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  “Are there any extra projections that aren’t part of those twenty-seven?”

  Threepio consulted with Artoo, then reported, “There are none, Master Lando.”

  “What are you thinking, Lando?” asked Lobot.

  Grabbing a projection with his left hand, Lando used that leverage to turn himself so his back was to the inner face, allowing him to reach out and grasp the next projection with his right. His legs were twenty centimeters too short for him to reach the bottom corners of the rectangle. “I’m thinking ‘seating capacity, twenty-seven.’ Though Wookiees and Elomin would be more comfortable than I am.”

  “A theater?” Lobot asked, turning himself around as Lando had.

  “Maybe. And maybe the show won’t begin until the audience is seated. Artoo, Threepio—get on over here and find a place to grab on.”

  Artoo towed Threepio to the inner face and waited until the protocol droid had grasped a projection with his working hand. Then the little astromech droid took up position beside his counterpart, using a grappling claw to seize hold.

  Moments afterward, the chamber was plunged into absolute darkness.

  “Lights, Artoo,” Lobot said quickly.

  “No,” said Lando. “Wait. It’s their show.”

  Shortly, all four curious spectators could see a brightening glow opposite them—a glow that seemed much farther away than the outer face of the chamber. As the glow continued to increase, it sharpened and separated into several distinct bright masses. Then, in the span of a few heartbeats, everything before them snapped into vivid, brilliantly lit focus.

  Those same hearts skipped a beat at the sight. Human senses insisted that they were no longer inside the vagabond. They were suspended in darkness, looking out upon a beautiful ruddy brown planet painted with sparkling blue oceans and cloaked in a partial veil of lacy white clouds. A brilliant but pale yellow star illuminated the planet’s face, which was sculpted by the wandering lines of black mountains and dark green stains spreading outward from the rivercourses. Two moons—the smaller one dusty gray, the larger a startling red—crept along their invisible orbits.

  Lando found himself feeling awe, vertigo, and that peculiar panting breathlessness that those who have tasted the cold bite of space are prone to. “Homeworld,” he whispered to himself. “The centerpiece exhibit. As though they knew they would never see it again.”

  “Lando, I feel like I’m spacewalking,” said Lobot, also in a whisper. “At least, I think this is what spacewalking would feel like. Is it real?”

  “No. It’s not quite right—it’s more real than reality,” Lando said. “But you’d have to have been there yourself to know that the proportions are wrong, that everything’s too big and too close together, that the planet’s too bright relative to the star, time is compressed, and so on. None of which matters. In every way that matters, it’s flawless.”

  Lobot turned his head toward the droids without taking his eyes off the panorama. “Artoo, what do your sensors tell you about what’s before us?”

  Even Artoo’s long answer seemed respectfully muted.

  “Artoo says that the outer face of the chamber is still in place,” said Threepio, “but it now has an optical index of absorption below one hundredth of one percent.”

  “That’s as close to perfect transmissivity as any material I know of,” Lobot said.

  “Do you mean it’s not a holo?” Lando asked.

  “Master Lando, Artoo says that the star is forty-four meters away. The planet is seventeen meters away.”

  “It’s an orrery,” Lobot said. “An enormous shadow-box orrery of the Qella system. I’m very curious about the mechanism—”

  Lando was nodding his agreement with Lobot’s conclusion, then interrupted him. “That’s enough. I don’t want to hear any more chatter right now.”

  “Why? What is wrong?”

  “Nothing,” Lando said, drawing and releasing a deep breath. “I may never see another piece of art this beautiful again. I just want to enjoy it for a while before we go on.”

  The refrigerated cask being loaded into the cargo box of Drayson’s landspeeder at the Obroan Institute’s Newport landing bay had made the fastest possible journey from Maltha Obex to Coruscant. Even so, Drayson wore his impatience openly on his face as he watched the stevedores maneuver the large coffin-shaped object.

  “Excuse me?” someone said at Drayson’s elbow. He turned to find a white-haired, sun-bronzed face peering curiously at him.

  “Yes?”

  “Are you Harkin Dyson? The cargomaster said that the owner was here for the pickup.”

  “Yes,” Drayson said, turning away from the loading. “And you are—”

  “Joto Eckels,” said the stranger. “I was in charge of the excavation. I just had to see if it was you. I wanted to thank you myself.”

  “For what, Dr. Eckels?”

  “If you hadn’t picked up the contract, our trip to Maltha Obex would have been canceled. We might not have been able to recover Kroddok and Josala’s bodies for years.” He gestured over his shoulder at Meridian’s shuttle. “And I want to thank you for agreeing to let me bring them back with me on this run—that was a great kindness to their families.”

  “Anyone would have done the same,” Drayson said.

  “We might like to think so, sir, but it’s not so. I know that’s not why you picked up the contract, but I want you to know how much that opportunity meant to all of us who knew the team. And I want to assure you again that none of this delayed delivery of your material.” Eckels nodded toward the cask, now secured in the cargo box.

  “I know it didn’t,” said Drayson, flashing a reassuring smile. “Thank you for your good offices, Dr. Eckels. Meridian will return you to Maltha Obex at your convenience—I’ve already given Captain Wagg his instructions. And please relay my thanks to the rest of your team.”

  “I will,” said Eckels. “And, by the way—based on what I saw before I left, I expect they’ll have quite a bit more material recovered and cataloged by the time I rejoin them. There are twelve good, hardworking folks down there, living out of cold camps and logging long days on the digs. You can expect us to return with more than enough to allow us to authenticate those possible Qella artifacts.”

  “Very good,” said Drayson, taking a sidestep toward the cargo speeder.

  Eckels moved with him. “I was wondering if it might be possible to get a look at those artifacts, a holo at the very least, before I head back to Maltha Obex.”

  “Sorry, I don’t think that would be possible,” Drayson said, smiling politely and trying again to turn away.

  “I understand the need for discretion. I just want to point out that it could be very helpful in setting priorities for our remaining time there,” Eckels said. “After all, twenty-five days is hardly enough to make a beginning on an entire planet. I can remember expeditions where we spent three months in general survey and site selection before we moved our first pebble.”

  “Doctor, I understand—and I won’t hold you responsible for the handicaps I imposed on you,” Drayson said. “Above all else, I’m a realist. I’m quite certain the results will be in line with my expectations.”

  Drayson moved toward the cargo speeder’s door as though to leave, but Eckels moved more quickly and blocked his way. “There’s something else I need to speak with you about.”

  This time Drayson allowed a flash of irritation to cross his face. “What is it?”

  “The, uh, material I brought you—” Eckels lowered his voice. “It’s clear from the way we found the remains, and the artifacts found with them, that these creatures were sentient.”

  “Which is as I expected. Did you expect otherwise?”

  “Sir, it complicates matters, that’s all. If there were survivors, the material would belong to them, of course,” Eckels said. “In the absence of survivors, though, the rules and protocols of the Office of Sentient Species apply—material remains must be preserved as found, artifac
ts may be reconstructed but not restored, and so forth. I’m sure that a collector of your stature is familiar with those requirements—”

  “Passingly familiar,” Drayson said.

  “Well, then, this shouldn’t be an issue—for my own conscience’s sake, I simply wanted to get your reassurance that the material will be treated with respect,” Eckels said. “There are no known survivors at present, but that can change. Look at the Fraii Wys, reappearing nine thousand years after history recorded their supposed extinction. And the last thing any of us want is a situation where survivors appear and find that their ancestors are hanging as decorations in the parlor.”

  “Is it your purpose to insult me, Dr. Eckels? If so, let me advise you that you’re very close to succeeding.”

  “Please, no, not at all. You must understand, the Institute is very reluctant to let material remains leave our control, and even when we do, we always insist on a right of first examination—”

  “Which you’ve had,” Drayson said. “I trust that you took advantage of the travel time to conduct that examination and make whatever holos and scans you ordinarily would.”

  “Yes. Yes, we did.”

  “Very well, then,” said Drayson, showing a quick smile. “If it helps, Doctor, let me reassure you that I’m acutely aware of the value of the contents of that cask—and I do not refer only to how much I will have paid for you to retrieve it. It will be handled with all possible care. After all, a man spends that kind of money to acquire a treasure, not to squander and destroy one. And the parlor walls are quite full already.”

  “Yes, of course,” said Eckels, bobbing his head. “My apologies if I offended you.”

  “No offense taken,” said Drayson. “Now, if you’ll excuse me…”

  It was a twenty-minute flight north from Newport to the nearest Alpha Blue Technical Services Section, located in the same district where several high-profile senators had their official residences. The unremarkable buildings housing Section 41 were not on the tour routes, however. The small signs bearing the generic and easily forgotten business name INTERMATIC, R.C. accounted for the traffic in and out of the site’s two private hangers.

  Even before Drayson’s speeder had stopped moving, Section 41 staffers were moving toward it with a repulsorlift cargo dolly in tow behind them. As he emerged from behind the controls, he was greeted with smart salutes.

  “Admiral.”

  “At ease, Tomas.” Drayson moved to the back of the speeder and helped loosen the tie-downs and guide the dolly under the cask. “Is Dr. Eicroth ready?”

  “Lab five,” the colonel said. “She’s been standing by for the last hour.”

  “Let’s go, then.”

  Dr. Joi Eicroth greeted Drayson with a professional smile that gave no hint of a relationship that had covered friend, lover, and fellow survivor over a span of thirteen years. But as soon as the cask was safely in place beside the large examination plate, Drayson chased the junior officers away and added a quick kiss to his greeting.

  “Scandalous, Admiral. I’m on duty.”

  “Yes, you are. Let’s get it open,” he said.

  “First things first,” she said, pulling a cord that brought two full-body isolation suits descending from the ceiling on their umbilicals. “I have to change into something more comfortable.”

  It took her the better part of five minutes to don her iso suit, and then the better part of five more to help him into his and seal the lab. But it took almost no time at all to switch off the cask’s stabilization system, break the seal, remove the lid, and vacuum away the inert, spacefilling foamite that concealed the contents.

  Then they stood at opposite ends of the cask, silently looking down at a creature that had died more than a century ago and been buried by its friends on the moving ice of Maltha Obex. Its oval, smooth-skinned body was nearly as wide as the cask. Its slender, double-jointed limbs would not have fit inside it if they had not been neatly folded so that its clumsy-looking three-fingered hands covered its face, and its legs made a neat square-and-X below its body.

  “It’s no wonder,” Eicroth said shaking her head.

  “What?”

  She moved to the side of the cask. “These limbs must be five or six meters long altogether—and with a cross section not more than six centimeters. A perfectly dreadful adaptation for cold. It’s amazing that this one lived long enough to die where it did.”

  Drayson nodded. “I want the genetic material extracted and sequenced immediately. The general dissection can wait until that’s done.”

  “Understood,” she said. “Help me move it up on the plate.”

  Chapter Three

  “General A’baht.”

  “Yes?”

  “The gig from the Yakez is coming alongside. You asked to be notified.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant,” Etahn A’baht said without looking up. “See that Commodore Carson is escorted to the flag briefing room immediately.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  It was the first of five such vessels expected to rendezvous with the fleet carrier Intrepid that morning, and Farley Carson was the first of the task force commanders to be piped aboard for the command briefing. The Star Destroyer Yakez was the flagship of the Fourth Fleet’s Task Force Apex, and Carson was A’baht’s sole friend among the arriving flag officers.

  By President Organa Solo’s order, the Fifth Fleet had been reinforced by elements drawn from three other New Republic fleets. With the arrival of Task Force Gemstone, all the disparate elements had finally gathered in deep space outside Koornacht Cluster, and the business of forging them into a single command could begin.

  That burden was to have fallen on Han Solo, but the Yevethan ambush carried out against the ferry flight and the commodore’s shuttle had left the combined fleet without its appointed leader. So far, no replacement had been announced, leaving the chain of command as it had been, with A’baht as senior commander of the forces in Farlax Sector. But Fleet Command had involved itself in the operational details to a degree that sharply limited A’baht’s command autonomy, and the selection of a new commodore seemed inevitable.

  In the meantime, though, there was work to do.

  “General A’baht,” said a new voice.

  A’baht looked up to see Carson standing in the hatchway wearing a half grin. “Stony,” A’baht said, rising from his desk. “I thought I told my aide to deliver you to the briefing room.”

  “The landing bay officer said the next gig was ten minutes behind me,” said Carson, closing the hatch behind him and easing himself into a chair. “I thought I’d take the opportunity to say hello.”

  Puffing out a breath, A’baht settled back into his chair and thumbed his comlink. “Lieutenant, inform me when the others arrive.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Switching off the unit and setting it on his desk, A’baht sat back and let himself smile. “It’s good to see you, Stony.”

  “And you, Etahn. I hear things have been a little rough.”

  “I’m glad to have you here,” said A’baht. “This is a very green fleet.”

  “I doubt that your training methods have softened with the years,” said Carson. “They’ll be all right.”

  “A leavening of experienced crews and battle-tested ships among them will make them better,” said A’baht. “We’ve trained them hard, but training is not the same as fighting. They got their first taste of that at Doornik Three-nineteen.”

  “A bitter taste, from what reached us,” said Carson. “How did the new ships perform for you?”

  “They held up well. The losses we took weren’t design-related. A couple of captains learned what not to do next time.” A’baht paused, then added gravely, “A couple of crews bought me very expensive lessons that I will probably not have the opportunity to apply.”

  “You don’t think you’re going to see home before this is over, do you?”

  “No—they won’t make any changes now. But when the new commodore
arrives, I’ll be reduced to a supernumerary—in fact if not in name,” said A’baht. “Already I’m little more than a mouthpiece for Fleet Command.”

  “It’s that way sometimes,” said Carson, his grin widening. “No one wearing this uniform enjoys the latitude of a general in the Dornean navy.”

  A’baht flashed a brief, knowing smile. “Or enjoys the responsibility. If I had had that from the start—”

  “It’s not the way Coruscant does things—no matter who’s holding the reins, there are always reins,” said Carson. “Are you certain they’re going to send someone?”

  “I think the only thing that’s stopped them from sending Ackbar or Nantz to take command is the fear that they, too, might become hostages,” said A’baht. “I seem not to have many boosters at headquarters.”

  “I told you—you should have let them make you an admiral,” said Carson. “I’d bet half your trouble with the command staff comes from clinging to your old rank. Headquarters is full of newborn traditionalists, and they can’t get it out of their heads that a general should have dirty boots or wings. These lofty quarters”—he raised his hands to take in the utilitarian suite—“are for admirals.”

  “So you are saying that they offered me the choice of retaining my Dornean navy rank as a false courtesy,” said A’baht.

  “Oh, I’m sure whoever signed off on the consolidation plan was sincere,” said Carson. “Generals are C-one, admirals are C-one—so it’s the grade that matters, not the rank, right? But old prejudices die slowly—to say nothing of old rivalries.”

  “Foolishness,” A’baht said disgustedly. “To judge a man by his title—”

  At that point, the hatch opened and Lieutenant Zratha poked his head in. “Admiral Tolokus and Commodore Martaff are in the briefing room, sir. The others are on their way up.”

  “Thank you. We’ll be along presently,” said A’baht, standing. “Well, Stony, time to don my tarnished title.”

  Carson was on his feet by then and saluted smartly—to A’baht’s surprise. “Sir, if I may say so, I can see no tarnish from here—and neither will the others.” He moved a step closer and dropped his voice. “This isn’t Imperial City. We know who you are, General—we know that you belong. Just lead the way. You won’t need to wonder about whether we’re following. They asked me to tell you that, sir.”