Apocalypse (37 page)

A
RMED WITH AN
I
MPERIAL
I
NTELLIGENCE
ID
COURTESY OF
J
AGGED
F
EL
, Tahiri had no trouble securing cooperation at the only spaceport on Hagamoor 3. She simply presented herself at the security commander’s office and demanded to see the file on the Mandalorian who had arrived a few days earlier. The officer—a grizzled old captain—inserted her identichip into his decryption pad, then his face paled. He snapped to attention and offered a crisp salute.

“Sorry, milady,” he said. “I wasn’t informed that Head of State Fel had reactivated the Hands.”

The captain’s anxiety was understandable. Answerable only to the Imperial Head-of-State, the Hands were Force-sensitive operatives whom Palpatine had used as merciless instruments of his will, dealing death and threats to anyone who incurred his wrath. Tahiri knew better than to think Jag would ever employ them in the same ruthless manner—but he was certainly not above trading on the name.

Ten minutes later Tahiri’s StealthX was under guard in a sealed hangar, and she was sitting in front of a vid display. On the display was
a four-day-old surveillance vid that showed Boba Fett—or someone in identical armor, with a very similar gait—working his way down an inflatable pedtunnel.

Unfortunately, Fett’s Mandalorian armor did not seem out of place in the tunnel. Hagamoor 3 was an open-access mining moon where claim jumpers, ore thieves, and every sort of swindler were on the prowl for victims, and it had a flourishing bodyguard industry. Every third person on the display was both armed and armored. To make matters worse, once Fett reached the business district in the main dome, the lanes were choked with riot troops facing off against pro-Daala protestors. Both sides were armored, of course. To track Fett, Tahiri finally had to resort to watching for his battered green helmet. With its T-shaped visor and distinctive rangefinder rising along one side, it was the easiest thing to follow from one vid archive to the next.

Fett was taking care to stay close to other armored figures and avoid some of the security cams, but he couldn’t afford to be too obvious. Any conspicuous attempt to avoid surveillance in an Imperial population center—even one as rustic as Hagamoor City—only drew extra scrutiny. As Tahiri watched, the Mandalorian visited a succession of hospitality houses and supply businesses. The Imperial surveillance net did not extend to the interior of most facilities, but on one occasion she did catch a glimpse of Fett through a transparisteel door. A salesclerk was turning a data screen around so the Mandalorian could examine a list of sales.

Fett was clearly hunting someone, and Tahiri was beginning to think he didn’t care who knew it. He could have disguised his purpose by buying a few supplies, varying the length of his visits, or emerging with a handful of sales flimsis. Instead he was simply moving from one business to the next as quickly as possible, staying only long enough to bribe or intimidate whoever happened to be behind the counter. It almost seemed as though he
wanted
his prey to know he was coming.

Maybe he did. Hagamoor 3 was in Moff Getelles’s sector, and if Daala had anything to say about it, Getelles’s days were numbered. He had betrayed her—and played a crucial role in trapping her and her allies at Exodo II. So it stood to reason that Daala would want to make an example of Getelles to keep other would-be defectors in line. And
what better way to make her point than by dispatching the infamous Boba Fett to handle the retaliation?

Of course, Tahiri realized that Fett’s involvement was no guarantee that Abeloth would also show up on Hagamoor 3. Tahiri was still playing a hunch on that. Since they both had a connection to Daala—Fett had rescued Daala from Coruscant, and Abeloth had run the blockade at Boreleo to visit her—she was hoping that they would eventually end up in the same place. But even if Fett didn’t lead her to Abeloth, finding out what the mercenary was doing on Hagamoor 3 would be a good thing for Jag.

Tahiri fast-forwarded through the next three days of surveillance, then finally spotted Fett entering a used-vehicle dealership. A short time later, a sealed landspeeder emerged through the dome’s rear air lock and headed off across the moon’s dusty surface. A comm call from one of the post’s security agents confirmed that the landspeeder had been purchased by someone wearing green Mandalorian armor. It also yielded the activation code for the vehicle’s emergency locator.

Hagamoor 3 was in Imperial territory, so the security agent could activate the locator beacon without alerting the driver. Tahiri soon learned that the vehicle had stopped a kilometer short of the Moon Maiden, a subsurface mine that had been advertising heavily for new employees over the last two weeks. A check of the tax records, however, revealed no recent additions to the workforce, only a modestly sized crew that seemed to have a lot more technical staff than was warranted. A rather cryptic remark at the beginning of the tax file noted that the mine was owned and managed by Suarl Getelles, eldest daughter of the Moff. There was no mention in the file—or anywhere else—of what kind of ore the Maiden produced.

The spaceport security commander was happy to arrange transport for Tahiri, and she quickly departed in a Mabartak G7 All-Environment Assault Sled. It took only a few hours to find Fett’s vehicle sitting, abandoned, just a couple of kilometers from the Moon Maiden. A few minutes after that, Tahiri was standing in the Mabartak’s cramped air lock, sealed tight inside an Imperial Security Special Tactics vac suit. Her best estimate placed her less than half a day behind
Boba Fett—or whoever it was wearing his armor, she reminded herself. It seemed unlikely that she was chasing an impostor, but where Fett was concerned, it was unwise to take
anything
for granted.

Which was why Tahiri decided not to use the vac suit’s integrated comlink. Fett could certainly detect it, even if he lacked the necessary software to decrypt the transmission. Instead, Tahiri opened her faceplate and depressed the Mabartak’s intercom key.

“I’m ready,” she said. “Cycle the air lock.”

“You’re sure you don’t want an escort?” asked the vehicle commander—a handsome lieutenant about her own age. “The intelligence team keeps trying to find out what’s really happening in there, but they can’t get anyone inside. And now we have
Boba Fett
sniffing around the place? He’s not someone you want to mess with alone.”

Tahiri almost smiled. “You’re sweet, but … no. I don’t need an escort.” She picked up the service pack she had assembled from the post’s armory. “Just be here when I return, Lieutenant Vangur. Maybe I’ll have a reward for you.”

Vangur’s voice grew hopeful. “A reward, ma’am?”

“Something for the
intelligence
team,” Tahiri said. Vangur had spent the whole three-hour journey from Hagamoor City trying to flirt with her, and the truth was that she had been happy to have the distraction. But now it was time to focus on her mission—and to get Vangur focused on
his
mission, too. She put a little edge in her voice. “I hope you don’t think I meant something else, Lieutenant.”

“No, ma’am. The thought never crossed my mind.”

Tahiri slung the bulky service pack onto her shoulders, then asked, “And what thought would that be?”

“Any thought you might find inappropriate.” There was a note of amusement—almost mockery—in Vangur’s voice that suggested he was not all
that
intimidated by his passenger. “Ma’am.”

“Never lie to an Imperial Hand, Lieutenant,” Tahiri warned. She actually found Vangur’s cockiness attractive, but she didn’t need attractive or cocky right now—she needed reliable. “It’s bad for your health.”

“I understand, ma’am.” Vangur’s voice remained confident, but this time there was no humor in it. “It won’t happen again.”

“Good,” Tahiri said. “Just be here when I return, and we’ll both stay happy.”

She closed her faceplate and waited. When the status light on the control panel turned green, she opened the hatch and stepped out onto the dusty surface of Hagamoor 3. Fett’s landspeeder sat on its struts a hundred meters away, resting at the base of a curving ridge that looked like the rim of a small impact crater.

Knowing that any attempt to approach the vehicle was likely to set off a remote alarm that would alert Fett to the presence of a pursuer, Tahiri extended her Force awareness in the vehicle’s direction. When she didn’t sense anyone inside, she traversed up the slope toward a little notch, where Fett’s tracks skirted the crest of the ridge. In the moon’s weak gravity, the climb was so easy that she did not even trigger the suit’s cooling system. But she had to use the Force to avoid kicking up a plume of dust that could have easily risen to thirty meters high. As she neared the top, she dropped to her hands and knees. Being careful to avoid any rocks that might rip her suit, she crawled the rest of the way, then pushed her head up above the crest.

The interior of the crater was packed with hundreds of vehicles, most resting on their struts in neat, orderly rows. Trails of boot-packed dust led toward the mine’s entrance, a small permacrete portal with the name
MOON MAIDEN
across the top. Jutting out of the slope above and behind the portal was a squat durasteel office building with two transparisteel viewing bands. The lack of visible doors—or any hint of a trail ascending the slope beneath—suggested that the only way to enter the building was from inside the mine. Just beyond the crater rim, a cloud of hot yellow fume was boiling away into the void, no doubt rising out of an exhaust shaft not visible from Tahiri’s location.

She could almost feel Fett’s bewilderment lingering in the Force. The number of vehicles parked in the crater suggested a workforce of thousands. But judging by the size of the portal and office building, the Moon Maiden was a small operation—so small that they hadn’t even bothered with a surface perimeter or security post. Nor did Tahiri see any equipment for processing, storing, or hauling ore. And if it didn’t handle ore, then the Moon Maiden was no ordinary mine.

Tahiri activated her helmet’s reconnaissance kit. The electromag
sensors picked up dozens of small emission sources arrayed at even intervals along the inner rim of the crater. They were almost certainly hidden security cams. When she viewed the durasteel “office” building at 20X magnification, it grew obvious that the walls beneath the transparisteel viewing bands were dotted with camouflaged weapons ports—many large enough to serve laser cannons. And the portal itself was sealed not by a standard air lock hatch, but by a blast door capable of withstanding a turbolaser strike.

Most disturbing of all was the mine’s thermal readout. Hagamoor 3 was a hunk of metal-rich rock scarcely large enough to generate its own weak gravity. The tiny amount of compression heat that it
did
generate barely lifted the ambient temperature above absolute zero. But the area near the mine read more like the ground around a geyser. Tahiri began to worry that the yellow smoke rising beyond the crater might mean the entire mine was on fire.

Seeing that Fett had not descended directly into the crater from there, she went down the slope until she was below the mine’s line of sight and followed his trail a few hundred meters along the exterior of the rim, then returned to the crest. Now she was adjacent to the portal, about fifty meters above it. Fett’s trail ended there, where a large blast circle suggested he had activated his jetpack to descend to the portal in a single hop.

Tahiri didn’t have a jetpack, but she did have the Force. She took a moment to brush the dust from the emitter nozzle of her blaster pistol. She transferred a couple of thermal detonators from her pack to her belt, then pulled her lightsaber off its hook and took a deep breath. She felt like she ought to be making a situation report before jumping into action, but even if she
had
wanted to break comm silence, there was little to gain from it. If she failed to return, Vangur would report the obvious to Head of State Fel: the Imperial Hand followed Boba Fett into the Moon Maiden and failed to return.

In the weak gravity, Tahiri required only two Force bounds to descend to the crater floor. Her third bound left her standing in front of the Moon Maiden’s portal, which was indeed a heavy blast door. Designed to swing outward in two interlocking halves, the door appeared to be made of a reflective duratanium alloy that was practically impervious to laser-based artillery. A faint shimmer in the metal suggested
that the area was protected by a nullifier field, typically used in military installations to dampen the triggers of thermal detonators and other handheld explosives. But what
really
riveted Tahiri’s attention was the sense of boiling darkness she felt in the Force—an outpouring of fear and grief that seemed to be building somewhere deep inside the mine.

Maybe Fett had led her to Abeloth, after all.

Could I really be that lucky?
Tahiri wondered.
Could I really be that unlucky?

She caught a flash of movement in the corner of her faceplate as a security cam descended on its control tether to give her a closer inspection. She extended a hand, using the Force to draw it into her grasp, then pulled the lens close to her faceplate and hit the chin toggle for her comlink.