sure be caught. Instead, Ordo's freighter entered the outskirts of Galactic City. At her order, Wilton pulled into a parking garage. Ordo ran into the cargo hold and set two timers on the side of the crate —she wasn't going to take chances with only one.
The four got off the ship and turned their heads frantically, left and then right, finally spotting a line of parked speeders. One yellow, snub-nosed speeder was open, so they jumped in, and fired it up.
"Back the way we came," Ordo said.
"How long, sir?" asked the corporal behind the speeder's wheel. "Not long enough," Ordo said. "Step on it."
Fifty minutes later, the world blew up behind them.
—
Moff Herizod wasn't looking west when the bombs went off. He was standing at a counter, trying to decide between a chocolate bar and a roll of mints. All of a sudden, the light swelled insanely, printing his shadow on the wall in back of the sidewalk stand. The fat little old woman behind the counter screeched and covered her eyes with her hands.
"Good God!" Herizod said, even before the roar of the explosion reached him. His first thought was that an ammo dump somewhere had blown sky high. He didn't think of a bomb. The explosion seemed much too big for that.
He forgot about the candy and ran out into the street. Then he realized just how lucky he'd been, because a lot of windows had turned to knife-edged flying shards of glass. The magazine stand and snack counter where he'd been dithering didn't have a window of any sort, so he'd escaped that, anyhow.
He stopped and stared. He wasn't the only one. Everybody out there was looking all around with the same expression of slack-jawed disbelief. No one had ever seen anything like those rising, boiling, roiling clouds before. How high did they climb? Fourty-five kilometers? Fifty-five? Sixty-five? He had no idea. The colors put him in mind of food—salmon, peach, apricot. The top of the clouds swelled out from the base, as if they were toadstools the size of a god.
The roars came then, not just in his ears but all through his body. He staggered like a drunken man. But it wasn't his balance going; the ground shook under his feet. Blasts of wind from nowhere staggered him. Also out of nowhere, rain started pelting down. The drops were enormous. They left black splashes when they hit the ground. When one hit his hand, he jerked in surprise—the rain was hot.
The rain shower didn't last more than a couple of minutes. It hadn't ended before he started trying to scrub the filthy drops from his skin. He remembered what Tiaan Jerjerrod had told him a few days before: hydrogen bombs put out poison. And what else could those horrible things be? No ammunition dump in the galaxy blew up like that.
How much poison was in the rain? How much was in that monstrous toadstool cloud? Am I a dead man walking? he wondered.
"We gotta go help," a man said. He hurried toward the westward explosion.
His courage and resolve shamed Herizod. Of course, the stranger—who was plump and fiftyish, with a gray mustache—didn't know what Horizod did. If ignorance was bliss…
After a moment's hesitation, Horizod followed. If he was already poisoned, then he was, that was all. Nothing he could do about it now. Overhead, that cloud grew taller and wider. Winds began to tear at it and tug it out of shape...and blow it toward downtown Galactic City.
Crowds got worse the farther west Horizod went. Everybody was pointing and staring and gabbling. You fools! Don't you realize you might all be dead?! No, Horizod didn't shout it out. But it filled his thoughts.
Damage got worse the farther west he went, too. All the windows were blown out. Speeders and shuttles had windows shattered, too. Pilots, their faces masks of blood, staggered moaning through the streets. Many of them clutched at their eyes. Horizod knew what that was bound to mean: they had glass in them.
He saw buildings brutally pushed down and vehicles flipped onto their sides or upside down. Some men stopped to help the injured. Others pressed on.
And then Horizod got a chance to look across the river. That part of the city was almost as heavily built up as downtown. Or rather, it had been. Almost everything over there was knocked flat. A few buildings that must have been uncommonly strong still stood up from the rubble, but only a few.
People staggered from the west. Some had had the clothes burned off of them. Horizod saw several with one side of their face badly seared and the other fine: they must have stood in profile to the bomb when it went off.
"His shadow!" a dreadfully burned man babbled.
"I saw his shadow on the sidewalk, all printed like, but not a thing left of Eeth!" He slumped down and mercifully passed out. Horizod wondered whether he would ever wake. He might be luckier not to.
A loudspeaker started to blare: "All military personnel! Report at once to your duty stations! All military personnel! Report at once to—"
Horizod didn't exactly have a duty station. He headed back to the War Department. One of the guards who patted him down asked, "What the hell happened, sir? Do you know?"
"Not exactly," Horizod answered. "I was hoping people here did."
Before a private took him down to Tiaan Jerjerrod's office, he paused in a men's room and washed off as much of the filthy rainwater as he could. "Why are you doing that, sir?" asked the kid, who went in with him.
"Just in case," Horizod answered. Getting rid of the horrible stuff wouldn't hurt. He was sure of that.
Jerjerrod always looked pale. He seemed damn near transparent now. He might have aged ten years in the few days since Horizod last saw him. "I thought they were bluffing, but they weren't." He said.
"Have you been up top?" Horizod asked. "Did you see them with your own eyes?"
"No." Jerjerrod had always wanted to deal with things from a distance. Was that a strength or a weakness? Probably both at once, Horizod thought. The General Staff officer went on, "How did they get them here?"
"They must have snuck them in, damn them," Horizod said. "Remember how they broke through in eastern Oiho? They had a whole battalion of guys in our uniforms, in our vehicles, who could talk like us. What do you want to bet they did the same damn thing again—and made it work?" Jerjerrod managed a shaky nod. Then he reached for a com. "With a little luck, they won't get away. We will shoot every last one of them."
Horizod nodded. "We'd better catch them," Jerjerrod said as he slammed down the com after barking into it with unaccustomed heat.
"They can't get away with that. How many tens of millions of people did they just murder?"
Would it have been better had the enemy launched the bombs out of an battlecruiser and then flown away? Would it have been better had he dropped ton after ton of ordinary bombs instead, or blasted as many people as he'd killed in these massive explosions? Horizod found himself shaking his head. It wouldn't have been any better, but it would have been more familiar. That mattered, too. The hydrogen bombs were something brand new.
Poison gas had carried some of that same whiff of horror during the last war. People took it for granted now.
Would they come to take hydrogen bombs for granted, too? How could they, when each one could destroy a city?
Jerjerrod spoke again, "There won't be one stone left on top of another one by the time our bombers get through with Concordia—I'll tell you that."
The last time he and Horizod talked about hydrogen bombs, he'd waltzed around the name of the planet where the Mandalorians were working on them.
This time, he'd slipped. He was human after all, and would probably have to do penance before the altar of Security the Almighty.
He realized as much a few seconds too late. "You didn't hear that from me," he said in some embarrassment.
"Hear what?" Horizod asked innocently.
"I wonder if we could drive into Mandalorian territory and take that place away from them," Jerjerrod said. Even though he was embarrassed, now that the cat was out of the bag he was letting it run around.
"Wouldn't take long to pull an assault force together." Horizod spoke with the assurance of a veteran field commander. "Don't know how hard the Mandalorians would fight back—hard as they can, I bet. Now that they've used ten bombs, how long do they need to build ten more?"
"That I can't tell you, because I don't know. I wouldn't tell you even if I did, but I don't," Jerjerrod said. "Days? Weeks? Months? Twenty minutes? I just have no idea."
"All right," Horizod said. The General Staff officer was liable to lie about something like that, but Horizod didn't think he was, not this time.
He went on, "This would have been a lot worse if they'd brought them here by the government buildings instead of blowing them up everywhere else."
"I don't think they could have—it wouldn't have been easy, anyhow," Jerjerrod said. "We search ships before we let them in here. Auto bombs are bad enough, but put a couple of tons of high explosive in a ship..." He didn't finish, or need to. "One of those was plenty to make us clamp down."
"Good for you, then. You just saved the Emperor and us. I mean, I hope you did." Horizod told him about the black rain. "Exactly how dangerous is that stuff, anyway?"
"We'll all find out. I don't know the details. I'm not sure anybody does." Jerjerrod looked down at his own soft, immaculately tended hands. "I do believe you were wise to wash off as much as you could. It's like X-rays: you want to keep the exposure to a minimum."
Horizod looked at his own hands and at his uniform, which still bore the marks of those unnatural drops. Were there little X-ray machines in them? Something like that, he supposed. Maybe there were more in the dust in the air. He wouldn't know. He never thought he would need to know. Nuclear weapons hadn't been used in warfare for thousands of years.
"We sure never learned any of this stuff at the Imperial Academy," he sighed.