NOTE: I will admit to you that I wrote 3/4ths of this chapter under the influence of alcohol, by which I mean I was buzzed (because that is the silver bullet which breaks through writer's block). I know it's pretty much crap, but it's still better than yours, so I don't give a fuck. And anyway, the following chapters will probably be even better. So there.

The sharp, almost flesh-slicing pinch of the stuncuffs closing on Kentamine's wrists made him wince. A hundred hands jostled him, groping and grabbing at his orange flight suit, ripping away his DH-17, comlink, life support box, code cylinder, utility belt—even his gloves. R2-Q8's alarmed chirping was cut off as a restraining bolt clicked into place.

"W-what's going on here, admiral!?" Kent demanded before he knew he'd opened his mouth. Physically he was still wasted, but the numbness was suddenly gone—in fact, he felt everything more acutely than he'd have thought possible for the human nervous system...or the human mind.

"What do you think's happening, pilot?" Krane's face was invisible behind the shifting forest of Alliance troopers, with their oversized helmets and opaque flash goggles, but Kent could hear the admiral's disdainful scowl. "You disobeyed direct orders and launched an unauthorized attack. You're going in the brig."

"The—the Imperials! I shot them down, but I—but they..." Everything was too solid, too heavy, too intense; even the light in the hangar felt like a hard substance weighing him down. Kent struggled to form words. His head whirled with fragmented moments from the battle—Troomis's frantic distress call, Orion IV's gray surface blurring past, the twisting courses of a TIE Fighters, the mushroom cloud...

The dead body of Thurlow Harris in a black flight suit, his tongue protruding, his open eyes rolled back, never to see again.

And Kent knew. He didn't know what he knew—it was too vast and horrible and overwhelming, like a planet rushing toward him at light speed—but he could not contain it. "WHAT HAVE YOU DONE, KRANE?! WHERE—WHY DID YOU ORDER THE CODE SILVER?!"

"Be careful, troopers—he could be having a paranoid episode. That might explain his recent actions."

The admiral's tone was calm, unconcerned, and Kent could not stand it. Even as Rebel soldiers shoved and dragged him to the door, he struggled to get a glimpse of his commander, his betrayer. "WHERE ARE THE IMPERIALS?! WHERE DID THOSE TIES COME FROM?! WHERE?!"

Something jabbed Kentamine's ribs so hard that he would have folded in half, except for the four troopers holding onto him. A grunting human face, half-hidden by black flash goggles, appeared centimeters from Kent's. His breath smelled like a dianoga's lunch.

"You better calm down and shut your exhaust port right now, buddy—or you'll get a kiss from my girl Jenny here. She'll make you feel all right."

Kent's bulging eyes crossed. "Jenny" must have meant the stun baton poised to enter his right nostril. His throat was raw, his arms and legs like Andorian jelly, his mind a field of popping, crackling static.

He relented. There was no hope of escape.

There was no hope of anything.

"Okay, pilot—here's your docking bay," one of the guards jeered after what felt like hours of marching through Orion Base.

Raising his head, Kent winced again—this time with relief—as the stuncuffs were taken from him. The guard standing beside the cell door caught his eye: not wearing full armor or goggles, Kent recognized him as Nik Jal'daan. One of a dozen or so lunch acquaintances from the mess hall, he was staring with restrained befuddlement.

A flash of recognition was all Kentamine got before they shoved him into the cell and slammed the door shut.

The overhead light-disk, barely strong enough to illumine the room, stared down at him like a sleepy, lidless eye. There was nothing to see by it, in any case. The cell had no furnishings; just beetle-black metal on every side, and a refresher compartment so narrow that its designer could have been a Muun.

Kent slumped against the back wall and put his head in his hands. Besides the light-disk, there was nothing to look at. Minutes later he slept from sheer exhaustion. After waking, he sat for some time. Eventually he slept some more. Woke again. Waited. Nik Jal'daan came with a "meal"—a ration cube and some dry water packets—but wouldn't speak or linger. Kent ate and waited some more.

Slowly—slowly—the roaring static in his head subsided.

It was stuffy in there. Sometimes hot. His flight suit was clammy with half-dried sweat. It was like a molecular oven, or a nanowave pressure-cooker. Whatever else he might say about his captors, he was grateful that they'd given him time to cook. Whether it would do him any good, though—

"Farwanderer—on your feet! Stand with your back to the wall!"

It was Nik Jal'daan, speaking through a slot that had opened in the door. Kent jolted and did as he was told. The already cramped cell was bisected by a red force field that glowed brighter than the light-disk. The door opened to admit a single human—the one Kent had known it would be.

Whoever shoots first usually has the advantage, so Kent took the first word even as the door was sealed. "Sir, this is a violation of protocol. I'm supposed to have been debriefed with the rest of Diamond Flight."

"I belayed your presence at the debriefing in light of your insane actions while on that patrol. Your wingmen have apprised Base Command of everything we need to know." Admiral Krane's bushy gray eyebrows arched. "Kid, you almost single-handedly jeopardized an Alliance sector-level headquarters. What the hell were you thinking?"

Kentamine licked his lips. The force field set Krane's face awash in rosy light, masking the age-lines and the bags beneath his eyes. "I want to speak to an advocate, sir. Now."

"You'll see an advocate during the preliminaries to your tribunal. As of now you've only been relieved of duty. You haven't been stripped of your rank—yet."

"This is in violation of protocol," Kent repeated.

"You shut the hell up and listen," the admiral snapped. "I'm altering the protocols, and it's only the beginning. You've been a rising star in the Alliance ever since that miracle you pulled off at Imdaar. I was proud to have you on my team here—you were my top guy. Now I have to explain to High Command why my top guy went rogue and nearly compromised Rebel operations in the entire Tion Star Cluster!

"Even if I didn't want to bring the sonic hammer down on you, I'd have no choice. There's too much yapping going on in this base about you already. Solitary's one of the only ways I can mitigate the damage you've done to morale. I'm the last person you're going to talk to for a while."

"Why are you visiting me at all, sir?"

Krane sneered with one corner of his mouth. "Nothing sentimental, I can promise you that. High Command needs a final report in connection with this incident. I wanted to see you myself before I finish writing it. I still need to decide whether to tell them you're insane, or if you had a clear explanation for your actions."

Kent frowned, incredulous, but took a moment before answering. He remembered Shaparo's warnings, how no one of rank within the Alliance hierarchy was above suspicion. Ostensibly, he'd been tasked with keeping an eye on Krane, but there had been little he could actually do without drawing attention to himself. Though there was no proof that the admiral was involved in the conspiracy even now, the circumstances meant Kent had to assume this man was his mortal enemy.

There must be a way to trip him up. Get him to admit something.

"What was insane about what I did?" Kent asked finally. "There was a research station full of innocent civilians, under Imperial attack, requesting assistance. So I tried to help them. I joined the Rebellion in order to save people from the Empire, sir—and I could have saved them, if my wingmen had been able to help me!"

They forked me, he thought, trying not to relive it—trying not to remember the streaking silhouettes, the green blasts, the mushroom cloud. Outmaneuvered me. It's a miracle I survived, let alone took down all three of those TIEs myself.

"We sometimes have to make sacrifices in war, Rookie One."

He thinks I'm just a Rebel pilot who put principles above orders.

"I couldn't just let them die."

"Even at the cost of betraying this base to the Empire?"

"But I didn't."

Krane leaned toward the force field, his eyes widening. "That's not the point, and you know it! This is a military, and you follow orders! You don't get to buck orders just because you disagree with them!"

"Where are they, then? Where are the Imperials?"

For the first time, Krane seemed confused. "What do you mean, where are they?"

Kent's eyes focused on the admiral's like composite-beam lasers. "If I alerted the Imperials to our presence here, wouldn't they be attacking us by now? Wouldn't Orion Base be evacuating?"

"We...would be, but it seems you destroyed those TIEs before they could send a message back. In any case—"

"A message back where?" That made Krane's nostrils flare, and Kent knew why: it was the first time in his life that he'd ever interrupted a superior officer. "Those were short-range TIEs; they had to have been a recon flight, launched from a Star Destroyer or cruiser or some other capital ship in orbit. So what happened, sir? Did the Imperials just leave, without thinking anything of three fighters disappearing?"

Admiral Krane's jaw locked. His eyes wavered.

He's cracking, Kentamine thought. I've caught him off guard.

"That TIE Aggressor pilot I shot—on the ground. I knew him. He flew with me in Blue Squadron. His name was Thurlow Harris."

"You...you're crazy, Rookie One," Admiral Krane said, shaking his head. "That body was examined. No one knows who it was. It was only an anonymous Imperial pilot. And we still don't know for sure where the other Imperials went. They could still come back."

"Then why aren't we evacuating? Why aren't we still under a Code Silver?"

Krane actually backed away a step. "Who says we're not?"

Kentamine's vague plans of treading lightly had by now evaporated like Tatooine dew. He couldn't restrain himself after the admiral had lied to his face about Harris—Blue Four, whose life Kentamine had saved at Yarin during the battle over the torpedo sphere, and who had paid him back a dozen times since. Even without the force field, everything he saw would have still been red.

Kent had looked up to this man, had been proud to earn his respect through the success of the Imdaar operation and to be placed under his direct command here at Orion IV. Now he saw—

"The Code Silver was lifted before I even landed my X-wing out there. Otherwise, I'd have been told to hunker down; they wouldn't have launched a shuttle to come pick me up. That's pretty suspicious timing, how the Code Silver began right before Searchlight Station came under attack and ended right after it was destroyed..." He recalled what Shaparo had told him about Kyle Katarn's early exploits, before the Bryar Force was formed. "...just like there was a Code Red at that prison on Dathomir when Crix Madine supposedly killed himself—except he didn't kill himself. Just like it wasn't Imperials who launched those TIEs—you launched them, you son of a tauntaun."

He left off, panting, gasping with rage. Admiral Krane had seemed to wilt before his outburst, cringing, falling back another step, his mouth slightly agape.

But then his mouth shaped into an almost serpentine grin.

"So you're one of them too," he murmured. "That would explain a few things."

Oh, thought Kentamine as his heart fell into his nether regions. Oh, I've kriffed up now.

"I knew you were a hotshot, but you were always a good soldier boy. I thought orders would be enough—didn't think you were crazy enough to take on those TIEs single-handed. When you went anyway, I suspected, but I didn't know for sure." Krane looked askance at the prisoner, then chuckled. "Until now."

Kentamine tried, failed to contain the shakes that coruscated through him from head to toe. He'd been suckered—of course he had. This wasn't his element—subterfuge and deception, games of words and implications. Like Krane had just said, he was a straight-laced pilot. Kent recalled the days of the Madine scandal, as well as what Shaparo had told him: that Kyle Katarn and many Rebel officers had viewed Madine with a strong professional respect which blinded them to his activities. They never had suspected what sort of dark lusts he had been harboring or the lengths he would go to express them—at the expense of the innocent younglings on the planet Kolaador.

Kent, too, had been blinded: not only by his respect for Krane, but also by his own emotions. Krane hadn't known that he was a part of the Bryar Force, but now he did—because Kent had lost control of himself, let his anger get the best of him.

Now he lost the only protection he'd had: secrecy. A protection he'd been too stupid to truly even recognize until it was gone.

"Y-you...you sent them," he stammered. "They were your TIEs. Just like the ones you trained me in for the Imdaar operation. And Harris, you—you brainwashed him or something."

Krane shrugged his shoulders. His hands rested smugly on his belt. "Call it what you like. What matters is that he did his job well."

That he had. Despite Kent's best efforts, all of his skill as an ace fighter pilot, he had obliterated Searchlight, leaving no survivors...except R2-Q8, but the droid would soon be discovered, and couldn't do any good with that restraining bolt on.

Kent's shoulders sagged. "Did...how did you know? How did you find out what Searchlight was?"

"That information's need-to-know, Rookie One," said Krane, half-smirking. "If it makes you feel any better, it wasn't anything you did."

It didn't make Kentamine feel better. Nothing could. He stared at the floor for what felt like minutes.

The admiral took the next word. "Hell of a coincidence, I've got to say—that Shaparo and his sneaky group of bastards got away, only to set up shop right here under my nose. Made it really easy for me, in a way. But I'll tell you this, Rookie One: you've got it better than those slimesloppers ever did. I don't have enough friends here to dispose of you without too many people asking questions. Luckily, though, I won't have to."

Kent looked up, the question on his face.

"The Calamari Cruiser Lulsla is en route. You're to be transferred to its detention block when it arrives—should be in a few standard days. After that, you'll be waiting for your court-martial."

"That's your mistake, Krane—I'll tell them," Kent said. "I'll tell them everything I know. You launched those TIEs. You killed the people at Searchlight. You're with the people who protected Crix Madine, and who killed him to cover your tracks..."

He trailed off, his words beaten into the ground by Krane's thunderous laughter. "Go ahead, you little schutta—tell them whatever you like. You'll only confirm what my report's going to say: that Rookie One shows signs of mental instability and extreme paranoia. It'll only burn your career down all the faster."

My career...my reputation...

With great effort, Kentamine dismissed those thoughts—they had tormented him here in the dark for far too long already. He couldn't let Krane walk out of this room in complete victory. He just couldn't.

"This isn't over, Krane. The tribunal, they'll investigate what happened here. No one ever declares a Code Silver that lasts less than a standard hour. I'm going to beat this, and when I do—"

"Drop out of hyperspace, Rookie One—you're getting way ahead of yourself here. Whoever said you're actually going to see the tribunal?"

A shiver went down Kent's spine.

Krane explained, "The Alliance bureaucracy moves like a sleepy Hutt. It'll be standard months before enough of your files get processed enough to schedule a court date—your first court date. In the meantime, you'll have to be kept someplace safe, but it's not going to be in the Alliance fleet."

The admiral's eyes sparkled with hellish light. "In fact, the Lulsla might very well drop you off at Dathomir. I know the prison commandant, and...well, sometimes tragedies take place in that facility. A real shame. Hope you don't lose the will to live while you're waiting."

Kentamine Farwanderer could not speak. Nor did he need the admiral to.

If they took him to Dathomir...not only would he die, but his reputation, his family name—all would be tarnished forever.

He freed his tongue. "You didn't get them all. Kyle Katarn is still out there. And others."

"Oh, don't worry. We know where that assault transport went—right into a trap. Even if any of your friends survive, it won't matter. They won't be able to stop us." With a mocking salute, Admiral Krane turned to leave. "Good flying, Rookie One. It's been an honor."

He left. The door shut with a boom and the force field vanished. Half-blind in the dark, Kentamine Farwanderer drifted to the nearest corner and collapsed.

For some time (hours, perhaps another day) Kentamine only languished in the dark like a wraith—until the tiny item compartment opened and his next meal was slid in.

"Nik, is that you?" he swallowed and retched dryly. He could barely even hear himself. "Nik! Nik!"

Panting, Kent clawed his way over to the door, shouting several more times. He thought he heard receding footsteps, but got no answer. Then, groping in the gloom, he found another ration cube, more dry water packets. He devoured them with the mindless, shameless enthusiasm of a Dxun cannok beast.

Up to this point, his thoughts had been as dark as the room. First he couldn't believe that Krane had tricked him into exposing himself so easily. Then he couldn't believe that Shaparo had trusted him. His failure to save Searchlight was like a sharp lump of carbonite in his gut.

When he'd eaten, though, when something was actually in his stomach, his thoughts began to change.

First he thought of those he wished he could talk to: Nik the guard. R2-Q8. Kyle Katarn...but most of all, Ru Murleen. When she wasn't leading patrols or other missions, she'd be here on base. She must have known what had happened to Kent. The problem, though—or yet another problem, rather—was that she was at least as much of a stickler as Kent himself. If he really had been logged under solitary (and there was no reason to doubt the admiral on that score), Ru probably risk getting in trouble just to visit him.

Again Kent castigated himself: Damn it all, I should have told her!

He should have told her everything long ago instead of being so cautious. Ru prized regulations and protocol, but she was no mindless drone. She'd been disturbed by the Madine scandal, same as everyone else. She might have listened, might even have joined the Bryar Force with him! Even now, if he could just talk to her somehow...

For some time he wavered, wondered how much good it would do. Would Ru be willing to break regulations, put her career or her life on the line to get him out of here?

He chose to hope that she would. More than simply being able to think for herself, that woman had spirit. What made her a great asset to the Rebellion—no less than Kent, in his own opinion—was that she often went beyond the call of duty. Kentamine usually got all the credit for destroying the Empire's Phantom TIE factory at Imdaar...but not only had Ru been flying their stolen TIE Phantom while Kent controlled the guns, it had actually been her idea to begin with. Their mission objective had only been to capture a Phantom TIE for the Alliance, but when Ru saw the opportunity to finish off the factory when it was vulnerable, she simply took it—flew them right into that mechanical monstrosity without looking back.

Kent thought the cell wasn't quite so gloomy when he was thinking about Ru. He loved that spirit Ru had, that drive—and now she was his only hope.

The Lulsla was coming to take him away—and when that happened, it would be game over. Kent didn't know how much time was left, but he had to get off Orion IV with R2-Q8 and make contact with Katarn and the others; otherwise there would be no hope of salvaging the Bryar Force's mission, and the deaths of Shaparo and the others would be in vain.

How Kent would find the others when he didn't even know where they had gone, he didn't know, but a good Rebel pilot knew how to improvise.

He sat with his ear to the door, counting the standard time parts as they passed, refusing to sleep. Refusing to doubt. It was no different than a mission, like waiting to ambush an Imperial convoy. Readiness was all.

Footsteps. His heart set off, but he gave it a moment for the steps to come near.

The item compartment popped open. As the rations were slipped in, Kent pressed to the door and cried, "Nik, wait! Nik Jal'daan! Nik! NIK!"

His cries turned to screams when the item compartment closed and the footsteps started away. After a few awful seconds, though, they returned. The slot the guard had spoke through days ago opened, showing a mouth in the shadows. "What do you want?"

"Nik, thank the Force," Kent wheezed. "I need you to wait just a standard minute and listen to me."

"I can't give you a whole minute. I gotta hit my patrol points on time, so make it fast."

"Okay. Okay. Listen..." Kent took a deep breath. He was almost dizzy with excitement. He was certain that the only reason the guard had turned back was that they'd had a couple of insignificant conversations in the mess hall. How unaccountably critical such trivialities could become!

"Nik, do one little favor for me," he said. "Find Ru Murleen. She's a friend of mine, the commander of Bandit Squadron. Tell her...tell her to find my astromech droid. It's in maintenance, but there's a message for her on it. From me. I want to make sure she gets it. Got my court-martial coming up, dunno when I'll be back—"

"What's in it for me? Talk fast," Nik cut in.

"In my quarters, under the mattress! There's an aurodium ingot that I stole from the Empire a while back. Worth at least five hundred credits. You can have it. Just talk to Ru for me! Tell her I'm innocent, tell her she doesn't know the whole story, and tell her to talk to my droid!"

"I'll think about it," said the mouth. The slot shut and the invisible footsteps hurried away.

Kentamine drifted to the other wall and crossed his arms before his face. Of course, there was no message for Ru in R2-Q8, but he couldn't risk giving Nik any more sensitive information than he already had.

Beings who were fond of sabacc metaphors loved to on about getting good and bad hands in life. Kent had only one card, a lousy one at that, and he had just played it.

All he had left was hope. Hope that Nik Jal'daan's greed could be counted on.

Hope that R2-Q8 would be willing to talk to a Rebel who hadn't been vetted by the Bryar Force.

Hope that Kyle Katarn and the others would make it out of the trap that Krane had mentioned.

Most of all, hope in Ru Murleen.

Kentamine was woken from his last nap in Orion Base by the door unlocking with a clang, then swinging open. Blinking, rubbing the blur from his eyes, his saw neither Nik Jal'daan nor any other guards, but R2-Q8, whistling furtively but frantically that they didn't have time to waste. Due to a "mysterious" scheduling mistake in the base roster, no guards would check the cell for the next standard hour.

Notwithstanding that reassurance and his own excitement, Kent didn't dare make a sound, only nodded and gestured for R2 to lead the way.

The droid did so. He gathered that it was close to midnight, for they only had to skirt around the paths of a couple patrolling guards as they headed...wherever they were going. Orion Base had only one hangar, and they weren't heading toward it. Still, that didn't alarm him. Stealing a ship, especially there, would be far too risky.

R2-Q8 took him into a turbolift, where it instructed him to press and hold down the Level 7 button for exactly ten standard seconds. When he'd done so, the lift shot below the sublevel listed on the maps that were posted all over the base.

Kentamine stepped and R2-Q8 rolled out of the lift—not into a hallway but into a tunnel hewn from Orion IV's brexolmeter slate. Ten meters away was a rickety-looking mechanical carriage with modest seating, a control panel with a single lever, and a bullet-nose front pointing into pitch black.

"This looks like an old maglev tunnel," Kent remarked. "Before we go, I should thank you. But would you tell me what's going on?"

R2-Q8 rattled its way aboard the maglev and, prompted by its uppity chirping, Kent strapped himself into the acceleration couch and threw the lever. The transparisteel hatch sealed itself, the carriage came alive with an electric whine, and they were away.

The astromech rotated its battered dome, beeping and clicking, and—

"Hi, Rookie One."

Kentamine started in his seat as a human voice joined them in the carriage, but then he realized that his companion was playing back an audio recording—and his heart skipped a beat, or two or three, because the voice belonged to Ru Murleen.

"I got your message from...from your acquaintance, and decided to have a chat with this droid of yours. Maintenance took half my credits, but he promised to let it go and keep his mouth shut. Meantime, it turns out that this isn't your R2 unit at all.

"I've got to make this brief. We...had a chat. This droid told me a lot of things, and I'm not sure how much of it to believe. But I believe in you, Rookie One. I believe you did the right thing, trying to save those people at Searchlight, and what Krane's doing to you is wrong. R2-Q8 says what you're doing is vital to the survival of the Alliance, and I'm choosing to believe it, because it's you who's doing it. I'm risking my neck here because it's you.

"R2 says he can get you out of your cell if I let him slice into a base terminal. After that...I've told him to take you someplace where there should be a way out. There's things I know about Orion Base that you don't. Places where special hardware is kept in reserve. Or kept to be used for covert ops. I think a place like that is where those TIE Fighters you encountered may have come from."

Kentamine was so absorbed in Ru's voice, the sound of her, the presence that was not there, that he was caught by surprise when the maglev stopped. The hatch opened and R2-Q8 ambled out into a large, dark room as the audio recording concluded. Kent followed the droid two paces, then stopped as glowbulbs in the ceiling snapped on, reacting to their presence.

"Your ride out of here is...one of my old ones. It has no Alliance markings. We Bandits, we flew a couple of our first missions disguised as pirates. But as far as I know, there aren't any ops like that in the works, so if this thing disappears, no one should notice for a while."

Kentamine nodded, understanding. Before him sat a gnarled, beautiful pile of junk that he recognized as a Koensayr BTL-A4 Y-wing—the true workhorse of the Alliance Starfighter Corps as well as a thousand million pirate groups and planetary space militias the galaxy over. Twenty meters beyond, a horizontal slit opened in the rock wall, showing a night sky that glittered with stars; this hangar was built into a mountain somewhere, probably a dozen or more kilometers from Orion Base. Swirling dust motes glittered excitedly in the actinic lights. Scattered around the ship were a few crates and pieces of equipment, including a magno-hydraulic crane for loading an astromech droid into its socket.

"So I'd better wrap this up," said Ru's disembodied voice. "Whatever you're doing, whoever you're up against...be careful...but fly fast and take chances, like you always do. Like we always did. Hopefully we'll see each other again, Kent. May the Force be with you."

By this time, R2-Q8 had positioned itself beneath the crane. Its dome swiveled as it beeped, asked what Kent was waiting for.

Kentamine, meanwhile—

His career in the Alliance was over.

He had become a fugitive.

Shaparo and the rest of the inner circle were dead, except for this droid.

Kyle Katarn and the rest of the Bryar Force had flown into mortal danger, and Kentamine still did not know how he was going to find them.

And yet he smiled because he had everything he needed: a ship, an astromech, and the voice of Ru Murleen saying she believed in him.

And if he had the last one—hell, Kent felt like he didn't need a ship to fly.

CHAPTER COMPLETE

PASSWORD: SPAARTI