the Imperial cruiser Valor. You are under arrest for flying in restricted space. Whether your punishment is execution or mere imprisonment is entirely at my discretion and depends upon how satisfied I am with the answers you provide to my questions.”
“I understand.”
“What is your name? Where did you come from?”
He barely remembered the name his mother had given him. He offered the one his profession had most recently given him. “Vrath Xizor. As I said, I flew here directly from Vulta.”
“What brought you here, Vrath Xizor?”
“I have information of interest to the OIC.”
The naval officer cocked his head. “Are you military, Vrath Xizor?”
“Former. Special detachment from the Four Hundred and Third. Company E.”
“An Imperial sniper?”
Vrath was impressed that Jard knew his unit designation. He nodded.
“Well, Vrath Xizor of the Four Hundred Third, you may tell me your information.”
“I would prefer to speak directly to the captain.”
“Darth Malgus will not—”
“Darth? The commander is a Sith?”
Jard looked hard at Vrath.
“He will want to hear what I have to say,” Vrath said. “It concerns the Jedi.”
Jard studied his face. “Put him in the brig,” he said to another soldier standing behind Vrath. “If Darth Malgus wishes to speak to you, he will do so. If he does not, then he does not.”
“You’re making a mistake—”
“Shut up,” one of the troopers said, and cuffed him in the back of the head.
Three troopers escorted Vrath out of the landing bay and into a nearby lift. Vrath did not resist. It had been years since he’d been aboard an Imperial ship, and they remained exactly as he remembered—antiseptic, purely functional killing machines.
Just like him.
“This one was a sniper detached from the Four Hundred Third,” said one of the troopers to another.
“Or so he says.”
“That true?” said another. “I heard things about that unit.”
Vrath said nothing, merely stared into the tinted slit of the trooper’s helmet visor.
“Some kind of supermen is what I heard.”
The trooper holding his shoulder gave him a shake. “This one don’t look like much.”
Vrath only smiled. He didn’t look like much—deliberately so.
The soldiers trekked him deeper into the bowels of the ship. The corridors narrowed, and blue-uniformed security personal started to appear at doors that answered only to certain keycodes. Vrath had been in Imperial brigs many times, usually for insubordination.
Before they reached the bridge one of the troopers—the one with a sergeant’s symbol on his shoulder plate—held up a hand for the others to stop. He cocked his head to the side as he listened to something over his helmet’s speaker. He glanced at Vrath as he listened.
“Confirmed,” he said to whomever he was speaking. Then, to his men, “Darth Malgus wants him on the bridge.”
The three men shared a look and reversed course.
“Lucky you, Four Hundred Third,” said the trooper holding him.
Exploding into motion, Vrath drove a kick into the chest plate of the trooper in front of him, sending him flying into the sergeant and knocking both of them hard against the wall. Then he spun behind the third while slipping his bound arms over the trooper’s head. He maneuvered the binders under the neck ring of the helmet and squeezed, not enough to kill, just enough to make a point.
The man’s gags sounded loud in his helmet speaker. His fingers clawed at Vrath’s arms. He was probably starting to see spots.
Vrath released him and shoved him away. The entire exchange had taken perhaps four seconds. The two men he’d knocked against the wall had their rifles aimed at his head.
Vrath held out his arms for them to take. “Don’t look like much,” he said.
FATMAN CAME OUT of hyperspace in the Kravos system. Zeerid immediately engaged the ion engines and flew the freighter into the system’s soup.
Debris from a partially dispersed accretion disk around the system’s star filled the black with ionized gas and debris. Some fluke of solar system evolution had resulted in an orange gas giant forming a few hundred thousand kilos outside the far border of the disk.
Zeerid wheeled Fatman through the swirl, deftly dodging asteroids and smaller particles. He maneuvered the ship to the end of the disk and maintained his position, though it taxed his piloting skill.
“Now what?” Aryn asked.
“We wait. And when an Imperial convoy heading to Coruscant comes through, we roll the dice.”
“How will we know it’s heading for Coruscant?”
“We won’t know, strictly speaking. But Imperial Navy regs call for a convoy heading to an occupied world to have an escort of at least three frigates. If we see that, it’s probably heading